Free to Navel Gaze

Tag: childhood memories

When She Was Here

E. Marmer | Free to Navel Gaze

When she was here, my mother would lie on her bed after I helped her shower, on top of the long white towel she insisted I put down so the bed wouldn’t get wet. But I thought of that towel as part of her cocoon, the one I made by putting another long white towel on top of her, and one small one for under her feet because the main towel wasn’t long enough, and one for under her head of course, because I wanted her hair to dry, but in her mind it was there to prevent the pillow from absorbing all that wetness from her hair, always so careful, my mother. Then I’d put her comforter over this sandwich in which she was the filling, and tuck her in.

With her arms and legs immobilized inside this wrapping, by weakness more than by swaddling, and her now small head peeking out over the cover, she seemed to me almost like my child. She pulled forth from me all the same sweet painful love I had only known for my children, with almost but not quite the same targeted piercing as I felt when my breast milk came in.  My mother in my care, so completely, so willingly and with utter belief in her security – it was just the same as with my children. And the sensation, this belief I felt from her, made me love her in a new old way. And when I bent down to kiss her just as I would have my child who was going down for a nap, I was even able to nuzzle her neck in a tickling way that made her giggle, then look into her laughing eyes with my loving ones.

I’d announce that I’d come back into her room in ten or fifteen minutes to check if she were dry and ready to dress, but we both knew I meant I’d really be back in as many as thirty minutes because I’d be trying to get something done in the kitchen and on top of that I had no sense of time.  That she knew it and knew that I knew she knew, made her love me in a new way as well.  I’d like to think so, anyway.  We also both knew that she needed more than 10 or 15 minutes anyhow to recover from the exertion the shower required, but that didn’t make either of us love more or differently, it just made us sad.

My mother had pancreatic cancer, diagnosed at least when she was 85, in some sort of merciful grace by an unseen god. On the other hand, for a woman determined to live into her nineties, it still sucked.  She didn’t want to leave; she hadn’t stopped enjoying us all, and the small pleasures that came with her every day. Such a modest woman, she didn’t ask for much and was more than delighted by all that she nevertheless received:  our attentions, her comfort and independence, the joys of watching her grandchildren and great grandchildren metamorphizing, the familiarity of the signs on her neighborhood roads, her simple routine just the way she liked it.  And so, aware that she might not live into her nineties after all, she determined instead to live as long as she could, and fight against the cancer as hard as an 85-year-old with, well, with pancreatic cancer, can.  As she had also lost almost 40 pounds in two months of intermittent hospitalizations which included recovery from a life-threatening surgical accident, leaving her so weak that she was unable to perform even daily living tasks, this made the effort required absurdly difficult, but she was not deterred.

My sisters and I decided that as the daughter with the best layout for her limited strength and mobility, the most unstructured, uncommitted time available, and an observed impressive endurance for those small irritations that can build and build with continuous exposure to one’s mother, sick or no, I would be the one to take her in and see to her care.  I think they knew, though, that it was what I wanted. I’d go to the mat for it. My sisters would come for wonderful long visits with our mother, and I would be able to leave for the occasional social engagement, or my own doctor appointments, but always I returned to her without the weight of obligation.  I carried instead a kind of gratitude, even a shameful pride, that I could make sure my mother’s existence was the most comfortable one possible in her condition.

She knew this.  She knew I was compelled to be the one, driven by devotion or some perceived claim. It could have been because I spent the least time with her, called her least of any of us over the preceding ten years or so, and I felt I had to make that up; or maybe it was because I carried the knowledge that I had spent much of my adult life working through the not always so hidden sorrows and insecurities I developed in part as a result of emotional barriers she erected, which I knew, of course, were the result of her own sorrows and insecurities as a child. . . and so perhaps I felt I had to make our last months (or what I hoped would be years) together as intimate and rid of shadows as they could be. It was true that, due to reckonings with my own daughter, and my fuller appreciation of all the ways I had fallen short for her, indeed due to the understanding I acquired over the years of so many things, I was primed to show my mother a new kind of unadulterated love.

But maybe it was because I needed to show her that I loved her desperately as no other could, as much as when I was child, and I wanted her favor and undivided attention as I did then.  As the third child coming into a busy working class household, I never really felt I had the individual attention from her that I wanted. And dammit I was gonna get it! I was going to have it, have her, all to myself. . . It’s this last possibility that disturbs me.  And yet, even to the extent it may have been true, my mother silently understood all of this. All the reasons, whether noble or pathetic, she accepted as originating from a pure place (as did my sisters, loving and generous souls that they are). Perhaps on some level my mother even recognized that my troubled relationship with my daughter mirrored somewhat the one she had had with me, in that I too had been the unhappy, solemn, and lonely child whom my mother cherished but did not know how to help; though neither of us needed to speak of that – she, because she did not like to reveal herself or reflect on the past, and I because I had already forgiven her so thoroughly that I wouldn’t even think to bring it up.

When I returned to my mother’s room, she usually reported that she was ready for the rest of our post shower ritual, which included dressing of course, but always began with the drying of her toes.  This precise operation, developed in response to her complaints that previous toweling had not sufficiently done the job, entailed my softly running the narrow edge of a dry washcloth between her toes. And it is the drying of the toes that I think of now, this small activity that somehow was the perfect expression of our momentary happiness, away from her cancer, away from the end, in being mother and daughter.  I was the one providing the care this time, but it could just has well have been her, when I was in her care, before memory even, running a dry washcloth through my toes in the same way.  We were back all the way to that space, before the barriers had time to click into place. Adoring caretaker and trusting receiver, both feeling safe in having their attachment truly known.

