Category Archives: Memories

Please Remind Me.

November 17, 1948. That’s the day my mother was born.

November is the worst month. It’s getting darker daily. Colder, too. Everything is dying.

My mother is already dead. It’s said we all start dying the minute we’re born but she really took that to heart.

Come April, when spring is upon us and my mother’s deathday looms, I won’t be this sad. Her death was an end to her suffering, and an easing of my own struggles around that. The light of spring is hope and losing her finally on that day in April doesn’t feel as sad as this reminder of her birth. Then, my memories of my mother won’t be clouded by sadness and pain.

But I am sad in November. The lost hope of what could have been and the towering mound of if-only wishes are all too much in November. Everything else that happens, both in my little world and in the larger world around me, amplifies my own grief. It’s like a pair of mirrors, each shines off the other creating endless reflections of sadness until I can’t fight it off any longer.

The darkness of November continues to creep in and it wears me down until I’m nothing. I feel damaged beyond repair, ruined by who my mother was and what she made me. Her death was supposed to be the end of me feeling this way. I have been cheated.

November is knowing that nothing, absolutely nothing in this world, can take any of the hope I once had and make it real. As unlikely as any sort of healing was while she was alive, I could still hope. I could still pretend. November reminds me of my naivety and foolishness. November reminds me that it’s all set it stone now.

She would have been 67 today. Would have been.

When you see me and I seem tired, or I have a look on my face or a heaviness on my soul, it’s just November. If you could, remind me that the seasons change and spring will be here eventually.

This is yeah write’s nomo Day 17.

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The Dancing Clowns.

When I first began writing, I thought I possessed exceptional talent. For that reason, although I cannot remember one single detail about it, I still firmly believe that the two-act play I wrote in the summer of 1986 was absolutely brilliant. And it is for that reason that now, nearly 30 years later, I still get furious over what happened to it.

The Dancing Clowns, A Play in Two Acts, centered around, presumably, clowns who danced. Something happened, there was an intermission, and then something else happened. The details aren’t really important here. I can tell you that I really worked hard to make the dialogue authentic, bring out evocative feelings, and to really make the audience identify with the clowns. I must have, because it was brilliant, remember?

I auditioned members from my newly formed Community Theatre Program (kids from the neighborhood) and cast each in a role that I felt best suited to their talents (gave the bigger parts to the kids I liked most). As writer and director, I had a vision for this production that I communicated clearly and effectively during each rehearsal. Because I was working with a pack of amateurs, I’d go home each night frustrated and concerned. Still, because of my passion for the craft, I carried on.

I sold tickets and used the proceeds to buy popcorn and iced tea mix. It was hard to convince my friends to buy these tickets because, as well as being cash poor, they also were in the show and didn’t know why I was insisting they pay to sit in the audience. I tried to explain about the popcorn and iced tea and even I can admit that in hindsight this may not have been the best approach. But some other kids who were not in the production bought tickets. None of the parents were interested in this which I found mildly disappointing. Even so, we were sold out in no time, due in no small part to the fact that I only had about six lawn chairs.

One week before the show, a terrible thing happened: I came down with chicken pox. Rehearsals shut down on account of the fact that my mom wouldn’t let me go outside and the moms of my friends wouldn’t let their kids near me lest they also contract the pox. Without quality time with my actors, I was fearful they would forget their lines or just lose interest in the project. And because tickets were printed with the date of the show, there was no way to postpone.

As my mother applied calamine lotion to my blistering skin, I complained about the terrible timing. As she drew me a bath with oatmeal, I lamented the difficulties of being homebound. I was miserable, and not just because having the pox in August when you don’t have air conditioning and it’s sweltering out is awful. I was watching my summer-long dream of becoming a playwright go up in smoke. I begged to be allowed to go outside and direct my production. I pleaded with my mother to believe, as I did, that I was no longer sick.

“Fresh air will do me good!” I said.

“No.” She said.

When the day of the show arrived, I managed to convince my mother to let me stand by the back window, the one in our porch-turned-pantry, so I could see the yard. It was sort of like being back stage since the actors were using the patio in front of the window as the main stage. I figured I could whisper cues and directions from there.

The show went on (as it clearly must have) to an underwhelming response. In an effort to liven up the crowd, the main clowns, including my very own understudy (did I forget to mention I gave myself the lead?), went rogue. They took the popcorn I had painstakingly decorated with food coloring (Rainbow Corn – another failed entrepreneurial endeavor of my childhood), and began throwing it at one another. The audience got involved and soon it was just clowns and civilians running wild, throwing my ticket-sale profits all over my backyard. When everyone got tired and the Rainbow Corn supply was exhausted, they all went home, patting themselves on the back for their spectacular performance.

It was at this time that my mother decided that fresh air would do me some good. I was sent outside to clean up the chairs and the popcorn and the rest of the mess the clowns had made.

As I cleaned, I cried. My mother said it was because I was still sick and overly emotional. My brother said I was just jealous of the other kids having fun without me. But I knew it was because I felt invalidated and insignificant.

I ripped up the original script for The Dancing Clowns, A Play in Two Acts. It’s a shame, too, because I’m still certain it was brilliant. I’d love to say I learned a valuable lesson that day about holding my ground and standing up for my ideas but that took a lot longer than learning not to cut off my nose to spite my face.

 

I’m submitting this post to the yeah write nonfiction weekly writing challenge. Join us, will you?

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Ebb and Flow.

There are words and phrases that, when I hear them, they are like sneaker waves, knocking me temporarily out of whatever moment I’m in and transporting me back in time. Thankfully, Foley catheters, baclofen and Hoyer lifts don’t often come up in casual conversation.

I was watching a comedy special with Tig Notaro the other night which seemed like the perfect antidote to my melancholy mood. A comedy special should be safe, I thought. But it wasn’t. Someone approached Tig to share something along the lines of, “When you had cancer, that’s when I was diagnosed, too.” And there it was, hiding in my “safe” comedy special, the phrase that I just cannot hear without stomach clenching.

I was diagnosed.

After my mother got sick, she said that all the time. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I was diagnosed with MS. When I was diagnosed…

Night after night, phone call after phone call, she told people she was sick. She said it like she was announcing what was for dinner or what she’d watched on TV the night before.

I was diagnosed.

There are so many other ways to say what she obviously needed to say and yet she chose that one phrase every single time, saying it so casually that I wanted to scream at her, “Stop fucking telling everyone you know that you’re sick! Stop saying it like you scraped your knee.”

When you’re fourteen, the more you hear something, the more true it is.

For the next 20 years she said it to anyone and everyone, her voice only growing calmer, more relaxed as the disease stole her strength. As her illness progressed, it wasn’t like a minor injury anymore. She said it with the appropriate level of devastation, but by then the damage was done physically, mentally, emotionally, that her inflection wasn’t necessary to feel the weight of it.

Now I can’t hear it without a sea of ordinarily repressed memories flooding back to me. I was diagnosed can collapse my insides faster than anyone knows but I’ve had lots of practice pretending my skin is enough to hold me up; I can react like a normal person most of the time.

It’s five years today since she’s been gone and longer than that since I’ve heard her voice. I’ve almost forgotten what she sounded like but when I hear those words, no matter who is saying them, they sound like my mother. I don’t want to forget her but I don’t want to remember those parts anymore.

I don’t know if using the words will ever take away their power. As I type them now I feel like my organs are being scooped out; I’m systematically hollowed. I wonder if next time it won’t be so hard. I wonder if remembering will ever get easier.

I wonder if I’ll ever stop being tricked into thinking the ebb of grief won’t be followed by the flow of its return.