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Notes On Not A Memoir

October 2, 2016

By Janet Clare

The black hearse crossed in front of our car on the way to my first chemo appointment. “Think it’s a bad omen?” I asked my husband, “like a black cat?”

That was nineteen years ago so it wasn’t a portend of things to come. I was, and remain, one of the lucky ones. And, don’t worry this isn’t a cancer-survivor memoir. This isn’t even a memoir. I didn’t have a rotten enough childhood to write a memoir. Not perfect, mind you, but it wasn’t a locked-in-the-closet, raped-by-my-father, thrown-from-the car by a drug-addled-mother kind of upbringing. No alcoholism, no overtly deviant behavior. Misunderstood? Certainly. It was the ‘60’s. Everyone was misunderstood.

It was a time of long hair and dark clothes, of seriousness and hopefulness, unrest and social progress that we innocents thought would never end. The world was expanding and we thought it would go on forever, and ever better. A time when some of our dreams for a more civilized, humane and liberated country actually came true. We never imagined fifty years later it would all go to hell. It seemed impossible. But at some point our country put on the brakes to enlightenment and skid to a frightening stop. Then backed up and went the other way. But this isn’t a treatise on political angst, either. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts

Immigrants in America: Notes from the Irish Shadows

March 17, 2024

This story may not be for the faint of heart. Current times might call for a trigger warning; this story involves substance use, mental illness, suicide and death. In balance with these dark truths comes a tale of love, perseverance, and the essence and strength of family ties.

As family stories go, sometimes its difficult to know where to start. Perhaps I should begin with what I know best, me. I am the youngest of four daughters, born into a metro Detroit, working-class family, with parents that were typical of the times. Three of us girls were “tow haired” blondes, with one brunette thrown in to keep things interesting. Dad was in a union blue-collar job. Mom was home raising us kids. Mom liked to get her teased up hair “frosted” as was popular in the 70’s and couldn’t have weighed more than 115 pounds on her 5’ frame. In the chaos of rearing four girls, each about a year apart from one another, she managed to simultaneously sew us God awful 1970’s patterned clothing (with the likes of plaid designs, bucket hats, and an especially distinctive pair of bell-bottomed pants made from a 7-Up pattern material) bowled weekly with the ladies, and had a meat and potatoes dinner on the table every night at 5 for Dad.

All four of us sisters shared a small bedroom when we were pretty young, and eventually had two to a room after a modest addition to our house. I didn’t realize it at the time, because it didn’t necessarily feel like we had much growing up, but we kids were blessed with something better than gold. We had stability, learned a sense of right and wrong, and knew that no matter what, we always had each other. It was a recipe for a family foundation of granite. I never truly understood how rare and valuable this gift was until I was a bit older. Though on the surface our childhood might appear idyllic, there were troubled currents just below the surface.

My Dad was a contrast of character strengths and weaknesses. He was a handsome, short-statured man, with a face framed by dark, curly, short hair and emerald colored eyes that twinkled after a few beers. As a kid, I remember my Dad’s two sisters, rather vaguely to me at the time, advising us girls to forgive my Dad for his flaws, alluding to a deeper, hidden past we didn’t understand. On the one hand, my Dad was hard working, instilling in us girls a oxen-like work ethic. We learned not to ask for things. As teenagers we had babysitting and other jobs to obtain most things beyond our basic necessities. However, Dad was generous at Christmas, helping to make our holidays special growing up. He passed on a moral code that included consideration for those less fortunate in life. I recall him helping an elderly lady, unknown to us, home from church after she fell outside on the church steps. Once, as a small kid, I was making an ignorant comment about a kid that was probably mentally challenged, and my Dad, in a patient tone, taught me never to be unkind to people that were born with afflictions outside of their control.

These childhood lessons, now hard-wired in my brain, have made me a better human. There was a somber side of my childhood as well. My Dad had a temper that often got the better of him and us. He would get angry if he heard us giggling or talking when we were supposed to be sleeping as small children. He would explode, possibly throwing a shoe at us to make his point. I recall if something got broken in the house being rounded up together, as if in a criminal line up, to suffer the consequences. The guilty party was spanked; therefore, confessions were never forthcoming. The only sounds were fear-filled tears, of course followed by threats of “I’ll give you something to cry about!”. One of the most shameful elements of my childhood was my problem with bed wetting. Control of this problem was ever elusive to me when I was young, yet I suffered the disgrace of my Dad’s temper in the morning non the less. Fear, like most things, can be a double-edge sword; fertilizing your growth or shrinking your spirit like Roundup on a weed. Now, as I reflect on my aunts’ revelations that my Dad had some demons in his past, it turns out in fact, there were some neon lights illuminating his struggles, as both a human and parent.

Now you may be wondering where does the immigrant story fall into place here. My Dad’s parents were both Irish immigrants, whom sadly, I never had the privilege to know. Our Irish roots instilled pride and was the steel of our family bond. As a kid, I remember my Dad advising me that the only ones you can truly count on are family. Grandpa Frank, tall and thin, was from Tralee in County Kerry, eventually landing in Detroit after serving in World War I. My Grandmother Delia, diminutive in frame, with large, kind eyes, came from County Sligo, meeting and marrying my grandfather in Detroit. I recall hearing tongue in cheek stories as a kid, that our Irish relatives settling in Detroit in the 1920’s were kind enough to facilitate the flow of spirits during the dry times of prohibition, hiding the booze in a wagon by having the kids sit atop of it in transport. Additionally, my Grandpa fit the Irish immigrant stereotype, by serving as a Detroit cop for a time. He eventually opened his own pub in Corktown, fittingly titled Shamrock Bar. Family lore would indicate this is when things began to sour for this newly established American family.

Dad was the youngest of 6 children, all born in the 1920’s and 1930’s. This was a family of small framed, fighting Irish. My two porcelain-skinned aunts were beautiful, one raven haired, and the other with an auburn tint. The boys were handsome as well, with muscular frames, with dark hair and eyes the color of the sea. My oldest two uncles served in WWII. Notably, both were captured by Germans and held in prisoner of war camps. We didn’t hear much about their experiences though. The stoicism of this generation did not embrace private or public sharing of the troubles they endured. Men during that time, and most definitely those in our family, preferred certain things be left unsaid.

These two oldest boys proved to have opposite outcomes upon return from the war. My oldest uncle went on to college to become an engineer, get married and raise a family. He was outgoing and friendly, with a true Irish “gift of the gab”. At family parties, with all of us cousins ranging from little to big, he would throw change into the grass and we would dive in to see who could find the most money. Maybe this sounds odd, but us kids loved it! A quarter back then could buy a bagful of candy at the corner store. My sisters and I also had fond memories of him paying us to take a bite of his homemade pickles (which we hated and I don’t think I ever did- cash or no cash).

Alternatively, the immigrant’s second son did not fare so well in life. I recall asking my Dad about this brother, who died before I was born, and I was quickly admonished that “we don’t talk about that” with the pain evident in his voice. History and truth can become blurry, especially when hidden under a veil of shame and sadness. This was especially the case with our family history of mental illness, substance abuse and trauma. I learned at a young age; these were among the things left unspoken and thereby maybe could become less real.

Family stories point a crooked finger at my grandfather. The story goes that he only had time and attention for his eldest son, shunning my Dad and his other brothers and sisters. Grandpa Frank became a “mean drunk” after opening his pub in Detroit. In our family, at least for my Dad, suppression was the preferred weapon of choice to combat these ugly childhood memories. My aunt, the most likely to shine a light on family secrets, gave us some clues about their childhood miseries. Some stories include one of my Grandpa kicking my Grandmother and their children out on the street after a fight, leaving them to sleep in a park. Another time my grandfather brought home a woman from the bar and had sex with her, while my aunt hid terrified under the bed, unable to get away. My Dad, exhibiting his grit as a small child, stood up to his scary, probably larger than life Father, saying “Don’t you hurt my Mom!” during one of their fights. My aunt provided a glimpse into the unsettling childhood they experienced.

However, there were good times too. Dad, after a couple of tongue-lubricating beers, would share some of his fond memories growing up. Grandma ran a boarding house for Irish immigrants that were newly settling in Detroit. He relayed his love of the residents’ Irish accents and their telling of colorful tales. My grandmother’s youngest sister was the last of her siblings to move to the U.S. from Ireland. My Dad would spend summers with her and her husband at a lake with his cousins. My aunt was a message runner for the IRA in Ireland before moving to the U.S. She was strong woman not willing to take guff from anyone. My sisters and I learned to play euchre from her and my Dad when I was 7 or 8 years old. Let me say you quickly understood not to make the same mistake twice, not an easy lesson for a young, not so sure of herself girl, like me at the time. Her Irish husband, a born leader, was one of the founders of the autoworker’s union in Detroit and an elected congressman for a time. I suspect he was a great role model for my Dad as a child. My hunch is that my Dad’s childhood experiences with these relatives resurrected him from the ashes of his immediate family.