If dressing exhausted her further, she’d tell me she needed to remain in bed for a little while longer, perhaps a half hour, for a little nap.  She knew that I’d let her sleep for longer than that, because I’d be trying to accomplish some mundane administrative task, or even perhaps get back to a poem I was writing; and I knew she secretly was relieved by my anticipated imprecise adherence to the clock, because she had not yet gathered the will to rise, to make her slow way down the hall to her chair in the family room.  But sometimes, before leaving her to rest, I’d lie down next to her, alongside her freshly made cocoon of sheet and comforter, and quietly sing her a song she had once sung to me: This is the story of two little babes who were left in their uncle’s care… This didn’t rankle. We both knew it was my way of telling her that I felt how much she had loved me, and that I carried it still. Sometimes she would join me, sometimes she would just listen and remember.

E. Marmer | Free to Navel Gaze

July 11, 2019
Offerings

My dad had a love affair with the Native American people. Not that he ever involved himself in native communities or causes, tried to learn more about their culture by direct, intensive study, or even decried the decimation of that people and culture by the white European American settlers and pioneers. He loved them because they were part of a tremendous, dashing and rousing adventure tale; and, being a romantic, my father loved all adventure tales. He especially loved those adventures that played out in real life, and so he devoured factual history and fictionalized history about such dramatic events as the American Revolution, the expansion of the white settlers west, the Civil War, and of course the two World Wars. He wasn’t limited to American adventures, though they were his favorite kind. He also read about Napoleon and Ghengis Khan, Marco Polo and Erik the Red. In the context of the clash between Native American culture and the white Europeans, who would be the inevitable victors due to their advancement in science and engineering, he offered no platitudes, no assessments of blame, no regrets, only his deep admiration and nostalgia for the warriors and chieftains who, despite being wholly out of their depth in the contest, were indeed noble savages.

I knew all this because my father was the person I observed most, absorbed most, feared most, wanted attention from most, and, in later years, discussed most in therapy. He would talk about Native Americans with respect and awe. He admired how they put everything on the line for the safety of their villages, how they acted in the name of honor, and were doomed precisely because they were not a devious people. When my sisters and I were very young, he’d put on a native headdress he had purchased while on a trip out to the Southwest with his buddy George in the years following WWII. He’d put the feathers on and hop and grunt the way he thought a brave or a chief might, and we girls would all squeal in delight, but also become just a little afraid of this transformation of our father into a wild man, in touch with the spirit world. He was part of the wild rumpus, and I could see the joy and serious concentration in his face. I could also see the pleasure my mother took in seeing her three girls so entertained and excited, but which I may at the time have mistaken for an endorsement of the authenticity of the proceedings taking place in our living room in the Bronx, far away in space and time from any actual native ceremonies.

When I was about 14, far from those days of the wild rumpus, my father came into my room, held out a keychain charm in his palm and said, “This is the second keychain this magazine outfit has sent me, and since I already have one, I thought you might want it.”

I couldn’t believe it! My father was offering a bit of the noble adventure to me, and I was not going to let him down! I looked at this keychain, a figure of an eagle with spread wings atop other native symbols and totems, and while part of me thought,“Er, what the hell am I going to do with this?” the greater part of me understood, or rather hoped, that this meant he KNEW I could appreciate how special this native American keepsake, which had been manufactured in some factory in Oklahoma or maybe even China, really was. “Oh wow, Dad,” I said. “Thanks.” And I reverently took the keychain and put it on my desk. I had been anointed! I had been chosen! It mattered not that my eldest sister was out of the house in her first year of marriage, or that my next older sister was too caught up in her senior year of high school to be spending much time around the house when my father received this duplicate keychain, leaving me as the only viable recipient. In my young mind, he had chosen me as the one who would understand. And, not knowing, or ever knowing, what to do with it, I left it on my desk as proof that I could be trusted to carry the torch of idealism, romanticism and appreciation for the suffering and ultimate demise of that noble race.

About two years later, my father was in my room for one reason or another when he saw the keychain on my desk. “Wait a minute,” he muttered, and I thought what was coming next was a glowing acknowledgment of my ability to understand why the keychain was so important. But what came next instead was “Why did you take this out of my drawer?” When I explained, “No, Dad, you gave it to me, don’t you remember?” he came back with, “If you wanted to see it, you could have asked me. Why would you go into my drawer and take something that wasn’t yours?” I was hit by two utterly unrelated thoughts simultaneously, neither of which I could articulate very well, for my ability to communicate has always been compromised by the rush of emotions. One, my Dad apparently had no memory of having given me the keychain, of that moment in time when I thought we were bonding as elder and protégé, and two, he actually thought I would pry into his private space and go through his drawers. I didn’t know where to turn first, but my dad did the navigating for me. “How could you go into my drawer like that??” he demanded.

I protested fervently. I said, “Dad, I wouldn’t go into your drawer. You gave it to me, don’t you remember?” You gave it to me!”

“No, I wouldn’t have given it to you,” he said, apparently having lost all memory of the arrival of a duplicate that would enable him to do just that. “And I could understand if you wanted to see it, but you should have come to me and not just taken it from my drawer.” A few more protests back and forth, and I had become a crying sack on my bed. There were very unsettling things going on. My father had no functioning memory! Either that, or he did not attach the least little bit of significance to the moment, making it easily forgotten. He thought I was capable of sneaky, petty thievery! I wasn’t quite sure which upset me more, but I suppose the indictment of my character won out.

