Scary vulnerability
Image generated by AI, can you believe it!
I am doing something scary for me. I’ve written a memoir. That’s not the scary bit. What’s scary is that it is not finished…and it is not perfect. Sharing something publicly that involves my creativity and my actual real life, is hellishly scary. Posting this seems a great way to cap off my year of accompanying shame. Going out in a blaze.
My request is for some feedback about this book. I want to know if this is relatable and something you’d read? This book is my real life year of figuring out what the hell was that relationship with my mom? It’s about mourning, forgiveness/ not forgiveness, being a parentified child, dogs-why I love them and resent them controlling my life, living in New England in the winter, trauma, rage and some actually funny bits. My other request is for feedback that says your message with kind words. I know kind is subjective, but let’s just go with that for now. Here’s the new baby:
Unaccompanied Minor
by Celia Landman
Chapter One
Winter. It’s back. I don’t mind the grey, the ice, and coldness when I am distracted and have stuff to do. My dream of creativity is different than actually creativity, which means I sit my bum down and do stuff. Stuff I don’t want to do, like write. My tapping keys in my kitchen while Sexy-kitty sit on the counter top eating, against house rules, her tushy on the countertops.
It’s been almost a month since my mother died and I am struggling to make meaning of what we were. Making sense of the world is important, it calms the anxiety. We are homo sapiens sapiens, this knowing knower, the one who thinks about thinking. It does not matter if it is accurate and evidence-based. It only matters that it turns the chaos and unpredictability into a string of events that explain things, to step back from the action to get the shot, because up close, it’s too muddied. The purpose of this living is to put the puzzle of our lives together.
Now I am the returning guide who points out the markers I was too young to see. I can step on the stones in the river and cross over without the same floundering, or panic without washing away into confusion and blame.
Maybe.
∞👁👁👁∞
The last time I saw my mother, I left her in the hospital when she was curled up in a C shape, not speaking. The morphine drip letting her rest—finally. I said I forgave her for everything. I also said I hoped she forgave me and that in the next lifetime maybe I’d be her mother and she would be my daughter.
I only did it because Oneida the hospital cleaning woman told me to. I figured she had been through a lot of deaths and knew best practices to get my mom out of the prison of her body sooner. I can’t wrap my head around forgiveness, since I have no idea what I would forgive. One of the reasons is because I don’t understand my mother, and I don’t take her behavior personally.
She couldn’t answer, and just looked so worn, doing the hard work of stepping through this doorway into the next. I pulled my sadness and tears inside. She had told me the week before in the hospital, “don’t cry.” She didn’t want tears by her bedside. If she could have spoken that day, I am sure she would have said, “Oh Celia,” in that exasperated tone, “I’ve forgiven you a long time ago. There’s nothing to forgive. The past is the past. Why do you keep bringing things up? Stay in the present moment. What’s happening now?” chiding me with this mindful awareness that denies responsibility for what went before.
My mom liked Buddhism because it gave her permission to ignore things. If it’s not happening now, it’s not happening. Wait long enough and it’s over and we never have to speak of it again. “People say and do things when things when they’re heated, and then they get over it, and you understand. You don’t need to bring everything up and talk about the details. It’s not kind or nice.” And being nice had high value, especially for her daughters. And she was an expert at not talking about the past. I don’t want to be like my mother.
There are some things you don’t get over. They live inside and grow and start eroding the foundation like road salt sprayed on the highways that in before times would take out the chrome bumpers and eat away the mufflers and the gas tank and rot your whole undercarriage if you didn’t get your truck washed in the winter. The quiet erosion of the system in the cold, grey New England winters.
∞👁👁👁∞
I heard a line of a song this morning, Could I ever have been that young, or was I always old. It got me thinking about the things I’ve done in my life that I squint at. I want a past with less pain, and I am engineering it, where I can be the hero or the victim, anything but weak, anything but a liar, coward, and a sneak. I don’t want that past where I lied all the time, I hid, I was afraid constantly. I was that kid, like mercury slipping away, sliding into danger because I didn’t know how to protect myself. I did not know my life was precious. It wasn’t what I was taught. I learned it after.
Scientists have studied that memory is like a copy of a copy, and that what I think about the experience, the sadness, the fear, the excitement, gets imprinted in the memory and becomes part of the picture and when I bring it up again, this new picture with these feelings gets printed again and again. That’s why time does not soothe anything. A memory is not accurate, it is inherently subjective and the older it is, the longer it’s been overlaid with emotional printing from the one who feels something, each time they pull up the image. The shame gets more roiling and burns hotter, the guilt, more nauseating, and the unlovable harder to look at.
Mostly, our life was a blur of doing. I am in fifth grade and mom comes home putting down her music. She’s hanging her coat in the stuffed closet already checking in, “Audrey did you get the note? Celia, did you defrost the hamburger?” Tying on the apron, her fingers are in the cold, red meat, kneading it and questioning us, “I asked you to empty the dryer? Did you? Dinner will be ready in 45 minutes as soon as the meatloaf cooks.” Her hands glisten with meat. The hands that played Chopin and Debussy, covered in raw hamburger. She adds oatmeal and torn bread to make the meat go further and soy sauce because she adds soy sauce to everything. The white rice goes in the squat yellow earthenware pot and bakes in the oven with the meatloaf. “Celia, please make a salad.” As I look in the hydrator for some non-wilted lettuce. I peel carrots and cut them into coin-shaped rounds add celery and put out the Ken’s Steak House Cesar dressing. “Willy set the table.” He does with minimal flourish using mismatched silverware.