Now back to my grandparents. I know it is an easy leap to villainize my grandfather. After all, he did some terrible things. As I did not have to live directly with their consequences, I am likely more generous of spirit than Dad and his siblings would have been in this story’s telling and ending. I also have the luxury to view this family history through today’s lens, acknowledging the role of PTSD resulting from the multiple traumas endured in these lives. These truths lead me to pause when I consider the broad family portrait that I attempt to paint now. I wonder what led my grandfather to move to the U.S.; how much poverty and hardships had he endured as a young person? Of course, he also served in WWI, and I don’t know what emotional wounds he sustained there, as PTSD was not even a consideration back then. I wonder if not having other tools, he used alcohol to sooth long buried emotional scars. Maybe any truth is blurrier than the surface implies.

The biggest causality in this story is my Dads older brother, the second born son. He clearly suffered childhood trauma, likely combined with undiagnosed depression or other mental illness. In addition, he went on to experience wartime atrocities that I can only begin to imagine, being held captive in Nazi Germany. Sadly, I heard he received medals for “being good at killing people” during the war, which could not possibly lend itself to decent mental health. I am sure given little to no alternatives, alcohol was the salve with which he treated his nightmares. He would terrify his family shooting off guns in my Grandma’s house, and go off to bars to get into fights.

My Mom tells me they would “have him locked up but sometimes he would escape” from a mental hospital (I would guess the word hospital wrongly implies there was healing going on there). Eventually he took his own life by hanging himself in a Detroit park on the 4^th of July. How sad and ironic a tribute to our nation, for someone fighting our wars, to die on Independence Day on home soil. I recall in nursing school, many years ago, my psychiatric nurse instructor said “sometimes there are situations worse than suicide” and I did not appreciate what she meant at the time.

When I reflect on my unknown uncle, I think I may have more insight on her statement now. I feel empathy for this man I never knew, and just as much for my Grandmother, as she had to watch her son self-implode. Indeed, my Grandma entrusted all of her sons to our nation’s military. Her third son served in the Korean War, and my Dad, while serving in the Army, although not during wartime, survived his forearm being crushed during Army bomb testing. Shades of the movie Saving Private Ryan hold a kernel of truth for my paternal family and especially Grandma Delia. Despite, or perhaps because of, the turbulent times they endured, my Dad and his family taught me a sense of family unity, much like the Irish Claddagh, tightly knit and bound together with friendship, loyalty and love. My Irish roots, as seemingly impossible as a rose in the desert, survived and thrived, despite the harshest of conditions.

I mourn the life of my Uncle. His mental health and ultimately life, though unacknowledged at the time, was but one small part of the currency paid to win the war. In the end, I now understand the lesson my aunts tried to teach me as a child. I not only forgive my Dad for his shortcomings; I am grateful for all he and his family sacrificed for me. I marvel at his ability to have provided a solid foundation for my Mom, myself and my sisters, despite the adversity he faced. Our Irish family is but a part of the broader immigration story of the U.S. This family, along with others that have come before and after, provide the backbone for our nation and a richness of culture that is distinctively American. Thank you, Uncle Bud, this story is dedicated to you. I hope you have the peace and love in your next life that eluded you in this one.

J. Ranger, although wizened to the ways of the world, is a novice in the writing community. She is clearing her throat and using her voice for the first time in a long while. Her brief memoir and snapshot of how her family came to be in the United States, shines a light on the struggles of family to overcome its past, and some debts our nation forgot it owed.

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Guest Posts, eating disorder

Jumping, But Not For Joy

October 25, 2020

By Rebecca Portela

My senior year of high school started in the midst of my deterioration. I spent a lot of my time reading memoirs of women with eating disorders, while my mother read psychology books on understanding women with eating disorders. Our relationship was fickle, despite the fact that we both just wanted me to be healthy and didn’t know what was causing me to be in such distress all the time.

Thinness was just the side effect of my strict regimen of calorie counting, exercising, and sheer mania. It was simply an ongoing endurance test, and I constantly needed to push my limits. And I always took it too far. My personal record was a whole week without eating or sleeping. Because why stop at starving? Let’s add a side of delirium, too. I spent most of the time at a friend’s house doing jigsaw puzzles. We had taken over the dining room table and the living room floor. We eventually had to dismantle our least favorites to make room for new puzzle stations. I was quite proud of our specific strategy styles. I pulled out the corner pieces and the edges, and he immediately grabbed the two closest pieces and tried to make them fit together. Sometimes he would force them, mashing his thumb down on top of them, convinced that they belonged together. Without speaking, we made piles of same-colored pieces and designated them accordingly. Sometimes we would have to speak and say things like, Be on the lookout for a little hat with some gold in it. During smoke breaks, he sat at the edge of his pool and splashed his feet in the water. He’d take in a big drag and as he exhaled, he’d make definitive claims like I’m gonna move to New Zealand and become a welder. I walked around the edge of the pool, stepping in the exact middle of each tile and saying something like, Can I come with you? We watched the sun come up on the seventh day and, by then, the leaves on the trees were puzzle pieces with little bits of sky. My cigarette smoke made love with his on top of the pieces of puzzle sunrise. I blinked and heard my eyelid unstick from my eye, like fresh Velcro. I knew that he would never move anywhere and he knew I would never go with him. The freckles on his hands lifted off and popped like juicy bubbles, interrupting all the smoke sex. A wild laugh bounced around at the back of my throat and I threw up all of it with the rest of the emotions in my gut. My back was itchy, which was how I knew I was on the grass now, crying or laughing or screaming or puking.

I fainted at school, and they called my mother to come and pick me up. She warmed up a can of soup that was in my pre-approved cupboard of “safe” foods. It was a soup called “Super Broccoli” and contained exactly sixty calories, and not much else. I waited until she left the room and dumped it down the garbage disposal. It wasn’t long after these periods of rebellion that my body kicked into survival mode and ate, whether I wanted it to or not.

This is where bulimia creeps out of the woodwork. Bulimia terrifies me because she is a slippery garden hose, whipping around in all directions and out of control. She is a gluttonous savage that devours everything in sight and then rejects it. She goes from zero to sixty to zero again in the blink of an eye. I did everything possible to kill that bitch.

I frequently turned to drugs and men when I couldn’t control my eating disorder. It was the only way to curb my obsession and compulsions, which were the actual root of my problem. After my first encounter with drugs, I craved the escape. I craved the insanity. I craved the feeling that nothing is real and so nothing really matters. I liked that my thoughts were turned off and that food wasn’t the focus of my existence. I was too busy being out of my mind. I didn’t have to care about anything.

My utter recklessness should have sent me to an early grave. As I peaked on one of my acid trips, I had a fleeting thought that a police officer, in the distance, suspected something. Or was that a tree? Speaking of which, I needed to get home to plant a tree because I needed to feel connected to the earth. Everything was connected. I was the earth. I was invincible. So I jumped in my car and played a very dangerous game called Driving Home on LSD, listening to “Eleanor Rigby” on repeat. Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for? All the lonely people, where do they all come from? It took me an eternity to drive the twelve miles from Coconut Grove to Cutler Ridge––two hours in real time. I didn’t even have a driver’s license at the time. My hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that they were throbbing and visibly pulsed in front of me. The traffic lights wore majestic tails that stretched out into the swirling neon signs of strip clubs and bars. The fusion of lights, honking cars, and the mysterious symbols on the dashboard was making it impossible to concentrate. A little lightbulb went off in my head every second, rapid fire, you need to push on the pedal, you need to push on the other pedal, now the other pedal again. It was exhausting and a little bit of an existential crisis. I’m still dumbfounded that I didn’t kill anyone that night.

The comedown was always the worst. My entire body was crawling with bugs that weren’t really there. They were digging into my skin and some even made it all the way into my blood, burrowing into my identity, taking over. I wanted to surrender to the creepy crawly bugs of sadness. I could feel myself giving up. I was losing myself.

2002, eating disorder treatment, take two. The treatment facility tried to incorporate “real life” as much as possible, so that it wouldn’t be as difficult to transition back into the world upon leaving. We were assigned an apartment in a building with regular people. The first floor was the eating disorder floor and the second floor was the substance abuse floor. And the other ten floors were for normal people. Our roommates were also people in the program who vowed to follow an honor system and refrain from “behaviors.” One of my roommates came outside on our porch to join me for a cigarette. She scolded me for doing sit-ups in the middle of the night and told me to cut the shit or leave. The weird part was that I did actually want to get better, but my eating disorder had been with me for so long and had been what kept me company all these years. Little rebellions were all I had left. So I found myself doing sneaky little things just to feel the slightest bit in control. Every night I would slink into the kitchen when everyone was asleep and dump out some of my salad dressing and fill it with vinegar. By the end of the first week, it was 100 percent vinegar. I had never felt more pathetic. I decided to give recovery a real shot.

