words cannot express: b

September 1, 2008

I was so embarrassed by it that I resisted wearing shorts, even on the hottest summer days when the sun seemed to take up the entire sky, shouldering every blue shade out of the way, and when tar lines meandering down the roads’ midsections rose to meet the heat, filling with pockets of air, before hardening again at night while we slept in our heavily air-conditioned bedrooms.

Even walking shorts only covered it when I stood up, not when I sat down and the fabric hiked up my leg to reveal that dark splotch with its strange thick hairs, the ones I later learned to shave off each day. But I could only do so much cosmetically. Concealer, even caked on, could not cover that blemish. And nothing could alter the texture which, had I held your hand to it without your looking, you would have sworn was not human skin at all but rather the tough exterior of some inedible fruit — something to be peeled only by thickly calloused fingers and tossed aside as soon as the fruit was free.

Blemish. That’s what I should have called it back then, since that’s what I saw it as. Something to hide, to be ashamed of.

A mark. That’s what my mother always called it. My birthmark, which by definition must have taken up residence on my body while I was still in the womb. Of course this means I held her responsible for it, for what she had done to me. I was also born with holes in my teeth, she told me, but at least I had all my fingers and toes. For that you should be thankful, she would always say.

It’s hard for a child to feel thankful for something she has never lived without and could not imagine living without. I didn’t even know anyone who did not have all their fingers and toes, save for a distant relative with a half-finger, which barely constitutes a missing digit.

And don’t we all have a distant relative like that? One who is so happy that when he sees you once a year, he scoops you up and for a moment you think about that deformed finger touching you, and later he tells you it’s OK to look at it, but when you do all you can think of is the manner in which is was cut off, which he delights in telling you over and over again while you squirm away and try, but fail, to not see him as anything less than fully human?

But the deformed finger makes him less than human, because as a child you cannot understand otherwise, which is precisely why I felt my birthmark made me less than human.

* * *

Thirty eight doesn’t seem old now, but when my mother became pregnant it was, according to her, considered a disastrously late age for a woman to give birth. That’s why she checked my fingers and toes as soon as I was born and why she was so relieved they were all intact.

She had delivered the news of her pregnancy to my father as they were driving to a mobile home dealer somewhere in Oklahoma. The plan was to select a two-bedroom unit from the available models. They would place the unit on a small lot near Lake Texoma, and it would serve as accommodations for their weekend fishing trips.

As they drove, my mother became increasingly nervous, she told me years later. She knew she had to tell my father and she had to tell him right away because the pregnancy affected everything about their lives — most immediately, and most notably, their mobile home purchase.

She didn’t want to tell him. Their children, a 15-year-old boy and a nearly 14-year-old girl, were becoming young adults. In just a few years, they would go off to college, and my father and mother would be alone again.

She must have seen that future clearly — as if time could be measured in inches, one inch equaling one year, and in four short inches, less than the length of her hand measured from the tip of her middle finger to the point where palm and wrist meet, it would be just the two of them driving to the mobile home, then slipping into their motor boat and slipping the motor boat into the water.

It would be just the two of them catching unsuspecting fish and being photographed for Lake Texoma Life, the flimsy monthly newspaper published in Northern Texas for the lake community on both sides of the state line. In those photos, my parents would stretch their catches out in front of them, one hand securing the caudal fin, the other pinching the mouth as it hung slack and open, like a screen door left ajar.

In these photos, my parents would open-mouth smile down at their accomplishment — my father not even modestly ashamed of his half-rotten central and lateral incisors, my mother giving no thought at all to her solidly constructed but markedly coffee- and nicotine-stained teeth.

The captions of each photo would invariably contain their names, the city where they resided, and the length of each catch, measured in inches. After each photo shoot, my father would ask when the issue was due out. On the appointed day, he would walk down to the bait shop situated at the end of a pier and grab a handful of copies so he’d have something to brag about to his friends back home.

But this would not be their future. No long afternoons, the two of them drinking beer on the boat and watching the marine radar for signs of activity. No peaceful, quiet drives to and from the lake with silence interrupted only by my father’s periodic encoded stutterings on the CB and the nasal lyrics of country artists wafting through the car as they detailed relationships far, or at least somewhat, worse than that of my parents.

