Browsing Tag

daughter

Addiction, Forgiveness, Guest Posts, healing

I’m A Misfit.

December 28, 2014

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black1-300x88By Treva Draper-Imler.

I am not pretty. I am damn funny, silly and a bit quirky. Those things make me too cute, as my friends would say. I tried being pretty, but the cost was my soul. I’m fine, really fine, where I am.

My Dad, Paul Draper, is handsome. He is a classic “Steve McQueen” type. He has a sculpted chin, dark hair and green eyes. My brother David is handsome. He was a model in college. The fact that my brother was a model probably added 5 years onto the time I will spend in therapy. My mom is pretty, She has red hair and sky blue eyes. Her skin is so china bisque fair, dotted with a freckle or two. misfit

My earliest memory of my father is him beating me till I urinated on myself. I was four, and he caught me chewing on a doll’s foot. I was in my Pj’s. He struck me until the floor was soaked in urine. He then made me mop my urine up. Continue Reading…

Family, Guest Posts, Relationships

Steele Grey.

December 27, 2014

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black1-300x88By Julia Cassels.

The phone started ringing at 8 am.  Incessantly.  Clients.  Clients’ mothers.  A million questions I don’t readily have the answers to.  “I understand your meeting with the Navajo Human Rights Coalition is Monday, but I do not have a release from the client to participate. … Yes, I understand.  Yes, I’m sorry.  No, I’ll see what I can do for you.”  I hang up.  Jesus, lady.

I walk into the kitchen to refill my coffee for the third time, turn around to discover the dog has torn up one of my shoes.  My fault for leaving it out.  I gather the remnants and then see she has also shredded my favorite book, a catalog, and something else which is no longer recognizable.  I pick up the pieces, wonder where the rest is, and thank God for coffee.

The phone rings again.  “I have asked to be removed from your call list.  This is the third phone call from your organization today.  Remove. My.  Number.”  It is 8:35 am and my daily allotment of grace appears to be spent.

Exasperated, I step outside onto the patio, phone in hand, to sneak a cigarette.  It has started raining again, so I stand against the wall, hoping for shelter.

The icon on my phone shows “Your TimeHop is ready!”  TimeHop pulls your old Facebook posts from one year ago, two years ago, etc so you can “Share your memories!”  I click over and scroll through photos of a holiday party we called Cheesemas two years ago, a quote I shared three years ago that is actually really stupid now that I look at it, and then— “Oh.”  The link to my father’s obituary.

I hadn’t realized it was the anniversary of his passing.  The thought never occurred to me as I walked through the past couple of days.

Continue Reading…

Guest Posts

Thank you for Listening.

December 27, 2014

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By Amy Yelin.

My father listened. That was his job. He was a psychiatrist, like Bob Newhart on TV, and as a child I thought this made him an important man. A celebrity even. Why else would he have his own parking spot?  Two spots, actually, both with signs that read: Reserved for Gershon Yelin, MD. Violaters Towed at Their Own Expense.

Sometimes we’d visit his office after a shopping trip or picking up books at the library in Port Chester, New York. My mother would park in one of those special spots, right next to his car, and then I’d feel important, too, like a regular Amy Carter.

My father’s office was in a typical 1970’s brick office building, with a dark hallway that smelled like menthol. I noted the numbers as we walked down the hall until we reached the door labeled 2G. Then, despite my mother’s insistence to only ring it once, I’d push the buzzer repeatedly,

My father opened the door just a tiny bit, the chain still on. “Who is it?” He’d say, pretending to be suspicious.

“It’s me…Amy!”

“And me,” my mother said, playing along.

“Whaddya want?”

After I rang the buzzer a few more times, the door flew open and my father greeted us with a happy but subdued, “Well hellooooo’

No one was ever there when we visited. No patients in the giant waiting room. No receptionist at the reception desk.  My father’s actual office, with nothing more than a desk light on, was a stark contrast to the fluorescently lit waiting room. The window blinds were always drawn almost to the bottom, resembling two sleepy eyelids, letting in only the tiniest slivers of light. Several pipes waited in an ashtray on his desk, and a standing globe, possibly the only fun thing in the room, beckoned me every time. I’d make myself at home in my father’s black leather chair, close my eyes and then spin that globe hard and see where my finger would land.

“Here’s where I’m going to move,” I’d announce upon opening my eyes. “New Zealand!”

“Bon voyage,” my father would say.

My father is 86 now. We talk on the phone at least once a week, but only see each other around Thanksgiving, when my dad and his second wife Terri fly up to New York from North Carolina for their annual medical appointments. We drive down from Boston and meet them at their favorite hotel, The Renaissance, not far from where I grew up. It’s a bizarre sort of family reunion, but it’s ours. Continue Reading…

Abuse, Guest Posts, healing, motherhood

Underwater.

