Category:

Journaling

12/16/2016

I could no longer ignore my messy house. I began in the bedroom I share with my husband, with my shelf of journals and the tiresome chore of dusting. As I have been keeping a journal for over forty years now, this one shelf can take quite some time to dust.

The notebooks I’ve used vary in size, design, and color. The common marble school notebooks; small sketchbooks or more expensive handmade journals; loose sheets of paper that I bind together myself. Some of the older ones have yellowing pages that have become dry and brittle.

In these books I have recorded daily events while also wondering, questioning, and venting. I sometimes tease out ideas for short stories or poems I want to write. When working on a memoir piece I turn to my journals to help me remember. There are pages of doodles and drawings when words have escaped me.

I pulled out four notebooks, at random, and sat on the floor. I flipped through the pages, reacquainting myself with a past self, a younger self, a different self.

July 26, 1982: Jones Beach today. Billy dragged me into the water and I was glad because it felt good.

Billy. My husband, seven years before he became my husband, grabbing me by both hands, walking backwards into the waves, telling me it will be fun. I hesitate, plant my feet firmly, but he does not give up. “Come on! I’ll hold on to you!” he says. His light brown hair is wet and slicked back. His nose is sunburned. His smile is big. I know I trust him. I move toward him, he wraps his arm around my waist, and we are bobbing up and down with the waves. The water cools me, and I am happy. I call him Bill now; Billy is our older son.

November 1, 1993: I should give them to her. My sweet babies, my sons. She is so much better with them than I could ever be. Where does her patience come from? I cannot remember my mother being like that with me, although I imagine she must have been. When I was a baby. Before I became this selfish, miserable person. I feel I am damaging my children.

I am sitting on the blue and white plaid sofa in my mother’s living room. She is rolling around on the floor, my toddler playfully wrestling with her, my two-month-old lying on a blanket nearby. Billy is laughing. Steven is trying to turn towards the commotion, trying to focus and see what is happening beside him. My mother tickles Billy’s belly, kisses his cheeks. Then she tells him, “Let’s check on your baby brother,” and they look over to Steven. I am tired. I am hungry. I am wondering if I will ever be able to relax, if I will ever be what my sons need and deserve.

Mother’s Day, May 11, 1997: At times I feel I’ve left my mother. I’ve pulled back, a bit too far; it’s as if I decided she is already gone. I think it is because I just don’t want to be unhappy. I am useless.

She is not gone, not yet. One more month. But she is already so sick, weak, tired all the time. And I remember the look in her eyes; unfocused, and so frightened. I don’t know how to help her. I still feel like I need her to help me. I promised her, when she first found out about the cancer, that I would find a way to make her well. A promise I could never keep.

March 28, 1999: We missed Mass this morning. The second graders were to attend at 9am, to be part of a procession for Palm Sunday.

My mother has been gone almost two years. It is the phase of my half-hearted effort to be like her, to please her still, by holding on to her religion, by passing it on to my sons. I fail terribly. It makes me realize how much I failed her.

Four entries, and so many stories they can tell.

I met a young man who held on to me. We married and had two sons. In the way my mother did for me, I tried to care for them. When my mother got sick, I wanted to save her, but I could not. I could not keep her safe from all that can go wrong. I will never be able to keep my children safe. For everyone, everything, grows older, can be broken, can be lost.

I placed the notebooks back on the shelf, marveling at how much dust they collect. Perhaps some is the dust of their own decay, their slow decomposition. One day, years from now, all of it — the words, stories, images — will be blown about by the wind, millions of tiny particles floating in a sunbeam.

~ Vicki Addesso

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My Guys

8/31/2014

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When our book was published I gave a copy to my husband, even though I have rarely seen him read anything other than the sports section of the newspaper. I also gave a copy to each of my sons, despite some hesitation on my part.

In our book I reveal things about myself that may seem shocking. Being molested by an uncle as a child. Drug use in my teens and early twenties. Depression. Anxiety. I had wondered if it was a good idea to open myself up like that, knowing family and friends, and yes, my children, would be able to read it. But I knew I had to write my story.

At the time, a little over a year ago, Billy was about to turn twenty-two and Steven was nineteen. All three of my guys were happy for me, and I think proud. Did I expect any of them to actually read it? I hoped they would. But, it is a book about mothers and daughters, written by four women. For a moment I regretted not having a daughter to read my story. Would a man, especially a young man, be interested?

My husband read my section of the book. He said he cried while reading about my struggle with postpartum depression and the chapter about my mother’s death. He told me he thought I was brave to write some of the things I did. I said he should read the other three sections, and he said he would, but he hasn’t so far.

Billy claimed to have too much to do, and yes, he is very busy, with school and work and friends. Though I do notice he has plenty of time to read the Game of Thrones books.

Steven started with my section and then read the whole book. This was not unexpected; Steven is a sensitive and generous person. I knew he wanted to read it for me. Yet I was surprised at how interested he was in the stories. He would knock on my door, book in hand, and ask if I had time to talk. Of course, I’d say. We had many discussions that grew out of his reading. He was seeing me not just as his mother, but as someone’s child, as a teenager, as a young adult unsure of what she wanted from her life, or how to proceed once she found out.

