(My goodness, here's another unpublished draft, this one from 2013, before the flood, asitwere. I'll publish this one, too, what the hell.)
I am of the Vietnam generation, acutely aware of the damage done by that war, at home and abroad, how all of us alive and awake at that time suffered mightily from it, and from the simultaneous social and political revolution.
The revolution didn't come all at once, there were stragglers, and there were people ahead of it. If it had been a tsunami, as horrible as that would be, it would all be over and we wouldn't have had any choice but to move on. As it was we had to MAKE choices and for the most part didn't make good ones, not having any empirical data with which to reason things out, only a sense of get-it-together, make-a-decision, and do-it-NOW. Snap decisions -- always my default -- really only have a fifty percent chance of being the right ones.
I was on the home front, mostly pregnant and chasing toddlers in the sixties, but that is not to say I wasn't at war. I was a lousy mother, but that is not to say I didn't do my very best not to be. I was a warrior pretty much alone on the battlefield, struggling with myself, covering all fronts and flanks, racing from one skirmish to the next. Suffering pets, four sick or wounded or merely and endlessly needy children, fouled diapers, sinks and sinks and sinks full of dirty dishes, weather so cold a child's lungs would freeze if he were allowed to venture outside. Weather so cold that each mother's miseries could not be shared with that of another -- too fucking cold to go out and find companionship, not to mention help. The MIA husband and father: he'd come home on Friday, usually after the children were in bed, and I'd be prostrate with exhaustion and resentment, but still cranking up the panic and sleeplessness in anticipation of the MIA leaving again Sunday evening, BEFORE the children were to be put to bed. He'd climb back into the limo, looking sad to be forced to leave his happy family, and, once safely away, breathing an enormous sigh of relief that he could do so.
I'd be back in the kitchen, just barely coping, and feeling my stomach clench with anger and panic at the prospect of another five days of battle. Life and death, it was; driving one kid or another at breakneck speed east on Central Avenue toward the Evanston Hospital Emergency Room, while the kid spurted blood or vomit or feces or made the most grotesque whistling sounds -- in as well as out -- fighting for oxygen.
I can't list the what-if's that had me in constant panic mode; they don't matter, what matters is the state of constant hypervigilance that I lived in for years. Whatever horror I could think of never happened, but plenty of horror did, and all I could do was suck it up, cope cope cope and try not to drink until the MIA showed up. I still have that hypervigilance, the keynote of PTSD, and it doesn't seem to want to leave me.
On the other hand, no matter how horrible life was in those days, I mattered. My presence and attention saved the day, and if there were nothing I could do to alleviate some crisis, well..., actually, there was always something I could do to alleviate a crisis, and I'm so smart, so capable, that I could usually fix things. That fixing things was not -- is not, ever -- a solution to a crisis of the soul did not occur to me, and kept me isolated but admired, even envied for a very long time, long after the point where my kids could pretty much look after themselves. Afraid of not-mattering anymore, I substituted for the helpless dependent children whatever was handy, whoever seemed to need me, and even if they didn't need me, I'd try to fix them anyway. Problem was, once they were 'fixed', they'd leave, just like the kids. That's what kids do: they stick with Mother until they get the hang of survival, then they split and do not look back (nor should they).
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Blowout
(This was actually written, or rather drafted, in the fall of 2015. I don't know why I didn't publish it then; probably a failure of nerve.)
[cough] [coughcough] It's been a while since I was in here; a lot of dust gathers in five years, not to mention cobwebs and the odd dead mouse. Let me turn on this light over here and gather my wits. There; that's better.
Last week Anne Lamott told me (and a lot of others) that I own everything that's happened to me, that I must tell my stories, and that if people wanted me to write warmly about them, then they should have behaved better. Well, that set me free, to a certain extent. I have spent more than forty years stuffing a sock in my mouth in the (clearly) vain effort to keep my children sane and secure in those decades of general and particular chaos. They're grown now, the kids, and they're all pissed for one reason or another, or else they're a little crazy, or perhaps both. I don't know them very well anymore, nor they me, so I might as well lay out a little history as I know it, with as much truth as I can collect. As to any negative impact truth might have on my offspring, or anybody else: as they say in Texas, y'on y'own, honey. Deal with it.