As I lay there, a shuddering and weeping heap, he stormed off to his room with the keychain he had snatched from my desk, intending to put it in its rightful place. When he opened his drawer, I heard from the other room a faint, “Oh.” He saw his original lying there, unmoved.

And what happened next was also very upsetting, although not unexpected. My father came to my door and gruffly, with just the barest bit of sheepishness, said, “I’m sorry. Do you hear me, I’m sorry, ok?” There would be no hugs, no scooping, no lamentations of remorse for having hurt me so. I lay on my bed gutted and bereft until after about 20 minutes, when I picked myself up and continued my life. Despite my anger and hurt, I did not return the keychain. I did not chuck it in the garbage. I suppose I hoped it would be cleansed with time and become once again a symbol of my father’s faith in me.

Another two years later, I was visiting from college, and my father, having come into my room to tell me one thing or another spied the keychain. I kid you not, this is what happened: he said, “Wait a minute… this is mine. Why did you take it?” And the whole thing played out again in miserable inevitability. As a young adult, with greater understanding of the world generally and of my father more specifically, this time I took it in with as much horror as sorrow. My father did not remember having hurt me so, just two years ago. He did not remember discovering the original keychain safely in his drawer. He did not remember me laying on my bed, a quivering, sobbing girl. And, bonus, he still thought me capable of going into his drawers and taking something without asking. This time, my concern for his swiss cheese memory, and what it might mean about his health or ability to learn, won out, just barely, over my hurt feelings. There was no sobbing. Instead, I found my voice and said, “Dad, oh my god, don’t you remember we had this whole conversation before? Don’t you remember how you accused me of taking your keychain and upset me and then you found yours in your drawer and apologized?” And in the face of his continued repetition about how wrong it was for me to go into his drawer, I held fast and spoke like a college freshman. “Dad, you’re upsetting me, wrongfully accusing me, and I advise you to stop because otherwise you’re going to feel bad and foolish in a few minutes!” Despite the surety and relative calm in my voice there was no listening, no consideration of this alternative possibility, no heeding of my warning. My mother had caught on to what was happening this time, and called up the stairs, “Stanley! Listen to what your daughter is saying!”

Omar Gordillo Soto

But he was not taking in the information. He almost never took in the information.

It was why he couldn’t know that I was not the sort to go snooping in his drawer or take his treasures. It was why he couldn’t know I had so achingly believed his gift was a special moment of initiation into the armchair adventure club. It was why he could not accept more than two seconds of a hug or engage in dialogue. It was why, when he eventually made his way once again to his drawer and found the keychain occupying its usual spot, he again did not express profound regret for having maligned me or having ignored my protestations.

I understood like I had never understood before. My father was passionate, vibrant, a storyteller, a dreamer, heroic in his own unflagging commitment to move forward, to provide for his family in a dangerous job that wore him down little by little… and I adored him. But I’d never get in. I’d never have the relationship with him that I truly wanted.

Twenty-four years later, on the day of the evening my father died, he lay still and silent on his bed, with closed eyes. I sat next to him. I caressed his face, able to do so for the first and last time in my life, and told him how much I loved him. Without knowing whether he could even hear me, I told him how I reenacted all his horseplay and recitations I so loved as a child with my own children, and would again with my grandchildren. I told him how he lived in me, in all of us. How I could always feel his love through the things he did for us, his constancy, and the way he beamed with pleasure and contentment for his family. How much he had always meant to me. I clasped his hand and kissed his forehead. Did I get in at that final moment? I will never know for sure, but it was my most undefended and truest offering nevertheless, for the man who had the biggest impact on my life, for good and bad, who offered me so much, and who I miss every single day.

Joe Velazquez

September 3, 2016
Atonement

Found at 2me4art.com

Over my life a particular memory visited me from time to time. Whenever it came, I always gave it its due attention. But it seemed to serve no purpose other than replaying a long ago hurt and, despite the gentler perspective granted with age and experience, always triggered the same painful mix of bio-chemicals that squirted forth when it actually happened so many years ago.

Of late, the memory began popping up more frequently.

At first, I wasn’t even wondering why. Then, when it finally dawned on me that the same episode was running again and again on my brain’s T.V. screen, I began to suspect that the constant replay was a demand to be noticed. Like a loud megaphone: Hey, dummy! Does this remind you of anything?

It was a time in my life when I was a real pain in the ass. Somewhere between the ages of 8 and 11, I was experiencing the fallout from being taken away from a life that worked for me. In that wonderful former life in the Bronx, my older sister Michele played with me more than she socialized with our eldest sister Renee. In that life, my best friend lived directly across the hall from me, and was available most of the time for companionship. In that life, my mother was home most of the time; and, when she did go out without me, I had the security of my best friend’s mom across the hall, or or my grandmother (who lived two floors below us) and never once felt alone. But in this new suburban life I was now in, I hadn’t made any real friends yet, my companionable sister had crossed over and was now a fellow traveler of our eldest sister, and my mother worked as a teacher. Little did I know that day when we were all so proud of her for graduating and huddled together, smiling for the camera to mark the occasion, that I should have been singing a dirge. For my mother of course did the next logical thing, which was to get a job as a teacher. Not that it affected me during school hours. But, after school, in place of my attentive, soft and patient mother, offering snacks and asking me about my day, there was a different mother. This one was stressed. A new teacher, preparing lessons for the next day. Working on her masters degree, and sometimes traveling into the city for evening classes, or spending yet more hours doing her assignments.