* * *

Even before my mother had come to terms with the fact that her future did not look like she wanted it to look, she had to alert my father that his future also looked different. If she let him buy a two-bedroom that day and broke the news later, he would come unglued in the way he often came unglued. She was also terrified of how he’d react to the news of her pregnancy, but she felt that if he was going to be upset about the pregnancy, he’d be upset no matter when she told him. Best not to also have him be upset about his choice of mobile homes.

We’re going to need a three-bedroom, she said.

He didn’t understand.

How could he? Twelve years earlier, one of her eggs was fertilized but didn’t make its way out of her fallopian tube. It implanted itself there in the tube, and she lay on the couch in terrible pain — the doctor said there was nothing they could do for her and that waiting was the only course of action — until her fallopian tube burst, terminating the pregnancy. It left her scarred and nearly killed her. She was told she’d never be able to have another child.

So she had to walk my father through it, explaining to him that somehow, more than a decade later and right at that very moment, a life was growing inside her.

My mother’s own mother had done the same thing, gotten pregnant long after her son and daughter were born, when she was no longer supposed to be fertile. When she found out, my grandmother went to visit relatives in another part of the state, stayed with them for several months and returned home nine months pregnant. Belly sticking out to here, as my mother put it when recounting the story, holding her hand nearly two feet in front of her stomach for exaggeration.

My grandmother didn’t have to say anything to my grandfather when she returned. As soon as he set eyes on her, he knew he was about to be a father, again. It was my mother she was pregnant with — my mother whose existence was kept from my grandfather until it was too late for him to put up a fuss about it.

Perhaps my mother would have done the same thing when she was pregnant with me, let herself start to show, let people, including my father, come to their own conclusions. But she couldn’t do that because she knew there’d be a baby on those lake trips, and that baby would need a room of its own. She certainly didn’t want the crib in their bedroom.

My father didn’t react the way she thought he would. He wasn’t at all upset at the prospect of spending another 18 years of his life raising a child, of hauling a baby to and from the lake. The diapers, the crying and the formula. He was thrilled, probably much happier about it than she was. She hadn’t planned on any more diapers, crying and formula. She didn’t like the thought of their lives together not beginning in earnest until she was 56, and he was 60.

He told her it was a miracle, and he believed it. And what’s a little personal sacrifice where miracles are concerned?

* **

Birthmark. A blemish or soft, raised swelling of the skin that forms before or shortly after birth. Exact cause, unknown. Believed to occur as a result of an increased number of blood vessels in the skin. Birthmarks are not inherited and are not caused by anything that happens to the mother during pregnancy. The most common types of vascular birthmarks are macular stains, hemangiomas and port wine stains. Macular stains are also called angel’s kisses or stork bites.

* * *

When I was a child, I wasn’t familiar with all the folklore surrounding birthmarks, such as the Italian, Spanish and Arabic translations of the word, which all stand for “wishes,” since the marks were thought to have their root in the mother’s unsatisfied wishes during pregnancy. My parents’ friends would tease me from time to time about my being damaged so to speak. They hinted at the negative connotations birthmarks conveyed, and the suggestion of being marred was all it took for me to feel I was wearing the proof of my inferior design right there on my right thigh for everyone to see.

And there wasn’t just one. There were two. A second “stain,” located on my back, was roughly the same size and color at the one on my thigh: loamy, like our garden after my father had hand-tilled fertilizer in each spring.

The one on my back was easy to forget about, since I never looked back there without the assistance of a mirror and since, being young, I was not yet in the habit of checking my body daily from all angles for evidence of further erosion. But the one on my leg always drew attention from friends and strangers. When the heat did me in each year and I finally acquiesced, slipping a pair of shorts on before going to school, I was certain the questions would start as soon as the other kids came close enough. What is that? That, on your leg? Eew. Or something to that effect.

* * *

I finally took a shine to the birthmark on my thigh when I reached my early teen years. I fell into the habit of talking to my friends on the telephone for hours on end and, to occupy my free hand, I would draw on every part of my body that I could reach using a Bic pen. I always started with the birthmark on my thigh, and the adjacent territory, drawing it into a man wearing a top hat and carrying a cane. The design would work out from there, with people, animals, stars, hearts and squiggles reaching up to my underwear line and down to my ankles.

