The first thing I wrote was jotted on a single piece of notebook paper with scrawled, childlike stick figures illustrating a story consisting of five or six lines. It was a story about my mother, about one of my first visits to the hospital to see her. It wasn't very descriptive, and the plot line was kind of predictable, but it told the story, and it served its purpose. My mom was sick. We drove to the hospital. We went inside. We rode up the elevator. We went in to see her. The end. And there is five-year-old-me, illustrated by five-year-old me, in all of my wild-haired, five-year-old, stick-figured glory, walking into a hospital room to see my mother.
That was one of the first of many hospital visits, one of many times I'd write about my mother, most of which took shape in the many different handwriting styles I experimented with in the eight years that I intermittently kept my thoughts locked in a small, white diary purchased for me at Hallmark Cards. Over those eight years, I both embraced and abandoned that book, filling its pages with careless ramblings, self-absorbed complaints, hormonal rages and irrational declarations of undying love, leaving it on a shelf, forgotten, to find it again, scratch out the names of my forever-loves and pencil in some new ones. While I'd like to say that this no longer characterizes my writing, I'd be lying. Nothing has changed, really, except for my writing style, my spelling abilities, and the fact that I don't dot my i's with little hearts or confess fantasies about Luke Duke.
Reading that early diary as an adult has always been painful for me, has always sucked me straight back into those helpless, hapless, heavy days of childhood, when my parents argued, my mother left my father over and over again, like a tragic After School Special on a terrible rewind-replay loop, and I, an only child, caught in the middle, would go with whoever tugged the hardest, moved the quickest, drove the fastest. This was always my mother, who, ironically, claimed to be so ill and frail. My father would watch, a heartbreaking vision of pitifulness, as I, staring out the rear window of the station wagon or Pinto or pickup truck, watched his motionless retreat as my mother sped from the white limestone driveway. What were they fighting about?
I never knew.
I'd like to say that I felt loved during those times, when the two grown people who meant so much to me would battle for my possession, but I didn't. I don't. They were using me to hurt each other. I could sense it then, but I know it now. These leavings were not in my "best interest," as my mother tried to reason, when she tried to reason. The places my mother took me, her safe places, were not my safe places. Always to the home of a divorced friend or a non-matronly woman would we flee, and they would sit at the table, smoking cigarettes, drinking Coke and hating men, no one serving me cookies or clucking over me with concern, the poor little girl with the broken family. And I know now that my dad always knew where we were. These safe places were not secret places at all, so I resent him for not rescuing me from those houses that were not home, from those older boys and girls who would lure me out back or into the cornfield or the garage with promises of friendship or kittens or candy only to whip down my pants, or theirs, leaving me embarrassed and confused, my empty hands and heart still outstretched, waiting for the promised prize while my mother, inside, played Bridge and laughed.
As I grew older, my parents no longer fought over me as much as they fought about me. My father, in his own immaturity, lobbied for arbitrary freedoms like extended bedtimes, or another dollar, or one more ride down the sliding board. My mother, who was trying to raise a daughter who would not be a spoiled brat (her words), would emphatically say no. And I, like a normal, selfish child, sided with my dad, leaving my well-intentioned mother feeling rejected, which made her angry, which made her lash out at both of us, but especially at me. This made my dad and me a team, and I liked that. We were comrades. She was the enemy. My dad was fun-loving and reasonable. My mother was rigid and hateful and, when my dad was at work, physically and verbally abusive. It was all very clear in my young mind who was right and who was wrong. In spite of her tremendous housecleaning ("neat freak," I would call her disdainfully), creative abilities (she was an artist, a writer, a seamstress, a knitter, an interior designer), and her industriousness (she grew her own garden, canning and freezing and cooking from scratch; though I loved my mom's cooking, my deepest longing was for a McDonald's to be built in the cornfield next to my house), my mother, I knew, was ill. And eventually, I knew, she was also crazy. One sarcastic or disrespectful word from me could send her into a fit of physical and verbal rage. Once, when I muttered under my breath an epithet that I'd often heard my dad utter, "You 'ol bat," she came after me so hard and with such force that I was cowering in the corner, wrapping my arms around my head to ward off the blows.