Each morning both floors boarded a bus that we called the Druggy Buggy, to head to the main building, where we spent most of the day in groups and individual therapy and met with our nutritionist. I was very expressive in group, writing allegories and poems about my eating disorder, comparing it to an abusive lover, a rabid animal, or even a parasite baby inside my womb. At night we would attend various Anonymous meetings around the area. Almost all of the women in the treatment center had issues with drugs and co-dependency, so we attended those meetings as well.

On my eighteenth birthday, I boarded the bus and smushed my face up against the window. I stared out at the traffic and chanted to myself This.is.not.my.life. This.is.not.my.life. Thisisnotmylife. A child in a car seat stared back at me from a car driving below. I forgot where I was for a moment and made silly faces, making the little boy laugh. I glanced over at the mother driving the car. She looked up at me and smiled. She became startled as she noted the words on the side of the bus, checked out the twenty other twig-shaped people inside, and sped off. I peered over the side and read: IN RECOVERY. It might as well have read: THIS BUS IS FULLA CRAZIES. HIDE YOUR CHILDREN.

I stepped on the scale with the number facing away from me. My nutritionist frowned and scribbled some notes on my chart.

“What’s wrong? What’s happening?” I asked.

“We’ll need to up your fat intake by 50 grams. You’ve lost some weight,” she replied casually. That put me up to 120 grams of fat a day. Being a vegan, this meant I had to chug olive oil.

“This doesn’t make any sense. I thought we were supposed to be learning how to eat normally. Normal people don’t have a nice tall glass of oil with their dinner. Seriously, this is insane. I won’t do it. This is bullshit.”

This particular treatment center operated very differently than any other facility I had experienced. They banned all sugar and flour from our diets and focused on a more whole foods approach. The idea was that sugar and flour were addictive empty calories. It was also one of the main reasons I agreed to admit myself. Ya know, before I knew I’d be doing shots of oil without a chaser.

The girls that were following their meal plan and maintaining their weight got special privileges. They got to choose between a thirty-minute run, an outing with a trusted pre-approved person, extended phone calls, or being able to come along on group field trips. I was doing really well and got awarded all privileges. As I sat awaiting my turn on our bowling outing, all that oil just didn’t seem worth the payoff.

For my unsupervised outing with my person, I chose my boyfriend, Jason, to take me to dinner. There was a vegetarian restaurant called Here Comes the Sun that I was excited to go to. I had never been to a fully vegetarian place before. He came to pick me up and we hugged for a long time. We hadn’t really spoken since I told him I had a problem, a problem so big that I needed to go to rehab for it. He was as supportive as he could be for someone he’d just started dating, but he didn’t really know how to proceed.

We started driving and the farther we drove from the center, the more antsy I got. What if we just ran away and never went back? What are they gonna do? I needed to rebel in some way. I had to take this opportunity.

“Pull in here,” I said, pointing to a cheap motel off the highway.

“What? Why? We have reservations. What are you saying?”

“C’mon. I miss you. It’ll be hilarious.”

He turned into the parking lot and we giggled wildly as we walked to the front desk knowing we would be checking out a few hours later. I giggled even more. I was skipping dinner. And going to get away with it.

The room greeted us with fragrant, stale must. The one working lightbulb strobed and hummed, leaving little to the imagination of what kind of sketchy meetings this room had seen. The motel bathroom was maybe once lime green, but now had a permanent brown film coating the walls. The shower curtain was decorated with cigarette holes. We looked at the floor and sat on opposite sides of the bed.

“You look well. How are you really doing though?”

The air conditioner dripped arrhythmically.

“I’m good. Can we talk about something else?”

He started talking about his grandmother, who was sick but still had her spirit. He tried to visit her once a week. They always went to the same restaurant. And he always made the same jokes that she liked to laugh at. He told me stories of stupid things his friends had done over the weekend. I rested my hand on the unusually moist bed and immediately yanked it back to my lap. We were sitting in front of each other, like a jail call with the glass in between us. I was in jail and he was living on the outside and this wasn’t real life. The light flickered, making his face look like he might ask things like, Do you want to die tonight? I started to cry and he awkwardly moved over to me and put his arms around my shoulders. He smelled like fresh mint and cloves.

The week before I was discharged, my therapist had me write a letter to myself that she would send to my house six months later. I stared at the blank piece of paper and honestly couldn’t imagine what six months from then would even look like. Or what I would possibly want to read from my six-months-younger, in-treatment self. What wise words of wisdom could transcend the barriers of a possibly relapsed future me? Or a possibly flourishing me? Or a possibly deceased me, and my poor mother opening this now irrelevant letter from her then-alive daughter?

Bex,

Don’t fuck it up.

Seriously.

I stuffed the letter in an envelope and gave it to my therapist.

“That was a short letter.”

“Yep. Short and sweet.”

Rebecca Portela is a writer and speaker for human rights and animal protection in New York City. She specializes in the genres of psychology and comedy writing. She recently finished writing her memoir, Unearthed, where she uses her unique sense of humor to address difficult subject matters, including PTSD and sexual abuse. Her work can be found in Idle Ink magazine, Beyond Words (Queer Anthology), X-Ray, trampset, io Literary, Stone of Madness Press (inaugural issue), and elsewhere.

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Guest Posts, Grief, healing

Nothing Fancy

August 25, 2016

By Sheryl Rivett

I watch, face pressed to glass, as the rolling hills of Miller county Missouri give way to breathtaking glimpses of sandstone river bluffs. A cloying sweetness wafts through my parents’ open windows, and I watch my mother hold her hair back from the wind, her manicured fingers shiny and smooth. I feel as if we, my mother and father and brother and I, are adventurers traveling the world in search of twilight sunsets and golden apricots, not the mere four hundred miles that lie between our home in Northern Illinois and my great-grandmother’s home in Missouri.

Addie greets us, rooted in St. Elizabeth like an ancient tree with hardy, sprawling branches.

We relax into small town life. Days inch by in the way that summer days pass. I play on the lawn in front of Addie’s clapboard house, while my father packs and lights and cleans his pipe and talks to farmers and neighbors passing by. The dolls I assemble on the lawn were once my mother’s, Addie their caretaker. She keeps them tucked away in a cedar chest, only unpacking the dolls for a special occasion. She lifts the top of the chest to reveal their shining faces, excitement lighting her own face. There is a magic in playing with the dolls my mother’s own hands once tended, a magic that opens a portal to her girlhood, and it’s as if I am playing side by side with another little girl, a girl with perfectly curled hair and wide, questioning eyes. The little girl frozen in the black and white photographs in an album that sits on a bookshelf back home.

2008. In the middle of the night, chest pressure and a feeling of suffocation. My diaphragm is locked tight. I leave my four daughters in the middle of the night when I ride by ambulance to the local hospital. The swoosh of the blood pressure cuff, the cool oxygen in my nose, blood snaking through the plastic tube. An xray. Continue Reading…

Compassion, Guest Posts, Inspiration

Grace Notes

April 20, 2015

By Melodye Shore

As I rounded the last corner on my morning walk, I stopped to admire a flowering pink azalea. Dainty pink blossoms fluttered on graceful stems, lifted like ballerinas on the morning breeze. Winter was being nudged back into hibernation, and spring was doing one last dress rehearsal before taking center stage.

But my reverie was cut short.

The air was filled with the unmistakable whine of chainsaws, and the frantic chattering of displaced birds.

I raced toward my house, chased after the disembodied sounds until I found their source.

An army of gardeners surrounded the pepper trees in my neighbor’s yard, right behind my own. They stood sentry along our common fence, weapons raised, until my neighbor called out to them in broken Spanish. Chainsaws bit into bark–a steady, grinding noise–as one after another, amputated trees limbs crashed to the ground at the workmen’s feet.

My heart sank. Planted in the wrong spot, Brazilian pepper trees can be a bit unruly. Without pruning, they grow impossibly tall and unruly. They litter the ground with seedpods, and their gnarled trunks shed bark. They’re not indigenous to our area, and it shows. Even so, I love them. They provide shade during the hottest part of summer, and they offer sanctuary to the countless birds that, moments earlier, had taken to the sky, voicing their displeasure.

Hummingbirds patrolled the wooden fence, wings whirring as they dive-bombed the intruders. Mockingbirds hovered above emptied nests, and house finches fought in vain to protect their hatchlings. Homeless now, a pair of orioles took wing, a blur of sunshine that disappeared when they vanished.

I stared at a bald patch of sky, where leafy branches used to be, and I was overcome by a naked sense of vulnerability. My heart ached for the birds—their sanctuary was being destroyed! But when the hacked-off branches teetered on the fence, and then collapsed into my yard like fallen corpses, my fingers tightened around my phone.

Now what? I asked myself. My neighbor and I were strangers— the fence, the trees that divided our properties also separated us from one another. I wouldn’t recognize his face, were I to bump into him at our local market, and I didn’t have his phone number.

So I called my sister, who lives 1000 miles away. “He’s killing them,” I sobbed.

