Category: Family

In the Eye of the Beholder

10/8/2013

“I have a problem with any memoir about a person who is no longer alive to defend themselves or tell their side of the story,” wrote a family member who was displeased with my section of our book.

“First of all,” I wrote in a reply to the e-mail, “if people could only write memoirs about those who are still alive, there wouldn’t be many memoirs.”

But the comment led me to review each of my stories to assure myself that they were fair. I had written about my impressions of my mother when I was a child, my memories of times she had supported and helped me, her independent spirit, and events of her life as she had related them. In only one story was I critical of her actions.

Knowing my mother – who was proud of my writing career – I think she would pretty much agree with what I wrote about her. Perhaps her memories would be a little different, but not so much that she would need to defend herself. Even in the story that criticized her, I believe she might say, “Maybe you’re right, Joan. Maybe I should have acted differently.”

In my e-mail to the family member, I pointed out that all but one of my stories were positive, thus implying that they did not require a defense. The family member has not yet responded.

~Joan Potter

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Fathers

9/8/2013

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At our readings, after we have shared excerpts of our stories, we invite the audience to ask questions. Inevitably, someone wants to know whether the four of us would consider writing another book together — and how do we feel about the topic of fathers?

My response has always been “never,” but recently I’m not so sure.

My mother has been dead for sixteen years. My father is eighty-four and still lives in the house where I grew up. But even though it’s just minutes from where I live, I rarely see him. My relationship with him was painful, difficult, damaging. Yet something has changed since he read our book.

Although I had been writing stories about my mother for years, it terrified me to publish them, mostly because of the thought that my father might read them. I never told him I’d written them, and when our book was published, I didn’t tell him about it. But somehow he found out. And without my knowing, he asked my brother to order a copy for him, and he read it.

One day he called and told me. He said that he admired my honesty, and that he was shocked at some of the things he had never known about me. He apologized for not being a better father. Then he asked if he could buy seven more copies to send to family and friends.

I brought the books to him, and we sat at his dining room table. He thumbed through his copy and read a few passages aloud. I listened to my words being spoken by my father. He read softly, slowly, and with gentleness. He was not angry. He was sorry.

Since that day we have been talking, hesitantly, and in circles, around the things we know but cannot yet say. This is a man who had hurt me, a man I feared. Now when I’m with him, I am nervous but not quite scared. Neither of us knows where we are headed. Maybe some day I will write about where we end up.

~Vicki Addesso

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On Second Thought

7/30/2013

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It wasn’t until my mother’s second reading of my section of our book that she told me it made her sad. The first time she read it (as I waited for days, edgy and unsettled, terrified about how it might make her feel), she seemed to like it. “Some of the early scenes were a little upsetting,” she said on the telephone, “but it ended up so nicely.”

I tried not to think about the brash histories I’d written and my damning observations: my mother’s submission in the face of my father’s temper, the persistent yearning I carried for an emotional connection with her, and my often misguided activities as a young woman that I insinuated were the result of her passivity. But my mother was happy that our book had been published, and she bought copies to give to her friends.

Then, a few months later, without my knowing, she read it again. This time, she told me she felt bad about the kind of mother she’d been to me. She wasn’t angry; she didn’t try to defend herself. She knew it was all true, and it filled her with regret. “I wish I had a second chance,” she said.

I sat holding the phone, reeling. I searched frantically for words to obliterate the sentences I’d written. “Oh, that? That’s not really what I meant,” I wanted to say, but how could I? I’d written exactly what I’d meant. What had I been thinking?

The fact was, I hadn’t been thinking — not about how my mother would react to my stories. I put her aside while I was writing. It was the only way I could be honest in how I presented my past.

My mother’s response was to be expected. What saved me was the way our story ended: she and I finding each other, establishing the kind of mother-daughter relationship that had been thwarted decades earlier. She was redeemed, and so was I.
~Susan Hodara

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Unchanged Memory

6/24/2013

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I’m watching a dance competition, a reality show that I like to think is not skewed in any way. Three tappers are in flight across the stage, the music fast and playful. I realize I’ve been smiling, which makes me think of my mother. As trying as she became in her last years, I sometimes caught her smiling when engrossed in a particular television program – a Fred Astaire or Katherine Hepburn rerun, or a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet. Then, briefly, my mother rose above the bitterness and anger over her drawn-out divorce and ensuing loneliness. She must have been swept away. I remember her spectator grin, a sustained, gentle suggestion of love. The residual effects of her joy lingered for an hour or so until she stepped back into her reality.

Whenever I watch a show that moves me, a show that I’m sure would have moved her, too, I picture her sitting across the room. My recollection of her benevolent look is often a fleeting one; it’s never that poignant. It’s a moment when I feel her near me, her countenance one of pleasure and, I’ve come to think, forgiveness.
~Lori Toppel

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The True Line

5/22/2013

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As I recall the scene, my two sisters and I are standing side by side on a ridge overlooking red cliffs and desert sands in an Arizona recreation area close to the border of Nevada, where my sister Abby lives with her husband. We are there to spread our mother’s ashes, which Abby had been holding on to until the three of us decided what to do with them.