So nothing she did or asked me to do could ever be reasonable. I despised her, looked on her with loathing. Even in her years of manic depression, after her several attempted suicides and threats to kill both my dad and me, when she was spending more time in the psychiatric ward of the hospital than out, receiving massive amounts of medication and regular rounds of shock therapy, I was angry and disgusted with her. I clearly remember the afternoon we were returning her to the psychiatric ward after a weekend visit as she, sitting in the front seat of the truck where I was wedged between her and my father, looked at the digital radio display which read 96.5 and slurred, in all seriousness and panic, "Oh...God...no! It's 9:65! I'm...late! They might not let me sign back in! I'm...late!"
Stop the dramatics, I thought, and grow up. Be normal. None of us feel sorry for you, and you're ruining my life. You're supposed to be the mother. You're supposed to be raising me, for crying out loud.
And while those things may have been true, there really was nothing she could do about it.She was, it would become clear later, sick beyond recovery, and no amount of medication or shock treatment would reverse the depression she endured. What was worse, for me, was that there was nothing I could do about it, either. So I ran to my own safe places--friends, little pink hearts, writing, hair, clothes, music, roller skating, obsessions with boys--and I would roll my eyes when she would say she was "depressed." What a rotten little liar of a word. Depressed. Just another way of saying, "I'm choosing to care more about myself than I care about you. Give me my crossword puzzle, my anti-depressants and my cigarettes and leave me alone." I hated that word, depressed, swore I would never use it. It meant selfishness, weakness and ugliness. My mom was selfish, weak and ugly. If ever I were a mom, I would be giving, strong and beautiful. I would take care of my children. Be responsible. They would love me devotedly. She was inhuman and wrong. I would do things right.
I didn't always scribble the angry thoughts or even the arguments on the pages of my diary. Most of those are still burrowed like a tumor in my head. My writing was always cathartic, but it wasn't always real. Or maybe I wasn't always real. I don't know. But when I read back through the writings of the younger me, I simultaneously remember the events and am a stranger to them. When I read what the young, impetuous, clueless me saw of my world, thought was important, the me of ages 10-18, I feel ashamed and appalled. Who was this child, so prone to selfishness and melodrama, who thought she knew everything? Who was so very wrong? What value does such hedonistic writing have?
What I realize now is that it wasn't the product of the writing that was important. It was the catharsis. Writing helped me through those times when I was confused and alone, when the ones who were supposed to be my strength were too weak to help me. My diary was my therapy, my confidante, my God before I knew my God. It wasn't meant to be re-read and analyzed. It had served its purpose of helping me sort out my feelings. It was no longer needed. This is why, on a brisk winter day in late January, I sent the little thirty-year-old diary out with the burn trash. "If you see a little white book in there, don't rescue it," I told my young son as he headed out the door with the matches. "I want you to burn it. It's not worth saving."
Some days, I forget that my writing still serves me. I try to make what I tap out onto the screen palatable, homogenized, inoffensive, easily digestible. But that's not always what my writing is meant to be. While I do hope it speaks to someone or moves someone or motivates someone, I also know that it helps me pick through the train wreck of my thoughts, memories, ideas and fears. I once read an interview with Stephen King in which he said that he writes is to get the menacing thoughts out of his own head. He writes to exorcise the demons. He writes to answer the "what ifs" in his mind.
While my writing is no longer locked away in a little white diary, decorated with a disembodied female head and her flowing floral tresses, whose key was misplaced long ago, it still serves that purpose of exorcising demons, hacking through the tangles of my thoughts with the machete that is my pen or keyboard. My writings are letters from my spirit to my God, from my past to my present to my future, from my brain to my heart, or vice-versa. The blank page does not sit in judgement of my feelings, but listens quietly, soaking in each word. My writing is a place where I can be giving, strong and beautiful, in spite of what my loved-ones think.
But it's also a place where I can be selfish, weak and ugly.
Even depressed.
A human being can be nothing less than all of these.
We are blessed to have "Rejoice," a young man from Swaziland, living in our home through the end of June. Rejoice has shared with us that access to print media, especially books, is very limited. It's very difficult for a person to get a library card, and libraries are hot, crowded and inadequately supplied. He would like to build a personal library to share with others in his village. We would like to help him by gathering these books and shipping them to his home in Swaziland.
