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What I Miss

4/25/2015

There are moments when I miss being my mother’s child.

All grown up with children of my own, and still those feelings come upon me like a shock. I want somebody to run to, someone to hold me, to tell me it’s going to be okay.

My childhood wasn’t perfect. But certain memories of my past can flood me with longing. Those occasions when my parents’ reassuring words were a truth I could believe. A time when simple gestures of comfort and protection were enough to wipe away the fear and pain.

What I yearn for is to be little, small enough that the arms of my mother could wrap around me completely. To rest my head against her chest and hear her heartbeat, listen to its insistent, unrelenting rhythm, and know that I am safe. She would say, “Don’t worry. I am here. Nothing can hurt you now.”

I’m sure my mother believed what she told me. She knew, in those moments, that somehow she would make everything all right. I know she felt this way because it’s how I felt when my own children needed reassurance from me. When it was my turn to wrap my arms around a small human being and be his protector, I did so confidently. My instincts as a parent grew solid and infinite. No harm would come to my children, not as long as I held them close.

I have a husband whose arms are powerful and caring. Many occasions have found me cocooned within his embrace, hoping for that same reassurance. There are times when my arms try to enfold him, when he rests his head on my shoulder and I tell him, “It’s okay.” But we know. We know that isn’t always true. Yet the strong arms, the shoulder upon which to rest the head, the bodies melding, this physical expression of need and the desire to meet that need - all of it softens harsh reality.

My sons are older now, in their early twenties, and they are taller and stronger than I. I get to hug them on their birthdays and holidays, and once in a while I will ask for and receive an impromptu, loving though hesitant embrace. They are still my children, but they are no longer children, and we both know that parents are not omnipotent, and that sometimes it is not going to be okay.

In our book I wrote about learning that my mother’s cancer was terminal. I was sitting on her hospital bed, and she was lying there staring off into space. She looked terrified. Even though the doctors had just said, “No hope. There is nothing we can do,” in that moment I knew they were wrong. I leaned over, wrapped my arms around her and lifted her up into my embrace. I told her it would be okay. “I will find a way to make you well,” I said. I like to think that for a few seconds she, like I, believed my words.

You grow up and you learn that sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t. When I was a child, my mother’s touch and her words kept the peril at bay. I guess what I miss, really, is being able to believe that somehow everything, in the end, will always be all right.

~ Vicki Addesso

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I Could Write a Book

11/24/2014

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Back when I was writing for magazines, I did a lot of flying to different parts of the country. Sometimes my seatmate would engage me in conversation and ask what my job was. “I’m a writer,” I’d say, feeling apologetic. I always worried that my occupation sounded pretentious, even though it was the truth.

“I have a great story to tell,” my seatmate might say. “I’d write a book if I had the time.”

On one of these trips I went to Chicago to interview the four police officers who’d captured the mass murderer John Wayne Gacy. My agent thought their story would make a compelling book. But the cops wanted to divide the royalties evenly among the five of us, which would give me twenty percent. My agent said no way.

“It’s our story,” said the cops. “All you have to do is type it up.”

So how long does it take to type up a book? Joyce Carol Oates, probably the country’s most prolific writer, has published 140 novels, short story collections, essays, and so on since her first book came out fifty years ago. This year alone she’s published three works of fiction.

But on the other hand, it took Donna Tartt ten years to write her bestselling novel The Goldfinch.

As for us, our book had its genesis in 2006, when we got together to form a writing group. Several months later, we each began writing about our mother, and eventually decided to gather our short memoirs into a book. The book, Still Here Thinking of You: A Second Chance With Our Mothers, wasn’t published until March 2013.

What took so long? First there were the years we spent writing and revising and refining our stories. Then we had to find an agent, send query letters to those who might be attracted to our project, and, after signing with one, write a book proposal she thought would attract a publisher. When our agent was satisfied, she began sending it to major publishers and waiting for their responses. For one reason or another, all rejected our book.

We were disappointed, but we knew that many successful books were turned down by publishers dozens of times before finally being picked up. Katherine Stockett’s best-seller, The Help, for example, had been rejected sixty times. There are, though, a few lucky writers who have never experienced rejection. Recently, Stephanie Danler, a thirty-year-old waitress at a Manhattan restaurant, mentioned to a regular customer – an editor at a major publishing company – that she’d just completed a novel. “Have your agent send it to me,” he said. He loved it, sent it to a colleague, and it was sold to Alfred A. Knopf in a two-book deal for a high six-figure advance.

But back to our book. We decided to drop the agent, rewrite the proposal, and start sending it to independent publishers. The owner of a small press took it on. After months of editing, revising, choosing a cover design, reading and rereading until we thought we’d uncovered every typo, our book was finished.

But that wasn’t the end. It was our job to promote the book -- contacting newspapers and magazines for articles and reviews and presenting readings and book signings in whatever venues were interested. Even now, when we’re reading a chapter aloud at an event, we’ll come upon a sentence that could have been more graceful, a paragraph that could have been moved to a different spot. This process of typing up a book – it’s never really over.

~ Joan Potter

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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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Elusive Memory

7/24/2014

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Memories are elusive. Sometimes they come in broken pieces, like dreams; sometimes they’re confusing and you find yourself surprised that they happened.

One of the greatest challenges of writing memoir is the choppiness of memory. You might have a strong image of your mother cooking breakfast, but you can’t connect it with a particular event. You might remember that you had measles, but you can’t recall the details of the experience.

People often ask if it’s okay to make things up to fill in the gaps. The answer is no. One of the most basic and important tenets of memoir is that it’s the truth – your truth. It’s the truth of what you carry with you from your past. The minute you veer away from that – add a straw hat or make up a location or throw in a line of dialogue that you don’t really recall – you are breaking your pact with your reader, and with yourself. Memoir comes from your life. If you want to embellish, call it fiction.