My father was also withdrawing. Not that he ever was the warm and cuddly type. He was a cop, and had to keep up his hard-boiled exterior. But when we lived in the Bronx, it was a few simple steps for him to come into the bedroom I shared with my sisters, to tell us some stories, make us laugh or sing to us. Now, we all inhabited our own separate rooms, up a flight of stairs, and my sisters were getting too old for that sort of thing anyway. And, too, he was facing his own wearying challenges. He was now commuting from the suburbs into a part of the Bronx that was getting scarier and more disassociated from that place where he grew up. The absence of any men who really could relate to him on any level in our upward striving suburban community, and the surreal and battering horror of traveling back and forth from dainty civilization to dystopia on a daily basis, caused him to retreat further into his world of books and pipe tobacco when he was home. And my sisters were off tittering about some shared secret knowledge or hanging out with their friends. I was no longer a cute diversion holding any interest for them, and my felt banishment filled me with resentment and longing.

From The Children’s Encyclopedia, by Arthur Mee. (London: The Education Company. Orig pub. as The Children’s Encyclopædia 1908), “Ideas” section, Volume I, p. 112.

The final loss, in a twisted turn of poor timing, I also was no longer my mother’s “warm little bundle.” This I learned when she started telling me all the time “Oh you used to be my warm little bundle!” As I was getting larger and losing what was left of my wide-eyed and sweet puppy features, it was not possible, had I even tried, to fool anyone into thinking I still needed slack for my hesitations and cluelessness. People expected me to get with the program, understand my responsibilities, stop expecting time made to soothe and redress my little hurts and disappointments.

One Sunday afternoon in particular I was sadder than usual. My sadness moved into broken-heartedness, and I felt strangely incapacitated, virtually listless. I became convinced that I had some sort of mysterious malady, which only a mother would understand, and certainly have the remedy for, if I could just muster up the energy to call for her, which I did. She was all the way downstairs, using up what free weekend time she had entertaining my Aunt Betty, and so I had to summon up quite a bit of energy for my call of “Mahhhhh-meeeeee!” to reach her. That I was in such a sorry state as to be required to use every last bit of my strength to make such an effort only made me that much more broken-hearted. Years later, I understood that what I wanted to see, what I ached to see, was my mother, coming up into the master bedroom (where my incapacitated little body lay), with a gentle reassuring face, soon to be stroking my hair and telling me that if only she could get ride of Aunt Betty she’d be there with me, taking care of me and making everything all right. What I got instead was a slightly exasperated mother, with firmly set lips, who was there to get to the bottom of why her then 9 year old thought she was incapable of walking down the stairs. When I told her that I wasn’t feeling well, she strode over, checked my forehead for heat and looked at me hard, trying to size up which reaction I deserved. I received the, “Well, just rest here and I’ll check on you later” response, which was far short of what I so desperately wanted. She went back down. I spent the next 15 to 20 minutes wondering what went wrong. Why didn’t I get the loving stroking of the hair and the reassurance that our bond remained intact despite all the demands on her time? And, convinced that I didn’t do a good enough job of conveying how broken-hearted I was, I decided as only a 9 year old can that the best way forward was to call her again, and this time really make sure she understood. Although this time I never got to say anything. As soon as I called out my even more plaintive “Mahhhhh-meeeeee!” I could hear Aunt Betty clucking her tongue about what a nuisance I was for my poor mother, and could almost see my mother’s face pained with exhaustion and embarrassment (for Aunt Betty made it clear always that she tolerated no such nonsense from her children). When she appeared at the bedroom door, having made the climb for the second time, someone even more removed from the mother I grieved for was there. I can’t remember what she said, but the words were irrelevant. Her angry expression and tone said it all. I was a burden, whiny, unreasonable and selfish. Something to deal with. Not a hurt little girl, her daughter, without words to express to her mother how alone she felt in her losses. In that moment, I understood fully and perhaps for the first time that my sweet childhood was truly over. I endured the moments of bitter reprimand that followed and said nothing more.

So why the increased frequency of replay? What was I hoping to find in that memory? As early as young adulthood, I had figured out that my mother was in an almost impossible situation, working full time, running our home and raising her girls all without much input or support from my father. I had already worked out that my father was steeling his soft and poetic nature every day for the work of a mercenary, patrolling an unsafe community that was no longer his own. I had already grown to understand that my sisters were just experiencing their own lives with all the complications and transitions that adolescence brings. I had nothing more to learn from that memory, or so I thought.

My own daughter, now 21, has had her own difficult journey. As the first born, she had no older sibling to shelter her when she first entered the world outside of her mother’s arms. She would return home from a difficult day at school to find me, formerly unflagging in my soothing attention, now preoccupied with her younger brother, or in the middle of house chores, or chafing against something gone wrong in my life that I hadn’t put to words or even understood but which only served to unnerve her all the more.

