Category Archives: memoir

Tidiness, regret, and bdays

Well it’s birthday month here in this house and I found this suitable birthday post in my draft file. If I’ve already published it, sorry, but I don’t think I have. It was mostly written in 2017.

How universal is the tendency to lament through a distorted lens? These days I like having cleared off counters and floors free of piles of clothing and slipcovers that are tucked in. Gone are the days when the kitchen was a perpetual mess and when shit was piled up everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

People would come in and if they were of a certain cheery mind announce, “Oh! You can tell someone creative lives here,” as if I wouldn’t know what they meant. Others would judge quietly and struggle to keep their eyes from roving about and cataloguing the mess.

I prided myself for being comfortable with chaos and it really wasn’t an attempt to rationalize my lax housekeeping. I genuinely considered it a strength and resented the fact that it was never gonna be a quality extolled by teachers in those parent conferences which were never a breeze and in fact were often excruciating. From the very get go.

All those lectures from pre-school teachers about consistency, like that was ever gonna happen. Like it was the only thing that contributed to a child’s well being.

“He’s angry.” They said when one boy was two and naturally implied that it was my fault. How was my tone of voice? Did I stick to my “no’s”? What were our routines at home? Did we have any?

I came home stung, wringing my hands with self-recrimination convinced that one boy’s stubbornness and the other’s hyperactivity were my fault. There I was yelling. There I was completely strung out. There I was, pregnant and/or nursing and not getting a single good night’s sleep for five fucking years.

I once heard a woman say she’d given up nursing after three weeks because it interfered with her sleep and I almost fell over. Were we even from the same planet? I committed to on-demand nursing and while maybe we’d all have been better served by my being rested, I gave the boys that.

My mother died when I was carrying our second child. I keep talking about this, I know. My brother was on the West Coast. My sister was very active on her trajectory to self destruction about an hour north. And Ken’s sister, though nearby, had two kids roughly the same ages. Ken’s mother had been gone even longer gone than mine. We were so strapped for cash that baby sitters, vacations, and even pizza were out of the question for many years. You might yell too if you couldn’t find your keys.

Years later I’m not sure how much blame to shoulder. After all, society reflexively, maliciously, and systematically assigns fault to mothers. Perhaps a little refusal is in order? And besides, a little emphasis on NATURE in the nature versus nurture argument isn’t going to offend anyone at this distance.

Remember that wonderful advice of Don Juan’s in one of the Castenda books: stop taking sides with reality?

Instead of crafting memoir as prescription, how about letting it be? Which is a lot like saying, how about letting yourself be?

Like the day I mixed up cement to make stepping stones embellished with broken plates instead of cleaning the kitchen counters. Or like all the times I took the kids to the golf course for sledding instead of staightening the downstairs. There were trips to the Science Museum, the Aquarium, to the park in Brookline with the play structure shaped like a pirate ship. All those choices? Solid. Clearly better activities than picking up clutter.

Today, I’m going to act as if a blog post can affirmatively counteract a tendency to let memory warp in the direction of personal failing. Memoir as prescription.

There is so much that I did wrong or simply could have done better. It was hard for me to be consistent. My temper flared (not abusively, I hope – though yesterday I came across three-year-old C’s story about a mother who yelled and then threw her child in the river). Is it terrible that this makes me laugh out loud today?

The choices I made as a harried mother with very little support (and certainly no housecleaning services) weren’t always sound — but whose were?

During those hectic stressful joyful years, I consciously sacrificed housekeeping in favor of playing and making things and getting out to do stuff.

So many trips to Audubon’s Drumlin Farm! There’s one boy sticking his head between the rails to get a better look at the goats. There’s the other calling out to the pigs. There’s the hawk with the wounded wing in its temporary cage and here we are hollering “hello!” to the echoing dark of the big barn.