I would even say that I was sad when the family dermatologist said he wanted to remove both the birthmark on my thigh and the one on my back. A precaution, he said, since they put me at risk for skin cancer. While I was delighted at the prospect of having a normal-looking body, I was also attached to the ugly little things and didn’t want to see them go. By that time, I did not see them as part of myself but as something separate from me, which meant I could love them.

Also, because the birthmarks were removed shortly after my father died, that alteration of my body made me feel like I was that much further removed from him. This makes no sense, I know. It’s the same feeling I had when the dog he bought me died. The dog didn’t tie me to my father in any way, just as the birthmarks didn’t tie me to him. But they were part of who I was when I was born and therefore were part of whatever in him was passed onto me. This made their removal more than a dermatological procedure; it was a passage of sorts, a loss.

I made the mistake of watching the dermatologist perform the excision of the birthmark on my thigh. It’s one of the most graphic memories I have. The mark wading there, all cut out, a moat of my own blood and fluids filling up the space created by the doctor’s incision lines. The birthmark in the middle, defenseless, a dark castle about to be overtaken.

* * *

Why did I hate that birthmark on my thigh for so many years? It wasn’t only because of the name and what the word mark portends. Nor was it simply because I needed to have more to blame on my mother than my very existence. The crux of the matter was that the mark was visual proof of what my mother had passed on to me, thoughtlessly, and that would follow me over the course of my life: a small brown pock wherein my fate was sealed and which, before I’d even had a chance to become my own person, bound me to having a life no better than her genes would afford me. Even its removal could not change that fact.

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words cannot express, interlude

June 24, 2008

Merry Merry quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

My mother used to say this nursery rhyme all the time, with a little lilt, as if everything in her world was just right.

I’ve changed the spelling from “Mary” to “Merry,” since that is how my mother spelled her name. Ironic to have a name like that when she was anything but merry, plagued all her life by depression, and most of it by drinking. And deep, unrelenting loneliness.

She sang this song about herself, as if the words were a spell she could cast to fix everything that had gone wrong, as if she could do take-backs on all the injustices committed against her and those she herself had committed.

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words cannot express: a

June 22, 2008

au jus: Served with the natural juices or gravy: roast beef au jus

auk: Any of several diving sea birds (family Alcidae) of northern regions, such as the razor-billed auk, having a chunky body, short wings and webbed feet.

auld lang syne: The good old days.

au naturel: 1a. Nude. b. In a natural state. 2. Cooked simply.

aunt: The sister of one’s father or mother.

* * *

She wasn’t my aunt. I don’t even think she was my mother’s aunt. If I have sketched out my family tree correctly, I believe Aunt Grace was my mother’s mother’s sister’s daughter, which would have made her my mother’s cousin and my first cousin.

That’s the relationship structure we’ll go with for the purposes of this entry. But I will continue to call her Aunt Grace, since that’s how my mother referred to her. Alternatively, various family members called her Little Grace, since her mother was also named Grace, and you can see what kind of confusion would ensue with two Graces running around in one very small Oklahoma town.

My Aunt Grace collected demitasse tea cups, according to my mother. Apparently Aunt Grace’s immediate family had more money than my mother’s family, so things like demitasse teas cups made a big impression. “Well, Aunt Grace had everything,” my mother would tell me, raising her eyebrows on the word’s first syllable and sliding down into the rest of the word like a swimmer slipping slowly under the water’s surface.

Her intonation and delivery at once betrayed my mother’s jealousy and judgment. My mother was always concerned about people who had too much, since that was a sure sign they were spoiled and didn’t have to work for what they acquired. When you grow up poor in Oklahoma, you can develop the attitude that those with money are “soft” or, as my father used to say about wealthy freshmen who joined fraternities, “a bunch of pansies.”

My mother told me about more than just Aunt Grace’s tea cups. I also heard about the lovely dresses and hats, the beautiful and well-appointed home, and the display cabinets that kept Aunt Grace’s tea cup collection safe.

“Aunt Grace’s mother doted on her,” my mother said, spooling out the word “doted” so it sounded as if a ‘w’ was wedged between the ‘o’ and the ‘t.’ “Her mother spoiled her.” My mother always maintained that Aunt Grace’s dysfunctional relationship with her mother was the reason Aunt Grace killed herself.