As we talked I realized how much my son needed me to write this book. That revelation was bittersweet.

~Vicki Addesso

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A Second Look

4/13/2014

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My father died in January. The house where he lived, where I grew up, where my mother and brother and sisters and grandparents and great-grandmother and great-aunt had all lived at one time, is now empty. Empty of people, that is. It’s still full of stuff.

My siblings and I have to clean it out and clean it up. We have to sell the old place.

I went there early this morning. I pulled a chair into the kitchen, climbed on it, and started taking down all the potholders Mom had tacked on the walls. I didn’t count but my guess is she had twenty up there. She used them as decorations. They were embroidered with flowers and vegetables. They’d been hung along the top of the wall above the cabinets for so long that they were dusty and grimy. As I was piling them on the dining room table my sister Debi walked in. She grabbed a trash bag, shook it open, and slid the potholders off the table into the bag.

“You don’t want these, do you?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said.

My mother was a clutterer. Knick-knacks everywhere. Shelves, windowsills, end tables, any flat surface - covered. Not one wall in that house has more than a few inches of naked space. She loved to go to garage sales, flea markets, and craft fairs and bring home more stuff. To her it was cute or pretty or funny, and that’s all that mattered. The only problem was all that junk collected dust, and Mom did not like to spend much time cleaning. The house always looked neat, and it was always welcoming and homey, but if you looked closely, you could see the layers of dust growing denser as time passed.

After Mom died, my father developed a schedule for his cleaning. But by this point, the crust of dust on all the knick-knacks had become a thick shroud, and my father’s efforts weren’t enough to wipe it away.

Debi and I laughed at the ghostly imprints left behind by all the things we cleared away. A donut where a wreath of dried flowers had been. When we removed a narrow shelf from the dining room wall, there appeared the silhouette of an erect penis. Flower pots stuck to the windowsills and had to be pried off. We’d hold up each object, like a game of show and tell, and ask, “Do you want this?” Nine times out of ten the answer was, “No.”

I did want the crystals Mom had hung with lace ribbon in the dining room window. Debi said, “Fine, they’re yours.” I had bought them for my mother. Going through the dining room and living room I came across other knick-knacks that I’d given to her. A birdcage, made of wood, Victorian-looking, painted a pale blue, with pink rose decals along the wider bars. I remember loving it when I bought it for her. I must have been a teenager. I don’t think she liked it very much, though she wouldn’t have told me that.

Many of the gifts I gave my mother were, in her eyes, strange. Like the crystals. Things I liked. One Christmas I gave her a huge box wrapped in newspaper. She looked so excited, like a little kid, as she opened it. But then I knew. I saw her face: her disappointment. Well, maybe it was puzzlement. I had bought her a model of a tall colonial sailing ship. I had thought she would go crazy for it, but when I saw her looking at it, I realized I had no idea why I thought she’d want something like that. It became the perfect dust collector. Mom put it on the corner shelf in the dining room, a prominent position, and it sat there for years. When my nephew Billy was a toddler he’d cry to play with it, and so she would take it down for him. Soon the strings holding the sails together were broken, the sails themselves in tatters, and now she had a good excuse. “I’m so sorry, but I think I have to throw this out.”

Debi and I were working away when my cell phone rang. It was my boss. “What happened?” she asked. I told her I’d stopped by the house and got caught up in some reminiscing. She was fine with that and understood. I have a very nice boss.

“I’m going to stay for awhile,” Debi said. “If I think there’s anything you might want to keep I’ll put it aside.”

“I don’t want anything.”

As I was driving to work I thought about all the stuff Debi and I had tossed into the trash. Were we pretending that it was easy? Easy to empty a house of things, perhaps. But what about the memories? I think about how it will feel to shut the front door for the last time and walk away.

Then I remember the giant duck cookie jar - or maybe it’s a goose. And the paint-by-number “tapestry” of a red barn that my mother had done. She wrote the year on the back, 1966. The frame is broken, but I could fix it. Maybe I should take a second look.

~Vicki Addesso

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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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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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Guilt

4/8/2013

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I was writing about a night when my mother was drinking heavily. She was telling me a story I had never heard before, a secret about her own mother. I sat at my computer and typed, but I wondered: why am I writing this? I felt ashamed, guilty, not because of what my mother was saying and doing in this piece, but because I was writing it.

What belongs to me? What am I allowed to reveal?

I feel safer with fiction. There I can disguise, exaggerate, maneuver people and events into place and have it all make sense. Life isn’t like that. You have to take what you get and it doesn’t always make sense. My mother was a good mother, but on the night I was writing about I didn’t think that. I wanted her to stop drinking; I wanted her to be quiet.

When I read this piece in our writing group I was nervous. I thought, “I am making a mistake.” I was ruining the mother I had been sharing with the others those past months. When I finished reading they were quiet at first. Then Joan said she felt sorry for my mother. Susan found our intimacy touching. They seemed to understand; they did not judge her.

We talked about the writing. I listened, took notes, crossed out words or whole sentences.

But what I really needed to know was this: am I allowed to betray her?

~Vicki Addesso

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Journaling

My Guys

A Second Look

Fathers

Thursday Mornings: "Missing Our Mothers"

Guilt

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