A Magical Doorway Opened...

Today I called my mom.  In passing, I told her about the progress of my novel that's set sort of near one of the towns where she grew up in the Appalachian Mountains.  She usually doesn't express much of an interest in my writing and doesn't even try to fake it.  It's just how our relationship is.  I knew I was kind of talking to myself and didn't expect much of a response.

But something I said about the research I was doing on two particular coal mining disasters had the effect of opening a magic doorway into the past. 

For forty-five minutes she shared with me her memories of living in a coal town.  I knew my dad had lived in a coal town but didn't know my mom had.  She even told me about the mining accident that her dad and grandfather were involved in.  Her descriptions made me feel like I was there and validated much of what I already had in my novel.  She also told me some things that went against the grain of what I've been reading in history books that generalize the region. 

I felt like a dwarf from The Hobbit sitting in a pile of gold treasure.

I did write down notes while I talked to her - I was on a corded phone, so I grabbed a black sharpie and scribbled on the back of grocery lists, my kids' homework, junk mail, anything I could reach.

I called her back a few hours later (after typing up the notes) to thank her for sharing with me and to assure her that nothing I'm writing is going to be even close to biographical.  I know that's something she would worry about.  What I'm writing is definitely fiction. 

Holy crap - she opened up again and gave me a fantastic idea for yet another novel.  She was every bit as excited about the writing I'm doing as I am.  How cool is that?!  She asked me to come over and talk with my step-dad, whose grandparents grew up in the same region. 

This is the best day ever.  I can't even express how happy I am - for one, I'm drowning in story ideas - I could spend the next twenty years writing about characters in this region.  And I've made an amazing connection with my mother that I never expected.

If I ever make money from this adventure, I'm going to buy something incredible for my mom just to thank her for the inspiration she gave me today.  That's some good motivation to strive to make lots of money.

A Haiku Kind of Weekend

My daughter is a fantastic writer, but she doesn't want to be told what to write and doesn't want to read her words aloud, especially if she didn't get to choose the subject or poetic form.

Her assignment this weekend for her sophomore English class is to write five short, haiku-like poems.  She has a long list of onomatopoetic words she and her classmates are encouraged to use in their tiny poems.  It is very likely she will have to read one in class.  Did I mention she's a perfectionist?

So a somewhat simple assignment has been made very difficult because she's fighting it and will not be satisfied until it feels perfect to her. 

I, on the other had, am excited and want to do it too.  I really need to write four new chapters, the ones I've been putting off, so this is an excellent diversion for me.

Every day of this long weekend, I am going to sit outside or go for a walk with my daughter and observe nature with composition books and word list in hand.  I'm confident by the end of the weekend, we will have a collection together of twenty or more.  

Too bad she's unwilling to write five poems about how much she hates this assignment.  She would be done in three minutes.

I need to look up haiku format now that I figured out how to spell it.  Have a great weekend!   

My Mom and Sad Stories

My mother keeps insisting that I let her know what I want from her.  She wants to know what I want from her before she dies.  I think she's paranoid that her husband will leave nothing to me or my sister if my mom dies first.  I think she's right.  But I am happy to say I don't need anything tangible.  I have everything I need or want.  I don't need things to create memories. 

What I do want from her is some time and a more positive connection.  That is the thing she is very unwilling to give.  I want pictures and stories of my grandparents and their parents.  I want to know why in this world my grandmother was called Amy when her name was Evelyn.  I want to know where my grandparents are buried so I can leave some flowers for them.  I want to know about my great-great grandma who was Cherokee Indian. 

I called my mom today to tell her I wanted to drop off a mother's day gift this evening.  I told her I was thinking about her offer.  What I want is two afternoons a month.  I want two afternoons with pictures and stories.  I want us to work together to write the stories of our family and give those stories to everyone in the family for Christmas as a book - I know I can do it if she gives me a little bit of time.  In doing this, I hope to mend our relationship.

I told my mother the truth, but with a very cautious and non-accusatory tone: 

I don't remember anything positive from my childhood. 

She said, "Oh, that's so sad.  There were plenty of positive things."  I asked her to try to think of some.  It would make me so happy to hear them.  It really would.