“Wha–” The panic in her voice was palpable. But as I related the situation, blubbered on and on about dismembered trees and murderous gardeners, the urgency in her voice dissolved into relieved laughter, followed by sighs of relief.

“What can you do?” she said. “His property, his trees…I’m sorry, but I don’t know what I can do to make you feel better.”

So I called my husband. “You should see this!” I wailed. My eyes were blurred by tears, but I tried valiantly to describe for him the massacre as it continued to unfold.

Awkward silence.

“I wish I could help you,” he eventually said, “but by the time I get home from work, the damage will already be done.”

We ended our conversation, and in that hollow space between knowing and not believing the situation in which I found myself, I heard a still, small voice. It called me out of my panic, whispered the answer I needed to hear.

Share your concerns with the right person, it said. Speak up, while you still can. Continue Reading…

Dear Life., Guest Posts, Relationships

Dear Life: I Love, But Am Not IN Love.

January 2, 2015

Welcome to Dear Life: An Unconventional Advice Column.

Your questions get sent to various authors from around the world to answer (and please keep sending because I have like 567 writers that want to answer your burning questions. Click here to submit a letter or email dearlife@jenniferpastiloff.com.) Different writers offer their input when it comes to navigating through life’s messiness. We are “making messy okay.” Today’s letter is answered by Karen Lynch, who just had an essay on the site that was phenomenal. Read and share and comment and get Karen’s book here. Send us your questions because there loads of crazy authors waiting to answer ‘em. Just kidding, they aren’t crazy.

Well okay, maybe a little. Aren’t we all? xo, Jen Pastiloff, Crazy Beauty Hunter. ps, I will see you in Vancouver in a couple weeks! My first workshop there!

By Karen Lynch.

Dear Life,

Here goes. I am in a relationship right now. I love this guy…but I’m not in love with him. My heart isnt where his is and I feel he wants to marry me (like right now) and I have told him I do not and will not get married again. He has a lot of growing up to do. I dont feel he is happy/loves himself.

There is another person in my life who every time I am around, he lights my entire body on fire. He’s the one who I feel has gotten to my soul! His actions speak so loud and clear, along with the signs I have seen nonstop since we have gotten to know each other better. The hard part is that we are coworkers, and my current boyfriend and I graduated from high school together 23 yrs ago.

I know where my heart lies, with the one who took it without my knowledge (if thats possible). I know he is the one, just not the right time just yet. When I had a vivid dream about a month ago, he came out west to be with me. And these vivid dreams I have ALWAYS come true. Though I dont have many of them, but when I do, they come true. He’s the one who seems to be able to handle my extreme independence. Time and patience are what it takes relating to relationships sometimes, that things happen when they are meant to.

I am not a babysitter for a grown man who can’t handle alcohol on weekends (current boyfriend). One who has an slept beside me for almost three weeks (one excuse or another). Who is afraid to get near me because my dogs get protective of me, and a lot more. I know what I need to do, just got to jump in and do it, even though feelings will be hurt no matter what.

Any advice/opinions will be appreciated.

Sincerely,

C. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Mental Health

Hunting for Joy

September 28, 2023

Years after we had all moved out and gotten married, my mom bought herself a kitten. A medium-length tabby with soft gray fur named Jazz. Completely smitten, my mother went 100 percent cat lady and quickly decided that Jazz needed a friend. Along came a shorter haired gray kitty named Joy. My mom went gaga over these cats. They have more toys than I ever did growing up. She pays the cat sitter an exorbitant amount of money if she ever has to leave them. She lavishes them with more affection than I ever received. I’ve given my mother framed prints of her grandchildren and she responds with a curt thank you, but when given pictures of her cats she completely lights up.

Now when I bring my own children to visit, Jazz and Joy mostly hide when my rambunctious crew shows up. Eventually Jazz makes her way out of the bedroom and begs for attention, and then completely ignores you in the assholey way that cats do. Joy, the more timid and moody feline, avoids being held or even seen. Jazz sits on my dad’s lap every morning and they watch Perry Mason together. Joy, only shows her face for tuna fish and my mom.

Growing up we had a cat or two and occasionally a dog. There was a short run with a snake, fancy fish tanks and even ducks in the pond. My favorite, an overweight, odd-looking calico named Mittens. Her face and body, blotches of orange and black but all four feet seemed to be dipped in perfect white paint. I was fond of Mittens. She often slept on my bed but could just as easily be found in the yard stalking prey or wandering off for days at a time. There were no photos of our pets on the Christmas card. Pets were pets. They were reminders to feed and litter boxes to clean. If you were lucky, you could catch one long enough to snuggle.

I’m not completely sure when my mom crossed over from stressed to anxious, but the line has long been crossed. I remember her always working, cleaning or worrying but it has gotten progressively worse over the last several years. She keeps notes on all the doors to not let her kitties out, but I’ve never once seen either of these cats attempt to go outside. They probably don’t even know what grass feels like, but the idea of them running away terrifies my mother. These days, a lot seems to terrify her. Simple things, like a deleted junk email can send her over the edge.

When I visit I hate that I can expect to be woken up by the sound of the vacuum before the sun is up or my mom attempting to wash the sheets while I’m still snoring in them. Lately, it isn’t only the vacuum waking me but my mom calling for the cats long before dawn. Jazz usually turns up, but Joy always hides. My mom searches every room, regardless who is sleeping, turning on lights and looking under beds for Joy. It almost always results in tears.

“Where is my Joy kitty?”

“Help me find Joy?”

“Did you let her out?”

This is not a one- time occurrence. This is every visit. Every morning. She will not relent until someone gets out of bed and looks behind dressers and in closets never opened. On a recent weekend trip home, my father boiled crawfish that we ate by the pound. My daughter insisted on taking the boat to her favorite island. My son caught dozens of perch off the dock. The weather, food and company could not have been better. My kids, sunburned and content, had barely argued all day. I decided to reward them with snow cones and returned long after my parents usually go to bed. My children came in laughing with blue raspberry snow cone stained lips and I worried that I’d wake them. To my surprise my mom waited up, like I was a teenager. She was not worried about us, but wanted to be certain that we did not let the cats out. We watched her check the front door multiple times to make sure it was locked and the oven three times to make sure it was turned off before finally going to bed. She walked upstairs and asked if we could leave the bathroom light on for the cats.

I said yes without asking any questions. My daughter puzzled by this behavior went quiet. Her smile gone, but she knew better than to ask why. She turned to me and you could read the worry on her twelve -year -old face.

“Mom, how do you not have anxiety?” she asked, but what she meant was,

“Will you be like this too? Will I?”

I told her that of course I have occasional anxiety. Just not to that extreme. I reminded her of tools we can use to help and rattled off several examples. My preteen just sighed. “I know how to breathe.”

I want to assure her in a hundred ways that I am not my mother. I want to point out all our differences. That I sing loudly in the car, that I laugh often, I rarely cry over emails and that I run the vacuum even less. The truth, however, is that sometimes I do worry, I will catch “it”, whatever “it” is. This crippling anxiety. This unpleasantness for life.

This complete lack of joy.

And right that moment, I hear my mom calling downstairs. She is close to tears, “ Here, Joy kitty, where are you?”

My mom, forever hunting for Joy.

Michelle Hurst is a writer and educator in Texas. Her favorite topics to write about are faith, chronic illness, hope, family relationships, and middle age. You can read more at www.michellewallishurst.com.

***

Wondering what to read next?

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Siblings

Harold and His Purple Crayon

September 23, 2023

Note: The below is adapted from Amy Turner’s acclaimed memoir, On the Ledge, published by She Writes Press.

Arriving within 30 months of each other, my brothers, Harold and Jimmy, and I had been a force from the beginning. We’d vanquished babysitter after babysitter. Live-in housekeepers escaped in the night, presumably ashamed to admit they were no matches for three toddlers. That we were preverbal had been absolutely no obstacle to our planning and execution. We were invincible. Back then, the three of us were one indestructible piece; even we couldn’t tell where one of us ended and the others began.

On our way to visit our son at college in 2010, Ed and I stopped for lunch. I needed frequent breaks. Just the sight of vehicles speeding by disoriented me. Two months earlier a pickup truck had plowed into me as I was crossing the street. Miraculously, I’d sustained no broken bones, but still suffering from a serious concussion, I probably shouldn’t have been traveling. However, regardless of my dizziness and throbbing head, I was determined to return to normal life.

Ed and I were talking about which of the parents’ activities we’d want to attend when my cell phone rang. Not wanting to talk on my cell in a public place, I sent Jimmy’s call to voicemail and retrieved the message from there.

“Ame, call me as soon as you can. Umm, it’s important.”

I looked at Ed and sighed. After 30 years of marriage, he knew my family as well as any of us knew each other. “Harold?”

“I’m sure. Oh, God, not now.”

When Jimmy described the policeman coming to his door and asking, “Are you the brother of Harold Turner? I’m sorry to inform you . . . ” I could feel the threads that I thought had frayed to nothing long ago tighten around me in a final, fleeting hug, then snap—one by one.

