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mallorys_cameraWhen I was very young – three or four years old – I had a series of… oh, visions I suppose is one word for them, the other term being dissociative fugues. It was a sensation of falling backwards that had a visual component attached to it, and that visual component was an image of myself in a series of endlessly reflecting mirrors. There was a question as well: why am I me?
I think my narrative propensities were born during these episodes. My whole life, I’ve been telling someone a story. I’ve just never known who that person was.
###
I refer jokingly to my dysfunctional childhood from time to time but of course that childhood was no joke. It had the full complement of Grand Guignol horrors, beatings with hangers, sexual abuse – I mean, I know absolutely how I got through it all: I am the reigning queen of dissociative affect, and that facility’s stood me in good stead. I’m Chance the Gardner in a middle aged woman’s body.
Anyway, one spectre of that childhood actually lives here in Ithaca – my mother’s sister Jane.
One of my very earliest memories involves being thrown repeatedly down the front steps of the ancestral Brooklyn home by Jane. Maybe I was four. “David is stupid!” I’d declared. David is her son. David was maybe two years old. In absolute rage she reached over and pushed me down the stairs. Okay, it was only maybe ten stone steps. Still. It hurt.
Crying hysterically, I got up at the bottom of the stairs, started climbing them again. Stared at Jane. Announced through gritted teeth: “David is stupid.”
She pushed me down again.
I don’t know how many times this got repeated. For all I know it’s still happening in a time loop off the main drag, inaccessible to puny humans whose neurons code for frequency rather than amplitude, and thus who have a very imprecise understanding of time.
Anyway, there is just a very long history of horrible interactions with Jane over the years, and when my mother died Jane began projecting her own highly ambivalent feelings about my mother on to me.
###
Jane is actually quite brilliant. For many years she was a Professor of English at Ithaca College, and ten years or so ago, I sat in on one of her classes, listened to her deconstructing this poem:
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it --
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet
She was amazing.
“Sheath-wet. Small waters. What are those waters doing? They're breaking. When do waters break? Can't you see how Roethe gives birth to the poem as he stares at the plant, how grafting becomes a metaphor for self-birth?” she begged the class.
They couldn’t.
Part of that, of course, was because she looked like a melting clown and had a tendency to spray spittle when she got really, really excited about things.
Moments later, she turned abusive. Began excoriating individual members of the class, kind of like Miss Jean Brodie on crack cocaine.
She retired three years ago. Ithaca College’s collective student body heaved a huge sigh of relief, and one can only imagine that most of her faculty colleagues did too: Jane had no use for contemporary literature, computers or cultural relativity. Roethke’s actually a modernist for her – and I think she’d prefer it if they’d declared a moratorium on novels after Dickens died.
###
Anyway, I was in no hurry to connect with Jane when I got to Ithaca. She was the mechanical laughing lady in the twisted funhouse of my early youth, and even though I’m close to 60 and she is – what? 80, now? – the archetype still has immense power over me.
But around May I thought, this is ridiculous, and called her up. Ended up seeing her twice. The giddy Blanche DuBois speedrap hadn’t changed, nor had her habit of pressing money on me – money I didn’t want because the payback is always charged sooner or later.
###
I had suggested we get together and go for a walk some afternoon, and she responded by beginning to leave me these long, rambling voicemails about jobs I did not want. I mean, yes, my practical situation is precarious at present, but I’m an adult, I’m not asking her for handouts, if she really had my best interests at heart, she’d know this was the wrong way to go about approaching me.
I never called her back and eventually the phone messages stopped.
Last week I was in basic take-care-of-business mode, and one of the items was Auntie Jane. I sat down and wrote her a note: shall we try this family connection thing again? I was very honest with her. I’m broken, I’m bruised and I’m in deep despair – words to that effect. I’ve lost everything I cared about, I’m trying to regain my footing, it’s a hard process at my age. What I need is affection, not long hectoring voicemails –
So yesterday, I get this letter back from her. A six page letter scrawled on yellow legal pad paper – I could only read the first paragraph before I dropped the letter on the floor. I literally felt as though I had been burned. This letter was so demonic and hate-filled, toxic really was the only word for it. This litany of all the money she’s given me over the years, and me – selfish bitch – not even giving her a thank you back, and how nobody else gave a fuck about me, only her and I was lucky she did –
The really odd thing about the letter was that after berating me for being a money-sucking narcissist, she enclosed a rather large check in the envelope.