I told her I recently heard her tell my kids that she used to rock and snuggle me in a rocking chair all the time.  I have zero memory of that.  I think she's thinking of someone else.

I told her I remembered her taking us to a little lake and then not letting us get in the water because she was sure there was poop in it.  Her response:  Well, there was poop in it!  Me:  Why did you take us there?

I remember my sister putting a frog in the open end of the top bar of our rusty swing set to see who would win the battle between wasp and frog.  My sister lost.  It turns out she was severely allergic to wasps, but was lucky not to die that day.

I told her I remember laying on the couch with chicken pox when I was five years old and intentionally rolling off to try to get some attention from her.  I remember laying there for an hour plotting it out.  She said she was right there with me the whole time, and my sister was on the other end with the mumps.  I beg to differ.  I told her I remember her spanking me for it.  If my sister was on the couch with me, I assure you she would be kicking me and I would have gotten plenty of attention from crying about it.  I have a distinct memory of us both getting mumps later that year.  I remember my sister getting over it, not before giving it to me.  I laid on the couch, which was moved to a different wall than the week of chicken pox.  My sister went to a birthday party and brought me back a candy bar.  I bit into it and thought I was going to die.  I am, to this day, terrified of nougat.  To this, my mother conceded - I think she doesn't really remember.

I told her I remember hiding in the bathroom with my sister while my parents argued right before they got divorced.  I remember glass broke but no details about what broke or how.  She told me the horrible story of that day.  It was actually worse than I remember.

I told her I have positive memories of my grandparents.  She immediately chimed in that my paternal grandma was a horrible person (not my experience) and proceeded to bad-mouth her in great detail until I asked her to stop.  She told me how lovely my paternal grandpa was.  I told her I know for a fact he was an angry drunk and he ruined my dad's life with his alcoholism.

After the conversation, I am sad to say I think my childhood may have actually been worse than I remember.  It's wrong, but I laugh when I write this.  I have learned to laugh.

My mother told me that my kids will only remember the bad things too.  I don't think so.  We celebrate the happy days and retell the stories constantly.  We have had bad moments, and I have been through plenty with my kids at my side.  I know they have seen many days where they struggled with me.  But a day rarely passes where we don't laugh out loud together or share a pleasant moment.  That's the difference.

So I'm thinking I can create a character based on my mother, named Nancy Negativo or maybe just nicknamed Negative Nancy, who cannot stop herself from telling her children the absolute worst stories when they ask for something nice.  She bad-mouths people on the way to their funerals instead of finding the tiny things in their lives to celebrate.  It's a work in progress.  Lucky for her, I have a backlog of stories to write.  Too many stories, not enough time.

I'm going to hold her to the afternoons, but will be surprised if she shows up to one a month.  I offered that my husband can sit with my stepdad who is ill - she said she didn't need help.  I guarantee that will be her excuse.  My husband is on standby. 

If I can get some pleasant stories out of her, I will try to post them here.  It may be a while....

I is for Impertinence

One of my daughter's 9th grade vocabulary words two weeks ago was "impertinence," which her book defined as rude disrespect.  Of all the words, this was the one that she couldn't remember.

My daughter is a teenager. Impertinence is the hallmark trait of teens. The word was quite likely invented to describe one.  My daughter is a really amazing, talented, loving kid, but I still get a daily dose of impertinence from her.

To help her set this very useful word in her long-term memory, I have taken to screaming, "Impertinence!" whenever she sasses me even a little - yes, even in public.  I also have adopted a house rule we like to call, "Chores for Impertinence."  But I never enforce it.  She always laughs and the impertinence immediately melts away.

Mothers, Daughters, and a Public Reading

Last night my daughter went with me to hear me read at the public reading for my writing class. She was the only teenager there - it was really special to have her there with me.  The honest discussion on the way home about how she feels about things was priceless, especially because she opened up to me without any prodding or questions from me.