December 19, 2014

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By Kelly Thompson.

The first time. The shock of being punched.

Walking down Nevada Avenue after an afternoon shopping. We look at fish tanks in a pet store. Greg is captivated by the angelfish and chooses two blue ones, a small tank, supplies; all are tucked into the baby stroller with Shawna in it; she reaches fat baby fingers to touch the fish before they are tucked away in the catch-all. The fish stare through big eyes – dart and dash about the plastic bubble.  The costliest purchase, a life-like resin castle, causes a brief disagreement.  I worry about the groceries it might replace and start to say something, but Greg shoots me a warning glance.  Later, when we get home and release the fish into the glass box, their bluish wings will flash like warnings as they weave between the swaying green plants, flit behind the castle turrets, disappear in its corners.

We buy ice cream; a Jimmy cone for me, Greg shares his banana split with the baby. She laughs. He gives her the cherry. We stroll by the park, a warm day. Sunshine. The trees are old and offer what must have been welcome shade on a hot summer day. I am surprised to see someone I was acquainted with in high school walking our way. He recognizes me, nods, and pauses, as if to talk. We say hello, have the briefest of conversations. Yes, this is my baby. My boyfriend Greg. Nice to see you. Take care. It seems there was a breeze blowing, caressing my hair. I always wore it long back then. I imagine I felt beautiful, carefree, the afternoon spent leisurely, my boyfriend and baby with me. A day as good as any I’d enjoyed with Greg. My naive ideas of romance, love, marriage, how to be a grownup, a mother, this must be what it looks like, are tumbling, jigsaw puzzle pieces, in the air.

The blow comes moments, seconds after the high school acquaintance has passed. His fist slams into my face. Who was that? What? Who was that? What? What? Who was he? John! I don’t even know him. From high school. What?

Disbelief. Followed by interrogation. I barely knew the guy who had been politely conversant as he passed us on the street. I might have last seen him in the halls of Palmer High School a year before, maybe less before I dropped out, a teenager displaced by unwed motherhood, to join Greg, a lost boy I met in a bowling alley, who grew up in foster homes, juvenile hall, abandoned by his mother. There is no discussion about our future. As soon as we meet, I’m his. Continue Reading…

death, Grief, Guest Posts

My Mother’s Appetite.

November 30, 2014

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By Dylan Landis.

Food Could Kill My Mother, But I Respected Her Choice to Eat

If my mother ate, she could die.

She could choke from laryngeal spasm, her doctor said, or, more likely, liquid and food particles would slip down her tracheostomy tube to her lungs and cause a fatal aspirational pneumonia. She was N.P.O., nil per os, nothing by mouth. Even a glass of water could kill her.

But my mother, Erica, wanted everything by mouth: she refused to refuse food. She snuck scraps off my father’s plate at their Sleepy Hollow, NY, apartment: cornbread, pasta, cake. “Without food,” she said, “there is no pleasure in my life.” She hated her new appendages: the blue tube jutting from her throat, from which a nurse suctioned phlegm with a noisy machine, and a stomach tube, thin and flexible as a tail, that hooked up to a feeding pump.

It didn’t take long for her to get dangerously sick. I thought she might die—but she came home from the hospital asking, daily, “When can I eat?” Soon, I would say, lying. When you stop coughing. She’d never stop. When you pass the swallowing test.  She’d never pass. They gave her sips of water and she choked. Her hands lay still in her lap when she asked me about food. Because my father, too, was in a wheelchair, only I had the ability to make her a cup of coffee, a half cup, even a quarter cup, in one of her delicate porcelain mugs adorned with birds. I felt guilty, not like a daughter but a parent. Her own mother had been tyrannical; she didn’t need that from me. When my mother was a girl, anything she refused to eat would appear at the next meal, and the next, and the next. Her mother always won. Continue Reading…

Addiction, Guest Posts, healing

Gramma in the Slamma (or Granny is the New Junky.)

November 18, 2014

By Jenny Gardiner.

We were expecting my mother for a visit, her first in many years. She was on the overnight train from Atlanta. My daughter had a starring role in her high school play, and mom was coming to see it. I’d arrived around dawn at the farmers market that morning to stock up on food for a busy weekend of houseguests before heading to the train station, when my pocket buzzed — a text from my brother that read: It’ll be the difference between Ambien and Ambien PM whether mom gets off at your stop. Good luck.

