February 28, 2022
I just got a definitive date when Brianna is moving back to the West Coast. She moved to Washington D.C. last year for school, but has taken a remote job working PR/Communications for an agency out of Orange County, so she will be moving back to this coast soon. I am so excited! It's tough having your baby girl so far away! Even though she will be working for a place in southern California, she has decided to move back in with her old roommate, Kaci (who I adore) in Seattle. We are living in times that actually allow someone to live in Seattle and work in Orange County--how wonderful is that?? And even though she won't be in the same state as me, she will still just be a stone's throw by plane, and I am okay with that. She will move home for a month in May before she heads off to Seattle, so I will definitely get to have some mama-daughter time soon. I am so looking forward to it!
February 15, 2022
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are part of the fabric of childhood for most kids. This was true for me as well, but for me it didn’t just represent childhood; it was uncertainty and instability. It was a reminder that things had changed–monumentally so. It was loss and fear and the end of innocence.
Sometimes I am in awe of the courage it took my mother to pull herself and her children out of the volatile situation we found ourselves in. A young mom with five children, 13 years and under, she found herself one night throwing whatever we could fit into the trunk of our car to seek safety and shelter elsewhere, as far away from our home as she could get. The younger kids in the family really didn’t have much of a concept of what was going on–they thought we were just going off on an adventure. I was older, though, and much more of a confidante than I should have been at that age. I knew that night was going to change everything about our lives.
We drove to a payphone across town, after Mom had taken many backstreets and circuitous avenues. She was afraid she might be followed. At the payphone, Mom called the local Marjorie Mason Center. Unfortunately, there was no room at the inn. It’s difficult to house a mom with several small children, even for a home dedicated to domestic violence victims. (To be honest, I held a child’s grudge against the Marjorie Mason Center for a long time. They were supposed to be there for families in need, but they could not help us in our desperate time.) The best they could do for us was to offer a place to stay several cities away. We didn’t have enough gas to get there, or enough money to pay for the fuel it would take.
Finally we landed at our youth pastor’s house in the middle of the night. He and his wife took us in, but were unprepared to keep us all for more than a night. They just didn’t have the space. The next day we all ended up on the floor of a spare bedroom in one of my mom’s student’s homes. The student, who was close with my mom, had talked with her mother, who extended the offer. I have no idea how Alma knew the details of why we were in need of a place to stay, but I imagine it must have been incredibly humbling to my mom.
Alma’s mom fed us a meal, but Mom couldn’t bear to have the family feel like they were responsible for continuing to feed us. Their family had their own financial struggles. Mom had no access to her own bank account–many wives didn’t in the 1970s–, and payday was still two weeks away. She took the $20 bill from her purse and went to the grocery store to get food that could be stretched out over several days and that wouldn’t go bad without a refrigerator. Peanut butter and jelly and bread were our lifesavers in those days. It was our breakfast, lunch, and dinner for nearly two weeks. We sequestered ourselves in that spare bedroom while Mom was trying to figure out her next moves. She had to move from immediate survival mode to future planning mode. This current situation was only sustainable for a very short time. While she planned and strategized, she also had to keep five young children fed and quiet.
“Why can’t we go outside and play?”
“Where’s Dad?”
“I’m bored! There aren’t any toys here to play with.”
“I want to go back home!”
“WHHHYYYY do we have to have peanut butter and jelly again? I hate peanut butter and jelly!”
We were kids. We whined. We wheedled. We cried. We yelled. Sometimes she would respond in sadness, sometimes in anger and frustration. She didn’t want to be here in this position any more than we did, but now that we were, it was her job to figure out what our next steps were. It must have been overwhelming. It must have panicked her sometimes and kept her awake on her palette of blankets long after she could hear the slow, steady breathing of her children as sleep overtook them at night. If it was just her, it would have been easier. But to be wholly responsible for five young lives who couldn’t help her and who were bewildered by the breakneck speed with which all our circumstances changed must have been a heavy burden that weighed on her constantly.
It was a turning point, for us and for her. We did finally find more permanent shelter, after bouncing from place to place for a time. I don’t know how she managed to gather resources and help, but I know there were many kind people who helped along the way, in ways both big and small. I marvel at her perseverance, her willingness to set aside pride, her resilience, and her courage. She shielded us as much as she could, but it would take years before she regained her financial equilibrium after striking it out on her own. Things weren’t easy, but they got manageable. I think those immediate years after that night affected all of us children differently. We all had different perceptions and memories of those days and the months that followed. For me, weirdly, a lot of it centered around those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I guess it was easier to focus my frustration and anger from that time period on the fact that we didn’t have any choice other than to swallow the only thing that was put in front of us, rather than deal with what put us in that situation in the first place.
It was more than twenty years before I could touch one of those sandwiches again.
February 2, 2022
Not long ago, in light of the #MeToo movement, I thought about the fact that I was lucky I had never experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. I remember having a conversation about it with a friend of mine, since the issue was all anyone seemed to be talking about at the time. I empathized with women who had experienced it, and was duly indignant on their behalf. I said that no one had ever subjected me to anything like that before...except, they had. I had experienced it, but I didn't realize it at the time--couldn't put that name to it. Another friend of mine had said he thought the #MeToo movement all had gotten out of hand, and why did it take some women 20 years to report it if it had really been traumatizing? How was it possible that people were only just realizing that abuse was abuse ? The speculation was that women were simply jumping on a bandwagon for attention, but hadn't really been traumatized by what they were claiming as harassment in retrospect. But I get it. In the novel 1984, the government attempts to shrink the language in order to minimize the possibility of articulating, or even thinking about, rebellion. How can you acknowledge it if you can't name it, can't recognize a context for how to label it? What I experienced as a young college student was an assistant manager who lived by the 'boys will be boys' attitude--everything was just fun and games. It wasn't assault; I didn't fear losing my job because of it, but by today's standards, what he subjected girls to in that place of business would absolutely be grounds for firing. I didn't know, though. Back then, we reserved that term for overt shows of force or threats to employment, not all the subtle ways harassment can manifest. I knew he was inappropriate, but I also assumed my only recourse was to have a sense of humor about it, to give him wide berth, and to try not to find myself alone in the stock room with him.
Even more recently, I was talking with a friend about my home life as a child. There was domestic abuse, but although I was witness to it, I was not the recipient. Even writing that seems too black and white; I rarely say that what I witnessed was domestic abuse. It didn't happen all the time. It only happened when he was really stressed. There was only one time that I know of that it was bad enough for the police to become involved. There were no broken bones. But that's how we rationalize, right? That's how people stay in those situations, sometimes until it's too late. And then as we continued talking, my friend and I, I recounted a couple of other stories. The times he held us underwater in the pool until we couldn't breathe, fighting and kicking to come up for air, terrified of drowning. The times he locked us kids in a room with him individually for hours at a time to lecture and intimidate us. The way his anger led him to send subtle and not-so-subtle signs of destructive consequences when he did not get his way. The way he tried to wield his power to drive a divide among family members. My friend, who continued to ask questions, finally asked me if I thought I had come from a background of abuse. My immediate reaction was no, and he asked me why. Again, I said I had only witnessed it, but not been the recipient. Even as I was saying it, juxtaposed to the examples I had just given of some of my dad's behaviors, for the first time it began to dawn on me that I wasn't in proximity to it; I too lived it. I didn't name it because I always thought of myself as lucky that it wasn't bruises or broken bones--the face of abuse-, and therefore I couldn't name it for what it was. At 54 years of age, I finally acknowledged that just because it wasn't as bad as many people experience, it doesn't make me 'lucky' to have endured that abuse. No one should have to.
March 29, 2021
A couple of months ago, I was talking with a dear friend who had recently lost her mom. Her husband had lost his dad a handful of years earlier. I lost my own mom over twenty years ago. We sat together late into the night and shared memories, shared struggles of missing our loved ones, of not being prepared to let go, and reminiscing about the times we were able to share with each of our respective parents before they passed. We laughed about small shared moments; we cried about momentary meaningful moments, and grieved what we missed--what they missed in no longer being here with us. We celebrated things we learned from them, and traits we share with them, and gifts they gave us, in memory or in experience, that shaped who we are.
I confessed to them something I had never said to anyone, because it seems a little morbid, in light of social norms. I am the picture-taker, the memory keeper of my family. The last pictures taken of my mom, just a few days before her death, were of her holding my niece, her most recent grandbaby. By that time, cancer had ravaged Mom, and she was weak and tired. Still, she said in moments when her fiesty spirit and devotion to family was as strong as ever, that she had never not held one of her grandbabies, and she wasn’t about to let cancer stop her from holding this one. In the photos, we had placed my week-old niece in Mom’s arms, and my sister had her arms underneath my mom’s to stablize her, since she didn’t really have the strength to hold up even that tiny little bundle. Those pictures are hard to look at to this day. Mom’s eyes are beaming, proud of her precious new granddaughter, but she is hunched over in her wheelchair, her face is swollen from the medication, the wig she wore to cover her hair loss is slightly askew, and her smile is tinged with pain. Her spirit was there, but her body was only days from letting go. This is not the image of the vibrant matriarch of the family, filled with zest for life, that I picture when I think of my mom.
Ironically, then, my confession was that one of my strongest instincts at Mom’s funeral was that I desperately wanted to take a picture of her. Lying in repose at the front of the church, my mom looked beautiful in a dress she’d picked out well in advance for the occasion. She entrusted me to make sure she was buried in a dress she liked--one she knew was a good color on her. Mom liked to look good when she was going out in public. Her face was no longer swollen and sallow; they had taken great pains to make her hair and her make-up beautiful and natural. She was peaceful, no longer in pain, and she looked like the mom we hadn’t seen in months. Her spirit was no longer there, but her body looked like her. I wanted to capture that vision of her to remember that last look, rather than her battle-weary body in the months leading up to her death. I wanted to take a picture of the roomful of loved ones too--family, friends, colleagues, students--who came to pay their respects and to share their stories of how she’d touched their lives. She would have loved that, honestly. But we don’t do that, do we? That’s somehow looked down on as perhaps disrespectful? Uncouth? Irreverent?
I didn’t mean any of those things--disrespect or irreverence. I was so moved by the emotion of being in that room with all of those people Mom was important to, and feeling like I’d been given back my mom for a brief moment even as she was being taken away from me, that I wanted to save those memories, that expression of love and grief and loss and connectedness, and tuck them away to savor and reminisce about later--all the minute details. But we don’t do that, do we? We don’t take photos of the dead, or of the celebrations of their life. And I wonder why that is. We record for posterity all other aspects of life--births, first steps, milestones in school, marriages, even divorces and heartache, reunions, moves away from home, from friends, and jobs, and celebrations of new beginnings. But the end? Recording the end of life is perhaps too difficult, too much for us to acknowledge its finality.
It’s not really final, though, is it? I don’t want to call too much on something as trite as ‘the circle of life’, but when we are celebrating the life of someone we love, especially a parent, what we are doing is recognizing those moments big and small that will continue to ripple out among hundreds of people with whom they spend their lifetimes. “You have her eyes.” “I can see her in your smile.” “I went into my profession because she inspired me.” “When I look up at the clouds, I can see him.” “She is sending me rain to say hello.” “You have your mom’s intuition.” “She had the same generosity of spirit you do.” “His sense of humor was just like yours.” A hundred little things that connect us, repeat the idiosyncrasies and personality traits and likes and dislikes, and beliefs, and traditions, and physical traits, and memories of shared moments, days, lives. In the same way that we celebrate and record all those other milestones of life, death--or the passing on of all of these gifts to our loved ones to carry on and continue to share with our loved ones in turn--should be captured as one of the most significant milestones of them all.
I wish I had one more picture of my mom.
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