She was really proud of me for being brave and shared my anxiety about reading in front of a crowd.  I need to stand with a cane but am not coordinated enough to hold a microphone, read from a piece of paper, and feign some sort of eye contact while propping myself up on a cane.  I think I could have managed if I didn't have to hold the microphone.  There was nowhere to put my cane, so I put it on the ground.  I stood on my bad foot a little with most of my weight on my good one.  My voice quivered, which made me anxious.  My hands started shaking, which amped up my anxiety even more.  I cried a little at the end.  My daughter said she cried too. 

I am absolutely suffering today in more ways than one.  My bad foot is hurting badly, and my good one (which is not that good) is hurting some.  I have a million things to do, but the nerve in my right foot is spazzing.  I think I may need to give in and go to the pain management doctor.  Maybe they will give me special lollipops instead of hard-core narcotics. 

I am very upset that I showed my anxiety to my daughter.  I wish I had held it together.  I wish I had chosen something different to read.  Maybe anything would have had the same effect.  It wasn't what wrote and read that brought me to tears - it was the anxiety.

The funny thing is that I have led countless meetings, given presentations in large lecture halls to sometimes hostile crowds, conducted user training for people who weren't there by choice, and spoken in front of VP's and department heads without any real problem with only flushed skin revealing my discomfort.  But I never fell apart - not even once.  It got easier and easier the more I did it.  Self-confidence in what I was presenting - in the application I designed or in an idea I had - was what got me through.  The speaking part was a necessary evil, so I sucked it up and did it.

I am torn between never reading in a public setting again and forcing myself to do it.  I'm not sure.  Next time, I will definitely pick something less personal and something more upbeat.  Or maybe something I have already successfully read out loud in the larger group in my class would be easier.  Lots of people who read last night read things they have presented before.  It didn't really occur to me to do that.  That would have been a safer move.

My mother called me tonight to ask how it went.  As I mentioned yesterday, I read her a chapter of the story over the phone and made her cry.  I told her she shouldn't come if she would get upset, and she agreed.  In retrospect, it would have been funny to have three generations of women crying together over a piece about my grandmother (er, uh, the character's grandmother) - four generations of women in the same room, three of them crying about the loss of the fourth. 

Up until now, my mom has been completely disinterested in my writing - it holds absolutely no interest for her.  If I mention it, she changes the subject the way I change the subject when my step dad starts talking about car repair.  She just doesn't get it at all.  Once I read the chapter to her, she got it.  I told her the other ideas I had.  She listened carefully and was truly excited.   

Tonight she called to ask me how it went.  I told her I cried and I got so nervous my hands and voice were shaking.  She told me I shouldn't let that stop me from writing and that I'm a wonderful writer.  She told me she wants to read the story when it's done.  That is literally the only genuinely positive thing my mother has said to me ever, and it means everything. 

Public Reading Tonight

My writing class - which feels more like a group than a class - has a public readaround tonight.  I don't mind at all and actually feel very comfortable lately reading my stories out loud in my small group.  Reading to the large group of maybe 15 or 20 women makes me uncomfortable.  Tonight there are 20 readers and presumably 40 or more total people in the audience including the people reading. 

Initially, I was going to read something new, something I recently wrote that is part of a collection.  But I don't want to share it out loud just yet - not because I don't think it's good.  I just want to keep it to myself - or my small group - for now.

Instead, I decided to pull something out of one of two short stories I have been working on revising.  One is a story I wrote last spring - my first short story that wasn't intended for the eight year old crowd.  I found the electronic copy this week and was surprised at how much my fiction has improved over the last few months.  It was a good story, but a little rough.  I selected a section that I could read and then read through another story so I would have options.

The other story is one I have been struggling with.  It is a fictionalized account of the time I visited my grandmother just before she died of colon cancer.  I had the story planned out in my mind and the chapters laid out exactly how I wanted them to go.  The thing is, I wrote it on paper in a journal or a notebook and have misplaced almost all of it.  The last time I worked on it, I wrote the ending in my daughter's piano teacher's living room while my daughter was having a lesson.  Before the lesson was over, I found myself crying out loud, sobbing, so overwhelmed with emotion that the best I could do was walk out to her front porch and get myself under control.  I lost that chapter - something Freudian at work for sure.

