memoir
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Exploring grace
My assignment this week with my writing partners is to articulate my definition of grace because I’m finally narrowing my focus on the theme for my WIP, Out of the Woods. I thought I knew this definition, but when my partner asked me, I fumbled for what I meant.
After our meeting, I stumbled across this:
The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self–to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it. (Barbara Brown Taylor/An Altar in the World) –reference found here.
Her quote reminds me of people who point fingers at others in condemnation, not realizing that what they condemn is what is inside them. You are my mirror. If I hate what I see in you, chances are I loathe it in myself. I recognize my shadow in someone else far more easily than I do in myself.
Grace forbids condemnation because there isn’t room for both.
And by accepting the other, we are sprung from our prisons.
By other, I mean that which is different from us.
I’m riveted by the notion of .grace because it was absent in my family. Actually, it pretty much still is. We are awkward in giving it, and we don’t recognize it when it is extended to us. I am convinced that my mother’s grief and sorrow over her choices made her sick. She never knew how much I loved her perhaps because she couldn’t accept it. If you don’t believe in something, can you recognize it? Ever?
Another assignment I have is to identify points of grace in my life, and in my mother’s life. I’m surprised by how difficult it’s been to identify such moments of grace for her. In my own life, yes, but not Mama’s. Not sure what that means.
What is grace to you?
Shenpa revisited
I wrote a little about Shenpa in 2012, but I didn’t have a lot to say because, while I recognized it, I didn’t really understand it. I’m not sure I do now, but I’m going to write about it anyway. I’ll share the same quotes:
Shenpa is what Pema Chodron calls the hook. We each have different hooks but we all get hooked by attachment to outcomes, expectations, or regrets. It is emotionally painful and we suffer. Whatever the hook is, I have to let it go. I must remember that 100 years from now when I am dead and gone, it truly won’t matter. It won’t be important because all my actions will be in the past. Just as they are now while I am living, from moment to moment. Why hold on to the negativity? What matters now is being kind, forgiving and loving towards myself and others. ~ Loran Hills ♥
I was just telling myself this yesterday: next year, it will not matter, these hurt feelings. I will be over them because my perspective will have changed. So why not fast-forward through the struggle and forgive NOW? Trust that my perspective will eventually have more understanding, that even if I don’t have it now, it will come, and I will not have caused more damage with resentment and hurt? Why hold on to it? Why am I attached to the hurt?
I don’t know why I’m attached to hurt feelings. I’m less so now than ever, but still. I recognize that staying in that space is a choice, and all I have to do to get out of it is to ask myself how much I want to be happy.
Chodron writes,
Here is an everyday example of shenpa. Somebody says a mean word to you and then something in you tightens— that’s the shenpa. Then it starts to spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming them, or anger at them, denigrating yourself. And maybe if you have strong addictions, you just go right for your addiction to cover over the bad feeling that arose when that person said that mean word to you. This is a mean word that gets you, hooks you. Another mean word may not affect you but we’re talking about where it touches that sore place— that’s a shenpa. Someone criticizes you—they criticize your work, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your child— and, shenpa: almost co-arising.
Trying to root out shenpa is like trying to force a paradigm shift. You know you’re in a box, but you can’t find a seam to force your hand through.
It’s an irresistible itch. You get that your partner didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, and you get that in the grand scheme of things it’s insignificant, but those hurt feelings…they’re more comfortable than happiness and peace because they’re familiar. You know what to expect, and the hurt fits the paradigm of abandonment and neglect and disillusionment.
Never mind that it’s been YEARS since you were abandoned.
I think shenpa is like the old rusted bike that got leaned against a sapling and was left there for the tree to grow around.
The only way to dislodge that bike is with an axe and chainsaw, and then you destroy the tree.
In dislodging that hooking point, it’s necessary that some part of ourselves is destroyed, but it’s only the part that doesn’t serve for the good.
I became aware of the tightening during my various attempts to quit smoking. I was trying to figure out why I smoked, and I discovered that I did it to shut my mouth. Better to inhale poison than to say what I thought. I was afraid that if I quit smoking, I would offend everyone around me when I said what I thought.
I quit smoking over a year ago, and I’ve offended people and I frequently wish I was more skilled in diplomacy, but I’ve also learned that not speaking is my choice,not something I have to force myself to do.
I’ve given myself the same permission to speak that I gave my children.
You know how in movies when a mother is hiding from the enemy and she has her child tucked tightly against her, and her hand is on his mouth to keep him from crying out? I think that when Mama silenced me when I was little, in some ways it was for my protection. This is how we do things in this family. We do not say what we think because it endangers us because the adults react. The tightening is both taught and embedded in us at an early age.
I will have to come back to this again.
I’m very interested in your thoughts about this shenpa….
love letter
I confronted my mother, once. It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.