I stared at it for a moment and then had my epiphany: she’s insane. I don’t mean eccentric family member insane, I mean really, clinically insane. Schizoaffective disorder would be my best guess – I’m not a diagnostician, but I play one on LJ.
I did not want to have her letter in the house poisoning the air, so I stuffed it and the check into an envelope, addressed it to her and included a Post-It: Please don’t ever contact me again.
I felt better almost immediately.
Here’s the thing about coming from such a highly dysfunctional family: by the time you’re 25, you’ve either killed yourself or made some kind of peace with it. I had actually cut off my mother’s family entirely before I had Max, but got back in touch with them after I gave birth because – well, he’s related to them too, he has the right to make his own decisions about the kinds of relationships he has with them.
But I think that’s it for me. No more Vogels. I've had a hard life as American lives go, but I'm not a flood victim in Pakistan, or an earthquake victim in Haiti, or a crack cocaine addict on Baltimore's mean streets. My life suffers in comparison with most of the people I know,but not in comparison with most of the people on the planet. I'm an orphan, it's a hard lot -- I'll just have to deal with it.
I think my narrative propensities were born during these episodes. My whole life, I’ve been telling someone a story. I’ve just never known who that person was.
I refer jokingly to my dysfunctional childhood from time to time but of course that childhood was no joke. It had the full complement of Grand Guignol horrors, beatings with hangers, sexual abuse – I mean, I know absolutely how I got through it all: I am the reigning queen of dissociative affect, and that facility’s stood me in good stead. I’m Chance the Gardner in a middle aged woman’s body.
Anyway, one spectre of that childhood actually lives here in Ithaca – my mother’s sister Jane.
One of my very earliest memories involves being thrown repeatedly down the front steps of the ancestral Brooklyn home by Jane. Maybe I was four. “David is stupid!” I’d declared. David is her son. David was maybe two years old. In absolute rage she reached over and pushed me down the stairs. Okay, it was only maybe ten stone steps. Still. It hurt.
Crying hysterically, I got up at the bottom of the stairs, started climbing them again. Stared at Jane. Announced through gritted teeth: “David is stupid.”
She pushed me down again.
I don’t know how many times this got repeated. For all I know it’s still happening in a time loop off the main drag, inaccessible to puny humans whose neurons code for frequency rather than amplitude, and thus who have a very imprecise understanding of time.
Anyway, there is just a very long history of horrible interactions with Jane over the years, and when my mother died Jane began projecting her own highly ambivalent feelings about my mother on to me.
Jane is actually quite brilliant. For many years she was a Professor of English at Ithaca College, and ten years or so ago, I sat in on one of her classes, listened to her deconstructing this poem:
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it --
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet
She was amazing.
“Sheath-wet. Small waters. What are those waters doing? They're breaking. When do waters break? Can't you see how Roethe gives birth to the poem as he stares at the plant, how grafting becomes a metaphor for self-birth?” she begged the class.
They couldn’t.
Part of that, of course, was because she looked like a melting clown and had a tendency to spray spittle when she got really, really excited about things.
Moments later, she turned abusive. Began excoriating individual members of the class, kind of like Miss Jean Brodie on crack cocaine.
She retired three years ago. Ithaca College’s collective student body heaved a huge sigh of relief, and one can only imagine that most of her faculty colleagues did too: Jane had no use for contemporary literature, computers or cultural relativity. Roethke’s actually a modernist for her – and I think she’d prefer it if they’d declared a moratorium on novels after Dickens died.
Anyway, I was in no hurry to connect with Jane when I got to Ithaca. She was the mechanical laughing lady in the twisted funhouse of my early youth, and even though I’m close to 60 and she is – what? 80, now? – the archetype still has immense power over me.
But around May I thought, this is ridiculous, and called her up. Ended up seeing her twice. The giddy Blanche DuBois speedrap hadn’t changed, nor had her habit of pressing money on me – money I didn’t want because the payback is always charged sooner or later.
