You should think about writing on the fact…

This morning I was on the phone with my mother, my air pods in my ears. She had had the kind of day prior that is squeamish for a woman of eighty-four, where loyalty and longevity compel you to endure the declining faculties of others. My mother is swift, and processes most things like a fast gigabit router, while others close to her age struggle to manage the most rudimentary tasks: setting up a new iPhone; keeping track of unused gift cards; brewing a decent cup of coffee. She is patient, still deploying her skills honed as a first-grade schoolteacher early in her career, where the most difficult child always deserved her bright-toothed smile.

She is at all at once: judgmental, benignant, and knackered. It was one of those days.

                I listened as she relayed the scenes of her day, made more colorful with her tendency to exaggerate (“she had three hundred sixty-two drugstore receipts jammed into the side pocket of her handbag” or “even a Parisian would have dumped three cups of sugar in that coffee! It was as thick as fresh tar on hot pavement”) and while she prattled on, I pulled up the listing for her friend’s house that had sold in a day, on the Oregon coast, a few blocks from our own beach house. Online real estate listings attract me like record album covers used to when I was a teenager. Unless you can actually go inside the house and see for yourself, or peel back the thin plastic veil and listen to the record, you really don’t know what the cover even means, or what the photos reveal. Either way, there is music inside. You just may or may not love it.

                My mother had left her car lights on in her cooked-carrot colored Honda Fit™ in the driveway of her friend’s. When you want to go home, and find you are unable to, the incurious click of the key in the ignition of your car is enough to make you feel like the moon has fallen, crashing through the sunroof and on to your head. It is a feeling similar to dropping a freshly made bowl of potato salad on to the kitchen floor. There is no saving the day. That moment of feeling out of control lingers longer than it takes you to clean things up. After discovering her dead battery, my mother had gone back inside to her friend’s bright kitchen and muddy coffee and had then waited three more hours for AAA. This time they shared a glass of Sauvignon Blanc that tingled sweet on the tongue. My mother observed her friend’s unkempt hair over the rim of her glass, the smell of dog urine wafting in from the next room. It had been a month since her friend’s husband had passed away.

                When she finally arrived home, she had barely put on her wool socks, poured a hint of whiskey in her glass, and propped herself in her knitting chair when her cell phone buzzed. The lights of the city competed with a waning full moon through the tall window next to her, which she had recently replaced. It glimmered proudly. Calling her was another friend, breathless over her recent choice to buy a two-bedroom flat in a retirement building near her aging Foursquare home in Northeast. She would clean it up and rent it out; she belongs to a “helping-community”, my mother advised, where people post their needs (which tend to get met) and trade services (perhaps when the needs become too many).

                “You know,” my mother said enthusiastically. “What these people ask are things like ‘can anyone help me seal up this cat flap because my cat died, and I don’t want another.’ Or ‘I have a copious quantity of old Lego sets, all sorted and labeled that I’m happy to donate.’ There is already a crew lined up to help her narrow her belongings to fit in a space one third the size of the house she’s lived in for ninety-six-some years.”

                I stood up and moved to stand against the gas fireplace, murmuring periodically to indicate my disdain, wonder or sympathy. The room was cool, and my back was warm. An email from my author’s website arose at the top of my iPhone which I held in my hand. In that brief moment before it scrolled away, I could see who the sender was, and I pressed my index finger against the glass, capturing the email momentarily on the screen -- a body of words levitating.

You should think about writing on the fact that your father was a serial predator who derailed many young girls' lives.

  As with most missives related to my father, or newspaper articles, or black and white photos in his old Levi’s and no shirt -- a loathsome heat rose from my chest and spread to my extremities. The room felt tight.

Most women I know are angry about something. Something they carry with them, is part of their cells, itches at them and lingers like an old stain. And most of the time, the cause of their rancor is a man.

In The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes, “As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.” This makes me think, if you let your mind stop keeping score, perhaps your body will join the party. You can start living as one again – the war over, the matter settled, the axe buried.

I have so many responses to this email.

1.       [Expletive] you.

2.       You’re a writer, why don’t you write about that?

3.       Thank you for your email. I hope you are finding ways to survive this trauma.

4.       I get to choose what I write about, and I have my own trauma to write about. And this, this that you tell me to write about, is also one of my traumas.

5.       What did you hope to gain by sending me this email?

And so forth.

                I had a friend who couldn’t sleep because the world was ridden with a virus, and people were hidden in their houses and behind masks. Related to this is the fact her children had grown up and she believed didn’t need her anymore, and her husband didn’t know what was wrong. She drove herself West and left her car parked near a cliff and jumped. When the coast guard found her, she was still wearing her Nikes and a sweatshirt, and her long blond hair mingled with seaweed.

                I have a friend who married a man she knew had been unable to end his long-held affair with cocaine. Six weeks after the wedding she annulled the marriage and became pregnant with a prior boyfriend who she is still partnered with today, twenty-two years later. They moved to Bangladesh where she had to wash all their vegetables in three different baths and solutions before cooking.

I have a friend who gave up a child with special needs she could not physically manage anymore to foster care. Related to this is the fact her husband spent their life savings on online pornography and then shot himself with a gun in their garage. She saw him there in her headlights, her young children in the backseat of her car, as the garage door eased up. She backed out and closed it again

                I had a friend who inherited a tangled mental state that she could never escape. She was high and she was low, sometimes in the same half hour. We spent our childhood together, and we made up private games and secret words, whispering at the dinner table and ignoring our respective brothers. When she cried, it was guttural and low, like a hunted animal caught in a coil spring trap. I was frightened. We wore tights and leotards and performed dance routines we choreographed ourselves, for our parents. When she was in her twenties, she emptied a bottle of pills down her throat. I always thought she looked like Sleeping Beauty, and that is how they found her, her jet-black hair flowing like ink around her pale face. Her lips still as red as apple skin.

                I have had a few friends who after being harmed by a man have chosen to be in a love relationship with a woman. This male perpetrated malice occurred at various times in each of these women’s lives; at seven, at nineteen, at forty. I don’t believe only men will hurt women but choosing women must feel more safe.

I have often wondered what men who do these things, men who hurt women, think of themselves. Before. During. Years After.

                My father has not apologized. Not to me. Not to this woman who wrote me today. Not to his second wife. Not to my mother, my sister, my brother.

                What are these men’s dreams like? And when they see themselves naked, their bodies grainy, corpulent, and spotted – do they remember that it felt right to do these things? Did their brains fall out of their heads or were they fully intact, just the primal part turned on, seeking only release, a twisted validation, a sick pleasure in hurting this woman? Was there a letdown after the fact? Did they look at her, the woman, and think a single thought that was hers. Did they think about her at all?

                I have worked my whole life to know what I know. My waking and sleeping lives both carry all the memories, the conversations, the faces, the vistas, the sounds – all the things that happened, like fading polaroids in the scrapbook of my mind. There are so many things I wanted to say and want to say and cannot say because I choose to not plant myself in the eye of the gargoyle, insistent on staring me down in some cold wet-stoned shifty place where women are maligned. I will live in the light; I will cherish what is me that recovered and grew tall.

                I will write about my mother, my friends, my daughter, myself. I will write about our power and our living in the light.

You should think about writing on the fact that you are still that girl who does not want to know she is okay now, who does not want to be the woman who survived.