twenty-six

“Determined to do everything myself, I turned independence into a weapon. I thought of it as a strength, but it was a faultline along which I fractured. I resisted taking other things too – love, advice, knowledge – even if it was good for me, even if I wanted it. Like my troubled relationship with food, which always felt like too little or too much, this refusal – a fear that merging with another would result in the loss of my hard-won self – was old and it ran deep.

fifty-two

“So, I went on at her about my eccentric but good-enough childhood and my well-intentioned parents, doing my best to keep from her everything that really troubled me. The experiences I could neither name nor claim, I had channelled into my writing. I saw no reason to repeat them, but I suspect I knew even then that if I did, she would be onto me – and there would be nowhere left for me to hide.

I knew by then that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her all my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there’s no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate. I climbed into bed beside her and closed my eyes, but I never relaxed enough to forget who I was and what had happened to us.

This was the story I wanted to tell without sentiment or cynicism; the one I thought justified speaking hard truths. The flash of insight I’d had—that I could not leave my mother because I’d become my mother—was my wisdom: a tale of psychological embroilment I wanted badly to trace out.

To tell that tale, I soon discovered, I had to find the right tone of voice; the one I habitually lived with wouldn’t do at all: it whined, it grated, it accused; above all, it accused. Then there was the matter of syntax: my own ordinary, everyday sentence—fragmented, interjecting, overriding—also wouldn’t do; it had to be altered, modified, brought under control. And then I could see, this as soon as I began writing, that I needed to pull back—way back—from these people and these events to find the place where the story could draw a deep breath and take its own measure.

Or else she would be taken over by an inexplicable rage, saying that I, the only person she loved, deserved the ugliest death because I did not love her enough. Why did you curse me so, Mother; why did you not stop her cursing, Father? Though the truth is, I do not want to know the answers. I resent even thinking about the questions—what others and the world have done should not define one as much as what one has done to oneself.