We didn’t limit ourselves to the well-peopled areas. Off we went down dirt roads behind the visitor center, walking along fields of corn stubble under a big bowl of sky. Look boys, there’s the drumlin! Let’s think about glaciers, about massive floes of ice with the power to move mountains. And remember, the big high mountains are the babies and the rounded-off low ones, ancient. Funny, right? Feel free to get muddy — what’s a little dirt, especially in a semi-kept house?

In warm weather, we’d stop at Dairy Joy on the way home. Soft serve dripping everywhere.

Remember that long plastic bin filled with ziti? It was the rectangular kind generally used to stow out-of-season clothing under the bed. Having quickly calculated how much better the entertainment value a few boxes of pasta were than say, a trip to the Science Museum, I liberally poured box after box into the bin. We were stuck home for some reason. The boys’ cousin was visiting. Let the contractors who were in the house look at me like I’m crazy. This was fun! Remember how happily they drove their trucks through mounds of rattling pasta? Remember the ziti necklaces we made before emptying the bin?

Also: Crane’s Beach, Loblolly Cove, Good Harbor Beach, the Essex Wolf Preserve, The Habitat (also Audubon), the Old North Bridge, Cold Spring Park, Newton Cemetery (for the ducks), Wellesley Town Center (also for the ducks).

We went to Acton to see dinosaur bones and to the Science Museum in Boston to look at snakes in glass cases and to stand agog in the lobby watching the story-and-a-half mechanism with its traveling ball and ingenious moving parts.

We went to construction sites to watch the trucks. We went on a whale watch out of Gloucester and saw a big one breech. We ate fried dough at the Topsfield Fair. Picked apples in Sherbourne and rode the serpent train at the Harvest Fair in town center.

There were sports: hockey, soccer, T-ball, skating, more soccer, gymnastics, soccer, skateboarding, and track, track, track.

There were guitar and drum lessons. There were plays in elementary school and all those birthday parties.

I made dozens upon dozens of Christmas cookies each year and filled Easter baskets with candy and trinkets. For everyday, there were thumb print cookies and chocolate chip cookies. I knew the tollhouse recipe by heart.

There were doctors’ visits, learning disability evaluations, sensory integration interventions, IEP meetings (both boys), teacher conferences, medications to try, OT, and calls from the principal (fortunately, only two involving the police and neither resulting in an arrest).

That shit was time consuming, I probably don’t need to tell you.

One son had a thyroid issue in middle school that required annual ultra sounds for a while. The other broke his left arm twice and needed surgery.

We didn’t go to restaurants much, especially in the early days. Once at the diner in Newton Centre, I asked out loud, “Why don’t we do this more often?” Oh look! There’s the little one writing on the mirror next to our booth with his hot dog! That’s why.

There were home-cooked dinners something like 340 nights a year. And while the boys did go through their white food phases (you know, that period when you almost succumb to the ideas that ketchup is a vegetable and pretzels are health food?), they did eat their salads. Yes, I served delicious salads with homemade dressing almost every night of their childhoods. There’s a routine, one I stuck to.

We read to the boys in turns, meaning we swapped boys and books nightly — which is how my husband and I ended up reading exactly half of the first five Harry Potter books. I might not have done so otherwise, but when the last one came out and both kids were prepared to read it on their own, I devoured it – because I could?

When other families went to Jamaica or Florida, we went sledding on the golf course over by the JCC and built snow forts in the backyard.

Speaking of the JCC, we were members for a few years – tumbling classes and fun in the pool (only the indoor one, alas – we could not afford membership in the outdoor pool). We belonged to our town lake, decidedly affordable, where there were swimming lessons.

We went to California twice (when they were young and later), Oregon (elementary school) and Colorado (high school). We went camping in Maine, Oregon, and all over Massachusetts.

We saw the Ringley Brothers Circus once, Cirque du Soleil, STOMP, Japanese drummers, Habib Koite, and during one misguided Christmas season, half of “The Celtic Sojourn.”

