memoir
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scars
Scars mark the places where life and sanity were threatened, ordeals endured, wounds opened and closed. They evoke a queasy awe in the best of us. We stare and look away, want to ask what happened but don’t dare broach the subject, as if these patches of mended flesh identified experience beyond the realm of human discourse. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the word ‘scar’ is one letter away from ‘scare.’ -Kat Duff
Scars are irrefutable proof that something happened.
I got my first huge scar when I was six years old. I’d stacked three scabby-barked logs in the back yard then stepped back a few feet to take a running leap over the stack. I barely cleared it; I dragged my leg over the log and tore a gash in my shin. The scrape was about two inches long, and deep enough that I sported a hideous jagged scar for many years.
The scar is gone now, except for a tiny patch of puckered skin that’s nearly invisible. Like many of my childhood experiences, that leap seems like it might not have happened, after all. I no longer have proof that I scraped the shit out of my shin, and if I don’t have proof, did it really happen? Never mind that I remember the messy scrape and the serious owie (but I don’t remember crying. huh.)–never mind the vivid sensual memory. The scar’s virtually gone.
Emotionally disruptive events leave marks, too—I hesitate to call them scars because in many cases they’re just lessons, however much they hurt. And I think that for a fair number of those lessons, it’s our choice whether we regard them as lessons or deeply scarring traumas.
Maybe all of them.
I don’t know. Betrayal, for me, feels traumatic. But if I consider my expectations, open and hidden, and if I consider what I learned about myself because of a betrayal—I just can’t comfortably label it a traumatic experience. I feel like I have a couple of horrible scars, and like they should be visible…but they’re really just lessons learned. When I look at them like that, it diminishes the emotional reaction I have to the memories. I welcome this.
NaNoWriMo: Day 13
About a year ago, as I was finishing up my thesis for my MFA in Creative Writing, I had a stroke. A small thalamic stroke, they called it. It happened on the day my thesis was due; I think I’d just emailed it when I noticed I was feeling numb on the left side of my body. When I say numb, I don’t mean to the core. It was just my skin that was affected by a tiny pinhole of a stroke in the region of my brain that controls the sense of touch.
Is it coincidental that something erupted in my brain when I was writing about being molested as a kid? I think there’s a connection: my body finally said enough of this bullshit. After two years of dredging up childhood abuse, it was just time to stop. And so I have, for over a year. I was afraid of causing another stroke if I went back to revise, even if I was balancing it out with all the good in my life. The brain is the one thing in my body that I don’t have a handle on –a stroke isn’t like getting period cramps or even a headache. That sucker hits you with no warning, not even a pop to let you know a blood vessel’s awry.
I have two symptoms that remind me of the stroke: the ball of my left foot feels like it’s asleep, and the left side of my gut has what feels like a brick in it. That brick is my barometer for stress. Most days it’s a faint sensation, but when I’m feeling any kind of stress, the heavy feeling comes back full force.
I’m a little jittery about writing. I wonder if I can trick my brain into thinking I’m writing about someone else, or if I can pull back enough to be able to view events from a distance—and it is a distance, of years. Writing it, though, makes it immediate. I have no trick for creating psychic space, but I’m hoping that this year off has worked some time-magic and I’ll find the psychic safety net is already there.
Here’s to the brick in my gut.
NaNoWriMo: Day 7
I found a letter from my mother dated April 12, 1989. The date meant nothing at first read, then I read, “No, I don’t think your father will ‘go to hell’ (grin)” and I remembered that my father died in early April of ’89. I’m not sure why I would have asked Mama if I thought he was going to hell. I was sure of it.
She further writes, “I think, rather, that he will be busy learning differences in the types of love that there is. I believe that he is just fine. Instead my concern lies in anyone who could see what happened to him and yet continue to surrender to those forces that shaped his unhappiness.”
This—and the rest of the letter—makes me nuts. I’m incensed that she wrote about him learning different types of love (I sneer here) when she knew what he did to me. It’s a crap thing to say to a daughter who felt the ‘love’ from that man. And the letter sounds so…reasonable, even with its roundabout finger-pointing at Dad’s mother , the mild terminology (Dad wasn’t unhappy; he was miserable,) and the complete lack of acknowledgement of my truth.
