ma - the essay / pa - a sonnet

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” - Oscar Wilde

I had decided on the subject of this essay as i woke, including the quote above. Just prior to writing, i received an email from my sister. She wants to arrange possession of a family heirloom for her son; that he didn’t invite me to his wedding still smarts; that he wouldn’t arrange his own acquisition is sad; the fact that she will provide movers to pick up and deliver is curious. Without information, i can only experience my feeling, which is toward a sibling who wants to take something from me without the courtesy of looking in my eyes. After one Thanksgiving dinner at a Joshua Tree home - a home which said sister subsequently procured from ma without any family discussion, save that between her and ma, i was preparing a plate of food to bring to Iceberg Slim’s daughter who i worked with in a Los Angeles brokerage office. My sister not so surreptitiously complained to ma, as though i was taking food out of my sister’s mouth. Ma rejected this objection - sadly i fear for the sole purpose of smoothing the way por moi avec un petite femme. However it may have been at just that instant my concept of ma began to deepen. Not because it might have been pity motivating her (fuck that), but for demonstrating an equity from her of which i’ve not seen enough. Ma has always been hard nosed with good reason. She raised four strong personalities during the fractious 60’s and loosed herself from what she had come to believe as a flawed marriage not in her best interest. Ma has always held her interests in high esteem, which in the era of June Cleaver, Father Knows Best and the Donna Reed Show had been more than confusing. Somehow ma and her finely tuned antennae had anticipated Gloria Steinem (CIA operative) and the real need for a review of modern gender roles. Ma saw opportunity in these shifting social dynamics to better her station and to that end, sacrificed much, though not without paying through the nose. She took on a grueling 10 year tenure as a middle school art teacher, which allowed me to leave home at age 15 (read as door locks changed). Her work included 5 periods of 50 pupils from Newport Beach, CA - the most privileged children in the country. It was, as i imagine now, as close to hell on earth as one might want to find.

The gamble was worth it, for she was delivered by the universe into a loving union with the CEO of an insurance brokerage firm - she had arrived in nirvana. At least as close to nirvana a woman could grapple with who spent her adolescent summers with her father, an itinerant miner in a dirt floor house to a service station he ran in the desert of Nevada circa 1940’s. I am sitting here trying to sift through conflicting emotions in an effort to understand this woman free of personal hurt and reservations one might learn as a boy going toe-to-toe with an understandably enraged self-actualizing adult. While she was teaching, i was just one other prong on the fork - a confused man-child. I feel great compassion for her through the lens of my own pain looking into the telescope of time. She had the gall to buck a system that was just then beginning to show the signs of the collapse which now surrounds us; that her early depravation seems to have informed her struggle more than any other factor is simply unfortunate for the world, for she was, and remains an incredibly intelligent, skilled and resourceful woman in a world of great need for such qualities. To see her today trapped in her gilded cage, under the protection of the eldest son. What figures more importantly for me is the effort to understand the flaws of my mother in terms of envy she expresses regarding my father. She had been duty-bound to disparage him for nearly the full of her post divorce life, lest her escape into abundance be noted by anyone as anything less than serendipity. I find common cause and commiserate her confusion at having gotten all she ostensibly asked for only to find emptiness, and still my admiration for her grows. All of the protections she had put in place to protect her from the elements, from me, from poverty, from all that was to blame for any misery in her life have only become mirrors reflecting the mirage of her own fears - a cage trapping her.

But the imprisonment of age has not daunted her, if anything it has provided her a sanctuary in which to plumb her own depths somewhat free of the vanities of beauty, though still shrouded in the trappings of wealth - glitter for those who remain yoked to such illusions. There is no question that my own reservations about wealth and power may be little more than envy - reaction formation of one shoved aside by family-order and greed; that my fascination for beautiful women could be the cloying residue of a rebuked younger brother; twisted yearning of a motherless child; or it may just be really neat to admire beauty through the viscera of art; i wish it were that simple, especially for my mother and sister. Ma has never given up hope i might improve even helping me to mitigate my intransigence - a character flaw i could do well without, but then that admonition comes from a woman who demanded that my siblings, or anyone for that matter, share her opinion regarding my stubbornness, or any opinion of hers for that matter - in a quietly intransigent manner; ironically it is likely her perseverance which i modeled. What is more troubling and difficult to distinguish is the role of disparagement in her world view. Her own father, my namesake, was largely absent from her life, though her mother made the very progressive decision for them to spend time together. Her mother a genteel southern belle married grandpa the much older miner, and then with three children in tow and few prospects on the horizon bailed for the greener pastures of life with my maiden aunt - the well-to-do career civil servant who had a dim view of my grandfather the “rough cobb” yankee. The further i remove myself from family, the more i subscribe to intergenerational pathology, which if true is remarkably encouraging, as well as damming in its mechanics. For example, were my failing to be merely intransigence, self loathing would not have become my demon to befriend in grudging admiration in order to become free. As i picture my siblings, they have been encouraged to see their strengths contrasted against my manifold faults, or illusionary exalted power depending on which side of the bed one rises - vice versa. The confusion of such exaggerated capacity or defects about anyone, impairs the ability to peer more deeply into cherished convictions about one’s own conceit.