* * *

First, she paddled out into the lake, even though she couldn’t swim. She meant to go under, and did. But someone noticed. She was pulled back to shore.

Though I have no details about this day, I imagine it was sunny. Hot like Oklahoma gets hot in the summer months, where the whole sky seems to be made of sun and everything but the wheat and corn have gone limp, their cells unable to stand erect against certain searing.

One might almost surmise that this response, this limpness, is a defense mechanism in plants: to faint on the soil they know so well and that they hope holds the one thing which will steel them in their attempts to stay alive: water.

Aunt Grace went limp that day, until there was water, water, too much over the skin, in the mouth, the lungs. Her body’s heaviness shuttling her to the bottom like a sinking vessel, her troubled mind the only passenger.

I’ve often wondered how it happened. Did she walk into the water from a rocky shore? Step off a pier? I don’t wonder about the details because I am morbid; I do so because as a writer I need to “see” everything. Someone describes a room to me, and I ask what kind of drapes they have, where the side chairs are placed, what fabric is on the sofa and if it’s strong or delicate to the touch, what kind of light comes in and at what times of day. It’s not enough to know that the room has drapes, chairs, a sofa and windows. I need details or else the room is nothing to me; there is only a blank space in my head where a room should be.

I need these same details where my family stories are concerned. Putting their lives back together, and seeing them move through those lives, is part of putting my own life together and seeing myself move through it.

So yes. I want to know if it was a windy day. What lake she was at. If there were cows nearby penned in with barbed-wire fencing and a cattle guard. I want to know if there was also a bull in the pen. If the bull scared Aunt Grace as she walked past the pen on the trail leading to the lake.

Was she in a bathing suit? Did she even think, or care, to change into one? What time of day was it? How many people pulled her out? Who were they? Did she require resuscitation?

But mostly, I want to know what it felt like to be that close to death. I can only imagine how her heart was beating, in what must have felt like a percussion section’s accelerando, blood being thrust into limbs for which Aunt Grace already had no use. That heartbeat which once signaled so many things — fear, excitement, arousal — now mocking her with its last battle cry for life. “Do not forsake this body,” her heart must have said. “Do not give the order to take it down.”

* * *

Sometimes the body clamors for our attention to remind us we are still alive and our lives are both valuable and viable, but the mind closes itself off to all that gibberish.

Sometimes the body can hurt so badly that it seems there’s nothing to be done other than to be forcibly separated from it.

I’ve known both kinds of pain. I suspect Aunt Grace did, too.

* * *

Her second attempt was a success, if you can use the word success in cases of suicide. In the medical literature, successful suicide attempts are called “completed suicides.” That phrase doesn’t sound any better. I sometimes think of my entire life as an “incomplete suicide,” the completion being only a matter of time and the function of a greater derailing of my mind.

Aunt Grace locked herself in a bathroom, swallowed a bunch of pills and at some point tried to call her mother for help. (She had taken the phone into the bathroom with her.) Her mother was not there to pick up the phone. When they came to her home and realized something was wrong, her brothers shoved and kicked their way into the bathroom, where Aunt Grace lay dead, her throat and neck scratched by her nails in an apparent attempt to purge the toxins she had ingested.

At least that is how I remember the story, as told by my mother. I might have some of the details wrong. Aunt Grace might not have taken the phone into the bathroom right away. Perhaps she took the pills, became scared, then pulled the phone into the bathroom with her before locking the door.

The locked door doesn’t make much sense, either. If she wanted to be helped, wouldn’t she have left the door unlocked? Maybe she only wanted to say goodbye to her mother and didn’t want any help at all. I don’t even know if it was her two brothers who came to save her, or if she even had two brothers. I think that’s what my mother said, but here’s another detail I did not commit, or can’t say with certainty that I committed, to memory.

It could also be that I’ve filled in the blanks, the way I do when something is described to me in broad strokes but, when I see the thing for myself, it is nothing like I imagined. As I go over and over Aunt Grace’s suicide attempt and her “completed suicide,” trying to get all the details right, I often feel as if I am writing a scene from a play in which all the characters, their actions and the objects on the set must be just right.