As a child, I thought that, of the three of us, Harold might be the most special. In one of my parents’ few joint expressions of playfulness, we were each “given” a tune that featured our first names. Although Harold’s song—”Hark the Herald Angels Sing”—was a bit of a stretch, he also had what our family prized above all—a book, actually a series of books, with his name in the title: Harold and the Purple Crayon. Published in 1955, a year after Harold’s birth, the book had been ready for him just as he was ready to be read to. About four-years-old and appearing simply as a black outline on a white background, fictional Harold realized his dreams and evaded perils, by drawing one unbroken line with his large purple crayon. He drew himself to the moon, and escaped a dragon and a drowning. However far away his adventures took him, in the end, he always remembered how to draw himself back to where he most wanted to be: at home, sleeping in his bed, the blanket drawn up to his chin, and his face at peace under a moon perfectly framed in his window.

If I’d heard this news about Harold at any other time in the previous 20 years, I would’ve been sad, but not surprised. What little I knew of Harold’s life during those decades had included his identifying the body of his second wife, who was murdered after she left a bar; moving from apartments to motels; and then alternating between the streets and couches of bar acquaintances slightly less down-and-out than he. Arrested several times for public consumption of alcohol and vagrancy, for years, Harold called only to ask for money—initially polite requests that always ended in angry demands. I still remember my head pounding in rhythm with the percussive and frightening hard C’s—”may not recover normal cognitive function, brain damage due to continuous grand mal seizures electroshock therapy”—as a psychiatrist described Harold’s condition eight years earlier, in 2002. Harold would recover well enough to resume drinking.

As children, Harold, Jimmy, and I were platinum blondes, but Harold’s hair darkened earlier and to a greater degree than ours. In the summer, his light brown freckles gained territory and could almost masquerade as a tan. Invariably, his face also showed red patches where the freckles stopped and the zinc oxide had been hastily applied, if at all. I still picture Harold on the tennis court—straw-blond hair and slightly sunburned face, fighting back tears after losing to his best friend, whose only advantage was a killer instinct.

I remember sitting on my twin bed, as a 15-year-old, facing 14-year-old Harold and 13-year-old Jimmy on the guest bed opposite me, the three of us crouched so far forward that our knees touched. My brothers were whispering in an anxious duet—”Wait, What? Dad was going to jump? That’s why he was gone when we were little?”—when our mother, arriving home from an AA meeting earlier than expected, walked in.

After a moment of stunned silence, she erupted. “Amy, what did you tell them?”

Buoyed by the self-righteousness of a heroine saving her brothers from a lifetime of ignorance and misery (and by the confidence that my psychologist would defend me should my mother punish me), I did the unthinkable in our family: I yelled back.

“I told them about Dad’s suicide attempt and the mental hospital. Dr. Ferdinand just told me. They have the right to know.”

Her yell had been scary enough, but the glare that followed my outburst was chilling. When she barked, “Harold and Jimmy, go to your rooms right now,” they were already scurrying to the door. She stared at me once more then shut the door with enough force to make clear the topic was now closed.

In high school, Harold’s drinking and drug use already had a desperate, determined quality, different from the usual teenage experimentation. He would try anything and was brazen in doing so—sometimes in his room at the top of the back stairs, out of earshot of my parents’ bedroom. While pot was becoming popular in our high school and some kids were using psychedelics, Harold was one of the very few who snorted heroin. How he did this and maintained good enough grades to get into Harvard was hard to fathom.

A week before Harold’s memorial service in Fairfield, Iowa, I began an archaeological dig in our basement to locate his letters to me during the year I spent in Switzerland. Desperately wanting once more to be an 18-year-old girl with a 17-year-old brother, I sat on the basement floor and, as the tears streaked the dust on my face, read them all: “It’s no big deal, Ame. I’m just having fun.”

Had I taken the letters upstairs to read, the dig would have ended there. I would never have noticed an unfamiliar trunk—the kind we had taken to summer camp—its once shiny black surface peeling and gray, its reinforced corners dented, and its metal lock now rusted and disintegrating. When I opened it, I could’ve been peering into Harold’s coffin. There he was—documented in glowing report cards, newspaper clippings of undefeated basketball seasons, tennis trophies, academic awards, childhood drawings, college essays, and postcards from camp.

I examined each artifact, hoping that this autopsy of sorts might pinpoint the source of his suffering. There was the expected anatomy of any academically and athletically gifted student. There were cards for Christmas and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the products of obligatory elementary school activities, but then there were others that I am sure no schoolteacher had a hand in: Harold’s thank-you notes to our parents that I would never have written as a child, or as a parent could ever have expected to receive, including—notes for Christmas presents, for a trip to a football game, or for just being “great parents.”

Also in the trunk, in a stack held together by a deteriorating rubber band, were my letters to him. When I saw my rounded, girlish print, I was embarrassed for my 18-year-old self who had thought her naïve threats could solve Harold’s problem—”Mom’s going to kill you if you don’t stop doing drugs.” Yet I realized she had not yet been jaded by the decades of worry and unheeded pleas that would follow.

Most of my memories of Harold’s vulnerability and sweetness had been obliterated by his anger and arrogance, the byproducts of decades of drinking. But as I read a note he’d written at age ten to my parents, “Thank you very much for making Sat. the 25th such a wonderful day, someday I’ll do it for you . . .” and one he’d written eight years later to my father regarding their victory in a crucial doubles match, “Perhaps the time that has passed since our glorious match has wrapped our experience in gold. Whatever the case may be, gold or fool’s gold, I will treasure it the same,” all echoes of his drunken rants were gone. In the silence, I could almost hear the soft beating of his heart.

As Harold told it, during his freshman year at Harvard, he noticed a group of students who—unlike his circle of friends—always looked rested, clear-eyed, and happy. When he asked them why, they said they’d started Transcendental Meditation (TM). Wanting that clarity and peace (and, though he didn’t say it at that time, sobriety), he started right away. With my parents’ blessing, he took time off from college in 1974 to become a TM teacher. After returning from teacher training, his social life mainly involved leading residence courses or watching tapes of Maharishi with other meditators.

But Harold was a “periodic,” like my mother had been, which meant that periods of sobriety were eventually followed by ever-longer stretches of binge drinking.

In 1987, Harold moved to Fairfield, Iowa, the TM organization’s centerpiece in the U.S., with his girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife, hoping, I believe, the influence of meditators might keep him sober. But it wasn’t enough. Whenever my mother, a fixture in AA by then, urged Harold to go to a meeting, he would taunt her, “You were drinking at my age. I’ll stop drinking when you did, when I’m thirty-five. Leave me alone.”

If Harold stopped drinking in 1990 when he turned 35, it wasn’t for long. His marriage broke up two years later, and by 1996 he was married to Trudy, whom he met in a bar. She also had multiple arrests for public intoxication. “She’s really nice, Ame, you would like her,” he’d occasionally slur on my answering machine. I hoped to God his situation wouldn’t get any worse, but one afternoon in early December 1997, I came home to hear him leaving a message—howling himself hoarse—”TRUDY WAS MURDERED! DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO IDENTIFY A DEAD BODY? OH GOD, HER FACE.” When I picked up the phone, my shuddering triggered a wave of nausea, as if Harold’s words landed in my gut, not my brain. I tried to ask questions, said I was so sorry, but he just kept yelling. “I was at home. We had an argument. This guy gave her a ride home from the bar… in a DITCH, they found her nude…IN A DITCH! During the next few months, Harold called about once a week to leave the same message, as if for the first time. Eventually I couldn’t force myself to pick up. (Later I would learn that a thirty-seven-year old man, pleaded guilty to Trudy’s murder and was sentenced to fifty years in prison.)

But at the time of Harold’s death fourteen years later, at 56, he had made incredible progress. During his eleven-month term in an Iowa jail for public intoxication (imposed because of his repeat offenses), he had been off anti-seizure medication, cigarettes, and alcohol. Upon Harold’s release, his close friend Jean (whose unwavering dedication to him was much appreciated but often baffling) moved in with him and ensured his abstinence continued. Still compromised physically by his stroke and suffering memory lapses, Harold didn’t have the wherewithal to rebel. Occasionally, though, I’d receive a voice mail from him: “Hey, Ame, I’m with this girl Jean. She’s attractive and all but such a pain. She won’t let me drink, or even smoke.” And so, with the help of the Iowa correctional system and Jean, Harold had accomplished what he hadn’t been able to since he’d been in his twenties: just over a thousand consecutive days of being clean.

I last saw Harold in 2008, in Fairfield, two years before his death and a few months after his jail release. As he told stories from his college days at lunch with Jimmy and me, his joy cast a soft focus on him so that I could no longer make out his receding hairline or the canyons that years of drinking had carved into his face. For a moment, I saw him at 18—by then, six foot two and slim, his once gangly arms and legs had found proportion, making him a natural for dancing, tennis, and basketball—any activity requiring a glide. The images of him in effortless motion are what stay with me: on the dance floor at my wedding, moving with an innate rhythm that belied our physically uptight upbringing; on a tennis court, arcing fluidly through a forehand; and on a basketball court, launching the ball toward the basket with one graceful flick of his palms and fingertips, his body erect, his feet suspended two feet in the air.