So I started to rewrite it and had one chapter that I felt I could read out loud without crying in front of a room full of strangers.  I read it out loud, revised it, read it again, and called my husband and read both pieces to him.  He liked the one about the trip to see my grandma before she died.  I did too.

I called my mom to see if she could maybe babysit so both my husband and daughter could come to bolster me up emotionally while I read.  She said maybe, probably.  After I got off the phone, I wondered if maybe she would like to come.  I thought she would like the story, that she would get it and appreciate it.  The last time I offered to let her read a poem I wrote, she started to fold the page and shove it in her purse without looking at it.  The last time I told her I was writing a novel and had finished a novel-sized children's story, she basically changed the subject.  I thought this would be an opportunity to share this with her, to give her an opportunity to see me for just three minutes, just this once.

She declined.  I was hurt as usual and wondered why I keep putting myself out there like that with her.

Then she called back.  She said she would love to come but was embarrassed to admit she is afraid to drive at night.  I offered to pick her up, which solved the problem.  I asked her if I could read it to her over the phone.  I did and by the end she was sobbing hysterically - and it wasn't even the sad part, not even close. 

I told her it was fiction.  I changed the names.  It wasn't real.  I asked her if she would cry if she heard me read it out loud in front of a crowd of strangers.  She said she absolutely would.  So I asked her not to come.

To my mother, my sort of made-up story was real and brought visions of her parents back as if it all happened yesterday.  To me the story is sort of real too for the same reasons.  But it's not real.  Tonight I will believe it's not real, and I will try very hard not to cry - not much anyway. 

I assured her this is the closest my fiction comes to touching my real life.  This story is impossible to tell without making it not be about me, but I really want to tell it.  It's still so painful and too close - even after 20+ years.  I told her my other stories have bits and pieces of things that happened in my real life, but they are truly fiction, not just the names.  I don't want her to worry that I'm writing about her - I'm not. 

I told her I did include that part about the time when she took away my baby tender love's food packets.  She thought that was funny.  I told her how proud I was that my husband said he thought my sister was pure evil after reading one of my chapters.  I smiled my biggest smile and told him it was absolute fiction - it never happened; it's just a story.  And the character in the story isn't my sister; she's the main character's sister.

My mother told me she had many regrets.  I told her I did too.  Athough she isn't going to be there to support me reading the story, I am very happy that I shared it with her and that she appreciated me for bringing back her parents for just three minutes.

Why Teenagers Can't Wear Boots

This morning, the temperature was something like 17 degrees, 7 if you consider the wind chill, which I do.  My teenager wouldn't put on boots.  She wanted to wear slippers that the kids these days wear as shoes.  Since this is complete craziness when five inches of snow is on the ground and the bus stop is all the way at the end of the road, well out of sight, with not one sidewalk shovelled (we suburbanites are getting lazy lately), I insisted on boots.  She argued and then got upset with me when she was late for school....

She has three pairs of boots to choose from:  her suede two-sizes-too-small boots that she insists still fit her feet, her new suede boots that I spent too much money on and am on the edge of taking from her so my feet can be warm, and new stylish boots her step-mom gave her that she adores, but not enough to put them on the day after a snow storm. 

I am sure this is a battle of wills, a battle of wills that may well go on for the next 3.5 years, until she goes to college and realizes that she will be really cold and sick if she doesn't dress for the weather. 

This is a battle I am not going to back down from.  Nor will she quite likely.  I am stubborn enough to hide her slippers until the spring. I will be up front about hiding her shoes - the problem for her will be that I have an absolutely terrible memory and will never remember where I put them.  So perhaps I should warn her I will hide (and most assuredly accidentally lose) the slippers if she doesn't have the sense to wear boots when there is snow on the ground.  Maybe that will be enough...maybe not.

I realize she shares my independent, strong will and may actually hide her boots if I hide her slippers, leaving her only with gym shoes or flip flops....

Strange Mother-Daughter Thing...

My mom and I definitely have a really strange relationship.  I think she would agree, but I'm not sure. 