There's a picture of the children shortly after we arrived in Bogotá, in 1971; they are all just beautiful. That they look so good is remarkable considering how their father, with my reluctant consent, had just driven his family into a metaphorical ditch. We were joining the Peace Corps! Isn't that exciting? Won't it be a grand adventure?
Dad is a Nixon appointee (a distinction I would not fully appreciate for several years).
Mom is doing the heavy lifting: packing for six people for three different manners of shipping (accompanying baggage and survival equipment for three months for a family of six somewhere overseas in an unnamed climate, then air freight to arrive within a month, and sea freight to arrive, incomplete and when it is no longer necessary) and storage of everything else; selling two cars; renting out the house; finding a property manager for the rented-out house; parenting two babies (one infant with massive and endless colic, one toddler with a faux celiac disease which required a special diet, else diarrhea and/or pneumonia would ensue) and two older boys ages five and seven whose main occupation was trying to kill each other, or, failing that, killing themselves; pinworms, spurting arteries, head colds, impetigo, head lice, ingestion of dishwasher detergent (read: lye) by the toddler on Christmas eve (hospitalization for three days), a dog with chronic diarrhea (an Old English Sheepdog, just FORGET about the washing and brushing he required); impending Chicago winter. I could go on and on; I really could.
Oh, and while Mom did this heavy lifting, Dad was elsewhere, mainly in Washington, D.C., supposedly being trained for a staff position in Peace Corps, but mostly being lied to by the Nixon administration, in particular by the CIA. This was 1970, need I say more? Lies or no lies, he bought it -- it will be SUCH an adventure! And had I remembered to pack his sock garters?
Well, it certainly was an adventure. From sheer physical exhaustion and unexpressed resentment -- okay, unexpressed rage -- I lost my mind for the first six months in-country (in two countries, actually: Colombia and Venezuela), and for the remainder of the two and a half year tour, I grimly held on to my family, my mind (that was the hardest part), my husband's eroding career -- whatever the hell that might become after the Fall. I whined to my mother; I whined to my sister Mia (who was enduring her own version of Hell, having followed her husband to Greece on no money for no particular purpose other than he wanted to do it, how like my situation); I whined to a Canadian family therapist in Caracas. Nobody seemed to have an answer to my existential question of what the holy fuck are we doing here, and how in hell are we going to find our way back to a sensible, orderly life in which we could nurture these psychologically bruised children when this is over?
Well, the sensible and orderly life really didn't happen, ever, before the kids reached their majority. Each of the six of us floundered and groped and wept and ranted and came together and flew apart in no clear pattern. We were shattered and badly re-glued, each of us, and we all seemed like emotional Mr. Potato Heads for an awfully long time. The father seemed to be the least eroded by it all; being the second most devoted control freak (the second child had him by a mile, and the third admired and tried to emulate both of them), once he divorced me, he perfected the trappings of equanimity. Unfortunately, his second wife -- a raucous and very excitable Irish American -- worked his every last damned nerve, eradicating the equanimity before it was truly established. Apparently their fights were epic, sending the younger, very frightened resident child to the midnight bed of the older only slightly less hysterical resident child more than once.
The father is dead now; he died fairly young -- he was fifty-five -- and it was not an easy passing, not for him, not for his third wife (he got really lucky third time out, but they had pitifully few years together before his weary heart gave out), and certainly not for his children. There were six of them by then, two with his second very Irish-fish wife, and they were all desolate at losing him, their only solid anchor. (Nobody thought I was any kind of an anchor, though I really was.)
For the record, I want to explain who I thought the father was, how he got it right sometimes, and how he tried desperately hard all the time, and just wasn't up to the whiplash changes occurring in the world and in his life. The women he loved were far FAR from the flour-dusted mommies he thought he wanted; they were half-broke mustangs at their worst, though smart and charismatic creatures, very challenging to subdue. Impossible to subdue, it turns out, and when he pulled out his serious weapons in the effort, everything went to hell. I ran for it, the Irish woman harassed him into the arms of another woman, and he very quickly just went under after that.