I wasn’t hip to the world of sleep meds, but I was well aware that my mother had succumbed by then to a severe addiction to all sorts of other legal drugs. The ask-your-doctor-if-this-is-right-for-you drugs. Years back, while a chipper Nancy Reagan was blithely advising us to “just say no”, her husband’s deregulation-of-everything was ushering in an era of direct-to-consumer campaigns by Big Pharma urging us all to say “yes” to the “good” drugs. The legal ones. Eventually my mom heeded their bad advice.

My mother was a smart woman, with more academic degrees under her belt than your average tenured professor. An educator, a lawyer, a reformed alcoholic, she should have known better. She hadn’t had a drink in over twenty-five years; she wore her sobriety like a badge of honor, with good reason. She’d reinvented herself after years of drinking and a marriage gone bad, picked herself up, earned a law degree (top of her class), and remade her life. She’d succeeded beyond her wildest dreams in her private law practice, focusing too much of it, in hindsight, on what seemed like a sure-bet: real estate. She lived in a beach community during the glory days of the industry, and her hard work as a highly sought-after settlement attorney had paid off, with a beautifully-appointed home on the sound and a spectacular view of the ocean. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts

To Be Made Whole.

November 5, 2014

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By Melissa Chadburn.

My weight fluctuates a lot— I’d say I gain and lose between 20 and 30 lbs. every year. I think there is a story my body is trying to tell. I think perhaps my body is storing too much pain at times.

The things that weigh on me:

The time I wanted back in with my foster family— so I met my foster parents at their job at the ad agency and gave them a presentation on why they should let me come back. The presentation was complete with ways I would financially contribute to the household, and ways that I would be good, and how no one would hardly notice me.

I only ever hit my mother once. It was a reflex. She was in a wild angered frenzy and threw a T-shirt at me. It had my favorite Superman button on it. A metal button the size of a cheeseburger. Somehow the weight of it landed on my nose and I bled. The shock of it all— my crying the blood, she ran to me, full of remorse. The second she was close I socked her in the stomach. Her face, the face she showed me, is the one that haunts me. My face and her face are so similar that the punishment is simple, it’s the look I give myself when I think no one likes me or that I’ve done wrong. Continue Reading…

cancer, Guest Posts, Letting Go, motherhood

A Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Mother/Daughter Bond.

September 22, 2014

By Lockey Mitten Maisonneuve.

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As she lay in bed dying, Marlene told her daughter Kathy, she could see a door opening, beyond it she saw flowers everywhere, Marlene said “it was beautiful.” Kathy whispered “it sounds like you have a beautiful place to go with a lot of people who love you waiting for you, it’s okay to go.”

I had the privilege of participating in Marlene’s final days on this earth. I would go to her house and help her through guided meditations. She liked the full-body scan kind with white light covering her entire body. At the beginning of one of our first sessions, she was weeping and wouldn’t make eye contact with me. She just kept trying to hold it together. I finally said “if you are trying to not cry in front of me, it’s not working, just go with it.” She did. She allowed herself to cry as she settled in to meditate. I guided her through, she wept, I reminded her to breathe, she relaxed, I guided, she became soft.

After the meditation, she was a bit frantic about needing to write letters to her three adult children and her grand children. She was in too much discomfort to write, so I offered to write the words she spoke. As I wrote the words she needed to say to her children I understood how loved her children are. After we completed the letters, we sat quietly for a moment.

Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Inspiration, Self Image

The Frenemy in the Mirror.

September 12, 2014

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By Georgia Kolias.

I walked through my bedroom door with a pile of laundry in my arms, clean clothes destined for dresser drawers. On leaving the room, I realized that my four-year-old daughter was standing in front of the full-length mirror. When we bought our house, we realized the previous owners must have been giants. The bathroom mirrors were high enough that I could only see my head floating up around the bottom of the medicine cabinet door. There were no other mirrors in the house and that suited me just fine. Looking at my body in the mirror was not usually something I wanted to do. Not because I have an unusually horrific deformity that I can’t face, but just because mirrors are a tool of the devil. You can either become bewitched by allowing yourself to feel validated and worthy because you like what you see, or they can become instruments of delusional torture in those moments when you aren’t feeling your best, your clothes feel awkward on your body, and the unavoidable critical voice in your head narrates rude descriptions of your flaws. Continue Reading…

death, Grief

Last Call.

August 3, 2014

A Memoir by Laura C. Alonso

We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material . . . when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us; all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.

~ C. S. Lewis

I called before coming that evening, asked if you needed something, anything you might have wanted. “How about fruit?” you asked. “Yeah, I’d really love some fruit.”

I drove over to White Hen, best fruit I’ve ever seen: golden bananas and enormous apples as smooth and red as blood. Three times the supermarket’s price, but I wanted to bring you the best. It had always been hard, you know? This was the least I could do.

Continue Reading…