Echoes in a Hollow Space

I was reading the opening page of The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and I thought, “Wow, that's uncomfortably familiar.”



Late last week before last I tripped over a case of cat food on the floor (Oh the irony! The Instacart shopper got the wrong one, stuff fussy Ginger won't eat) and had a bad fall. I crashed through the kitchen door, into the fridge, and landed on my back on the floor. I was SO lucky not to have gotten more than bumps and bruises and humiliation. But I spent several days convalescing and contemplating the folly—of my household arrangements, among other things. Since recovering I've been trying to get things off the floor and moving with extreme caution. Not for the first time I've thought that I do not envy those who have to clean out this place when I croak.

This dovetailed with an article I read yesterday about artist Francis Hines whose life work was thrown into a dumpster when he died. (Happy ending: someone who recognized it came along ahead of the trash collectors and saved it.)

Our posterity as artists is often left to those who don't appreciate the urge to do art and think it's all just a bunch of junk. And maybe it is. But it's also difficult, when you reach a certain age, to realize your life's work may end up in a dumpster. I'd like to think my life meant more than a waste of oxygen and resources. I know I'm not alone in this feeling but it is one of the hazards of having no family.

I don't think "legacy keepers" is ever a valid excuse to have children (and no guarantee that will work out for you, anyway). The only valid reason to have children is because you really want them, and I never did. I like kids quite a lot, just never thought I had the talent for raising them. And those are my Mother's Day thoughts. Gods bless all those who had the desire for kids and the talent and drive and patience and willingness to not only raise them but center their lives around making them good human beings. O Heroic Ones, I salute you!

I’ve been working on editing my mother’s memoirs for a while now, and I’m in the final stages, I do believe. Which means it’s time to replace my bracketed placeholders [insert that picture when you find it] with actual photos. My mother had a huge collection of snapshots and in her later years we’d sometimes go through them and I’d ask who everyone was and pencil in the description on the back. Then Mom “put the boxes away in a safe place” one day and subsequently couldn’t remember where. I’d made a half-hearted attempt to find them—and did find one small collection—but there were tons of photos I could remember but couldn’t find.

Then one day last week I realized there was a gigantic plastic tub—maybe 18 in. tall and wide and about 2 ft long—buried beneath a bunch of bags with books in them waiting to be recycled. I cleared off the bags and looked inside. The pictures my mother and I had both been looking for had been hiding in plain sight all along. So, I started going through them and scanning ones I needed for the memoir. And for other reasons. I’ve only made a small dent in this enormous collection. Many have the penciled information on them, many do not. And Mom kept everything, even the inside-your-purse-mistake photos, the thumb-enhanced photos, the so-blurry-you-can’t-tell-what-you’re-looking-at photos. (Back in the day when you took your film to One Hour Photo and the like they’d print everything, even the crap ones.) I have managed to throw away those, but the others? What to do with old photographs of people you don’t know?

I know what Cleaning Nazi Marie would say, but I just can’t throw them away. It’s like throwing the lives of those people away. I tell myself the old ones at least might have some historic value. And if that self-con doesn’t work, I remind myself that there is something of a market for these things at antique stores and flea markets. I don’t plan on selling them, but maybe the poor unfortunate who comes after me and cleans this place out can make a few bucks. Or finally get around to throwing them out. Either way, I won’t be involved.

My mother was not a particularly talented photographer. Too impatient to wait, frame, focus, get those thumbs out of the way. Just point, snap, and move on. Which is odd because she was a good and patient painter and crafter. There are a number of vacation snaps she never got into albums of places I can’t identify. I may get around to chucking those. Most don’t have people in them and they’re the kind of thing that is only precious to the one taking the picture because it evokes a memory of time, place, feeling. A memory I don’t have.

She also kept every note from baby gifts when I was born, every congratulations message, early birthday cards from her to me, and an entire keepsake book of Pamela paraphernalia. All the things to let me know I was once held precious by someone. I don’t say that in a pathetic way because it makes me feel warm inside. And miss her. The mother she was then, the mother she became again in her later years, not the mother in-between who tried to make me who I am not and who I fought with and hid from so much.

Memory is a double-edged sword, but I’m keeping all the memories, even the bittersweet, because they made me who I am today—as much as my mother did.



