Story 01

Her  name is Mandy. She lived thirty-five years. She’s been dead for six. The anniversary of her death was yesterday and today is still proving to be difficult.

And this is where I stop writing and freeze up.  My brain seems to be ridged, empty, blank and not in a good way, but rather in a standing moment of terror. Terror held captive in the belly of a cave where all the air has been sucked out as if in one huge gasp.

I see the way out, but nothing that I want to write about will come out of my thoughts or  my pen.

I think about all the eloquent thoughts, sentences and words that play in my mind over the last six years but as soon as the pen is in my hand I freeze up. So  I’ve come to this place in the basement of an old factory building where Ted has set up a table, a chair and a fan.

I’ve come here to write – to break through this horrible thing that doesn’t want me to write. I’ve agreed with myself that I’ll write. Just write whether it’s the story I’m wanting to share or just foolishness. I’ll just keep writing.

The ‘they’ I want to write is the story – my story – her story – our story – the story of motherhood, mothering, mother, my own mother, myself as mother, the mother Mandy wanted to be but knew she couldn’t be.

I want to write the story of grief, the way it is for me, the journey it’s been, the way it has changed me, the good, the bad, the best of me and the worst of me.

Mandy wanted me to tell her story and I could not, but she died wanting me to tell the story about what it was like to be her mother. I just couldn’t, being her mother wasn’t always pretty and I can’t finish this thought…..

“Every woman has a story to tell.” I read that somewhere once and it’s power has never left me. I started a journal where I cut pictures from magazines, pasted them into a journal book then wrote opening paragraphs about each one’s story.

I know it should read "everyone has a story to tell" and of course they do, but I can’t always relate to that. However,"every woman has a story to tell" resonates with me because so many women are silenced from birth. I know that silencing. I continue to abide by it in most aspects of my life and in most of my interactions with others.

Most people are not interested in the lives of others. I believe that. I live it.

I have thousands of pages from my journals and some pages of prose that I don’t know what to do with. Now that Mandy’s dead there’s no one to read them, say nothing about care about or for them.

Maybe that’s why I don’t write now. Maybe it feels senseless, worthless, yet down deep inside I’m driven to write – my story, her story, our story, the story of motherhood and long painful journeys of loss and mourning, grief, healing and joy.

Life is full of stuff, of stories, but also of awakenings, lessons, adventures and discovery. There are things that happen that no one believes, things that they judge because it isn’t their experience. For example:

When I was forty we moved from one house to another. We needed more room to do more foster care. In the move I took three oil paintings on canvas. Two painted by one of my mother’s sisters and the third a tall sailing ship in the ocean by no one I knew that I’d picked up at  a yard sale.

So we get these paintings that were covered in films of dust, cigarette and wood stove smoke. My mother who was helping with some cleaning and un-packing brings me one of the small covered bridges to hang. I was shocked when she handed it over to me and the colors jumped up from the canvas as if fresh from the tubes.

“Ma, what  did you do to this?”

“I cleaned it.” She said.

I know it sounds silly, bizarre even, but here I was forty years old, of average intelligence, a parent, housewife, foster parent, high school graduate and it never occurred to me that you could clean paintings. I don’t know what I thought about them or what would happen if I considered cleaning them. I just assumed that you couldn’t.

“What do you do to clean them?” I asked.

“Well, either windex or dish soap on a damp rag. I used windex on this one.”

I scolded myself. Of course it’s oil paint. It resists water the same as a painted wall, of course you can wash it. My mother  just shook her head, “Your smarter than I could ever be. I can’t believe you didn’t know that.”

But I didn’t. I really truly had never considered the possibility of washing paintings. I recall this because I’ve seen people with that look of utter dumbness on their faces and as my mind is asking, “Really? Are you kidding me? How could you not know that?” I am acutely aware that although sometimes people can be playing the ‘stupid’ card they might really not know something that we think they should know.

If I could change the way people judge one another in so many hurtful ways I would. I would ask them to take a breath and think about how you are treating others before you say every little thing on your mind.

I move on to thinking about truth and reality. My stories can only be told from the point where my truth meets the paper,  now that Mandy is dead hers can only be told through my perspective with a few excerpts from her  journals.

The two stories that well up in my heart to be told: my journey with grief and my feelings about mothering. I have more experience with mothering than just my own…(my heart is pounding out of my chest) but I’m not going to stop writing. I’ve had experience’s with other mothers stories… my mother’s, my foster mother’s, my sister’s and the many bio-mothers of the dozens of foster children I’ve had.

Do you see what I see? My heart is beginning to slow down.

I see Mandy standing in a colorless place encircled by stillness. She looks at me from that great distant place…

I ask, “What Mandy? What is it?”

My heart is very heavy. It pulls me down as if it weighs so much that the structure beneath it can barely sustain it. Maybe it won’t and the foundation will collapse under it’s great weight.

I wanted to be a mother from the earliest time I can remember. I knew how to hold babies from watching my aunts and from little golden books with pictures of little girls playing with baby dolls. I had a doll of my own, baby dolls with blankets discarded from the real babies in my family. I loved them. I talked to them, soothed them and fed them with Popsicle sticks dyed red and orange on the halves where the frozen ice used to be.

I wanted to be a mother more than anything. I wanted to be a writer and sometimes I thought about being a psychologist but nothing was more deeply ingrained in me than mothering.

By the time I was three I mothered my mother and my baby brother then later another brother and a sister.

It wasn’t just infants with blankets and bottles that I mothered. It was peoples bruises and hungry bellies. Mostly I worried about their feelings, about not hurting them and not letting others hurt them when I could avoid it. I seemed to know early on that I wanted to be the kind of mother who made others feel safe and loved and worthy. It would turn out that it wasn’t that simple and I would have to learn that the hard way.

Meanwhile I practiced mothering with my family who needed a lot of comforting; my mother was at the top of that list. She was a mess. I believe she suffered from undiagnosed bi-polar and/or borderline personality disorder.

So where do I go from here with this writing project? I think it does matter to me that someone cares to read it. I have thought for a long time about just writing for me, as they say and I do that in my journals, thousands of pages over the years, but story telling is for someone. others… for the reader. Stories by their definition are to be ‘told’, shared in some fashion with others.

Now that Mandy is dead there doesn’t seem to be any reason to write them down. She wanted to read them – she was interested in my life from the inside out. She had the courage to read them and to know my truths.

I said, “Mandy, I can’t write what it’s like being your mother. It’s  complicated and it just wouldn’t be right to write it all down.”

“It’s okay, Mom.” She said with calm and urgency at the same time, “I know it’s not easy to be my Mom. I know that and it’s okay. It might help somebody else to read about what it’s like to be the Mom of a borderline.”

“It’s not all hard, Mandy, being your mother isn’t all hard, you know…”

I’m not sure she believed me that day or any day before she died, but it wasn’t all hard. There was so much more to it than that. There was also joy.