In one of my favorite photographs of Harold and me, we’re standing next to each other, smiling, our two-year-old children—his daughter Katherine and my son Matt, born a month apart—playing at our feet. I still marvel that they look more alike than most fraternal twins I know.

As Ed drove the two of us from the Cedar Rapids airport to Fairfield, I closed my eyes to silently practice the remarks I planned to give at Harold’s memorial the following day. But as I began, I suddenly pictured the windshield of the oncoming pickup truck, felt the same vulnerability that had buzzed through me moments before it struck me. I was shivering. It was as if Harold’s passing had ripped off protective layers so deeply buried I hadn’t known they existed until they were gone. I squelched a sob. My primal connection to him, I realized, had less to do with our being 13 months apart than with our seeking a sense of security from each other that our alcoholic mother and suicidal father couldn’t provide in those early years. I let myself cry, and Ed reached over to rub my shoulder. I hoped Harold and I had been forgiven, and that whatever pain we’d caused each other—his drinking, my inability and, at times, unwillingness to help him—could no longer obscure what we’d felt since his birth: a bond that, had we known the word for it back then, would have been love.

Soon after we arrived in Fairfield, Jean recounted the story of Harold’s death. The night before, Harold had eaten little and told her that he’d just had two great telephone conversations: one with his daughter, Katherine, and the other with Jimmy, who had told him to “hold fast.” Jean was happy that Harold had had a chance to speak to them but his cell phone indicated that no calls had been made or received.

The following morning, Jean had left early, after first making sure Harold was warmly covered in bed. When she returned three hours later, she’d found Harold on the floor. As she described how the duvet had been draped over his body, I envisioned him in a cocoon of white comforter—its edges almost carefully, and perhaps lovingly, tucked under his chin to reveal only his face.

Half-smiling, I shook my head slowly and brushed away the tears sliding over my cheekbones. I was relieved for Harold, and us even more so, that he’d died peacefully of “natural causes.” Had he died at so many other times in his life, there would surely have been painful details eliminating the possibility of consoling ourselves with a story of his redemption.

At the memorial service, the speeches, like the photographs surrounding us, recalled Harold at his handsomest, happiest, and fullest potential. When Katherine, by then 24, began her remarks by saying she’d read a children’s book that meant a great deal to both of them, I knew its title before she mentioned it. However, I was surprised and moved to learn that Harold had often asked her to read it to him over the phone, even as recently as last month. Listening to his daughter read Harold and the Purple Crayon in the full yet silent church, I realized that, although Harold had never stopped creating his own perils, he must have hoped that one day, like the fictional Harold, he would be able to draw his means of escape and find himself at home, at peace, and safe from himself. He had finally done just that.

Amy Turner was born in Bronxville, New York, and is a graduate of Boston University, with a degree in political science, and of New York Law School, with a Juris Doctor degree. After practicing law (rather unhappily) for twenty-two years, she finally found the courage to change careers at forty-eight and become a (very happy) seventh grade social studies teacher. A long-time meditator and avid reader who loves to swim and bike, Amy lives in East Hampton, New York, with her husband, Ed. They have two sons. Amy’s first book, On the Ledge, A Memoir, was published by She Writes Press in 2022.

***
Wondering what to read next?

A personal look at how trauma harms both the body and soul.

Fifty-five years after Amy Turner’s father climbed out on a hotel ledge and threatened to jump—a story that received national news coverage—Amy is convinced she’s dealt with all the psychological reverberations of her childhood.

Then she steps into a crosswalk and is mowed down by a pickup truck—an accident that nearly kills her.

Poignant, intimate, and at times surprisingly humorous, On the Ledge offers proof that no matter how far along you are in life, it’s never too late to find yourself.

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Family

Her Body, At Rest

September 6, 2023

Mom: I think we were quite young when it really started to kick in heavily. And then she was going every day to see a psychiatrist and we were told she was getting French lessons. We were never told what was so. We were never even told she committed suicide.

Julia: How did you learn that she did?

Mom: I guessed

When I go through the mail today, I see I have received an envelope from my mother. I’d know her cursive anywhere, her signature ‘S’– for Sally–a series of loops that used to leave me awestruck as a child.

It will either be a New Yorker article or her mother’s suicide notes. She’s been promising both for months.

I bury the envelope within that day’s small pile of mail where it sits, nestled between a ValuPak and a Company Store catalogue. I pass the pile every time I enter or leave my apartment, adding new mail to it daily.

We are standing in the vestibule a week later, when my husband Scott knocks the catalogues and envelopes to the ground for the third time. The small pile has become an unwieldy stack.

“Sweetie,” he says, with a raise of the eyebrow, “would you like me to go through the mail?”

“Oh,” I say, as casually as I can, “no. It’s on my list for today. I think my Grandma Marjorie’s suicide notes may be in there.”

“Jesus,” he says, with a shudder, and wanders into the kitchen ending the conversation.

As I lean down to pick up the scattered envelopes and catalogues, my daughter Esme looks at me with curiosity and says, “Maymay help?” At nearly twenty months, for her the commonplace is exciting and the trivial consequential. On another day, we might make collecting the mail a game. Today, I panic. She cannot touch that letter. She cannot hold that part of the past in her hands. She will be infected. Her brightness eclipsed.

“No,” I reply, all my usual gentleness disposed of. She looks confused for a moment and then her eyes fill with tears. She says simply, sternly to herself, “Maymay help. No.” I reach for her to apologize, but she is already walking away, managing her disappointment in me without me.

Left alone in the vestibule, my body floods with adrenaline. I have an urge the throw myself between my peaceful life and the envelope; to fling the papers out the window and watch them float to the ground like feathers. Or ashes.

Instead, I follow Scott and Esme into the kitchen to make plans for dinner. I do not touch the mail. The scattered envelopes remain until I restack them later, careful to hide the letter somewhere in the center, where it will not be seen.

The next day, while he is out and she is napping, I take the giant stack into the living room and sort it. Stripped of its pile, the envelope lies alone in the middle of the coffee table. White paper sitting on a black surface, it almost glows. I am suddenly tired. I lie down on the couch to rest my eyes for a moment. I wake up an hour later to Esme calling me.

“Mamaaaa? Maaaama?”

I head toward her room. I’ll open the envelope tomorrow.

Mom: What I remember happening in the house is just, I didn’t want to be there. And I translated it as a shame that the house was so big and we were so rich and the lights were always on. It was like showing off when I wanted to crawl in a hole. I remember someone who didn’t usually bring me home from a ballet lesson dropping me off at the house and me telling them I didn’t really live there. I was just visiting.

Julia: How old were you at this point?

Mom: I must have been nine, ten. Before our mother went to the hospital, but things were already really bad.

That night I dream I am marched into an arena filled with silent spectators and shot point blank in the back of the head. I feel my body hit warm hard dirt and sand. I feel my heart slow to a dull thudding stop.

I wake, sweaty and flooded by memory. I pad into the living room in the semi-darkness and stand in the doorway looking down at the table where the envelope lies, waiting.

–

It is eighteen years ago. I am twenty and sitting on the kitchen counter top of my childhood home, legs dangling, fists clenched sweaty on my thighs. Even though I’ve been gone for nearly three years, every homecoming still turns me into an angry child with sweaty palms and feet that don’t quite touch the floor. I hate this place. I hate the unopened moving boxes that have been gathering dust since we moved here ten years ago in 1990, peppered throughout the house like landmines marked ‘KITCH G’ and ‘BATH A’ in my mother’s long capital script. I hate the dust, the endless drafts that seem to pour through the walls, the way that— despite its many windows— the house always feels dark. I hate this kitchen, which was ripped out one weekend in a gleeful torrent of artistic ebullience when my mother’s college roommate was visiting with her daughters in 1992 and marked the beginning of a renovation that just never happened. We painted murals on some walls, others we ripped down to the studding. Eight years later, it’s all still there: the angels my mom’s friend Jamie drew, the multicolored phrase ‘WE CAN LIVE IN HARMONY’ I wrote over the door frame which was of course accented, in perfect twelve year old fashion, with a lopsided rainbow. I am just a visitor now, exiled by choice and obligation from my new life in New York City for this weekend visit, but whenever I come home I always leave gasping, as though I might be boxed up and left in the corner. Marked ‘J’ for Julia and never opened again.

I repeatedly bang my heels into the cabinet behind them— percussive and rhythmic: a pounding, a heartbeat. As if by making noise I will not disappear into the past. As if it will make her see me. The twenty-year-old version of the baby she pushed out of her body and the girl who—at seventeen— pushed her way out of this home. We spiral down anyway, chasing and fleeing. My heels, it turns out, are a drumbeat that drives us farther away from this moment and into the twistable memory of my childhood, of what was and was not.