There are ways to work with the slippery realities of memory. Often my starting point is a clear but isolated image – like a tiny movie that begins and ends abruptly. I believe it’s there for a reason; it holds some significance. So I describe the image: my mother is here, my brothers are there, the weather is warm, the wind is blowing through the window, I have a sore throat.

I’ve found that through the process of writing, more memories emerge. When we decided to write our book, one of my biggest fears was that I didn’t remember enough. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to fill my section with stories. But by sitting down and starting with the few distinct memories I had, other moments resurfaced, details unfolded, and new truths were revealed. It was like finding buried treasure, and I was finally able to tell the story I wanted to tell.

~Susan Hodara

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Just Write

6/2/2014

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Whenever we do readings, many audience members are anxious to tell us how much they identify with our experiences, and to share stories of their own mothers. In response, the four of us have been offering mother memoir workshops. After we’ve read from our book and talked a bit about memoir, the participants write about their own mothers. It might be for fifteen minutes, or even just five, the scratching of pens and the clicking of keyboards the only sounds in the room. Then one by one they read aloud what they’ve written.

Images of mothers materialize, this one in a wide-brimmed hat, that one sunning herself at the beach. Daughters idolize their mothers, or hate them, or can’t wait for them to come home from work. They watch their mothers reading magazines, preparing food, applying lipstick, and zipping up a fancy dress. One women wept as she read about her mother being beaten by her father and calling to her for help. In her story, she was a little girl; now her long gray hair was piled onto her head, but the memory still burned.

I am always inspired by the power of the details and the depth of emotion that emerge so quickly, so spontaneously. These snippets of memories culled in just minutes demolish the excuse of not having enough time or of not being in the right frame of mind. They are testimony to the long-running wisdom behind the craft: just write.

~Susan Hodara

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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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Phoning Mom

1/5/2014

Growing up, I felt I had little to say to my mother. Now I speak with her on the telephone every day.

I don’t mean a quick hello-how-are-you kind of checking in; often we talk for nearly half an hour. And because we’ve spoken the day before, there isn’t much news we have to share. But I know the particulars of my mother’s life: the television programs she watches, the trouble she’s having with her Hebrew homework, the stir-fry she made with all the vegetables in her refrigerator that were getting old. I know about the books she’s reading, the floor she’s having installed in her kitchen, the walk she took or is about to take when we say goodbye.

It started a few years ago when she ended up in the hospital after a fall. Following a visit of several days, daily phone calls were the best way to alleviate my worries about her, and to offer her some distraction until she could return home. When she did, my calls became less frequent — until she fell a few months later and was back in the hospital once again.

I’m the one who calls her, usually late in the afternoons. And because I’m generally not one for prolonged telephone conversations, I prefer to talk when I’m doing something else. Sometimes I chop garlic or unload the dishwasher or fold laundry; if the weather’s nice, I’ll use my cell phone and go for a walk. I have to confess that there are days when I wish I could take a break — when the call begins to feel like an obligation.

Then the other day I got an early morning email from my brother, who lives with his family a few miles from my mother. On the subject line I read “Mom (she’s fine)” and my breath stopped. My mother had been in the hospital the previous night, I learned. She’d been feeling dizzy, something related to the timing of her blood pressure medication. “She was discharged about 3 a.m.,” he wrote. “She’s probably sleeping now.”

I waited an hour before I called her. She filled me in on the details of the episode; she was okay, she said, planning on taking it easy for the day. As I listened, it struck me that no matter how mundane our conversations, they have become a part of my life. They are a touchstone, a simple pleasure that I already know I will miss. It is a gift that I get to have them at all.
~Susan Hodara

Solo

11/17/2013

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I have a close friend who, in a span of seven years, lost her father and grandmother to cancer, her brother to lymphoma, and then her husband to a car accident over an icy bridge that should've been marked. Shortly before her husband’s death, she discovered she was pregnant. She and her husband already had a toddler, and she had a daughter by a previous marriage. Here my friend was, in mourning, and knee deep in motherhood, dealing with it alone.

Over the years, when my sons were testing my limits, I sometimes thought of her. When a difficult decision had to be made, I sometimes thought of her. When my husband offered to pick up the boys from a friend’s house so I could make dinner or I was simply tired, I sometimes thought of her.

At her daughter's wedding this past summer, after the ceremony, my friend was sitting alone in the front row, her curly blond hair framing her profile, the sun setting. My husband and I were seated behind her, and I was thinking of how far she’d carried her children. Then I noticed an ever so slight trembling, and I drifted over to hug her hard. Yes, we were celebrating her daughter’s joy over having found love, but I was also celebrating all that I valued in her, even the quiet tears. I thought: Look at what you’ve done. You’ve raised three bright children who are personable and caring. Later I told her these same thoughts, realizing that I could only imagine the challenges and sacrifices that she, or any single mother, had to face.

During the process of writing our collaborative memoir about mothers and daughters, I explored a mother’s role, my own as well as my co-authors’, and I followed the sweeping impact, the indelible fingerprint she leaves on her child’s spirit. For many reasons, I’m lucky to know my friend, but when it comes to motherhood, she has shown me another side of the story, a narrative suffused with an inimitable resilience and fire.

~ Lori Toppel

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In the Eye of the Beholder

10/8/2013

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“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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What I Miss

I Could Write a Book

My Guys

Elusive Memory

Just Write

A Second Look

Phoning Mom

Solo

In the Eye of the Beholder

Fathers

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