In my family, if it doesn’t square with the party line, personal expression is a verboten behavior. So like all myopic writers expressing eternal truths, i resort to impulse power - the harder they come, the harder they fall; or in this case the more you want me to shut up, the more i want to say. When all of ma’s self-made turbulence manifested in a collapse at her teaching position, i returned home from school as the medics were leaving; after some hours of knowing little more than ma had collapsed, my sister came out of the closed room and walking down the darkened hall telling me, “well I hope you’re happy now.” Ma’s collapse was not my fault then, nor is harm to her my doing now - my solitary dialogue with this demon of destruction does not bode well for me, my siblings or our collective awareness; i hear now the cousin demon of self loathing clenching at my gut screaming - let me out, let me out, and all i can do is reassure these kindly internal monsters they have not committed mayhem, and would they please come up with something more constructive than “y’all are fucks”. The people i’m describing are not evil, they are my family. I am, we, are not guilty of anything more than being confused humans doing their best. During this tumultuous growing up time, ma was adamant that psychology would verify all she felt and went to great lengths to confirm her suspicions - not terribly different than this sanctimonious diatribe ostensibly written for the purpose of honoring a complex relationship with a parent. It is the hazy outlines of awkward moments coming into focus which keep me plugging toward a deeper understanding of ma’s being and the prism of light that is her family; for example there is a startled look in her eye after an embrace when i have asked “why does it feel like you are pushing me away when we hug¿” It is the difficult questions i ask, and which she accepts after a fashion, that give me heart, for without the ability to bring to fruition the integration of one’s feeling, what good are sensibilities?

Ma has come to accept that i will not accede to a delusional deconstruction of family, so when she bemoans the standoff my siblings and i enjoy by waxing nostalgic - “my family never had this kind of .  . . “ as a good son i feel honor bound to gently point out that she did not speak to her sister for 20 years. I’m altogether too certain it is the instinct of my siblings to attribute anything but kindness to such a remark. I believe they use their convictions about me as justification for feelings they have chosen. I’m struggling for a different approach - ma is not a saint - a magnificent powerful woman, but no saint, anymore than i am as you can read in this scandalous expose. From this, i accept that i will never get all that i want or ask for from ma, much less, family or the world, but more importantly, if i am to learn how to love, it must be based on what is, not for some state of things to be. I have learned something; i can love ma. This one lesson in life thus far is worth more to me than anything i’ve learned. What i have found from this decision, is a woman of vast worth who is sitting beached by an unkindness of her own making. At a time in her life when she could be honing all the extraordinary skills she has gained tooth and nail during a long exciting existence, she sits weighted by some erroneous delusion that either her favorites are exalted without flaw, or she failed in some way; her children have failed, or her housekeeper is .  . .  Her sensibilities are delicate, and she has imparted much to each of us which: but great sensitivity is an odious condition without a free and open embrace of all it can achieve - good and bad. Sensitivity can be confused with reality; reality is flawed, it is intractable, relentless in its slog toward eternity. Sensitivity is dynamic, it can become an urge to quiet an infant’s discomfort, or provide the safe feeling of truth in the midst of lies, or even demand love toward siblings whose behavior doesn’t meet one’s high standards of excellence. Sensitivity can lead one to understanding or plunge one to the depths of delusion, whereas strength most often results in exhaustion. I hope as ma fades toward her destiny that she feels the understanding which her strength has encouraged me to learn and allowed her daughter to achieve.

post script: to anyone reading this as an indictment of people i know to be doing their best and who are not present to defend themselves - the fault is my own for not being more clear that the struggle i’ve attempted to describe herein is love and nothing more.

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pa - a sonnet

pa was a poet of finer meaning

than found in most amateur poetry.

he’d call bullshit like a judge in hearing-

heard enough times, you’d know what’s up a tree.

his feelings were deep and not always clear

so reading his soul was more than a treat,

it was a channel to one you held dear.

dumb luck he was left alone with just feet.

lines did not fill him enough in the end

the measure of his steps walked off the page.

but like some minstrel of yore; he’d just bend,

that, or i could not read his change of age.

matters not; what does - is you’ve read one more.
poetry for him was just life at the core.

jts 053017

http://stoneartist.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved