Us humans keep wanting to know where we are going and where we came from. We puzzle over the why and how and why not, trying to figure out how come I am the way I am and what happened to my parents to make them so…like themselves. Well, some of us keep trying to figure it out. Especially if there’s been something hidden that was too shameful or different to mention. I’ve seen that writing my own memoir has given me a way to remedy this aloness and secrecy. And it’s helped me see what has changed for the better. Here’s the second chapter of my map of the past.
Unaccompanied Minor
Chapter Two
This morning around 6 something, I woke up with this sadness and pain and remembered that my mother died. There was just a feeling like a heavy curtain draped over my head and pulling me down with it, all my bones gone soft. Did I love her? Yes, I guess this aim to care for her, despite her relentless badgering me to do it and criticizing me that I couldn’t do it the way she wanted it, there was love. It’s not a pure clean love, the way I feel about my kids when they are sweet and I think they are just so kind and good and there’s simplicity in the way I recommend them to the world and am happy they are here, or the love of this cat with super soft fur like the sealskin coat my mother had inherited and wore before we were horrified at wearing a seal.
When I was little and not so little, even in fifth grade, I’d tuck myself into the coat closet and stand behind the coat. It had a nap that if you ran your hand one way, it was so soft and turned a darker minky brown, then I could draw a grid with my index finger and play tic tac toe in the soft fur. I could write letters on this fuzzy background and secret messages, wiping them out with an upward sweep. Sometimes, I just go stand in the closet to feel the unworldly softness of this coat, a secret place of hidden delight and refuge in the hard plastic world.
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Competition means less of everything for everyone. Plants are smaller and leggy, fighting for sunlight. I have a distrust of big families. When I say “there were six kids in my family,” I usually hear back, “That’s so nice. You were all friends,” or “good company for each other.” I know big families who are friendly and loved being part of a group. In my family, though, it is hard to describe how being in this group was an acutely lonely experience. Lonelier because we were together. Alone because we did not have each other’s back. We fought for the scraps of attention, the dashes of approval. We competed for everything, whether known or unknown. It wasn’t conscious, it was wariness. Home wasn’t a place where we could be ourselves, because the message was, don’t be yourself. At your core, you aren’t what we want.
“Kids are like pancakes, the first ones you don’t get right,”my mother would say. Now my sisters call Will the first pancake. Being the second, I am less burnt or underdone, but still probably one that would end up in the bin.
Shame separated us. Which is why, although my siblings have friends, I would not describe any of us as extroverted. A sense of melancholic aloneness runs through our veins. The search for belonging, and home, rather than believing we are home. We are visitors, waiting for the gates to open. But as my dharma teacher would say, that horse has left the barn. No one left to open those gates, but us.
Hiding means I always keep a bit of myself from view. From early days, I knew I needed improving to be approved. And this hiding, this shame circled round and round. The kids passing it back and forth, shoving each other into the spotlight of blame because as long as it isn’t me. It’s better.
I don’t think it was always like it was. I believe my mother was delighted with me. My older brother was a cautious and introverted child, while I was eager to explore the world. “You were such a happy baby. It was so nice to have you because you were so delighted with everything.”
I had almost no hair and in my baby pictures. I have large round eyes looking out of this small head with wisps of hair rising around me like a balding ghost. I look like a mouse crouching at our play table with an impish smile while my brother, who is thirteen months older, sits like a massive stone in a turtleneck and corduroys, smiling with decorum. I caught up in size in a few years, and we were playmates and companions because that’s who was with me.
The earliest memories I have are from Medfield, Massachusetts where we lived in a Victorian house in a 3rd-floor apartment. I was in a crib and Will in a crib on his side of the room. We’d watch the nighttime car lights from the street in our turret room in the dark, following each car headlight making a rectangle that traveled its course against the curved wall and was gone. This was silent and slow and even thinking about it is soothing. We sat on a freezer in the kitchen, my father tired from working nights at Jordan Marsh, his head low over the Maxwell House coffee in his mug, the sky pink with dawn, and us gnawing on the frozen hot dogs that were cold and dripping in our hands. We nibbled at the frozen, salty edges until they melted and sat watching the day be born.
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I am aware I am swearing less. My swearing has worn off somewhat. Which is interesting because when I worked with the teens, I was swearing regularly. I have nothing against swearing—except when it’s swearing AT someone. Swearing in general can be creative and bonding and give some good insights, such as a super fucked, or a cluster fuck bomb. Can Buddhists swear? Is that right speech. I am not concerned with the answer and getting it right.
Two things I am thinking about: the first is how I have outsourced moming from even when I was small. I’ve consistently found nurturing women I could attach to who guided me. I feel some tears coming in my eyes and a pull like strings around my jaw thinking about the generous hearts I’ve encountered. How the world has always been giving to me. When one tree doesn’t give the fruit we want, there’s an abundant one next to it. There were people with more capacity in my life. The first outsourced mom was Mrs. McCarthy, who Will and I called Mrs. Goggy, because we couldn’t say McCarthy.
Mrs. Goggy gave us Goggy crackers, which were Ritz crackers, and we would hang out with her and her family when we were small. Really small, like four and five. Different times, the whole neighborhood was ours to explore and neighbors got involved with parenting the whole neighborhood, not just their own. I think that’s what is lost—the sense of confidence that it’s ok to offer guidance or a cracker to someone else’s kid. Of course we want safety, but now any adult hanging out with a kid is suspect. And something is lost when we trade community for separation. We lose places of refuge for kids and adults who aren’t as burdened, those who can pick up the slack for overworked stressed parents.
This was typically the role of the grands in past times when we had intergenerational living and I imagine I would have needed so much anti anxiety medicine if my mom had lived with me. It’s a beautiful ideal for other people, which is always the easiest ideal of things and places I don’t have to actually endure and can lament like the old person that I am turning into.
Mrs. Goggy fed us Ritz crackers because “It was one of the only things you could eat. You and Will had dysentery so badly. You were sick for a year. You had brewer’s yeast in apple juice and I was trying everything. You couldn’t eat anything,” mom told me over coffee. Wasn’t dysentery what the soldiers had in the trenches in WWI? That severe diarrhea from unsanitary water supply and bad hygiene is the number one killer of children in India. Why in Medfield, Massachusetts did my brother and I have this. What the fuck? Didn’t people wash their hands? This will never be clear to me, but it does explain why we got Ritz crackers instead of cookies and this set up a lifelong quest for salt and fat, maybe that is the culprit.
Mrs. Goggy lived with her husband and an old child, who was probably all of 20 something, in a big square house, like ours but hers wasn’t sliced into apartments with one family on each floor. She and her family sat outside in folding aluminum chairs with striped webbing. She wore soft dresses and had whitish hair and a soft voice. I would tumble in the thick, green grass and display my prowess at the somersault while she and her husband and ancient boy would clap. This type of group attention was something my little heart longed for and I loved to be seen as competent and skillful and entertained the Goggys as often as I could with my feats of daring.
To pay the Goggy’s back for their kindness, Will and I decided they needed help because they were so old. They were painting trim on their large Victorian house and had left the paint and brushes out, covered with a drop cloth ready to go for the next day. We decided that our height precluded us from getting much done on the official house, but we were a good size for addressing the smaller structure of the garage. We picked up the brushes and began, but not just painting, but decorating. We made circles and swirls, large dots so that it would be a polka dot garage, the white paint so bright against the grey of the shingles. We spent the morning helping, doing our best to make this garage something spectacular. We returned the brushes into the little tray and ran home for lunch. Later, after the phone rang, mom looked at us, “Did you paint the Googy’s garage?”
“Yes,” we answered, full of expected congratulations.
“You can’t do that. That is someone else’s house. Now they have to paint over it. You have to stay in our yard for a couple days.”
I was confused that my beautiful contribution was not received the way I wanted. It also was a teaching of shame. “You can’t just go and paint someone’s garage. That’s naughty.” This was one of the first lessons of boundaries. That other people’s things are theirs. Something that mom didn’t always stress or observe herself. I learned that I wasn’t supposed to impose my ideas of what’s good and beautiful on the innocent. The ones who wanted a boring unpolka dotted garage, but who had the most delicious snacks.
I was the kid who was “into everything,” which meant I was busy, moving and active. I was also happy. I am smiling in most photos except where I am sick. I have fuzzy down on my head, a toddler in a smocked front dress with a Peter Pan collar and white tights with ruffles on the tush, my bottom lumpy with diapers. I have dark circles under my eyes which my mom says were there from the dysentery. But we look happy enough, and my parents look in love. There are pictures of us in meadows with dandelions, me, with my old man patchy hair and Will with all the thick brown hair and a big head, both of us on a blanket in zipped up knit sweaters of green and red. This was before the too-much times that made things so hard. Before dad’s rages and mom’s turning away.
We lived across from the IGA which was a small one-story building with an asphalt shingle roof. My brother and I used to play on it when we were old enough to climb the ladder that leaned against the building. We would cross the street and wander the isles, putting an index finger on the yellow plastic price tags and sliding them down the length of the metal rail. It was satisfying the way they moved, gliding them down to find their meeting place with the other tags. Mr. Berenson, a little man who wore a white butcher’s coat and surprised me with his whiny, complaining tone and holding up his sticker gun, rushed at my mother when we were shopping, “Your children are changing the prices! No one knows what these cost!” He hissed holding up a can of green beans. “They are on the roof; they could fall, and we’d be responsible. I cannot allow them here unsupervised. You need to get a hold of them.”
I guess because it was the sixties, there was this laissez faire parenting. Children were left to themselves, to be children while the adults did the big work of cleaning the house, going to a job and earning the money to buy the food from the IGA.
There’s the story mom tells with the low intonation of a storyteller, “I was pregnant with Gabiel and tired. So, Will was three and you were two. I put you both down for a nap. And when I woke up, there was this glass of sherry in the refrigerator, and I didn’t know how it got there. And then I saw him, lying on the floor of the bedroom. He had gotten up and found the sherry beneath the sink. He said he drank one glass,” her voice breaks into adoring laughter, “then he put the rest in the refrigerator to save for later. Then he said, ‘I got sleepy and needed to take a nap.’” In a more serious voice she says, “he was only three, what dexterity to pour from that big bottle.”
In those young family days, my father was getting his degree from Boston University. He went to school during the day and had a job at night in the accounting department at Jordan Marsh, a now defunct department store. He would bring home the ribbons and fabric flowers for us from the wrapping department’s waste, and we pasted these on paper and boxes and they are responsible for me getting voted the most beautiful doll carriage in the fourth of July parade in Bedford, much to the shock of my mother. The competition had matching Raggedy Ann and Andy costumes, red, white, and blue crepe paper streamers woven into the spokes of their carriages, and me with a flurry of bows and floppy flowers, ribbons saved from the dumpster, scotch taped to a dented doll carriage.
“When they called your name, I thought, oh no they’re making a mistake. Don’t go up.” She told me. “The other children’s doll carriages were so careful, and you had done yours all yourself.” I didn’t know my mother doubted me or how she saw me as I walked to the podium wearing my secondhand tutu with sequins dangling off the bodice and my neighbor’s old tap shoes I had painted silver. I was confident in my five-year-old certainty that the judges saw me as someone who creates beauty. But I am getting ahead of myself.
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I am creating a patchwork and getting to choose what to include. I can make a picture that I want to show you. I am saying this not because I want to manipulate the past, but because I will. I can’t help it. My past is not the past of my siblings even though they lived in the same house with the same people and they will have a different view. I don’t want you to think my mother was one thing, or another. I want you to see her as I saw her, which is to join me in uncertainty. For her whole life she maintained that child-like openness, both frustratingly curious and enviable.
Was she a good witch or a bad witch? What was our relationship? I was her child, then I was something else, a helper, a little mommy always in her shadow of disapproval. I want to know the terrain, so I know where it’s safe to step and showing you, I believe will make the path backwards clearer, so I can see where I came from, where I am going, and it will make sense. I need the story to make sense because I don’t know what to think or to feel. And more than anything, I want to understand.
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Both my parents were Buddhist by choice, not by birth. This may be weird for two white people from New York. Buddhism like any religion, has a range of intensity from the more traditional and orthodox to the ones that resembles the town meeting vibe of the Unitarians. You can be Buddhist and something else; it’s not an all or nothing, more like a base of salad or rice you add flavor to.
My father found his brand of Buddhism through his mentor and lifelong teacher Harold Isaacson who introduced him to all things Japanese, including Haiku and Buddhism. Later Dad became a Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhist, following the path of Rigpa, which focuses on the preparation for and friendliness with death. Mom’s Buddhism was influenced by her husband, but she practiced in the Insight, Theravada tradition, the teachings of the Elders, like the people who actually read the Bible in the Christian world. She found the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center around the time she was diagnosed with breast cancer, a few years younger than I am now. “I don’t know what I would have done without CIMC. It gave me a place to go and get centered and helped me when there was so much going on at home. I had cancer and your dad was being so difficult.”
Although she was Buddhist, mom never stopped being a practicing Catholic, or rather Christian. She told me a story of walking into church in the city when she was in her twenties and sitting in meditation and finding that two hours had elapsed, and she was in “a deeply concentrated state.” She used to say when she came back from retreats, “I get very concentrated.” Her words were beyond slow after a week of not talking and it was excruciating waiting for her to pull the next one from her word bag and make a sentence. When she wasn’t in deep concentration or on retreat, the other switch flipped, and she was constantly talking.
Mom said her Dharma teacher told her, “Children who are lonely often end up talking to themselves.” Which explained her non-stop narration of life. “Oh, there’s the water pitcher…and what was I going to do now? I was going to walk to the door and pick it up, but there’s something else. Oh, right, I need to call Cheryl about sharing a ride to the prayer meeting. I will call her right after I fill this up. See, it’s not hard. I am filling a water pitcher, and now. I’ve done it. I will call Cheryl. Where did I put her number?” And it would go on and on and on, so that I felt like I was trapped in her mind and there was no escape, except to get out of earshot.
Her Dharma teacher’s assessment made sense to her, “I was a very lonely child. My parents didn’t understand me. I felt alone. I made up my mind not to talk when I was eight. That was the year my brother left for the Navy.” Her brother, Uncle Bill had lied about his age in the time before computer records when there was a vestigial presumption of honesty and had joined the Navy and she became the only child living in a house with an emotionally distant mother and a grandmother trapped in dementia. Mom did what other children do and went quiet in wordless protest when they can’t talk about what’s wrong, but in her suppressed German household no one expected a child to talk. No one missed her voice.
The word the Buddha is recorded as using is dukkha, which literally refers to an ill-fitting hub of a wheel giving it a wobbly roll. Dukkha according to the Venerable Ajahn Sumedho is translated as “incapable of satisfying,” or “not able to bear or withstand anything.” The word is nuanced and includes the full range of painful experiences, from the store being out of my favorite brand of oat milk, to the death of a loved one. Dukkha includes all things we find unsatisfactory, painful, or irritating.