The father was indeed a control freak: as long as I knew him, his hands shook, just from the anxiety of living life in a frightening world. He was not lazy, though; he gave everything he did everything he had. He dearly loved his kids, and was what a friend of ours calls a perfect baby-daddy; as they grew they became more difficult for him to understand and therefore to control. (By the way, who in hell really controls teenagers anyway? Anybody who says he does is kidding himself, and those who manage to communicate with the creatures are probably not their parents.) In the position of losing his grip on the children, it became impossible for him to show his love for them, at least so that they'd believe it.
To his horror, a couple of his kids, maybe more than a couple, have tendencies toward the artistic and therefore anarchic, and the resultant explosions echoed back and forth across the continent. Sadly, there really wasn't time to repair it all before he died, though the final wife, as well as the wife of the eldest child, did their very best to make repairs, to tack on some patches at least, but the scars remain, some to this day.
The father had a pretty good sense of humor, thank God. It was dry, and fast, and when he was amused his whole face would open up and grin. He had perfect teeth, which was annoying to those of us who didn't, and he wasn't tall but he was handsome, in a Fred MacMurray sort of way. ("Long upper lip?" said my Edwardian grandmother. She was funny in a wholly different way; this was bitchery we think, but we can't be sure; we were never sure where she was concerned.) He thought of himself as playing catch-up most of the time we were together: I was sophisticated and whip smart, but much too young to be married; I think he was planning on training me from a young age to be the wife he thought he wanted (see flour-dusted mommy, above). Too late he discovered that there was no one in the world capable of "training" me; if the Titan Emilia Belknap Cresswell couldn't do it -- and she freely admitted she could not -- no way was a mere man going to make me submit for long. In truth, I tried to at first, because I loved him, and because he wanted me to be submissive. Besides, I didn't have any other ideas about a different kind of life I might have wanted. My horsey attitude won out in the end, and we battled pretty much from our third year of marriage until The Fall. I don't know who won; I didn't, and I bet he didn't think he did either. We both lost, and so did all the children, at least for a while.
Now, the kids have established their own lives, they've triumphed over a rough childhood. They all graduated from college, a couple with advanced degrees, they don't do drugs nor drink excessively, they support themselves, they are coming to terms with life. They can be kind, and generous (though seldom with me), and they work very hard. Their father would be proud of them.
[cough] [coughcough] It's been a while since I was in here; a lot of dust gathers in five years, not to mention cobwebs and the odd dead mouse. Let me turn on this light over here and gather my wits. There; that's better.
Last week Anne Lamott told me (and a lot of others) that I own everything that's happened to me, that I must tell my stories, and that if people wanted me to write warmly about them, then they should have behaved better. Well, that set me free, to a certain extent. I have spent more than forty years stuffing a sock in my mouth in the (clearly) vain effort to keep my children sane and secure in those decades of general and particular chaos. They're grown now, the kids, and they're all pissed for one reason or another, or else they're a little crazy, or perhaps both. I don't know them very well anymore, nor they me, so I might as well lay out a little history as I know it, with as much truth as I can collect. As to any negative impact truth might have on my offspring, or anybody else: as they say in Texas, y'on y'own, honey. Deal with it.
There's a picture of the children shortly after we arrived in Bogotá, in 1971; they are all just beautiful. That they look so good is remarkable considering how their father, with my reluctant consent, had just driven his family into a metaphorical ditch. We were joining the Peace Corps! Isn't that exciting? Won't it be a grand adventure?
Dad is a Nixon appointee (a distinction I would not fully appreciate for several years).