We are not fighting about the fact that I was barred from wearing a bra or shaving my legs until I was well into high school. Nor are we screaming about the fact that once I reached thirteen and therefore passed the age my mother was when her mother died, she systematically started trying to remove all traces of me from the house by putting any belonging I had left outside of my room in our moldy mouse haven of a basement. KITCH G would last through the turn of the millennium but my Doc Martins couldn’t make it through the afternoon. No. We are screaming about my freshman year high school track meets, to which she made one frowning appearance with my brother and was never after seen again.

“You only came to see me run once! And you never said congratulations! You never said you were proud of me!” I scream, sounding like a rejected script page from Saved By The Bell. Tears are streaming down my face and I have failed us both in this. In addition to never discussing our shared past, my mother and I do not—as a rule— cry in front of each other. Crying is weakness. Survival dictates fury.

“You never said you needed me to! You never needed me that way!” she responds, shock and confusion on her face.

“Of course I did!” I don’t say.

“I still do!” I don’t say.

“After enough disappointment, I learned not to need you at all!” I scream.

I can see this remark land on her like a tidal wave, its weight crushing any idea that still exists that our relationship can be saved, that I understand her at all. She is crying now, in a ragged way that embarrasses me.

“You’re lucky I was even alive,” she says, quietly.

Alive. It is the one thing I cannot contest. The thing she gave that was not given to her; the offering that should forgive all other transgressions.

She looks at me. I look away. She breathes as if to speak but says nothing. I look at her to end the silence, to let her know it’s ok not to say anything, but she has looked down. This is the story of our relationship; we seek but never connect, we reach but never touch.

Then, quietly, she says, “Would you like to see my mom’s suicide notes?”

I stare at her, shocked. At her freckled cheeks and auburn hair. The ‘slipper’ nose she hates. The face I love but cannot tolerate. I do not know how to respond to this new offering. I didn’t know these notes existed, let alone existed in our house. I was seven when I learned my grandmother killed herself and nearly eleven before I saw a picture of her, discovered I had her eyes. I’ve spent my life since then wondering where behind our shared eyes her sadness might reside in me, and how I might scoop it out, a surgical procedure of total removal, always fearful of being eaten from the inside out, a nice snack for the darkness that swallowed her whole. If I read these notes, will I be welcoming something? Opening a door? But my mother has reached. I will reach back.

“Ok,” I say.

We pad upstairs. She goes first. I follow. We pass the boxes and the dusty furniture and wend our way to her room. I sit on the floor next to her bed while she rummages through her dresser and takes out several pieces of folded blue stationery. She shuffles them. She doesn’t look at me.

“These aren’t the originals,” she says, “these are copies Aunt Ellen wrote out for me. The cross outs are my mom’s, though. Apparently at the bottom of the one to us there were water marks that Ellen thinks means she was crying. Anyway, here you go.” I take the pages and perch in a patch of sunlight on the edge of her bed to read. She hovers nearby.

Back in the present, three days later, I orbit the envelope, still on the coffee table. When it comes to Grandma Marjorie, I’m a satellite circling a planet I will never catch but cannot release.

In the early hours while the house was quiet, I dreamt I was dying of some unnamed illness and leaving my daughter behind. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I felt myself reach for my life, my child. I felt them both slipping away. I woke in the darkness sure that I was ill, disappearing and spent the morning checking my body for the tender swollen places death might live.

I am angry with a dead woman for bringing her despair into my home. I am angry with myself for inviting it.

I have spent years building walls of safety, relegating the chaos of my childhood to tiny piles. My daughter’s life is peaceful and her joy, infectious. In our home, there is evidence of her everywhere. I want her to grow up never questioning her place in the fabric of our family, never doubting my presence or my love for her. She doesn’t know that darkness is her birthright and I have no intention of teaching her.

I imagine my mother sending me her past, trusting me to hold it so she no longer has to. My mother who has gentled, who has turned her grief and rage into a soft forgetfulness, a longing to connect, to be close; who keeps urging me to take ‘all this pain and make something beautiful’.

I pick up the envelope and turn it over in my hands. There are four sheets of paper inside— copies of the handwritten copy I read eighteen years ago— folded neatly into the pocket of a navy note card from my mother; a golden eclipsed sun and many stars that says simply, in her long, loopy script:

As promised.

Love you

sweetheart.

Mom: I mean, there are people who have known me for a long time that don’t know my mom committed suicide. People know Ellen about an hour and a half and they know.

Julia: Why do you think that is?

Mom: I think I would say that I’m ashamed somehow. That’s not what mothers do. That you can’t even…you know…not even for you.

After reading, I fold the pages and sit, holding them in my lap. I think of my daughter’s tiny body, asleep in the next room, safe in her knowledge of me. I imagine my mother as a child, suddenly motherless. I remember myself at twenty, sitting with these same pages, my mother just across a patch of sunlight. Through time and space I feel my mother look at me. I look back. We reach.

Julia Motyka is a writer, performer, and yoga teacher. She lives in NYC with her husband, two kids, and an ever-growing menagerie of animals. She’s working on a memoir and an essay collection. Occasionally she posts things @juliamotyka_me. Maybe she will tweet someday. That day is not today.

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Guest Posts, Grief, Self Love

Hair Is More Than Serious Business: It’s Identity

June 26, 2022

Long ago a friend handed me a book called Five Sisters: memoirs by five 19th-century Russian anarchists whose fierce idealism, at the cost of tremendous personal sacrifice and a certain cold-blooded willingness to commit murder, helped bring about the assassination of Tsar Alexander I in 1881. It was full of photos of these young women, dark-eyed and intense, with masses of dark hair. “They remind me of you,” my friend said. I was young, but no revolutionary—I couldn’t even watch violent movies. Still their single-minded, fearless gaze, conveying pure refusal, struck a chord. Even more: all that hair.

In 1958, my mother had made me cut my hair. I was twelve, about to enter seventh grade and, said my mother, to be grown up. I had gotten my period and begun wearing a bra, and she was following the rules of her time, place, and class, which decreed that becoming a woman meant cutting your little-girl long hair short.

I resisted—I liked my shoulder-length hair, straight but with a slight wave, and very thick—but she was determined that I be properly inducted into womanhood. She dragged me to what was then called the beauty parlor, where a peroxided stylist gave me what was known as a bubble cut, and I joined the ladies of the hair roller brigade under the dryer.

I was so miserable, hating my new bubble head, that behind my back my mother asked my friends to tell me it looked great. (They did in front of her but ratted her out later.) The worst of it was that I couldn’t grow my hair back and have what I had before, since after that cut it stopped being straight and became bushy and unmanageable. I had been inducted not only into womanhood but into a long struggle with pincurls, rollers, and hair spray, and later straighteners and French braids, none of which could tame it. I didn’t know that this change in texture was due to normal hormonal changes of puberty and would have manifested eventually anyway, so it felt doubly unfair.

In college, I learned from Glamour magazine that now, in the liberated sixties, a “girl” no longer had to cut her beautiful long hair when she joined the workforce, as long as she kept it perfectly polished and groomed. My hair was long again but it was too late. Hairdressers didn’t know what to do with it. Over the years I went from long to short to long again, always trying to make it behave against its nature. I fought my hair for decades.

In cutting it off, my mother was obeying the precepts of a faith practiced by women of a striving immigrant middle class. She revered Eugenia Sheppard, an enormously influential fashion columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, and her temple was Loehmann’s, a famous discount store where the labels were ripped out but discerning shoppers recognized quality brands by the linings. Her scripture was the laws dictating how a woman should be and dress and look in the 1950s and early sixties.

My parents, children of Russian Jewish immigrants, had made it out of Brooklyn into a spanking-new Long Island suburb, and like many others at the time, my mother wanted more than anything to be American. “Immigrants emulated what they considered to be upper class,” social historian Carole Turbin told me. My mother’s rules “related to class and assimilation, wanting to be a lady and be respectable.” A lady dressed formally (a dress, nylons, and in the summer, white gloves) when she went into the city; never left the house without makeup on; wore a girdle so her backside didn’t jiggle; and kept her hair cut and controlled. During a family road trip around 1960, we were stuck in Lincoln, Nebraska, for a few hours, wandering around downtown while my father took the car to be fixed. My mother fretted the whole time because she and I were wearing shorts, which according to her creed were inappropriate for a city street. How you dressed was who you were—not that you chose your clothes to express who you were, but that by following the rules you defined yourself as existing within specific boundaries. Parading through a city in shorts put us outside those limits.

She pressured me relentlessly to match her notion of how I should be. We fought over clothes she wanted me to wear: a lemon-yellow spring coat; a silk party dress whose bodice she had altered to be so tight that sitting down was uncomfortable. When I tried to refuse that coat she got really angry, and I think now that she was frightened by what might become of me if I didn’t fit the template. Like the Russian anarchists, I was rejecting rigid social constraints. But unlike them I had no philosophy pointing me toward an alternative vision.