She writes, “Sometimes people make choices, act a certain way, do certain things for unacknowledged ends. They live by and within a set of rules with the expectation that their compliance will ensure a set outcome, whether it is money or returned affection or a gathering of objects or maybe the fending off of loneliness. Perhaps it is a combination of all these things. Then, after years of minor and sometimes major compromises, the person doesn’t get whatever it is that he or she “purchased” with the prescribed actions. What then? Maybe the person interpreted the “rules” incorrectly, maybe something else—but the changes in the person are accomplished anyway, the goal is unattainable, and the perceptions of the person are so altered by the day to day compromises that he or she has forgotten the rules of living according to inner clarity. A fine mess. Oh, well, I guess it is pointless to say any more on this. (smile)”
Actually, it’s brilliant.
And I’ve re-read the paragraph before her comment about Dad learning about different types of love. I’m busted again—I still skim my mother’s letters because they’re so hard, so painful, to read word for word. She writes, “I’ve been reading about incest…and…the conclusion I’ve come to is that there seems to be many kinds of incest, not all of them physical. Perhaps it can all be crystallized into the concept of a failure to love, or a failure to understand the nature of love—how to love—“
This makes her no-hell comment less inflammatory, but I’m still angry. Part of it is that I want to be, I think, but I’m also puzzled/peeved that she was reading about incest 25 years after the fact, and she spoke so dispassionately of the matter, like it had never touched her. Like I was a friend she was counseling. Gag me, ok.
Finding this letter is a blessing. It’s opened a vein, not of gold but of molten lava that I’ve tried for years to access. I’ve been unable to feel anything other than baffled grief regarding my mother, and I’ve known that it was superficial, that mere pain didn’t do justice to either of us.
I miss —having a mother. And sometimes I miss her.
NaNoWriMo Rebellious Matter
…a tiny preview to those who’ve read my rough draft–here’s how I’ve begun revising my memoir. It’s rough, but I like the tone.
What I’d like to give my readers is hope—the kind that sneaks up on you when you’re doing the dishes or taking the kids to school or petting your cat: it shimmers in your chest for a moment and suddenly you realize that you’re going to be okay. That’s how it happened for me.
I was driving home from a therapy appointment in 1995, belting out Comfortably Numb when I had to pull over because I had a sensory flashback of the night my father took my virginity while I was sleeping. Out of nowhere, my vagina’s on fire.
I park by the side of the road, music off now, and I’m trying not to hyperventilate while I do a panicky, improvised Lamaze breathing–because, hell, that’s how you treat pain down there, right?
But my lips start tingling, so I shut off the car and get out.The heat hits me like the backdraft of a bomb, and I forget about the pain in my crotch. The pavement cooks my feet through the soles of my sandals as I hurry to the grass beyond the sidewalk.
Off with my shoes, and I’m standing barefoot in the skinny shade of a palm tree, and another more recent memory sweeps in. My sons, playing naked in the slimy thick mud in the front yard. Their bodies caked and splattered, hair spiky with it. Happy. Me, too, watching them, then, and now. Happy.Another feeling, one I can’t identify, is in my chest and it hurts a little. At first I think it’s sadness, which would make sense, given that I’ve just pulled over to quell a horrible memory. But no, I’m feeling something good, and the closest I can get to naming it is contentment.
Today, 16+ years later, I have a different name for it: hope.
That was when I saw that now is more powerful than the past.
Now is my gift. It’s mine, every tiny second of it.The flashbacks are like rips in time’s fabric: sometimes I slip through. But the beauty lies in the weave: I never fall without being able to grab the threads of now.
Back in the saddle: Memoir Revision
It’s been about eight months since I finished the first draft of my memoir. I’ve finally mustered the nerve to work on it–for a while I was afraid I’d give myself another stroke, and I already had enough on my plate, anyway, with my new jobs. Now that the semester’s winding down (two more weeks!) I’ll have time and brain space to rewrite it.