Dreamscape by wbsloan on Flickr

And at those times, when my daughter needed me, I’d deliver a sort of patched together, half-hearted exasperated offering of my own. Sometimes I even lost my patience with her, when all she really wanted was for me to scoop her up and tell her that she was loved, and special, and that I was glad to have her home. Instead, she knew that part of me wished she was still at school, so I could catch my breath, and have just that bit more peace, and maybe somehow get grounded back to who I was. When she came home from her own battles each day, she was greeted, not by the loving, tender mother she wanted, but by the same overwrought mother, with strained smile and limited patience, that I had greeted. The same mother who hoped to fix her daughter’s unhappiness by suggesting better ways to have handled something, as though that would stem the onslaught of painful experiences. The same mother who felt guilty and helpless whenever she witnessed her child’s pain, and never said the right thing. How is it that I determined to do things so differently from my mother, so that my children would not feel the same rejections and misunderstanding I had, but ended up failing so completely in that regard?

Brave and determined soul that she is, my daughter set herself to exorcising all causes for resentments from our relationship while she was still a teenager. After years of less effective confrontations, at 21 she finally developed the language to convey (and I finally refined my listening enough to receive) the simple truth that she had felt like a burden to me. She felt she was the problem child that made everything harder for me… for us. She confessed it to me one night, one night of wonderful, vulnerable, almost scary bonding and revelation. And there it was, at the ready, finally able to reveal why it had been plaguing me: that memory of my own mother, angry with me for needing her when she was barely hanging on herself, and resentful for not knowing how to fix it all, that aching in me and in herself. And I whispered to my darling daughter, “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry that I didn’t simply hold you and tell you I loved you, that everything would be okay. That all of it mattered, yes, but that none of it mattered now that you were in my arms.” How long would that have taken? Ten minutes? Ten minutes to soothe a child facing the world without her mother. A child without sheltering siblings and with no trusted friends yet. Why couldn’t I just have simply hugged her, without judgment or the desperate wish that all her problems, that she, the way she was, would just change into something else that would make my life easier? Instead, I contributed to a pattern that would haunt us for years: the lonely and misfit daughter and the overwhelmed, worried and ineffectual mother. I’d come to pick her up from a birthday party, with a dreading expression, expecting before being told that there had been some pain for her in the proceedings, some conflict that all the other children and moms couldn’t understand, or prevent, and wished would magically disappear; and instead of scooping her up and being on her side, I’d wish it would all disappear too. I wished she would just be easier. For my sake as well as hers.

So here is my atonement. To my daughter, for doing exactly what my own mother did, and what her mother did before her. For not wanting to acknowledge the legitimacy, the normalcy, and even the inevitability of the hurts a sensitive child feels when weaned from her mother’s side. For not wanting to explore my part in those hurts, making them worse by adding my own frustration, resentment, guilt and feelings of inadequacy as insult to injury. But my atonement also is to my mother. I atone for having judged her as not up to the task of understanding and comforting an angry, sad, lost child. It is a very difficult task, maybe impossible; I know that now. I atone for my high-handed thinking, when I became an adult, that I was big enough and wise enough to forgive her. There was nothing to forgive. She loved me, and my pain pained her. She was a wonderful, wonderful mother, all the more so in light of all she carried. I atone whole-heartedly, seeking her forgiveness for assessing her and finding her wanting, now understanding finally that all the love and best intentions, all the experiences and memories we swear we will bring to our own child-rearing, may not be enough to overcome the limitations and distortions hammered into us by whatever stressors and unspoken resentments are plaguing us at any given time in our adult lives.

The cycle of hurt between parent and child will continue, I suppose. I pray that my daughter will be able to break it should she have an unhappy child. And I hope in any event that my daughter too comes to understand that I loved her always, and that her pain pained me, and that I wish more than anything that I could redo some of those moments she remembers, bringing the perspective I have now, and taking the hurt away.

October 27, 2015
You Like Me!

People of a certain age may remember that moment in 1984 when Sally Field won an Oscar for her performance in Places in the Heart. In her acceptance speech she was overcome with emotion. Barely but beautifully managing to remain coherent, she expressed her profound happiness and amazement that despite not having had an “orthodox” career (after all, she was Gidget and The Flying Nun), and wanting so much to be respected as a serious actress, she was now being recognized as such. Or, as she more succinctly put it: “…I can’t deny the fact that you like me! Right now, you like me!!” Immediately there were jokes on late night comedy shows, teasing remarks in the media, sniggering banter among the general public, all indicting poor Sally for being so unabashedly preoccupied, apparently, with whether people liked and respected her acting. “How embarrassing! How neurotic! How nakedly needy!” went the chatter, and all nodded in agreement. It became something of a meme, pre-internet, and even resurfaced nine years later in The Mask, a bit altered but still clearly a grotesque homage to the original, when Jim Carrey’s Loki character suddenly receives an Oscar in the midst of his violent encounter with the bad guys. Carrey tearfully and vehemently grasps the statuette and sobs, “You love me! You really love me!”

Even at the time of Sally Field’s speech, I remember feeling a bit peeved by all the ridicule, mainly because it was Sally Field for godssake and who doesn’t love her? So what if she gushed something that sounded a bit too self-revelatory when she accepted her Oscar? It was an unbridled moment of shock, joy and gratitude. Who can be poised under those circumstances? Oh wait, we can. At least, that’s the myth, the standard, the expectation we all accept as gospel. No matter what, don’t reveal uncertainty, insecurity, or a care of any kind for what people think of you or how you are coming across, for that is weakness. And what do we do when we see weakness? Mock it, cluck our tongues, or thank god we haven’t displayed it ourselves. We align ourselves, so we imagine, with the strong, the confident, the unconcerned.