Mom is doing the heavy lifting: packing for six people for three different manners of shipping (accompanying baggage and survival equipment for three months for a family of six somewhere overseas in an unnamed climate, then air freight to arrive within a month, and sea freight to arrive, incomplete and when it is no longer necessary) and storage of everything else; selling two cars; renting out the house; finding a property manager for the rented-out house; parenting two babies (one infant with massive and endless colic, one toddler with a faux celiac disease which required a special diet, else diarrhea and/or pneumonia would ensue) and two older boys ages five and seven whose main occupation was trying to kill each other, or, failing that, killing themselves; pinworms, spurting arteries, head colds, impetigo, head lice, ingestion of dishwasher detergent (read: lye) by the toddler on Christmas eve (hospitalization for three days), a dog with chronic diarrhea (an Old English Sheepdog, just FORGET about the washing and brushing he required); impending Chicago winter. I could go on and on; I really could.
Oh, and while Mom did this heavy lifting, Dad was elsewhere, mainly in Washington, D.C., supposedly being trained for a staff position in Peace Corps, but mostly being lied to by the Nixon administration, in particular by the CIA. This was 1970, need I say more? Lies or no lies, he bought it -- it will be SUCH an adventure! And had I remembered to pack his sock garters?
Well, it certainly was an adventure. From sheer physical exhaustion and unexpressed resentment -- okay, unexpressed rage -- I lost my mind for the first six months in-country (in two countries, actually: Colombia and Venezuela), and for the remainder of the two and a half year tour, I grimly held on to my family, my mind (that was the hardest part), my husband's eroding career -- whatever the hell that might become after the Fall. I whined to my mother; I whined to my sister Mia (who was enduring her own version of Hell, having followed her husband to Greece on no money for no particular purpose other than he wanted to do it, how like my situation); I whined to a Canadian family therapist in Caracas. Nobody seemed to have an answer to my existential question of what the holy fuck are we doing here, and how in hell are we going to find our way back to a sensible, orderly life in which we could nurture these psychologically bruised children when this is over?
Well, the sensible and orderly life really didn't happen, ever, before the kids reached their majority. Each of the six of us floundered and groped and wept and ranted and came together and flew apart in no clear pattern. We were shattered and badly re-glued, each of us, and we all seemed like emotional Mr. Potato Heads for an awfully long time. The father seemed to be the least eroded by it all; being the second most devoted control freak (the second child had him by a mile, and the third admired and tried to emulate both of them), once he divorced me, he perfected the trappings of equanimity. Unfortunately, his second wife -- a raucous and very excitable Irish American -- worked his every last damned nerve, eradicating the equanimity before it was truly established. Apparently their fights were epic, sending the younger, very frightened resident child to the midnight bed of the older only slightly less hysterical resident child more than once.
The father is dead now; he died fairly young -- he was fifty-five -- and it was not an easy passing, not for him, not for his third wife (he got really lucky third time out, but they had pitifully few years together before his weary heart gave out), and certainly not for his children. There were six of them by then, two with his second very Irish-fish wife, and they were all desolate at losing him, their only solid anchor. (Nobody thought I was any kind of an anchor, though I really was.)
For the record, I want to explain who I thought the father was, how he got it right sometimes, and how he tried desperately hard all the time, and just wasn't up to the whiplash changes occurring in the world and in his life. The women he loved were far FAR from the flour-dusted mommies he thought he wanted; they were half-broke mustangs at their worst, though smart and charismatic creatures, very challenging to subdue. Impossible to subdue, it turns out, and when he pulled out his serious weapons in the effort, everything went to hell. I ran for it, the Irish woman harassed him into the arms of another woman, and he very quickly just went under after that.
The father was indeed a control freak: as long as I knew him, his hands shook, just from the anxiety of living life in a frightening world. He was not lazy, though; he gave everything he did everything he had. He dearly loved his kids, and was what a friend of ours calls a perfect baby-daddy; as they grew they became more difficult for him to understand and therefore to control. (By the way, who in hell really controls teenagers anyway? Anybody who says he does is kidding himself, and those who manage to communicate with the creatures are probably not their parents.) In the position of losing his grip on the children, it became impossible for him to show his love for them, at least so that they'd believe it.