Movies not so much. In one kid’s film, thinking myself to be among people who were used to tolerating disruptive children, I let the young one run around the perimeter (he wasn’t yelling or anything – just running, round and round and round — did I mention hyperactivity?) A woman growled at me: “That child’s a MONSTER.” We didn’t try that again for a while.

We painted, knit, sewed. There were Lego and wood block creations in every room for a lot of years (and yes, that means I know how excruciating it is to step on LEGO bricks). There were Calico Critters and Play Mobil pirates and tons and tons of Beanie Babies. One American Girl doll.

We visited friends in Maine and friends on the Vineyard. There were lots of trips to grandparents in Schenectady, sometimes spiced up with Air Shows, a tour of the race tracks in Saratoga, or hikes in the Indian Kill Nature Preserve.

Happy Birthday boys! You’re the best things that ever happened for me!!

Lady Liberty, Houses

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Here I am at my kitchen sink in Pittsfield, MA. Age 24? I lived alone in a sweet third floor apartment and gave over one of my bedrooms to painting. That seems like a different life.

More recent collage Supreme Court backdrop

Why didn’t I keep at it, you might wonder. Well, paints are really expensive for one thing and probably the more important other thing, in my family my sister was the painter. I was the writer. You know how potent those early designations can be!

I post the purple painting fragment to demonstrate the way motifs endure. I didn’t know when I painted Lady Liberty as a young woman that she would become an urgent symbol of American resistance later on. None of us could’ve known.

How fragile our democracy! How resilient white supremacy! How infecting to our institutions Christian theocratic tribalism! In those days I worried about HIV and how to create a reasonable worklife.

Just as a recent data point: Trump got booed at the US Open. His dictate to the Association to air clips of him with the sound off were foiled by — oh, I don’t know — the internet?

Do you hear that though? Not the booing, but the tyrannical imposition of his insecurity. He KNEW he would be booed. He KNEW the association would bend the knee.

Last summer when friend Lisa and I attended an indigo workshop we stayed very near my last college residence (above). Two Isabella Street, Northampton. Near the railroad tracks. From there I went to San Francisco for a short six-month sojourn before returning east. But while in SF, I worked in a copy shop and had access to what was then cutting edge technology: a color Xerox machine with a color dial. I got an employee discount! It allowed you to make endless variations by changing how color was laid down. To say I enjoyed making collages and then tinkering with them on the machine would be an understatement.

Also talked about here. I repeat myself. I give myself permission to repeat myself.

Anyway, there is that house motif. And below, a photograph I took while still in high school.

Sometimes I wonder (not at all to my credit), if my endless house creations indicate a profound loneliness and inability to connect. What no people? Not even a cat in the window? Or maybe they reveal artistic limitation — living creatures being much harder to render than walls and roofs after all.

At least they have gotten more richly rendered over time!

Sunset clouds and a recollection

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Thunderstorms threatened all afternoon but never materialized, a disappointing pattern probably related to climate change. It happens all the time.

As the sun started sinking, it inflamed the clouds into such gorgeous colors that a bunch of us found ourselves on the sidewalk taking pictures. Thunder rumbled now and again and occasional flashes of lightning appeared to the west. Pure magic.

It was a communal moment that made me laugh. iPhones held up to the sky.

My corner-house neighbors and I chatted a bit. We moved in to our houses on the same weekend in May 1993 — she with her three sons, me weeks from getting pregnant with my first.

One of her sons, also taking pictures, shared that he turns 50 this weekend. I almost fell over.

Then he shared a funny story about my first born, who I have to tell you talked early and in full paragraphs. People were often stunned. He was intelligible even with the ever-present binky in his mouth. (He would slide it to one side and talk through it, not unlike an old man with a cigar).

Anyway, he might’ve been three when this happened. A dragonfly flitted near the lot line and he pointed to it and said to my neighbor, “Look! It’s iridescent!”

Radishes divine

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I might be weird for loving radishes as much as I do, but right now I’m obsessed with eating their crunchy goodness with just a splash of olive oil, a spritz of lemon juice, and salt and pepper.