I had suggested we get together and go for a walk some afternoon, and she responded by beginning to leave me these long, rambling voicemails about jobs I did not want. I mean, yes, my practical situation is precarious at present, but I’m an adult, I’m not asking her for handouts, if she really had my best interests at heart, she’d know this was the wrong way to go about approaching me.
I never called her back and eventually the phone messages stopped.
Last week I was in basic take-care-of-business mode, and one of the items was Auntie Jane. I sat down and wrote her a note: shall we try this family connection thing again? I was very honest with her. I’m broken, I’m bruised and I’m in deep despair – words to that effect. I’ve lost everything I cared about, I’m trying to regain my footing, it’s a hard process at my age. What I need is affection, not long hectoring voicemails –
So yesterday, I get this letter back from her. A six page letter scrawled on yellow legal pad paper – I could only read the first paragraph before I dropped the letter on the floor. I literally felt as though I had been burned. This letter was so demonic and hate-filled, toxic really was the only word for it. This litany of all the money she’s given me over the years, and me – selfish bitch – not even giving her a thank you back, and how nobody else gave a fuck about me, only her and I was lucky she did –
The really odd thing about the letter was that after berating me for being a money-sucking narcissist, she enclosed a rather large check in the envelope.
I stared at it for a moment and then had my epiphany: she’s insane. I don’t mean eccentric family member insane, I mean really, clinically insane. Schizoaffective disorder would be my best guess – I’m not a diagnostician, but I play one on LJ.
I did not want to have her letter in the house poisoning the air, so I stuffed it and the check into an envelope, addressed it to her and included a Post-It: Please don’t ever contact me again.
I felt better almost immediately.
Here’s the thing about coming from such a highly dysfunctional family: by the time you’re 25, you’ve either killed yourself or made some kind of peace with it. I had actually cut off my mother’s family entirely before I had Max, but got back in touch with them after I gave birth because – well, he’s related to them too, he has the right to make his own decisions about the kinds of relationships he has with them.
But I think that’s it for me. No more Vogels. I've had a hard life as American lives go, but I'm not a flood victim in Pakistan, or an earthquake victim in Haiti, or a crack cocaine addict on Baltimore's mean streets. My life suffers in comparison with most of the people I know,but not in comparison with most of the people on the planet. I'm an orphan, it's a hard lot -- I'll just have to deal with it.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 02:02 pm (UTC)I'm as greedy as anyone else. But you know, that money was cursed. There's no way I could have accepted it and stayed psychically safe.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 02:44 pm (UTC)*rummaging for contact info*
http://anais-pf.livejournal.com/652619.html?thread=2333259#t2333259
John posted a photo of her in the comments. Just click through to her website and either call or write to her. She's very nice and not at all scary.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-27 05:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-27 10:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 02:17 pm (UTC)I feel grateful that my immediate family has been relatively sane and not inclined toward high drama. However, because I have a large extended family, i.e. many uncles and aunts, most now dead from old age, there were at least a few among them who were bonkers, and I'm glad to have not been close to any of them.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 02:38 pm (UTC)Sane people are a blessing (as yr recent misadventures w/yr co-tenant can attest!) I intend to surround myself wht them from this point on.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 03:26 pm (UTC)You are being too kind: I know I used the word "anyway" like 45 times in that entry.
Processing this stuff through writing is what keeps me sane. And of course I have less to protect than you might which means self-disclosure is not as risky for me as it might be for you.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 03:24 pm (UTC)Amen, sister! That's the truth.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 04:50 pm (UTC)You made a good choice.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 10:13 pm (UTC)I think so too. When I stuck her letter in the mailbox, I felt a great darkness lifting.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 06:03 pm (UTC)Wow! Just wow!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 08:32 pm (UTC)i can relate very much to the pushing down the stairs. there's a club for people who have one of those loops running.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 10:08 pm (UTC)Now you know why I keep telling you to cut yr family off for a while. :-)
no subject
Date: 2010-08-26 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-26 09:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-28 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 10:52 am (UTC)Yeah, LJ is kind of a ghost town these days.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 04:47 am (UTC)i think you mean roethke, right? not a big fan, personally. he's no auden. that poem is clumsy and obvious. "sheath-wet" and "slippery as a fish" ... oh lord.
do take care.
(cash the check next time. :-) )
no subject
Date: 2010-08-29 10:51 am (UTC)Auden's one of my very favorite poets.