Now, however, on the back end of my presumed 100 years of life, I realize keenly that the myth is its own form of weakness. To be so comfortable in your own skin that you are truly unconcerned with how you come across, so that you neither avoid nor pretend away displays of uncertainty, doubt, or even idiocy is the sign of real confidence. It is the deniers, the mockers who are the poseurs. Their derision highlights their fear of being caught in the act of not being self-assured. The people who actually know me best may understand that this is certainly what I’d like to believe, anyway, for they know or at least suspect that I’ve been preoccupied for a good chunk of my life with how I come across to others. Huzzah! I’m free from it now. Finally and irreversibly free from that concern, but oh, how it plagued me! And I daresay it plagues a lot of people who never admit their affliction or even fully understand that they have it.

I knew I was preoccupied with the judgment of others from an early age; I kept my head down as much as possible. I was quiet with my peers, constantly scanning for whom it was I needed to avoid, or not antagonize, or win over if I were to evade being found out as the strange, uncool, uncertain creature that I was. My first taste of blissful freedom from this preoccupation came at age 12. It was then that I went to sleep away camp. It was a rough and bumpy first 3 weeks. What everyone chalked up to homesickness was actually misery and fear from being among peers who might brand me a loser. It was a misery I experienced all through 4^th, 5^th and 6^th grades, culminating in that summer at camp. I spent a good deal of time in the bunk of my 15 year old sister, sitting on her bed during free periods, learning macramé from the other girls in her bunk, or asking her to let me brush her hair (and surprisingly she did!). I never was so worshipful and doting and meek toward that particular sister as I was that summer, desperately subduing anything remotely pesky lest she banish me and I be cast adrift in the sea of my own bunkmates, all of whom seemed more self-assured, more popular, and more cool than I. Then, at the end of the third week, something extraordinary happened. I overheard two cute, adorable girls, whom everyone respected and admired, conversing about how nice I was! What happened was this: I was using the bathroom in the bunk when this girl Pam thought it would be funny to spy on me from above the divider. I was so surprised and mortified to have my private appointment with the toilet thus invaded, that I literally fell off the seat and cried out, resulting in a rush of girls to the scene. To my amazement, they started berating Pam for being so gross, so mean, so invasive, instead of laughing at me. In a dazed sort of aftershock from the whole affair, I wandered outside to the porch and sat down on a bench. Across the way were the two bunk darlings, Arlene and Mindy. I sat down just in time to hear Arlene say, “I really like Elisa, she’s so nice,” and Mindy answer, “Yeah, I really like her too, she’s so sweet.” They then looked up and saw me sitting there, and we all started laughing in sheepish embarrassment. Except I wasn’t just embarrassed. I was amazed, over the moon, astonished, delighted, so profoundly happy and confused. Could it be? These girls whose imprimatur of acceptance I could have only dreamed about actually enjoyed my presence? It was a seminal moment in my life. I transformed into a happy camper, literally, and proudly mixed in with my bunkmates as one of them. Camp became a place where I was free from the warfare of the cliques and popularity and meanness I witnessed back at elementary school, and it became so dear to me that I cried when it was time to leave. As I had been crying to my sister and my mother for the first 3 weeks about how I wanted to go home, this was somewhat perplexing to them, but nevertheless a huge relief for my mother who no doubt had been fluctuating between guilt and exasperation.

From that moment on the bunk porch, when I metaphorically clutched my own little award – I can’t deny, you like me! Right now, you LIKE me! – I developed greater ease, and a perspective on the wider world of social opportunity sufficiently broad enough to start looking for friends with whom I could connect. I stopped worrying about or trying to impress kids I really had nothing in common with and certainly didn’t genuinely respect. And in that effort I had wonderful success. I ended up having around me the most amazing authentic friends I could have hoped for. I was comfortable enough to be my goofy self. My more or less emotionally brave, honest, loyal, genuine, and caring self.

Then college happened, and once again I was thrown into a sea of young, uprooted and somewhat unsure and often posturing youth. My radar went back into primal overdrive. My information was distorted of course. I believed that everyone had someone to go to dinner with, everyone felt connected, everyone was cool, and everyone had a troupe from his or her freshman hall to rove with. Everyone, that is, except me. It never occurred to me that many others, if not most, had the same concerns of appearing easeful and smooth. And while, over the course of the four years, I slowly, slowly recovered from that setback and convinced myself I wasn’t the complete buffoon I feared, I never quite made it all the way back to that state of grace I found in high school among my dear, dear friends and family. And then, in a still somewhat overly self-editing and internally awkward state of mind, I unfortunately launched into law school and after that a corporate law firm (GAK!), a magnet for aggressive competitors and desperately posing associates who only know about half of what they pretend to know. Even the law partners, who must convince everyone and themselves that that are authorities, because verdicts or millions are at stake, know what they are doing only about two thirds of the time. I know this now, especially after having been married to one for a couple of decades. Not only that, I now understand that this is true of just about everybody. People can only do the best they can, and sometime they are doping it through like everyone else. (Except for blockheads who insist on things they know nothing about instead of actually opening up their minds and taking in information. Those jackasses only know what they are doing about a quarter of the time, if that.)