She called me two days after my biopsy to see if I was OK.  I actually could have used some help with my toddler during and after the biopsy.  We had to bring my little guy with us to the hospital, so basically I was alone waiting while my husband entertained my little guy.  Luckily there was a huge train display in the lobby for Christmas, which kept him busy for the two and a half hours we were there - a very long wait for me alone and an even worse one for a toddler.  My husband had to take off work to hang with the babes.  She is at home and lives nearby but never offered to stop over to help take care of him - she typically declines if asked, so I didn't.  Even an hour or two of help would have made a world of difference.

Yesterday, she called to find out how the biopsy went and was sobbing hysterically, saying with extreme melodrama that she was so worried about me and so relieved I was OK.  It would have been so devastating for her if I had cancer.

I am very confused.  If you really care, don't you offer up some help or concern for the person who is sick?  Don't you call before the biopsy to ask the other person if they are handling it OK? How did it turn out to be about her?  How did it happen that I ended up consoling her?  I can't see how it could suddenly impact her if I had cancer - there are no phone calls unless I call, no visits, no nothing unless I initiate it, which I honestly am tired of doing.  I have literally gone more than a year without talking to her in the past with no phone calls from her.  Why suddenly all the emotion that I may be sick?

I'm very annoyed with the fake compassion. Is it possible this is as good as it gets?  Is it possible that after 42 years, I continue to expect more?  Apparently so....

Today is our family Christmas thing.  I am going to try to take a deep breath, liquor up if necessary, and try to be invisible or at least calmly pleasant.

Study Time

My high schooler has semester exams this week and a snow day today.  She slept in and started work after lunch. By 2:00 p.m. she was done studying for the week.  I convinced her to work on it some more, but not much. 

Her motto is, "I got this."  We agree that we have different personalities.  I for one admire hers but think my approach to life works better during exam week.  She is brilliant but has the approach to life of an artist.  Her priority is to draw a picture on the inside cover of her spiral binder to set the appropriate tone before the first word is written down.  I say write it down quick as you can and then memorize every fact systematically and forget the picture.  For me, the goal is to do anything you can to get a 100%.  I have always been like this, even in second grade.  Personality flaw, perhaps, but this extremely detailed approach to studying will get you an A every time.

My daughter attempted use her creative skills to assume my personality today while studying.  I offered her a bribe if she would.  It lasted two hours, with breaks every twenty minutes.  It probably won't work since she didn't fully delve into my obsessive-compulsive, systematic, anal-retentive programmer mindset. 

When I was a kid, I would have studied in a frantic state up to the minute before the exam, until I was over-saturated with content to the point it would explode out of me during the exam.  I was nervous, unhappy and depressed constantly.  I thought everything depended on my grades, on my success at school.  After all, what else did I have?

My daughter, however, has her first of seven exams this week in exactly thirteen hours and is ready.  She feels confident she is prepared and is watching t.v. playing with her brothers.  She is not worrying about her exam.  There is no self-doubt creeping in on her making her think maybe she should study more.

Completely exasperated with her about an hour ago, I told her she could babysit and I could work if she was really sure she was done studying.  To my surprise, she agreed with a smile (I was being sarcastic after all), and it was actually for the best.  I got this unexpected opportunity to write about inexplicably amazing she is and how I believe she is going to allow herself to walk through life with confidence.  Maybe I am a good mother after all - but the truth is I clearly have a lot to learn from her.
 

Pay-Backs Are Coming

After writing somewhat unkindly but honestly about my mother today and later deleting it from public view, I will be getting what's coming to me very soon.  My daughter has to write a short story for her English class in high school.  I am the main character.  She is writing about the day our garage started smoking and our house nearly caught on fire. 

It is a great story and I will leave her to tell it, but her take on it was different than mine.  I saw the evening as a blessing - if we hadn't seen the smoke when we did, the house would have been fully ablaze that night.  My daughter remembers how I completely misunderstood my husband and thought the worst of him in one small instant.  I was definitely wrong that night in the one action that has stayed with her for four years.  I will take it however she depicts me and will be proud of her if her writing is honest even if it hurts. 

I asked her if she would at least make me pretty on the outside.  She laughed and said, "Of course."