The first time through, all I could manage was to write the memories–I couldn’t find the oomph to incorporate who I am now into the text, which made for a very dark book. I mention this in case a reader out there is also writing his/her memoir and perhaps thinks there is only one way to write a memoir. Not so. The process for my first draft was disjointed — I wrote memories out of order. For a while I’d write about something that happened when I was 5, then I’d switch to something more recent because writing the first memory triggered it.
Take your time while you write, and be patient with yourself. Your first draft won’t be perfect–there’ll be things you forgot to include, or maybe later you’ll realize the house wasn’t yellow, it was white, or you won’t be able to remember the name of the kid next door. Just keep writing, knowing that you can always come back and fix things.
I’m ignoring the voices in my head–and I really should listen. It could be fun.
A friend of mine posted a brief video of Stephen Spielberg on her Facebook page, and normally I avoid such interview-y vids because I really don’t care what so-and-so has to say. I don’t know who he is, and opinions are like assholes: everyone’s got one. I’m tired of being inundated with opinions and images and sounds, unless it’s raucous music, and even then I need earplugs as a filter. God, it’s such a hassle, getting old.
Stephen Spielberg, though–I’ve grown up with him. I watched the “first” Star Wars flick when I was 13, and have loved nearly all of his movies since that first intro. ( A few exceptions, one disgustingly notable: A.I. Seriously. He should have left that film alone. It would have been perfect had it ended with the little robot-boy at the bottom of the sea asking the statue if it was his mother.) I forgive him, though, and will continue to do so because I love his vision.
So I figured I could sacrifice 59 seconds to him. He could have something interesting to say.
“…listen to yourself,” he says. “When people don’t listen, it’s not that they don’t learn, they just deny themselves tremendous opportunities and glorious choices. They deny themselves this, and it’s their own damned fault.”
He said this with a sort of exasperated conviction, like he keeps having to say these same words over and over to people who have no ears. That –helplessness, the underlying sadness in his voice, I heard that.
I heard, if you listen to yourself, you can create your art with as much joy and success as I do mine.
I’ve been feeling stuck — creatively, artistically, writerly. Stuck, unmotivated, and uninspired. This, despite the fact that crap keeps happening—and I mean GOOD crap. I just call it crap because it’s been overwhelming, and when there’s an avalanche, it doesn’t matter if it’s snow or dung—you’re gonna get buried. Right?
argh. Wrong. That’s a terrible attitude, and I know it. So for the past two days I’ve been noodling about the fact that I feel like I’m drowning despite the facts that:
- I have an agent patiently waiting to read 100 pages of my first book;
- I have two Sonnet explications about to go to publication for Facts on File;
- I have been offered the chance to teach two college classes;
- I have been teaching security guards basic verbal self-defense, report-writing, and how to interview witnesses.
All of this has evolved since mid-September, and it’s all amazingly, stupendously good. Yet I feel stuck. And I feel like I’m missing something crucial, which, of course, I am.
I’m not writing.
So I have this slithery insistent feeling under my skin that will continue to get slitherier until I obey. (Then it will subside into a bright shimmer under my skin that doesn’t make me want to stomp but leap. Ahhh, writing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHC5VQFxf0g]
Memoir-writing issues
Thank you, Barbara Abercrombie. This post–Writing About Mom, along with others (I’m not linking them–you go browse. Seriously. You’ll get lost and be glad you did)–anyway, the post about moms gave me insight into a problem that’s dogged me since I began writing my memoir.
I’m writing about my parents, and a nasty monkey’s gnawing at my ear and chatter-whispering about all the things my kids could say about me so maybe I should shut up and leave well enough alone. Karma, y’know. And he is particularly snide and snotty about how my story will probably kill my remaining family members via shock and dismay: heart attack/stroke/seizures.
He’s a mean monkey who doesn’t care that I haven’t repeated all of my mother’s mistakes, nor does he care that I’m not writing vindictively; all he cares about is that I’ve got my flashlight out and I’m digging through rubble and stirring up dust and mildew. Such a mess. (Since when do monkeys care about messes, anyway?)
I was drawn without a mouth—no, that’s not true. I had one till I was six years old, or so. It just got erased. But now I have my doodle markers out….
Memoir excerpt
D5 Creation