 

 

Random quote of the day:

“This early training to ‘be nice’ causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to ‘be nice’ in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler.”

—Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“In the eyes of its mother, every beetle is a gazelle.”

—Moroccan proverb

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

This morning on National Public Radio I was listening to Sherman Alexie discuss his troubled relationship with his mother and his new memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. Memoirs, it seems to me, and Alexie affirmed, are for those who don’t get the chance to reconcile their complicated feelings towards parents and other loved ones. Oh yes, there are celebratory memoirs, to be sure, but when you come from a twisted root, it’s hard to write the sweet without delving into the sour.

The discussion triggered a lot of things for me. While I listened, I thanked God, thanked God, that for the last five years of my mother’s life, I was her caregiver. Those were difficult years, but… I got that sacred chance to reconcile my complicated feelings—and I think my mother did as well.

I used to call my mother the Dragon Lady with my friends who knew her well. She was hard-charging, always right, full of anger and unreconciled childhood crap of her own—but charming as hell, funny, creative, with an amazing life force, and a remarkable personality that drew people in and made them love her. Both sides were genuine, but she generally saved the Dragon Lady side for those she loved. People always told me I had the coolest mom. And I did. Except for when she was Dragon Lady.

I harbored so much anger and so much resentment for so many years. Therapy helped, but it didn’t leach the poison in me, just gave me mechanisms for coping with it.

In those last five years of Mom’s life, though, the roles were reversed. She was the child, I was the parent. At first, Dragon Lady was still there, fighting to retain her power, fighting to get the most out of life that she could in diminished circumstances. But even when she was most frustrating, she was so damned courageous. Always. For me, being a full-time caregiver, working full-time, and trying to find a way to get Mom to and from dialysis three times a week, I didn’t have the physical or emotional resources to carry my bad feelings forward. Gradually, I released them—or they released me.

And a wonderful thing happened. My mother began changing, too. The Dragon Lady never apologized for anything, ever; she said thank you rarely and never said “I love you” unless someone said it first. In her last years she became gentle, grateful, considerate in a way I’d never seen. She frequently told me “I love you, baby girl” without any prompting at all. And it became very easy to reply, “I love you, baby mom.” It wasn’t just that I didn’t have time for anger and resentment anymore—they really, truly went away. All that remained was love. For her, for me.

I won’t kid you. Those years were not easy. By the time my mom died I was stretched so thin I don’t know how much longer I could have gone on and not torn to shreds. But I really think my mother died in a state of grace, and that grace extended to me.

It nearly crushed me when she passed. But at least I had gotten that incomparable gift of reconciliation.

About a year after she died, I got the notion of writing a memoir, and worked in a fever for about a week. But it was impossible to write the sweet without the sour. I had purged myself of those hard feelings, and I didn’t miss them. They had poisoned my life for a long time and I really did not want them back. I let go of the memoir and held on to my state of grace and my reconciliation. I am so grateful for them. They are a rare and precious gift, mysterious as grace always is.

I love you, baby mom.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Any suburban mother can state her role sardonically enough in a sentence: it is to deliver children—obstetrically once and by car forever after.”

—Peter De Vries, “Humorists Depict the Suburban Wife,” Life Magazine, Dec. 24, 1956

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I'm not sure equating rejection in romance with rejection of one's writing is an especially comforting thought, but Terence Cheng makes an interesting case. I've not been particularly lucky in love, but I have known love, and I do love. And yes, I am in-love with writing, not my own writing. I understand the difference.

That said, there are certain pieces of my writing that I love despite the flaws and rejection. They may never lead to the big, showy wedding day of publication, but they are my funny Valentines. Whether we ever march down the aisle together or just keep tripping over the the threshold, whether anybody else ever loves them, they're my special friends. They speak to a part of my heart, even if they aren't the best piece of writing in the world, even if objective opinion has people raising their eyebrows, saying, "Really?"

They're misshapen little lumps, they are, and I have no expectation of "bigger things" for them. But mothers love their lumps, even if everyone else thinks they're the ugliest baby they've ever seen. That's not romantic love, I realize. Sometimes I don't love the polished pieces that others like nearly as much, the ones closer to romantic expectations. The heart is quixotic like that.