To his horror, a couple of his kids, maybe more than a couple, have tendencies toward the artistic and therefore anarchic, and the resultant explosions echoed back and forth across the continent. Sadly, there really wasn't time to repair it all before he died, though the final wife, as well as the wife of the eldest child, did their very best to make repairs, to tack on some patches at least, but the scars remain, some to this day.
The father had a pretty good sense of humor, thank God. It was dry, and fast, and when he was amused his whole face would open up and grin. He had perfect teeth, which was annoying to those of us who didn't, and he wasn't tall but he was handsome, in a Fred MacMurray sort of way. ("Long upper lip?" said my Edwardian grandmother. She was funny in a wholly different way; this was bitchery we think, but we can't be sure; we were never sure where she was concerned.) He thought of himself as playing catch-up most of the time we were together: I was sophisticated and whip smart, but much too young to be married; I think he was planning on training me from a young age to be the wife he thought he wanted (see flour-dusted mommy, above). Too late he discovered that there was no one in the world capable of "training" me; if the Titan Emilia Belknap Cresswell couldn't do it -- and she freely admitted she could not -- no way was a mere man going to make me submit for long. In truth, I tried to at first, because I loved him, and because he wanted me to be submissive. Besides, I didn't have any other ideas about a different kind of life I might have wanted. My horsey attitude won out in the end, and we battled pretty much from our third year of marriage until The Fall. I don't know who won; I didn't, and I bet he didn't think he did either. We both lost, and so did all the children, at least for a while.
Now, the kids have established their own lives, they've triumphed over a rough childhood. They all graduated from college, a couple with advanced degrees, they don't do drugs nor drink excessively, they support themselves, they are coming to terms with life. They can be kind, and generous (though seldom with me), and they work very hard. Their father would be proud of them.
COLD TURKEY
My God, has it really been six years since I added a blog post? Just goes to show what a time/energy/thought/contemplation suck Facebook is. (In truth, there was a draft I made a year ago, which I'll publish after I finish this. Still, it's been a long time between drinks.)
Which is why I'm back at the Bulldozer today. In light of the shocking and demoralizing recent presidential election results, the Universe has ordered me to knock off Facebook-checking, and reading of the New Yorker, and the New York Times. (I cheated on that last today, but scrolled all the way down past the Politics headline before I started really reading. Even at that, my stomach gave a tiny lurch when I'd glance at some of those headlines. Holy shit.) Anyway, I'm reading not-too-trashy thrillers, and am halfway through this year's reading of Aubrey/Maturin. I've made up four ice-trays of fresh lemon juice with zest, made my bed, sent out a couple of emails, and, frankly, I'm bored.
I remember Mother saying, when I asked her how she was doing living alone after burying her second husband, "Well, I find I get a little tired of myself." I'm thinking that had the blog been invented in those fallow times for her, she would have indulged in writing one, and found a lot of interesting things to tell herself. That kind of creative surge might have warded off her death at a (relatively) early age, and opened up some new avenues of creativity that I KNOW she had but had never really explored.
Anyway, this is a good way for ME to tell myself some stories. I'm confident no one else reads this, and so I'm free to write whatever I want, follow any path that looks interesting, judge anyone I want (except myself -- that's a sin). On the other hand, as in Levertov's poem "St. Peter and the Angel", there are the daunting "next terrors of freedom and joy." That's the only other direct order I've been given by the Universe: to enjoy my life. What a thing to say to a child of New England! Joy? Terrifying. Freedom? Perhaps more so.
My niece has been shackled all her life by the madness and fears of her immediate family; the most crazy member, her mother, has died, as have her craziest, most haunted siblings. Her children are grown and nicely on their way to life, her father will nestle comfortably for his few remaining years in the bosom of the male-dominated household of the surviving sister, and Blue, having formally retired from her career, can do whatever she wants now. We talked about how scary that is, and we are agreed that it is exactly that.
So here I am. I may come back to write more, shoving aside the fear block, and talk to myself in this safe room. If I don't, I'm not a scaredy cat; if I do, I think it will be because the fear of boredom (idle hands the devil's workshop, e.g.) is greater than the fear of writing. We'll see.
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