My mother had sewn me beautiful dresses when I was little, and probably to imitate her, as little girls do, I started sewing on her basement machine, beginning with simple gathered skirts and progressing to complicated outfits. Like her too, I knitted. In college I knitted an entire dress while reading Jacobean drama from a textbook large enough to lie open on my lap. After college I got married, as so many girls did, largely because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. Living in Chicago the next winter, I went to Marshall Field every Saturday to join the yarn department knitting circle whose instructor helped me knit a tweed suit with cardigan jacket and pleated miniskirt. I still wear that jacket but every time I put it on I think of those afternoons when I could have been doing something else, and feel a vague discomfort.

But only recently did I seriously ask myself why I did all that sewing and knitting. For I had no vocation for making clothing. I didn’t even particularly enjoy it. What I did have a vocation for—though nobody noticed, including me—was writing. My very first published work, around age 13, was a letter to American Girl magazine responding to a story they had printed. I had studied the published letters and deliberately imitated their gushy tone and quirky comment at the end. It worked, although now I ask myself why I didn’t just write in my own voice. Probably it never occurred to me that any voice I might have was worth listening to. But I date the origin of my writing career before that, to the moment I “flew up” (as the transition was called) from the Brownies to the Girl Scouts and decided that the writing badge was the only one I wanted. While I was too impatient (and still am) to be really skillful working with my hands, I have no trouble rewriting a sentence fifty times to make it perfect. So why did I spend all those hours at a sewing machine instead of a typewriter?

I want to say, because she cut my hair. Because in my mind hair, clothes, and the Russian anarchists are mixed up together. They’re all about identity.

*****

“If you are a Black woman, hair is serious business. Your hair is considered by many the definitive statement about who you are, who you think you are, and who you want to be,” writes novelist Marita Golden. And in different ways, hair was and is about identity for women of all skin colors. Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837–98) was renowned for her extraordinary beauty and above all for the thick chestnut hair that fell below her knees. “If I were to have my hair cut short in order to get rid of an unnecessary weight,” she confided to Constantin Christomanos, who tutored her in Greek during the two or three hours required each day for her hairdresser to construct her heavy crown of braids, “the people would fall upon me like wolves”—as though her hair were what made her their empress.

A teenager I know created an Instagram self-portrait that began with a photo of her magnificent Afro puff. “I love my hair,” she explained. “That’s who I am.” Philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes, “As a child I already knew that I possessed long hair that was trapped inside a short cut. I also figured out, as I got older, that I was a freethinker trapped within Orthodox Judaism, a feminist trapped in paternalism, a novelist trapped in the rules of my own rigorous academic discipline. My hair’s struggles have been my struggles.” Some women liberate themselves by cutting long hair short. Google “cutting my hair freed me” and you find many testimonials to this effect. But I say, with poet Honor Moore, “My power resides in the length and thickness of my hair, and I will never give it up.”

Many cultures see hair as a conduit of energy with magical and spiritual potency: thus Samson’s oath to God not to cut his hair gave him extrahuman power until Delilah tricked him and had it cut off. Marita Golden notes that for Black women, hair “is an expression of our souls.” Kelissa McDonald, a Rastafarian, told Allure, “For me, locs are almost an extension of my crown chakra energy. They act as antennas, you know? My hair helps me to discern the intentions of people, actually.” Melissa Oakes, a member of the Mohawk tribe, explained that her hair was waist-length because indigenous people “are the roots of this land, so these are our receptors that are connecting us with the land. It’s an old saying: The longer your hair, the closer connection you have to the earth.” No wonder twelve-year-old me didn’t want a haircut.

Empress Elisabeth also complained to Christomanos, “I am afraid that my mind escapes through the hair and onto the fingers of my hairdresser. Hence my headache afterwards.” I know exactly what she meant. I’ve always had the notion that my hair is so thick and unruly because I think so much. But unlike Elisabeth, I got headaches because my thinking energy stayed stuck inside my head. In any case, cutting the hair interrupts that life force, as happened to Samson—and, I would say, to me in that beauty parlor, just as the sexual and psychic energy of womanhood was waking up.

In her pioneering feminist book The Female Eunuch, whose central claim is that women have been effectively castrated, Germaine Greer defines castration as “the suppression and deflection of Energy.” In exactly this way cutting my hair severed my connection with my own identity and deflected the energy that could have been focused on writing into those hours at the sewing machine. My mother tried in myriad ways to force me into the mold of the perfect fifties female, but this one is the wound that left a scar. Unable even to imagine what I might choose to do, I fell back on what the culture and my mother were telling me I ought to be doing. While writing this essay I read and heard numerous stories of traumatic haircuts inflicted by mothers on daughters, motivated largely by wanting the daughter to fit into the cultural constraints required of females—the girdle we all wore.

***

My mother’s girdle mostly lived in a drawer because it was so uncomfortable she rarely wore it. But she never stopped trying to justify flouting the girdle rule, and her rationalizations never quite satisfied her. Probably this was why she never made me wear one. But for years I wore a mental girdle. The Russian anarchists went beyond refusing the limits that bound women in their time; they tried to destroy the stifling social order that oppressed everyone, in order to create a new society. I think I also perceived in them, dimly, a determination to achieve an authentic identity. And today I understand as well that refusal isn’t enough: one must go beyond that. For me it took years. When I saw their photos and felt that kinship, I was still at the beginning of an evolution. I had managed to flout my mother’s expectations, getting divorced, living alone, and working freelance. The moment I left my husband, I started to write. It didn’t end the headaches, but it got some of that stuck energy out of my head. I discovered that writing is when I feel most essentially myself. But it took my hair a while to catch up.

***

Unruly, wild hair disturbs people, especially on a woman’s head; thus Medusa was a monster who had to be slain by a hero. So the only thing most hairdressers I handed my hair over to could find to do with it was cut it off, so short that it couldn’t curl much—until I found Rose, a hairdresser unafraid of curls. I was still in thrall to the idea that my hair could only be managed if kept fairly short, but it now curled as it pleased all over my head.

In spring 2019, I let it get longer than usual because I was too busy to go for a cut. But it looked ok. Time passed and it still looked fine, so I let it slide a few weeks more. Then I asked Rose about keeping it long. “What you want is a curly shag,” she said, and gave me one. It looked fantastic. Just as important, it felt fantastic. I went home and let it grow some more.

Several inches later it dawned on me that I had my original hair back—my heavy, unruly mop—and that I loved it. I loved the feel of it—not just its weight, but the visceral sense that weight gave me that I was completely me again. Representative Ayana Pressley perfectly describes that experience in her video revealing that she has alopecia. About five years before, she says, “I got these Senegalese twists, and I feel like I met myself fully for the first time. I looked in the mirror and I said, ‘Oh, there I am!'” For me it was mystical: I felt solider, stronger, braver, that I had attained a deeper level of being me. And it still looked really good. I saw that my tough curly hair only worked when it could be itself, and I had freed it to do that. It was a revelation to discover how happy I was to have it back, even though it took quarts of shampoo to get clean and half a day to dry. Rose’s cut was so excellent that my hair usually looked good no matter what I did with it. And if it didn’t, I didn’t care.

That, at least, was my theoretical position. Then the coronavirus put it to the test. The lockdown hit just before I was due for a cut. The hair salons closed. So for a while I had more hair than I ever bargained for. I retrieved hairstyles from my past: pony tail! French braids! Twists! What’s now called a “messy bun”—the only kind I could ever make, lucky for me it’s now an actual style. I unearthed my hoard of old barrettes and went to buy more, only to discover that they’ve mostly given way to clips. Ok, I got clips. And I found antique barrettes on eBay.

Then my partner and I needed masks, but masks were still hard to find. I never sew anymore, except for occasional utilitarian repairs, but I still have fabric scraps left over from garments I made long ago—not to mention my mother’s sewing cabinet, a neat little piece of furniture dating back at least to the 1940s that still contains some of her sewing leftovers. So I rifled through everything and came up with enough fabric and old bits of ribbon and ancient packets of seam binding to make two masks. True to form, I was impatient, so they looked rather slapdash, but they did the job. I took a certain satisfaction in retrieving those old skills, plus the whole process resurrected a weird feeling of connection to my mother—the past returning into the present, but on my terms.

When the salons reopened, I returned to Rose with still more hair and told her how much I loved it. So we kept it long, and I went home and watched it grow more, until its weight pulled barrettes out of place and and gave me a headache. Eventually we settled on shoulder length, manageable though not particularly neat. I no longer mind it sticking out wildly, though. The imperative to look “good” has slipped still further away, and I’m left with just the satisfaction of having my hair back—and owning myself.

Stephanie Golden is a book author and collaborator, book doctor, and journalist in Brooklyn, NY. Her books include “The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness” (University of California Press, a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award) and “Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice” (Harmony Books). She also wrote 7 books in collaboration with experts, mostly on fitness and health. Recently she’s been writing essays.

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