March 2, 2020
I’ve been reading the latest issue of the magazine Poets & Writers, and I am struck by the terrible seriousness of artists and writers. The people profiled are frequently women, minorities, immigrants, queer, or some combination of all, who write from a specific artistic vision or voice, and often from a place of survived trauma. Their point of view and credibility are unassailable.
This got me to thinking about my own “artistic vision” – did I even have one? And if I did not, would developing one give greater focus to my work?
Because of my history with depression (which I will write about someday, just not yet) I have often found myself in a position of preferring to be happy rather than “right.” Or at times truthful.
And yet. Writing the truth of my particular experience as best as I can express it is probably my default vision. I don’t have an agenda. I’m not writing to advance a cause, like Feminism (though it may be implied) or Christianity (which is explored), because I don’t come from a place of particular disadvantage. I grew up white, upper middle class and privileged with opportunity – good public schools, safe neighborhoods, university. (I didn’t learn to clean a bathroom until I was in college; I didn’t learn how to maintain a car until I was married.) In many ways I was spoiled and protected, raised by traditional parents who read, listened to music, collected art and antiques. My brother and I ruefully reflected that ours was a “white bread” world. I’m sure a world that others would have gladly traded us for.
But in the midst of this plenty, I personally hungered for the honest and real as I reached adulthood. Because my mother’s great weakness was her deep and abiding worry for what other people thought, a concern that ruled her life, a fixation that caused great friction between us – and at times, ferocious contempt on my part, despite my complicity — because I did not fully understand or respect where it came from.
At age nine, my mother lost her own mother after four years of sickness fighting breast cancer. Then her beloved father, with whom she was not allowed to live, died of a heart attack when she was thirteen. She was raised by her starchy, formal but loving grandmother, and an unkind maiden aunt, who had a genius and predilection for exploiting Mom’s vulnerabilities just for fun.
As a result of this environment, Mom never learned to be direct about her own preferences and needs. She could advocate all day long for the needs of her family, but not for herself. She wanted us to pay attention, read her mind and anticipate what she wanted. I learned early to read emotional, visual cues and move quickly to assuage any upset. My happiness was tied closely to keeping family life peaceful. I became the obedient child – life was much easier if one followed parental guidance and rules!
This worked fairly well for the first eighteen years of my life – but then the necessary symptoms and separations of adulthood began to intervene. I went as far away as I could to college. I learned not all families operated in this fashion. I realized I kept my voice to myself. I had a professor express concern that I would live life as a doormat.
Over time, Mom’s form of control began to crack under the pressure of two “matriculating” adults – my brother and me. Her inability to arrive anywhere on time grew worse and more damaging with age. Deeply embarrassed, we arrived hours late to my future sister-in-law’s wedding shower. Without excuses for their eventual arrival hours late, Mom and Dad delayed disastrously Gary’s and my Christmas Eve dinner for Frank and Donna.
As my brother and I created our own lives, Mom managed her own stress less well in the wake of her children’s “lack of cooperation,” often in association with momentous events and family gatherings. For instance, the night before my brother’s wedding, she blew a gasket because she felt she was not getting the help she needed from the rather giddy wedding party (the reception for 140+ people was being held in our home). The morning before my college graduation, she harshly castigated (then stopped speaking to) me for not wearing hose to my baccalaureate. In the church, just minutes before the wedding ceremony of my cousin, she laid into me regarding how Gary was dressed. Once relocated and retired to Williamsburg, annual preparations for Christmas and the big dinner often lead to Mom’s meltdown when I failed, as a working married woman (but childless!), to be as available as she needed. There was also the medical appointment I failed to volunteer to attend, the time I wore tailored shorts (and not a dress) to dinner with cousins at a casual restaurant – and oh yes, who can forget the moment she ‘discovered” Gary and I were cohabitating before marriage (“How can you be so stupid? We raised you better… People we know will know!”).
My father was largely silent during these explosions, likely understanding the dynamic at work much better than we. He deeply respected what he perceived as Mom’s authority and knowledge regarding “the right thing to do” and what appearances must be maintained. When my cousin became engaged, Mom and Dad threw a small, elegant engagement party at Linden Row, a restored home for special events in the Fan district of Richmond. The same aunt who had tortured her with criticism and cruel manipulation, declared the party “perfect” and Mom glowed with her achievement. It had taken her a lifetime, but she finally received the approval she so craved.
So I ended up marrying an honest, unpretentious man who was unafraid of his own voice and who unstintingly encouraged my own. While he did not care for the “show” that Mom liked to put on, and while he knew he was not polished and “nice” enough to make my parents rest easy, he also would not allow me to make the mistake of cutting them out of our life together, ensuring that I called and that we visited them multiple times a week.
Because of his street smarts and particular brilliance for correctly reading the motivations of people, Gary rightly challenged most of my hot-house notions regarding life and reality – challenges that I welcomed and absorbed as a die-hard people-pleaser. I came to understand some of my false foundations, how my desire to please and be helpful could lead me to say untrue things. Unfortunately, it’s a habit I’ve never completely unlearned.
So when I write, striving for honesty and truth, and not just to make a poem “lovely” or an essay “fun”, it’s really a position of strength for all of the effort and awareness behind it. It forces me to be honest about myself in ways that make me deeply uncomfortable – but also makes the writing hard and difficult and not always cathartic. But the writing will amount to nothing—and will resonate with no one — if it is not built on an undisguised, unvarnished foundation.
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