15+ years later, my scalp goes clammy again at the memory of telling Mama she was a chicken for running away. Always running away.
Mama taught me to run, even as I hated it, protested against it. It’s cliche to say that I’ve become my mother, but I do see her in me.
“You’re not as smart as you think you are, Stacy,” she’d say. Snarky–but also a little frightened. What she meant, perhaps, was that I didn’t understand her or the world as well as I thought I did. This is still true.
Around 1995 or so, in a straight run, Mama drove all the way from Hopland, California, to El Centro. 13 hours on the road. She was exhausted, and, unbeknownst to me, extremely ill with the cancer that would eventually eat its way through her body. My sons were 5 and 7, and she was visiting them for the first time in years. I had visited her briefly a couple of months earlier, and that probably made me brave.
Jake, my 7-year-old, offended her by wrinkling his nose and telling her she had smoky breath. She viewed it as rejection, and I saw it as him speaking truth. She felt he should apologize, and I refused to force him to do it. He was not rejecting her at all, and he hadn’t been rude, only spontaneous. So I made a choice then not to re-create the rules I had grown up with. Part of it was a fumble. I didn’t know how to address the situation in a healthy manner, but I did know I was not going to silence my sons to protect any adults’ feelings. This would mean consequences socially, of course, but it would also mean that they would not be cowed.
So Mama jumped in her Jeep Wrangler and lit another cigarette. I jumped in with her and told her that she was being a chicken by running away, and that she was abandoning me again. Which was a worse offense? Jake’s comment, or mine? I could’ve handled that better– fifteen years later. :/
But again–Mama taught me how to run.
I think I understand that flight instinct. Perhaps the pain was too much in the space together with me…but if she had just taken some of it with her and not shut me out entirely after that, I think we could have worked through our stuff. Sure, it means juggling that pain like a puffer fish, but the understanding and peace that results from fighting through something is matchless.
I have run, but I have learned to go back, and the more I do that, the more I see the importance of not leaving in the first place. I think the running instinct is tied to shame, somehow. Am I running for cover? Or perhaps I just want to put distance between me and air that feels like broken glass in my lungs. That kind of pain is from hurting someone you love and knowing you were wrong and you can’t fix it. Ever.
But you have to face it and acknowledge your part, and you cannot say, “I did my best,” because on some shadowy level you knew the choices you were making. I remember being in therapy and thinking that it didn’t matter if Mama “did her best” because her “best” didn’t protect me. I remember thinking that it was horseshit, and now I am forced to see the truth in that for myself. I could have done better.
Mama said I was her blackest pain. She wrote that in one of her journals, then she went on to describe me as a baby, and how sweetly it all began for us. I wish I didn’t understand this so well.
At the same time, I recognize grace.
Mama did not, and so could not receive it from me.
I loved her even though she failed me. And why is that?
Why do we love our mothers no matter what? We are irrevocably stuck in a love/hate relationship….
I drive my youngest son crazy. I know this, and all I can do is give the grace that I need, and to always have a place for him.
I’m reminded of a saying: Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, then it’s not the end.
Snow White could give lessons on giving the cold shoulder
I am always the Princess.
I am Snow White, surfacing from a coma brought on by the apples of knowledge that both my mother and stepmother gave me. I almost want to stop right there and leave it for you to noodle on–but I’d rather root the whole fairy tale up and dump it all in a big pile. Please bear with me while I shovel everything out.
- Apple (knowledge)
- Snow White (Princess)
- Dead mother (abandonment)
- Stepmother
- Sleep/coma—->blindness/emotional blindness/denial
- Prince
Emotional or mental blindness–like hysterical blindness, y’know? Blind like the sailor in Joseph Conrad’s story of the blind captain–the sailor had no idea his captain couldn’t see, and only realized it in a sideways leap of logic when he noticed a pilot fish guiding a whale. (Dr. Stampfl–my former professor– calls that abduction.) The captain was physically blind, but the sailor was mentally blind.
Still thinking….
So. Emotional blindness and paralysis are Snow White’s problems. My problems, too, sometimes.
Some’d say this is making a kid’s story too complicated.
I say no.
There’s a reason these stories have survived hundreds of years. They speak to us on some level beyond our ken.
- I welcome your thoughts….
since the tree is on fire
Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves.- Italian Proverb
I’ve done that. Been warmed by a fire that was not supposed to be. One that was supposed to clear weeds in a tall palm tree that my then-husband never got around to pruning. Naw, they weren’t weeds, but they looked like them, ok. Horrid, twining, drooping grey branch-things that hung down from the palm leaves. Hideous. They had to go.
Since we didn’t have a ladder that’d reach high enough, but some of the branches hung low enough for me to touch on my tiptoes, I fished a lighter out from the junk drawer, and with one flick started a slow crackling fire. In mere seconds the fire fingered its way up the branch to the top where it fwooomped and made my heart clatter.
