First having read the book of myths,
from Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich (1972)
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body armor of black rubber
and absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
I am on the other side of the country today. I have left my home near the Pacific Ocean and am at the Eastern edge of our country, staring at the Atlantic.
I stand at the edge of Waterfront Park and I stare out at the Navy ship that is now a museum and wonder what it looked like here, at this particular edge of the earth, fifty years ago. I try to conjure my father, barely eighteen, dressed in his Navy uniform, as a small shadow on the flat deck of the massive gray ship anchored across the harbor.
I cannot see him. I can barely imagine what this port looked like when the military was more than a historical footnote for this town. I see jet-skis and small boats full of people cruising the harbor.
I think how I now live in an old military town all the way on the other side of the continent, one whose laws have only recently been updated to allow tattoo shops. Laws allowing breweries where hangars used to be and condos where barracks used to be.
Fifty years to the day from my birth, I am showing my child where I was born, a place I have only been to once before since moving away at the age of one. For just one day almost twenty years ago.
Last night, the skies opened around 6:30 pm and a heavy rain poured down while loud crashes of thunder rang through the air. My eight year old daughter and I walked outside of our room to the courtyard and stood out there while she marveled that there is such a thing as summer rain. My little Californian did not know that such things happen all the time in so many places.
It is 91 degrees today. There is a relative humidity of 82%, so it feels like 101 degrees, or so say the people who calculate such things. Today, I completely trust their math.
It is not the ideal time to visit this place, but I was born on the day I was born and it wasn’t an ideal time for a seventeen year old newly shotgun-married girl to be driven to the brand new Naval hospital after so many sweaty months of pregnancy spent in the wet heat of that Southern summer.
If she could deal with it nine months pregnant, I can deal with it a half century old, I’ve joked to friends and family.
It does seem right that this place will be a mix of beauty, history and discomfort.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
I am navel deep into the memoir project and I have been taking any small pocket of time I can to write a scene, to try to lay out a time period, an event, a crisis. To make then somehow come alive in now.
I sit down and I quiet the world around me and I close my eyes and I find one small feeling or one small image or one small detail that lets me step back into that time and feel it again. I focus on my body and how it lands in the memory.
It feels good. To be doing this part of it, finally. To be mentally able to do this part, finally.
It feels really not good. To feel these feelings. To want to tell the old me some things that only the new me knows.
It feels dangerous. To feel these feelings again. I could go my whole life never feeling these things again and yet: here I am, choosing to swim in those choppy waters again.
It feels embarrassing. I think maybe I should never show this much of the so-ugly truth. And this is how I know I am right in needing to finish this project. I think of all of us who are still embarrassed or ashamed – of where we were, what we did, what we didn’t do.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
Today I start in on my 51st year and the truth that I am not young
anymore is undeniable.
Young is not a planet I will live on ever again.
Even my child – who is undeniably young – seems so tall
and wise and weighty and grown.
The seconds seem to not individually tick away anymore – they are more like
the vroom-vroom of an engine revving up.
The cliches are true – how is it that my mind and body slow down but the
rotation of the earth gains momentum?
The universe, the planet, my body – none of them care that I could really
use a time-slow power so that I can process all this old stuff that impacts my now.
All this old stuff I need to make sense of as close to now as
possible.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
Half century.
What a wild thing to contemplate. What a jarring way to put it.
What a feat.
In my forties, I halved and rehalved and rehalved myself until the strips of me were so thin they practically crumpled in the wind. To try to save my relationship. To try to keep my family intact. To try to avoid the truth of stacked up betrayals so dense they could crack bones.
To try to not say the word abuse and then to try to learn how to push through the bitter and acrid taste of those letters on my tongue so I could say them out loud.
And then: to get through court. To get through parenting and working and breathing in a life still at the mercy of abuse.
And then: the work of healing and seeing things from my deeper past as they are, not how I wish they were. Of not turning away when the glare from the image is bright like the nuclear disaster films of my elementary school years.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
I have spent the last year trying to unfold those halves and re-halved pieces and smooth them into place.
But you can’t un-halve yourself like attaching wet pottery. The scores are there – so deep you can’t even see them – but, there is no slip to brush on so that the pieces will adhere. No oven to force out the moisture so you just have the whole, hardened version.
So far it feels like there is only smoothing the halves out, pressing them with flat palms so they can be seen and laid out next to each other and there’s not much more that can be done but to try to puzzle the pieces into some sort of image resembling a whole me.
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
Today: there is first-day-me and half-century-me on the very same square of land.
The image of not young me folded over in half and one edge lining up with the very new me of all those years ago, who was wailing in a new hospital that will eventually become surrounded by chainlink and barbed wire, is an image with an odd kind of beauty.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year thinking about that brand new baby me. And about that girl who gave birth to me who became the woman I knew for decades after and who haunts so much of who I am now.
That woman is not a part of my life anymore. That woman is a part of every cell in my body and so will always be a part of my life.
I’ve been thinking about what her existence means to now me. How her continued absence still shapes me, as a not young woman, as a mother, as a daughter.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
Also: my mother’s first big mental break was between her 50th and 51st birthdays.
Oh yes, I thought to myself a month ago, that.
It’s the kind of mark in time that terrified thirty-something me.
It’s the kind of thing that can make peri-menopause symptoms feel like horror movie foreshadowing.
Imbalance: part of all menopause symptoms.
Imbalance: the thing that can derail a life and all the lives around it. The thing that fractured my family irreparably.