But back to my immersion in the larger adult world at the age of 25. In this toxic soup of competition, insecurity and posing, I floated. In a new city, far away from family and friends, I began the process of trying to swim, to find my authentic center all over again. Only this time, I didn’t make it anywhere near as far. Let’s just say I entered a prolonged period where I carried the fear of how I was coming across like a block of stone on my back. A fretful monitor in my brain carefully edited my choice of words in the nanoseconds before they came out of my mouth. It scrupulously screened my gestures and manners for anything remotely coarse, naïve, unworthy, insecure. I was consumed by insecurity over seeming insecure! I went over things that happened or that I said after the fact and shrank with mortification over how I could have been such a dolt. I met and married someone floating in that same toxic stew, and we moved to an affluent suburb of carefully practiced gentility, where we felt even more like poseurs. Where parents boasted about their genius children, and tried to appear nonchalant entering or living in huge country versions of mansions with extensive grounds. Where it was so easy to believe that everyone but you always remains assured, elegant and graceful, self-possessed in their movements and tone of voice, even behind closed doors.

What was it that freed me finally and irrevocably from all the dread and self-editing? Well, I do still edit myself somewhat, but these days my only filter is a desire to be kind. It took me until I was 52 to really, really understand that pretty much all of those overly self-assured people are full of shit, and that the truly, truly cool genuinely don’t care if they seem clueless, awkward, or temporarily needful. They are unembarrassed to seek approval or support. They know that everyone is unsure some of the time and it’s no big deal to admit it. I can’t be sure what it was that suddenly led me to open my eyes. To see and even hear the uncertainty and false bravado in so many people around me. To thrust off the expectations or standards of acquaintances and even friends who themselves are worried about the whispers and opinions of others. Maybe it was my utter exhaustion. Maybe it was the journey I went on to find out what it was I really cared about. Maybe it was watching my own children struggle with these same issues. I want them to know that the truly cool, ironically, are the very people who think nothing of proclaiming in moments of absolute joy and relief and gratitude, “You like me! And I’m so glad!!”

The final irony here is that once I was completely free from the worry of whether I was poised and likeable, whether I blended, I started putting others at ease. I started cracking more jokes, and making more honest or personal remarks. I started expressing my uncertainty about something in the most forthright way, and to my astonishment people responded with relief! With gratitude that I expressed something they also felt but didn’t want to admit! With unsolicited compliments about how natural, genuine and comfortable in my own skin I was! In short, they gave me awards, and in my mind I happily accepted them. You like me! You really like me! It was so freeing. So easy! I could be myself. And I wish I could tell her. I wish I could say, “Sally, you are my hero! You deserve an award! Not because you risked being so naked, but because you didn’t hesitate to consider it a risk at all.” If only I had understood way back then.

August 15, 2015
Melvin Beylis Died

I heard from my mother that Melvin Beylis died. I’m using fictitious names for privacy, so this man I remember with fondness is going to be named Melvin Beylis.   The last time I saw Melvin was close to 30 years ago, and, before that, was when I was a teenager. But my memories of him from that time, and indeed from my entire youth, are as vivid as the most intense memories can be. As vivid as memories are when they are of someone who epitomized a time and place for you. Melvin did that. He and his wife Myrna epitomized my life in the Bronx, in the 14 story building that seemed to my young eyes to tower above the shorter apartment buildings and townhouses lining Bronx Boulevard.

Melvin always had a glint in his eye and a warm chuckling smile for me. His voice was barrelly and resonant, though he didn’t talk much. But when he did speak, his accent sounded vaguely exotic to me, a deep rumbling of a way of speaking that was so comforting and familiar, yet foreign in some way. I think his slightly darker skin tone and saucer sized brown eyes added to this notion that he was exotic. I couldn’t know then that what I was hearing was simply a mellifluous Bronx accent. A more sing song version of the hard pronunciations surrounding me on all sides, but flowing out of Melvin with their edges just ever so smoothed off, and sprinkled with his one of a kind giggle. His dark, caramel giggle.

Melvin’s receding dark hair was slicked back with the natural hair oil most men allowed to accumulate back then, to the apparent approval, or at least with the toleration of their wives and girlfriends. He seemed big and tall, despite rounded, stooped shoulders, and enough extra weight and body hair to look a bit like a shuffling bear. Someone that you wanted to hug, especially when you saw that warm smile and heard that mirthful sound emanating through parted teeth. But my best friend, Laura, told me, by her face and body posture, that her father was not as warm as cuddly as he appeared. She seemed almost a little afraid of him, in a respectful way, the same way I felt about my own father. And so I didn’t hug him, or dissolve into unguarded affection, even though he seemed so inviting. And when I hung back, I could sense the affirmation from Melvin: yes, that’s the right distance.

I could also sense but not articulate the ways Melvin was different from my father, Bernie, who had a jauntier and harder edge – who seemed more “hard-boiled” – or how Myrna was different from my mother Shirley. Myrna’s hair was a difficult to describe warm brass color, somewhat poufy if not bouffant, and highly sprayed – the kind of hairstyle that gave you no clue as to the wearer’s age, and which she could carry, and indeed did, for the rest of her life. Myrna spoke as someone with not a shred, not a hint, of any self-doubt. Someone who owns a space as soon as she walks into it. Someone whose voice modulates from sarcasm to authority to sly wit, but never falters or softens. She conveyed a confident, unassailable assessment of the facts at all times, never a gentle questioning or exploration. In contrast, my mother Shirley was less apt to offer a viewpoint or perspective, and only did so to be sociable. She spoke with the same accent, and with some measure of steadiness, but next to Myrna she seemed more understated.  Indeed, her two steps forward one step back way of making herself understood seemed practically genteel, and a bit at odds with Bernie’s gruff but good-natured swagger.