My brother’s whole name is William Shakespeare Landman, and he is called Willy mostly, or Will and William when he’s being horrible which is often.
“We’re out of napkins.”
“Use toilet paper,” Mom says and he makes a face.
“It’s toilet paper.”
“Then use the cloth napkins,” which means we need to find them wadded up in the secretary, the seldom used, lumpy woven cloth napkins with stains that I will be washing later during the week.
Dad sits at the head of the table and Mom at the other head, “Here a little child I stand holding up my wither hands, cold as fishes though they be, here I lift them up to thee,” as the kids on the bench seats raise our arms, “for a benecent to fall, on our meat and on us all,” as we lower our hands, “Amen.” We’ve been saying this blessing since I was little complete with arm movements. It’s Robert Herrick, Dad’s poetry crush. He loves Herrick and we’ve been performing this, all six of us—which must have been pretty adorable to watch, but we just did it without thinking about the meaning of these words, except we all have asked, “What’s a benecent?”
Last month I asked my next younger sister, Ele, short for Elenor.
“It’s a blessing.”
“I know, but is it a real word, or did Herrick make it up?”
“No,” she spells it, “B-E-N-E-C-E-N-T. It’s a real word,” she says authoritatively even though I can’t find it in the online dictionary. What I find is benison, a word which means blessing. So we’ve been saying it wrong for my whole lifetime. My apologies to Mr. Herrick.
Then there’s the after-dinner clean up, “Ele, you clear.” We all bring our plates to the kitchen and whoever is on clearing gets to bring in the meatloaf and the soy sauce which besides ketchup is one of the four condiments we have in the house.
After dinner, it’s girls against boys, which is grossly unfair because as it skews out, the boys have age and weight on us, so it’s never fair. The gladiator ring has a reproduction Oriental carpet, and the stadium is the pull-out sofa. We strategize, me, Ele, and Audrey, but it’s usually me who ends up getting hurt. Sometimes Ele, sometimes Gabe my younger brother, but I don’t go after the younger ones. My target is my older brother who seems like he lives to humiliate and terrorize us all. He holds kids down, sitting on their stomachs. twisting his forehead into theirs and sometimes, lets a long trail of spit descend from his mouth while the kid beneath him struggles to avoid the dangling thread of saliva. Heads get banged. I am an expert at a half-nelson. Bodies are flung over the couch. You dodn’t yell for mom unless you are totally out of moves. “Mom, Willy hurt me!”
“William, leave them alone!” Mom yells from the dining room where she and my dad sit with their Lapsang Souchong after dinner. “They’re younger than you are.” We never yell for Dad. We never want to subject our bro-nemy to that. Yelling doesn’t stop anything and we kept fighting—no action—no intervention. My parents are tired.
We learn to get revenge where we can because the parents don’t do it for us; no running intervention. Only once did I win a fight with my brother. He sat on my chest, pinning my arms and I lift my legs and swooped them around his shoulders rocking my weight forward. I caught him off-guard with dropped my legs to the floor hard slamming the back of his head into the rug. He gets up with tears and rubbing his head. I watch with a slightly sad and sorry feeling. I am used to getting hurt, I didn’t think I could hurt him. It’s a shock and it doesn’t feel good.
In our job roster, Clearing the table also means wiping down the vinyl tablecloth while Dad does the wash-up and the kitchen counters. Someone is supposed to sweep the floor in the evening. When the crumbs stick to your bare feet, you know they did not do their job. I think Dad likes to clean up, to work through the chaos in his striped blue and green apron. After he’s done, the stove is clean, the counters are visible, and the dishes dry in the rack. The scattered bowls, smears, and sticky drips of mom’s frantic cooking have been neutralized and it’s a kitchen. Then there’s the homework, the signing forms.
“Celia, have you practiced your piece?” We all have instruments that our parents pay money for our musical education, and we are obligated to practice. And then pajamas, baths, and bed. If you want a snack, make it a secret, “I just cleaned the kitchen. It’s closed.”
There is little joy or happiness. No choice in any of this. No rest, just doing, getting through. And in the winter, this sunless routine was every day. “Your mom was depressed,” my therapist says. No, not my mom, the doer, the relentlessly cheerful one. “Dad was depressed.”
“They were both depressed.”
Both depressed. “They both felt trapped.” I know they did. We sensed it, the unescapable drudgery and doing. The long months without sun.
“How much of this feeling is yours and how much is your parents?” Is this my depression? My sense of being stuck or is this my inheritance. “I know they were lonely.”
“You learned this, but it doesn’t have to be your reality. You can choose something else.”
Can I really? Even with all my training, my Buddhism, my meditations and my people who love me, I feel empty, and alone. I don’t know how to climb out. I don’t have the energy.