In trying to have some kind of intimacy with Aunt Grace, I fail her, treating her like an object instead of the person she was. In my defense, I don’t have enough detail to make her real, so I must work with three things: what my mother told me, my faulty memory of the telling, and my tendency to fill in the blanks so I can create the image I need.

I suspect my real intimacy with Aunt Grace lies not in stories about her but rather in my genetic makeup: in my body, in my brain and in the interplay between the two. Sometimes when I touch my arms softly, I imagine they are my mother’s arms or Aunt Grace’s arms. I can see the two women warm and pale and young and covered in moles. How am I so different from them, when so much of them is in me?

* * *

Sometimes Aunt Grace’s story ends on the shore. Sometimes there is no other story. There is no bathroom. No locked door. No funeral. No mourning. No tragedy.

* * *

Dramatis Personae
Aunt Grace

Act I
Scene I

We’re on a rocky beach. Water comes to the shore in small, rhythmic waves. A slight breeze carries oppressively hot air through trees and over the water’s surface.

Aunt Grace, mid-30s, wears a black, one-piece bathing suit and has styled her hair in finger waves. Barefoot, she steps onto a long pier and walks slowly to the end before stopping. She leans forward, looks down into the water, watches small fish swim in an uncoordinated manner. She almost smiles. The fish continue to dart and jag, some swimming backward without seeming to realize it.

She leans farther, nearly losing her balance, and can now make out larger fish, the ones she thinks are ugly. Sometimes these fish look to her like rocks, but then they move and she sees them for what they are. She thinks of how she once held one of these ugly fish in her hands, shocked at how quickly fear changed its color. And eyes like buttons you might use to embellish a fancy evening dress. But cloudy. How quickly they clouded over. She has never since held a dying fish.

Where is the bottom, she wonders. How far would it take to get to the depth needed? Could she dogpaddle out that far? Was today the day?

The breeze comes up, moving the hairs on Aunt Grace’s arms and legs, even the fine hairs on her face. It doesn’t make her much cooler, but a warm breeze is better than no breeze, she thinks. The hair on her body reminds her that she’s still alive.

THE END

Posted by Dana | Filed Under blog, memoir, words cannot express | 5 Comments 

words cannot express, part 2 (in its entirety)

June 18, 2008

(I’m reposting this four-part series as one long piece, since it’s easier to read that way instead of piecemeal.)

Elementary school. I don’t know how to spell a word. My teacher orders me to look it up in the dictionary, saying I am old enough to look words up myself without coming to her. I approach the reference shelf, slide the thick volume forward into my hands then onto the countertop. I open the book and stare at it, thumbing through the pages in hopes I will stumble on the one containing the word I am looking for.

* * *

Nobody in my family ever showed me how to use a dictionary. We didn’t even have one at home, the single bookcase my father crafted himself loaded up with knick-knacks instead of books. Later, encyclopedias would appear on the bottom row of shelves. Later still a diary my mother started but never finished, filled with two- and three-sentence entries scrawled in her indecipherable script, her tremor having long since robbed her of good, or even legible, penmanship.

She started keeping the diary when she joined Alcoholics Anonymous. I remember pulling it off the shelf from time to time, and from what I could make out, she mostly wrote about how much she loved me, how much she missed my father and how she felt more resolved than ever to stop drinking.

* * *

It took me a very long time to realize that the dictionary contained tabs for each letter of the alphabet. I remember the day I discovered that was the case. It was one of my first eureka moments. No longer did I have to blindly open the book and search page by page, chunk of pages by chunk of pages, for what I was trying to find. I now at least had something to guide me to the right section of the book.

It took me even longer to realize that the words within each section were laid out in alphabetical order, even though that fact is logical enough that it should have been intuitive. In my defense, the ordering of letters in the alphabet never made much sense to me, which means any system based on alphabetization also didn’t make much sense.

The only way I learned the alphabet at all was because of the alphabet song, without which I would have been utterly lost. Even as late as third grade, I remember looking up to the alphabet wallpaper border that trailed along the four walls of our room, trying to nail down whether the M came before or after the N and where letters like J and Q fit into the mix.