I had an Italian/chef boyfriend once upon a time who would prep radishes the same way only simpler — with only olive oil and pepper — and I can tell you that they’re delicious that way too.

For some reason, the stripped down nature of this treat reminded me of a snack my Dad used to eat — a slice of white bread with mayonnaise and pepper. It was considered a real treat, especially if served with a small glass of buttermilk.

Gross, right? But then I remembered that as kids we’d enjoy cold hot dogs right out of the fridge (fully cooked, of course). Also gross.

My father was born at the beginning of the Depression. In 1929, in fact. I don’t know of anyone in my generation who would slug down buttermilk and go, “Ah.”

Here’s another memory — and I swear on my father’s grave that it’s true.

One year, I might have been six or seven, we were heading down the Taconic Parkway en route to visit family in Woodhaven, New York (which was either Brooklyn or Queens depending on the year of the map), when I began to smell something gross. I crinkled my nose. Was it coming from inside the car? Did anyone else smell it? No and no.

I tried to dismiss it. I’d learned early, I’m sad to say, not to trust myself — especially in the face of opposition. But as we crossed the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the smell got stronger. I knew we were heading toward it, but still no one else could smell it. How baffling!

Finally, we arrived and spilled out of our Pontiac Tempest. Scrambled up the steps and into Nana’s narrow and dark brownstone. Whoa! Right there on the porch I was hit with the smell. It was moist and animal. Something cooking, then? I followed my father into the kitchen where he lifted the lid of a giant pot on the stove and inhaled with pleasure.

Pigs’ feet.

Pigs’ feet? A delicacy I guess.

I can’t remember if I sampled them or not. I can’t remember if I said a single thing about how off-putting I found the smell. Probably no to both. Given what a treat pigs’ feet were to my father’s family, I’m pretty sure no one would’ve minded me taking a pass.

Journal excerpt — early 90’s

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The wind hounds Framingham. It is one of the most constant reminders I have that this, indeed, is a prison. The wind’s vigor, its selection of the compound as a place to rush through and rush through some more and the way it flaps the antiquated metal slat ventilators all serve to make one feel diminished, inconsequential, and exposed.

When it’s calm elsewhere, like in Newton, Natick, or Weston, the wind barrels through the grounds of the prison with persistent force. An additional punishment. When a light breeze graces my leafy suburb, a harsh wind scours MCI/Framingham. There’s no logic to it. Just like there’s no logic to a mother of three being handed a mandatory term of five years for committing a crime of poverty.

More than the glint of sun on barbed wire coils, more than the assessing looks of officers garbed in blue, more than the drab disrepair of the old building, the wind reminds us where we are and that we are exposed, lonely, inconsequential. I get to leave. They do not.

I know nothing of another worker there except that she loves to fly kites. She shared this as we were crossing the yard that separates the old building from the new, a place where the wind blasts as if down a desert canyon. This personal disclosure seemed not so much evoked by the wind as blown out of her. The wind demanded it. Her sharing reminded me of an abandoned burger wrapper that after several tugs of air gets lifted into a current and carried an uncanny distance.

I don’t know what the wind does to the souls of the inmates.

One woman who had the chore of cleaning dead pigeons out of the old building’s rafters mentioned ghosts, at which point I made the rather stunning observation that it had never occurred to me to imagine what the place felt like after nightfall. She heard howling. She speculated about spirits.

*. *. *.

These paragraphs were from torn pages found in a casual file in the basement over the weekend. Most of it was about the frustrations of serving inmates when I didn’t have much to offer them.

Aid to Incarcerated Mothers’ primary mission was to arrange visits between children and their inmate mothers. The prison, notably, is located about thirty minutes from where most of the incarcerated women came from. I was the staff attorney for a while and reviewed petitions to terminate parental rights and social worker plans and I can’t remember what else.

I vastly preferred being in a medium security women’s prison to working in a posh law firm, that I do remember. That and how the women kidded me for looking like a soccer mom (I didn’t have kids yet).