It’s surprising to me to realize now that they all had the same Bronx accent. They all said “ar-right” instead of “all right” and “draww” instead of “drawer.” They all said, “prahhl-ly” instead of “probably” and “beeyoo-ti-fuhhl” instead of “beautiful.” But they all sounded so different from each other, anyway, merely from the added ingredient of their individual attitudes, their different handling of words and emphases. And perhaps because my own parents were too familiar to me, too much the norm, I never realized that they too spoke with the same dialect. The same rolling and pitching and dropping out letters and merging of syllables. The same accent I must have had, realize now I still have, when I’m spending long hours with my sisters and the conversation gets animated. If it weren’t for Melvin and Myrna, and the study of them that living across the hall allowed, if it weren’t for remembering their immutable and undeniable patterns and their warmth – for there was occasional warmth and mirth even in Myrna, behind the caustic surety – I might have never understood just how much I lost.

We moved away when I was 7, and though I remained friends with Laura for many years (our parents making it as easy as they could for us to see each other regularly and for sustained periods), in my new surroundings I began a process of transformation, a washing out, that led me to the wider world, but at a price. In Rockland County, an increasingly settled area known as “upstate” but only 30 minutes from the Bronx, I mixed with kids who spoke differently. Their parents were from other parts of the city, or from New Jersey, or even farther afield, and they didn’t have the hard r’s I did or say “dawwg.” Many of their parents were professionals or college educated, not like my father the cop or my mother who went back to school to become a teacher only after we were all in school full time, and these adults spoke with a loftiness and expansiveness that seemed like a softer music to me. I wished I had understood then that it was blander.   It wasn’t as lively, or, indeed as alive as the way Melvin and Myrna spoke. And, without even realizing it, I softened my edges. In my little 7 year old brain, then 8, then 9, and so on, I mimicked and strained out the harsh sounds in my words before they slipped from my mouth. I modified. I took two steps forward and one step back.

By the time I was living and working in Boston, my exposure to people from all over the country, first at college and then at law school, had ensured that I spoke, if still recognizably from the mid-atlantic states, not at all the way I did when I left the Bronx. Not at all even the way I did when I first arrived at college and met a boy who wrote home about his new girlfriend’s New York accent. More muting, more conforming, more blending, more sophistication I thought, did me the service of rendering me unidentifiable as a Bronx native. In most conversations with my sisters, ones I have with them when others are around and I’m not completely unguarded, I speak differently from them. I even triumphantly noted a time or two in the past that I have come to lose much of the accent they still possess. The one disturbing blip occurred when I worked in a New York law firm my second summer in law school. I had some trouble figuring out the right poised and measured responses to give to partners when they asked me to take on more work, and this led to a coaching session with the partner looking out for the summer associates. He began his helpful, patiently condescending advice with the apparently sympathetic phrase “I, like you, came from a lower, middle class background.” This he apparently discerned from my inadvertent occasional slip back into harder more “Bronxonian” speech patterns while living in the city that summer, since I never discussed my heritage or socio-economic background with anyone at the firm. I remember my ears burning with outrage and humiliation, even as I dismissed him as a wannabe, a poseur.

In my early adult life, I completely lost touch with Laura, and not just because I lived far away. I ensured the demise of that relationship, first having managed to make her feel increasingly bad whenever we got together by always pointing out all the ways in which our lives and styles had diverged, and then by becoming insufferably self-absorbed, as people who are actually insecure do. It is only now, thinking about Melvin’s large brown eyes and occasional baritone rumblings, and then Myrna’s brash and unflinching assertions, that I remember how I loved the patterns of my childhood. The charm of its familiarity and reliability.   At some point, just a few years ago, I came to understand that when I lost Laura’s friendship I lost something fine and rare, and that her giggling, no doubt a gift from her father, lit me up and made me smile, but it was too late. We had spent our entire adult lives apart, and there was no basis for friendship anymore. There was no longer any basis even 25 years ago, when I told her in an unwelcome phone call that I had heard she had stumbled on her way up the aisle at her wedding, a wedding I should have been at and indeed had been invited to. Far away as we were from each other even then, she could not have understood that I was not trying to point out her awkward moment with intent to diminish her, but was instead lamely trying to reach out, to tell her that I could well imagine her charming giggling at her misstep and the unspoiled and gorgeous and sweet, sweet joy of that moment I wished I could have seen, if only to remember all we shared as children. Even way back then, despite that vague awareness of what I had lost, and that fumbling attempt to reclaim it, I continued moving, if not entirely away from the cradle of the familiar, determinedly insensitive to it. This, I realize now, is a particular thread, a pattern, that repeats and repeats in my tapestry. A tapestry that consequently wasn’t as bold or as lively as I now wished it had been. As I now wish to weave it.

I think of how Melvin and Myrna represented the Bronx to me, how over the years they and Laura grew more cordial and less warm toward me on those occasions when I did see them, and, in Myrna’s case, true to her tell-it-like-it-is nature, barely cordial. And I find myself so very relieved to discover that those hard r’s and stretched out diphthongs are not completely gone, if only I relax and become completely unselfconscious, and that instead of taking one step back after my two steps forward, I can look around, giggle, and simply wonder aloud good-naturedly if I’m out too far.

March 31, 2015