* * *

My mother’s entries in her AA diary were frequent at first. But as time went on, the entries were fewer and farther between, ending with one in which she’d decided that one glass of wine per day wouldn’t hurt her. She could restrict her drinking to that much, she wrote.

Next to the diary was a copy of an AA book, known as The Big Book, given to all the group’s initiates. It seemed ironic that my mother left the diary and The Big Book in the bookcase for nearly 20 years as she sat in the next room drinking her way to the cirrhosis that was partially responsible for her early death. I never knew why she left the book and diary out. Was it a public statement that at least she had tried? A reminder to her that she might try to quit again? Were the diary and The Big Book placeholders for the life she wanted?

* * *

The dictionary. It was my nemesis. It embodied all that was wrong with the world: the false construct of letter organization that led to the false construct of word organization. How could I be expected to experience language in this way, when the entire system was illogical?

Even after I’d learned about the words being organized alphabetically, I still didn’t understand that the guide words at the top of each page signaled the range of words that appeared on that page. And even once I’d figured that out, thanks to a kind classmate who gave me the heads up, I could spend exorbitant amounts of time tying to locate the word I wanted once I’d made my way to the correct page.

Take “worry,” for example. Did it come before or after “worm”? Before of after “worth,” before or after “worse”? I would move in closer and closer to the word in small increments, reciting the order of the alphabet as I went, “m-n-o-p-q-r-,” “m-n-o-p-q-r-” and thus nailing down the position of my word letter by excruciating letter.

* * *

After my mother’s funeral, my husband, sister and I began clearing the bookshelf, which still held the encyclopedia set, The Big Book, my mother’s AA diary and an assortment of items that had found their way to the shelves since I had moved away to attend college. Among them were a Physician’s Desk Reference (my mother had been a nurse and wanted to be able to look up medical entries as she and her friends were diagnosed with new illnesses and conditions), my father’s college yearbooks, and a children’s book whose message was to accept people as they are. My sister commented that of course my mother would display a book like that, since we had spent years having to accept our mother as she was.

Most of the items from the bookshelf were swiftly disposed of, including the diary, whose pages I revisited for a moment before letting it slide form my hands and into the trash bag my husband held out. The diary was one of the only pieces of writing my mother left behind — that and some mostly nonsensical entries in a spiral notebook. She had started keeping the notebook when she suspected she was dying. By then, she was on so many medications that her entries made little sense and didn’t at all capture the liveliness and humor of the stories she’d told over the years.

For some reason, I kept that notebook, partially because I knew my mother was trying to create a written record of her experiences while she still had time. As the writer in the family, I suppose I felt it was my duty to be the caretaker of this record. But I also kept it to remind myself not to wait until I am dying to write and share my story. My mother’s fractured, often incomprehensible account of her life as expressed in this notebook is a clear example of what happens when we wait too long to tell others who we are and what we’ve been through.

* * *

To me, the dictionary was an intimidating, heavy and formidable publication that sat on the classroom’s reference shelf waiting for me to fail in its use. Every time the teacher barked at me about looking a word up, I would begin my languid walk to the reference shelf, hoping that along the way I would gain clarity about how to use the dictionary and use it quickly.

I was like a kid on crutches when it came to looking up words: I moved slowly and awkwardly through the pages, running into obstacles here and there that I had trouble overcoming. Others would turn away from me, embarrassed at how I limped along.

What I needed was my own personal dictionary, one I was able to use in private where I could shamelessly practice navigating the unfamiliar territory of its innumerable pages without being teased, reprimanded or accused of daydreaming. (I never was daydreaming, but rather reciting the alphabet over and over like a mantra, my heart beating faster with each passing moment in which my target word escaped my capture.)

I knew other kids had dictionaries at home because I’d heard them make reference to that fact. I started asking my parents if I could have one, and I remember my father being perplexed. Why would I need such a thing, he asked.

Not too long after that, an Encyclopædia Brittanica salesman came by our house, and my father bought the whole set. He proudly told me how much better encyclopedias were than dictionaries. What he didn’t know was that they were even more of a mysterious, inaccessible world than the dictionary at school. If the dictionary at school was The Arbuckle Mountains, then the Encyclopædia Brittanica was Mount McKinley.