In my memory, we open the bag of ashes and take turns flinging them over the ridge, but the breeze blows some back to us, where they settle on our faces and clothing. I can hear my sister Linda saying something kind of mystical about this being a signal from our mother, and that’s what I related in the story I wrote in our book.

But after Abby read the story, she told me Linda hadn’t said that at all, that what she did say was a piece of ash had gotten under her contact lens. I like that remark. It’s more specific than my vague spiritual recollection, and it reflects Linda’s self-absorption. If I’d remembered the line—and if Linda actually said it—I’d have used it in my story.

My sister Abby has a different memory of the same event. She believes what I remember didn’t happen. I can’t change what seems true to me; I can’t adopt someone else’s memory because it would make a better story. So the contact lens line will be lost to history, only to appear in the deleted e-mail I got from Abby when she questioned my version of the incident.
~Joan Potter

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Thursday Mornings: "Missing Our Mothers"

4/24/2013

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There was a period when we were working on our book that we recorded conversations about different aspects of our experience together. We called them “Thursday Mornings at Ten.” Here’s one titled “Missing Our Mothers.”

Lori: I’ve found that when something’s going wrong, when something feels very dramatic in my life, or if I’m sad, I want to call my mother.

Joan: I know what you mean. When Roy was in the hospital after his cancer surgery, my mother was on my mind all the time. It was like she was hovering there, which was really weird. I wished I had been able to talk to her about it, and gotten her support.

Susan: Even though my mother is still alive, I already know what I will miss. It’s not so much her advice, but there’s something about her responses, the way she’ll say, “Oh yes, things can be hard,” or, “Time will make it better” — they’re clichés, but I know I can count on her to say something nice, completely judgment-free. That unquestioning acceptance — it’s so simple and kind.

Joan: I’m sorry my mother isn’t here to see some of the good things. She knew her first great-grandchild, Julia, when she was a toddler. Julia was such a terror, and my mother would say, “Oh my goodness, what is going to become of that child?” I would love for her to see Julia now, singing and playing her guitar.

Vicki: Yes, there are all those things they’ll never know. I remember moving into my house in 2001. I loved the house, but I had such a hard time when I moved in. Then my sister said to me, “You know, this is the first place you’ve lived in since Mommy died.” And she was right. I was making my home in a place that my mother would never be a part of.

Lori: I have no illusions that my mother would have changed. She would have continued to want attention, be difficult and demanding. But I think now I could have served her better, and that would have made her happier. That’s what I was always looking for: to make her happy, to see that smile.

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Having My Way

3/9/2013

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I recently met a friend for lunch at an Indian restaurant in town. It’s a small space with about ten tables placed close together. We chose a table in the center of the room, but I was tempted by a nearby spot near a sunny window. So we moved. But once there, we realized the sun was so glaring through the window that we had to squint to read the menu. Apologizing to the server, we returned to our original seats.

I thought of my mother, who was never pleased with her first choice of a restaurant table. In a piece called “Having Her Way” in Still Here Thinking of You, I recall the ways in which she would – calmly but firmly – get what she wanted in certain situations, even once encouraging a group to give up their table so our family could sit there.

Her habits of persuasion appear in me from time to time. The other day, my daughter Kathy and I were reminiscing about a Richie Havens concert we’d attended a couple of years before. While he was singing a particularly gentle song, accompanied only by his guitar, a man and woman sitting directly in front of us decided to have a chat. I poked the woman on the back and told her to be quiet.

“You sounded so severe,” Kathy said. “It was kind of scary.”

“Well, they shut up didn’t they?” I said. “And don’t forget, I’m my mother’s daughter.”

~Joan Potter

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The habits...the set of a brow...

1/31/2013

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In his recent The New Yorker Personal History, “Becoming Them,” James Wood noted the similarity between his legs and his elderly father’s. “The other day,” he wrote, “I saw that I have the same calves, with the shiny, unlit pallor I found ugly when I was a boy, and with those oddly hairless patches at the back…”

I was reminded of my mother — of my mother’s leg, and by extension, of my own. In Still Here Thinking of You, I wrote about a parallel incident of suddenly spotting the likenesses between my legs and my mother’s while glimpsing her rarely seen bare leg on a visit to her home: “Then it strikes me: this is my own leg.” In my story, I am momentarily sad.

Wood’s piece is about the ways we take on elements of our parents as a way of mourning them, even before they are gone. The habits, the turn of a phrase, the set of a brow: we go on about our lives, but our parents are there.

The sadness I felt in identifying my mother’s leg as my own certainly anticipated her loss, and the role that my leg will then have in embodying a part of her that no longer exists. It is a role that I — that we who are all partly our parents in one way or another — rarely think about.

~Susan Hodara

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Forward>>

In the Eye of the Beholder

Fathers

On Second Thought

Unchanged Memory

The True Line

Thursday Mornings: "Missing Our Mothers"

Having My Way

The habits...the set of a brow...

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