I realized then that the tree was about 15 feet max from the house and –oh, my–the window blinds were curling in the heat. I heard thuds at my side, and looked down to see that two bare pigeons with smoking skin were at my feet. I’d totally forgotten that birdies lived in the tree.
We lived on a busy highway, and people could see the fire from far away–in no time a firetruck arrived on the scene and hosed it down.
I didn’t know palm trees burned so hot.
I dreamt once that my house burned down. My reaction was muted; seems I ought to have felt despair at all I’d lost. Or desperation to find anything of worth among the ruins, but I was aloof. As far as I know, I didn’t light that fire. Psychologically, of course I did. And it was time to move on, to let go.
There’s a time for planting, and a time for burning the fields (here in Imperial Valley, at least.) Air quality notwithstanding, I’m all for field-burning. I have been advised by my beloved that there is, however, never a time for pruning palm trees with fire.
“TIME AND TROUBLE WILL TAME AN ADVANCED YOUNG WOMAN, BUT
AN ADVANCED OLD WOMAN IS UNCONTROLLABLE BY ANY EARTHLY FORCE.”
Dorothy L. Sayer
I disagree.
Not all women are tamed by time and trouble.
But they do learn not to light fires they can’t control.
That Which is Forbidden to Exist
“When we are told that something is not to be spoken about,
we understand that to mean that this something
should not exist-
should not,
cannot,
must not,
does not exist.
In that moment, our reality and,
consequently, our lives
are distorted;
they become shameful and
diminished.
In some way, we understand this to mean
that we
should not exist.To protect ourselves,
we, too,
begin to speak only of the flat world
where everything is safe,
commonplace, and
agreeable,
the very small world about which
we can all have consensus.
Soon
we don’t see
the other worlds we once saw,
for it is difficult to see
what we are forbidden to name.”
~Deena Metzger Writing for Your Life~
This was not written as a poem; I separated the phrases so the emphasis fell where I wanted it to.
Altered literary art. heh
I’m combining this with a writing prompt I read on Laura Davis‘ blog: Brainstorm a list of things that would be dangerous to face in your writing. Then write about one of them.
It is, of course, dangerous to name the forbidden.
But consider this statement from Literary Trauma: “…psychoanalysis believes,” Deborah M. Horvitz writes, “that crucial to recovering from an experience of trauma is the capacity and willingness to incorporate that traumatic event inside one’s self as an indispensable piece of personal history and identity. Since, in the fiction in this study [Literary Trauma], narrative is inextricably entwined with memory and the process of remembering, the greater one’s ability to “make story” out of trauma, which is defined differently for each protagonist, the more likely s/he is to regain her or his life after that trauma” (6).
So.
Telling our story is crucial to our recovery, but we’re forbidden to do so because:
- it will disrupt the family
- it will ruin the family reputation
- an important member of the family may go to jail
- the family will disintegrate–children will be torn from parents
- it’s better left in the past
- it’s not happening NOW, is it? Why can’t you let it go?
- PTSD? Is that even real? Besides, you were never in any war.
I wonder if the stories we cannot share nest themselves in our bodies and manifest as sickness….
Out of the Woods intro
When I was little, my mother read fairy tales to me. She never read stories about fainting princesses who languished until a handsome prince rescued them. She read Little Red Riding Hood to me, and Hansel and Gretel, and Babes in the Wood. When I learned to read, I read them every night before bed. In a way, these fairy tales and others were harbingers of what lay ahead for me, although I didn’t consciously connect any of the stories to my life, not even later, when life events mirrored parts of the stories. I had zero sense of impending doom. In retrospect, though, it seems it was all spelled out to me in the stories, and later, in the books that I loved.
Of all the stories, Babes in the Wood is the one that has resonated most strongly in me. It is a story of abandonment with no rescue, which reminds me of something my mother wrote me when I was in foster care and I had just learned that the father I’d never known existed lived in Oregon: Stay away from Twinkies so you don’t end up fluffy, and remember: no Prince will ride in to save the day. Not even your daddy.
I wonder if messages about my family’s history were unconsciously transmitted via folktales. The children in Babes in the Wood were left to die in the forest. Five of the six children of my generation on my mother’s side were put into foster care by their mothers. I’m not sure why my little brother made the cut, and I’m not sure he fared better than the rest of us, after all.
Mama’s nonchalance–hell, her outright silence– about the story’s ending baffled me for many years. Now I think that it was like a bad smell you get used to after you’re exposed to it for a while. It was her own reality, after all: her parents put her and her two older sisters in an orphanage when they hit adolescence. Other families sent their children to boarding school, or to summer camp. Ours sent the kids into the wilderness. (Fortunately for the parents of both generations, none of us followed the path of Oedipus.)