I do not think her fate is mine.
It hasn’t been yet. Not in any way, really.
Except for that thing about making babies with men who can’t be parents. So I guess there is that one way.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
Today I realize that I am breaking.
I’ve been in a slow motion breaking from my mother, my father, my family of origin who have never really tried to know me. From my daughter’s father. From loose connections, unsafe places, doubting shadows. From expectations that are too tight or too loose. From the ideas of myself I used to have that I don’t think were ever real.
I’ve been grasping tightly, too. To my writing, to the rhythm of my daily life, to chasing my child around the house while laughing and colliding, to kissing her forehead that last time I check on her at night, to still being able, barely, to carry her to bed. To friends who know me, who see it all and still say over here, sit here, we’ve got you. To the hard work of making sense, of healing, of accepting that there will always be some of that to do. To the yet to be lived story of not young.
Halving, anti-halving, cleaving in both senses of the word.
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
The act of writing, recently, has been about realizing that I don’t even half-know my story. Not even close.
When I had to meet with a genealogy counselor at Stanford about my genetic testing for breast cancer last year, the family tree portion was like a sample of a list instead of an actual list.
Talking about it made me sweaty. Made me want to make joke after joke to not have to really go over my answers.
I don’t know. Not that I know of. I’m not sure. I don’t think so.
My mother didn’t know her father. I haven’t known my father in decades. I don’t know my paternal family. The few relatives of my father that I have met, I haven’t seen in more than thirty-five years.
Sitting in the past, thinking about the past, writing about the past – is all a ship aiming to get to the land of half-knowing.
Half-knowing is volumes more than I know now.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold
Lately, I’ve been thinking of Adrienne Rich’s Diving Into the Wreck and how much it has meant to me for so many decades now. How many different times in my life that it has carried the weight of things I didn’t know if I could carry alone.
Today, it rings new tones. The wood of those words clangs against the old metal of my body differently now that I am not young.
This place I am today, place of my first outside air, city of big ships and small boats, of magnolias and tobacco and brass pineapples (big and small, everywhere and in all places) is a beautiful old city. Built on the blood and bones and abuse of enslaved people.
It is a place so American that you can’t miss its contradictions.
For America, it is old. Very not young.
The history here is humid and heavy.
Until today, I saw my history like that of the West Coast: hopeful and full of sparks that rage.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely hidden inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
I look at this place and wonder: how was I so small here and so new and now I stand here and I have breathed more breaths than I can count. A half-century’s worth of inhales and exhales. I suddenly realize I came somewhere that would make me this not young three hours earlier than back home.
I start to think that maybe my mother left California and went to one of the oldest places in our country in order to birth me so that she could try to reverse time by going back West only a year later. To try to buy us both a younger future. To try to trick time somehow some way.
But that is imagining my mother had more choice than she did.
That she could see – fifty years ago in that hospital where the nurses told her that if she wanted clean sheets then she better change them herself – where she and I would be today, half a century after the day that both joined us and separated us.
She took a pregnancy test at sixteen and it said oh yes you are, what now?
She married my biological father, even though he had already left for the Navy by the time she realized she was pregnant, because she was in love with the fantasy of a family.
These were her words. I am not guessing at these.
(Ok, so we have that in common, too. That’s two.)
Because she had a mother who had a hard time loving children, new or grown.
(So, I guess, there’s that, too. That’s three.)
She had a mother who had children with men who couldn’t be parents. Who would appear and disappear like nighttime shadows.
She had a mother who told her not to have me so she crossed state lines and said I do and made her trailer the best decorated one in the park.
It really was, just ask her.
She waited nights in that trailer for her husband to come home and sometimes he did. Sometimes because his check was spent and the bar didn’t allow tabs.
My mother sacrificed and worked hard and not that many years later, gave me a different dad. Siblings.
I was a child of divorce who also had a nuclear family.
I cannot hand my child a full family. Not the one she was supposed to have. And not the one I was supposed to have.
Not young is too late for the same makeup family my mother made for me.
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass.
Here, in the now of this day, I can pretend to pause time, block out the vroom-vroom of my loosening skin and graying hair, and do the work that needs to be done to give her a mother different than I had and different than my mother had (and so on and so on).
I can bring her here and take her to the building where my mother and I first met and say here, here is where I was when I was tiny like you used to be.
I can say yes, I was tiny, too. And then bigger. And older. And bigger still. Before I was so not young.
I can show her what it means to have a complicated history and say to her: I want you to always remember where you come from and I want you to always forget, just a little, where you came from.
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which our names do not appear.
I can say you will be not young someday, too, and I want you to remember this moment, this day, this place.
I came from pain and fear and shock and hope.
I can say: these things define me and yet they do not define me at all.
That stubborn American contradiction. That odd human truth.
I am trying so hard to see the thing itself as well as the myth.
I want to show you who I am. So you don’t have to wonder and plead.
So you can spend less time on the ladder.
And then we will get ice cream. And do a nighttime cemetery ghost tour.
And I will wake up tomorrow still not young.
And she will call me old lady and we will spend our last full day in this old, conflicted, beautiful place.
I won’t say any of this to her yet: I don’t know the half of my story. I know too much of it. I want to know more. You come from love and control and grifts and hope. I hope the rest of your story is more beauty and less knife-blade. You have felt too much already that is sharp. I hope the half you have already lost doesn’t haunt you so far into not young. I hope you know that I see you. I hope you know there is a book in which your name always appears. I hope so much.
Life After Emotional Abuse 