* * *

Some of my mother’s more lucid entries from her notebook include a recipe for her friend Helen’s ratatouille, a memory she had of burning the bottom of her right foot on a chunk of coal as a child, the addresses of her grade school and junior high school, playing the autoharp until she reached 4th grade, a few failed attempts to recall German phrases she learned as a child, and her assessment that, growing up, she was “smarter and more interested in life” than anyone she knew.

After the first few pages, she stopped making notes about her childhood and instead started writing words like “pain,” “Ativan,” “MRI,” “pain,” “Ativan,” “swelling.” Interspersed were entries about the weather: “drizzle, 40 degrees,” “Stillwater, dry, above 40.”

Later still strange sketches began to appear on some of the pages, along with odd names here and there, like “Jerry Lewis” and “Bob.” On one of the last pages in the notebook, she’d written, simply, “Life Ins.”

* * *

I’d had enough public humiliation. I finally gave up. When ordered to look up a word, I took to standing at the open dictionary for what seemed like an appropriate length of time before closing it. I would then return that hardbound monolith to the shelf with a more-forceful-than-necessary shove and walk back to my seat, where I would write down the word, making my best guess at its spelling. That’s when I discovered the sloppy-handwriting cover-up: I would write illegibly on purpose so the teacher couldn’t tell if I spelled the word correctly or incorrectly.

Somehow, Mrs. Green saw through my tactics: My poor performance earned me NIs in writing and penmanship and nearly got me held back in school. It also led my teacher to comment to my older brother, who’d come to pick me up one day, “Is she like this at home, too?” (Of course, that might also have had something to do with my incessant talking, for before I had any facility with writing, I was a chatterbox.)

* * *

How can I blame my mother for waiting until the end of her life to write down her stories? At the very least, I must share the blame. As a writer, I feel it was my responsibility to make a written record of my mother’s stories while she could still tell them. How many times had I heard her tell the one about my grandmother’s pregnancy, and yet to this day I still can’t relate the details with precision. And what about the one where my uncle tried to kill my aunt by adding poison to her milkshakes? Or the one about my paternal grandfather’s brother being shot in the back?

How could I listen to these stories again and again without committing them to the page? What I realize now is that I was so caught up in my Shakespeare and Eliot — which the academy deemed as real writing — that I didn’t see my mother’s stories as worthy of my attention, my real attention anyway.

Sure, I would ask her to recount these stories because they were entertaining and it was a good way to pass the time with her. But I treated them like fluff. They were the equivalent of a daytime soap, something I could insatiably devour without giving any real credence to. I would never write a paper for school about her stories or dissect them to determine their deeper literary meanings. I had no obligation other than to vaguely recall their details, just as I know Sami and Lucas are two characters on “Days of Our Lives” who have an off-again on-again romance, but I couldn’t tell you anything specific about them if pressed for details.

* * *

The other thing about that dictionary is that it was too heavy for my small hands to lift, so it always landed on the countertop with a thud that seemed to embody its authoritarian, fist-pounding certainty. And it was certain. Its sole purpose was to be certain, to take the mystery and beauty out of words, to strip them of what made them magical and relegate them to a set of immutable, stark definitions. A dog, for example, was more than “a domesticated canid, bred in many varieties,” “any of various animals resembling a dog,” or “a fellow in general: a lucky dog.” A dog, in my estimation, was what I held when I was most afraid or lonely, what shared many of my greatest childhood joys. Where was that definition?

* * *

Look up mother in the dictionary, and here’s what you find, cradled between “moth-eaten” and “motherboard”: 1. a woman who conceives, gives birth to, or raises a child. 2. a female parent of an animal. 3. a female ancestor. 4. a women who holds a position of authority or responsibility similar to that of a mother. 5. a mother superior. 6. a woman who creates, originates or founds something.

There. That’s the one. #6. My mother was a creator. I understand that now. With her death, most of what she created is lost to me. Because of the walls I put up. Because I did not take her stories seriously. Because I did not know how to listen to what she spent a lifetime telling me. And I’m not talking about life lessons, I am talking about her life, her world, what mattered to her.