Yeah, I did therapy. Started with group therapy–safety in numbers. Grew brave after a year–and by that point, desperate–and started seeing a therapist by myself. The prevailing sentiment then was that people who went through therapy came out psycho. My Nana, for example, was very worried for my mental health because I was hashing up things that were better left buried. I should mention here that it was her son who molested me.
When I entered therapy, I was aware only on a superficial level that my perspective was shaped by my childhood. It seems obvious now, like how we marvel that the Columbine parents and teachers didn’t see the massacre coming. I didn’t know, for example, why I was indiscriminate in my sexual relationships before I got married. Conversely, I didn’t know why I felt guilty when I didn’t want to have sex with my husband. I didn’t know why I felt so ugly, even though people told me I had beautiful children who looked just like me. And I thought there was something wrong with me that I felt so crazy around my family.
My take on the new person who emerged: Yup. She was psycho. She went in psycho, and came out a new and improved psycho. She was missing some of her cogs for functioning in her family machine. She forgot her role. The cliche is scapegoat; I reject that. I like black sheep, and not for the obvious reason. Farmers put one black sheep in their flocks for every 100 white sheep. That way they only have to count the black ones to know how many sheep they’ve got. I think the black sheep is the one who carries the story of the flock. A friend told me once that families will often send one of their own out (by way of shunning) in unconscious hope that that one will bring back the elixir and heal the family.
I don’t know if I care enough to bring back an elixir. This may change with time. Or not.
The best I can do now is carry the tale.
to be continued
How to excavate a story from your past: Memoir ideas
Telling a story from one’s childhood is not the same as excavating it. One may think that simply writing out a vignette from one’s childhood addresses issues plainly, but it ain’t so.
Here’s the thing:
First you have to write out the memory exactly as it has been playing in your head for the past umpteen years.
Then you have to go back and fill in the sensory details: Was Mama’s apron black? Or red? Janey insists it was black, but you know it was red. Mental note: dig up old pictures, if possible.
Was music on the stereo? What color were the curtains?
Was the TV on? Were there toys on the floor?
How many people were in the room?
Dinner on the stove?
(Even if you’re in your bedroom, you can smell dinner, right?)
You’ve got to make sure you’ve got the dialogue right. You have to write that down to the best of your recollection before you can feel around the edges of the words for sharpness, or hidden meanings. And you can’t just go groping around smashing the dirt this way and that. You have to tread gingerly. And you have to use the right tools:
these don’t serve the same function….
That flat shovel can lift an unbelievably thin layer of soil. The round point one is the tester–you know something’s down there, so you cut into the soil with it. (If you click on the picture it’ll take to to a right proper archaeology site :))
The flat shovel is what you use to lift each layer of the memory.
First layer: remember where you are in the memory. Where are you physically, where are you relative to the story, where are you in time?
Second layer: who else is there?
Third: What happened?
Fourth: What was said, and who said what?
Then you start digging with the other shovel and see what you over-turn.
There are some memories I’ve had to sneak up on, just like I would a wispy dream. I tell my brain that my fingers are just fiddling around on the keyboard, and I ignore any possible typos at this point because I’m typing like Stevie Wonder–my eyes are closed, and I’m leaning a little to the left because maybe that’s the way the car was going, and I’m swaying because I know Daddy’s got Johnny Cash on the radio and I’m trying to remember that empty lot on the corner that I liked to play in because I liked the texture of the greasy dirt on the bottoms of my feet.
After you write the bare-boned scene, ask yourself why it is so important. What holds the meaning for you? Why does it hurt to remember it? Or why does it make your heart burst with joy? Maybe you’re standing on the front seat of your daddy’s old white Pontiac, your small hand tucked into the collar of his shirt, and your face is snugged up under his chin where you can smell Old Spice and tobacco, and the memory holds both deep delight and terror, because you’re next to your favorite person, and you know he’s driving drunk…..
Regurgitation: It’s what’s for breakfast
“As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. … This is our life and it’s not going to last forever. There isn’t time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.” —Natalie Goldberg
This idea is repulsive.
I’d prefer not to envision myself as a cow in any way. Furthermore, throwing up what I just ate? And pawing through it to find the good chunks to chow down again? Just thinking about it makes my stomach heave a little.
But I have done this in my writing.
I’ve ingested life through all my pores and then vomited the experiences onto the page.
It’s a matter of having taken in too much too fast and then needing to put all of it into one place so I can pick through it and draw out meaning.
I don’t have the words for anything unless I write it out. If it stays inside, it stays unnamed and unclaimed.
I ingest indiscriminately the first time. The second time I’m far choosier, and those are the things that stick to my bones.
I so wish this didn’t sound like a promotion for bulimia.
D5 Creation