I can almost hear my mother laughing at my having forgotten her stories. Then coughing a few times. Then clearing her throat and saying in her Oklahoma drawl, “Well, Dana. Sit down. Let me tell you again.” I can almost see her taking a long drag from the Virginia Slim in her right hand. Then a sip from the drink in her left hand. Then telling me everything.

Posted by Dana | Filed Under blog, memoir, words cannot express | 4 Comments 

words cannot express

June 11, 2008

I’m really interested in writing about language and family dynamics. That is, how the use of language can and does change from one generation to another in families and how that rift can lead to a significant divide between parents and children, children and parents.

I should say that I am interested in writing about all this as it relates to my family. And, even more specifically, to the relationship between my mother and me. This is a topic I explored years ago in one of my rhetoric classes, and for some reason it’s been on my mind lately. I’ve been running through old images of myself sitting across the dining room table from my mother, both of us speaking the English language but needing a translator to get at what we wanted to say to one another.

But I’m not just talking about an emotional disconnect or a turning away from language that goes hand in hand with a turning away from the concepts attached to that language — such as words that convey weakness or insecurity, or that seem to get at who we are at the core (a core we might not want to share with anyone else, even our closest relatives).

I am talking about actual words, and the concepts they help us convey. At a certain point, my mother and I lost the ability to relate to one another on a conceptual level. We ceased to see, and describe, the world and our places within it in the same way.

* * *

My mother grew up in rural Oklahoma along with her older brother and sister and her two parents. On the surface, it was a childhood not unlike my own. I too was the youngest of three children, separated by my older brother and sister by 15 and 14 years respectively — about the same age span between my mother and her siblings.

As the story goes, my maternal grandmother had concealed her pregnancy by going off to live with a sister until she was nearly due, when she returned home to her husband, obviously about to give birth. Her rationale was that she was so pregnant by then that my grandfather couldn’t do anything but accept the situation.

This is how I remember the story, anyway. Since my mother’s death, we’ve lost the family’s fact-checker. I used to call her periodically when I had forgotten the details of one or another family tale, and now I don’t have anyone to call so I am left to my own devices when resurrecting these stories. It’s funny that while I can’t remember all the facts of these stories (or at least the “facts” as my mother related them in her colorful manner), I do clearly recall her laughter and the slight nod of her head as she told her stories over and over.

For there were only a few things in life that my mother couldn’t pass up, among them a drink, a cigarette and the opportunity to tell a story. She never tired of it, the way my husband the computer programmer never seems to tire of writing code.

* * *

As a writer and poet, I’ve been exposed time and time again to the idea that we are only what we leave behind in writing. Here is my first of many steps away from my mother, and from my other family members, all of whom rely on the oral tradition to keep stories alive and to relate new stories as they unfold.

This was evident the day of mother’s funeral, where all my cousins and first cousins were whoopin’ it up the before and after the funeral itself (not during the funeral, fortunately). Collectively, they generated so much laughter and created such an uproar that if you had closed your eyes you would have thought you were at a hoedown. They were telling their stories and clearly having a grand time doing so.

I could only sit back and watch in admiration. Somewhere along the way I lost, or never developed, this skill that everyone else in the family seems either to have acquired or to have been born with. The closest I ever came to being verbally expressive was playing the flute, and that’s not really the same thing at all, even though the body language and gestures are so strong when playing a musical instrument that one could almost take the instrument away and know exactly what the person is “saying.”

My sharp turn away from my family and its oral tradition came in college when I became an English and creative writing major. I began committing as many thoughts and feelings as I could to the page. And while I’m not saying that I subscribe to the notion that we are nothing more than our words — our written words, I should say — I will admit that as a young aspiring writer and scholar there was something seductive about the idea of living on in print long after death.

In many ways, my interest in writing and literature was the beginning of the end of an already strained relationship between my mother and me. It would take years for me to find my way back, if not to her, then to what she had to relate to me, stories that for years I discounted as mildly entertaining at best. It took a long time for me to realize these stories were her, or at least were central to who she was, just as writing has become central to who I am.

I’m not sure exactly what I am getting at or where I am going with this exploration of language and delivery method, but I think it’s worth exploring. Yes, I think so.

Posted by Dana | Filed Under blog, memoir, words cannot express | 14 Comments 


This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)

Poetry exists as a body attempting communication. — Sam Hamill