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[Prefatory note: the Cat Stevens lyric might seem improbably hopeful given all the difficult stuff that follows, but it is precisely about hope: an acknowledgement of this new day, its being an occasion for real growth and song.]

I dreamt last night that there was something going on with my grandmother's health, and that as such I had made the trip back to Southwestern Virginia again, on my own.  In waking life, I have asked the nursing staff to keep me aprised of any new developments, independently of my mother, with whom I am my grandmother's co-conservator and co-guardian, and also with whom I am at a certain impasse - the kind which appears to be irreconcilable.  This has made the co-conservatorship and co-guardianship situation even more fraught with agonizing ambivalence than it otherwise would be.  As was reflected in the aforementioned dream, which found me first meeting with the nurses and visiting with my grandmother, and then in another room with my mother alone, bizarrely without my grandmother at all, but rather, working under the direction of my mother, changing sheets on the hospital beds, cleaning out bedpans, etc.  All the while I was struggling to figure out how we'd ended up there, together, when my aim had been to go back there without her.  (It was an interesting revelation for me, the last trip back there, made without my mother - unlike the two previous times, I'd felt comparitively at peace, happy even, in contrast with having my stomach perpetually in knots, walking on eggshells, doing everything imaginable to appease my mother, resulting sometimes in her conditional satisfaction with my existence, and at other times earning all the usual condemnations.)

The impasse of late had its origin in the fact that we'd had a plan for my mother to come out here, that we would go back there together again.  I went from working feverishly to coordinate the details  required to make such a trip happen, to entering a nearly catatonic, unresponsive and frozen state.  To be sure, there were specific, triggering moments that jump-started the freezing-process, but in the scheme of things these were immaterial: "tip of the iceberg" stuff.  All the while the dangerous mass beneath the proverbial surface was screaming to be acknowledged.

So I've spent much of the last month writing letter after letter to her, sending none of them because, upon re-reading them, I have understood they all contained the same central flaw: an unrealistic hope on my part - a very foolish investment - that it might actually be possible for me to reach her with any of my words.  That she would not, for example, simply extract from anything I might write certain sentences and individual words, and then (while also injecting some of her own sentences and words, and then attributing them to me) spit her unique renditions of those words back at me, in some characteristically vitriolic, condemning, holier-than-thou manner.

I'm deeply grieved about this, because it's forced me to confront the illusion I had been depending on: that we have this great, strong mother-daughter bond, etc.  In fact, that bond, for whatever innate strengths it might have, was irrevocably compromised a long time ago.  I did not speak to her whatsoever between September of 1993 and October of 1997, for reasons that are central to the After Poughkeepsie manuscript (and as such, would be impossible for me to render in abbreviated terms here).  When I did get in touch with her again, I wanted nothing more than to believe I could forgive her.  And I might have, had she ever acknowledged what it was that she had done to me in the first place: what had warranted the four years of silence.  But the dynamics of our newly "reconciled" interaction left me feeling even more burdened and poisoned by the earlier overt silence. 

Still I was stubborn, giving the reconcilliation effort my all.  I always got the feeling, though, that she considered things in a very different light: that I was the one who had wronged her, and that it was she who was being benevolent enough to permit our resuming the relationship. 

The only thing she's ever said to me about those years, that gave me any idea she'd really grieved for me, she said quite recently, and out of the blue: that she'd noticed, whenever walking in the woods, that every naturally occurring angle she saw - e.g., a branch growing out of a tree's trunk - was a "V," the first letter of my name.  That in that silence, for her, I was still everywhere.

I don't doubt that she grieved, but I have no reason to think, still, that she has ever - or will ever - take any responsibility for what she did that instigated that long silence.  (Like trying to get me locked up, for starters: convincing her friend, for example, to lie in statements to police that she had been my therapist and that I had expressed suicidal ideation, etc., when in fact that person had never been my therapist; she was merely a family friend, whom I had not actually spoken to directly in upwards of a year.  She could have - probably should have - lost her professional licensure for that, but my mother had convinced her that I'd gone nuts and so she was willing to perpetrate that fraud.)  In my mother's mind, I'm sure she still feels extremely righteous about everything she did at that time, to "save" me.  In fact, she put me in immediate danger of getting killed (not only of being deprived of my basic human liberties).  And in the aftermath, the very difficult and ultimately poisonous relationship I was in at the time, with Lee, was made that much more difficult for me to get out of.  Again, it would take the entire book's manuscript to explain, but the fact is that without my mother's and others' fraudulent interventions "on my behalf," my relationship with Lee would have ended years before it did.

It took me a few months after I was finally able to get out of the relationship with Lee to work up the nerve to contact my mother.  The four years of silence between us weren't exclusively owing to the manner in which she had betrayed me - it also had to do with the fact that Lee, not unreasonably, wouldn't have stood for it.  I re-established contact with my mother in 1997 as part of my process of separating from Lee. If I was going to on with not speaking to my mother, it would need to be for reasons other than Lee's conviction that such contact would be unwise. 

The relationship I've since had with my mother can be most accurately described as moments of benevolence and grace ribboned through with lies.  Remove the lies, and what is left?  Anything?  Time will tell.

Following, in any case, is the most recent draft.  Since this blog is no longer getting hits from her particular IP address, I'm considering, with some hope - for her benefit as well as mine - that she might never read this.  I don't want to hurt her, or be hurt by her.  I just want the hurting to stop (which, actually, is not the same thing as pretending the hurt never happened in the first place):

      April 16, 2006

Mother,

I’m going to challenge myself to keep this relatively brief, in contrast with various of my earlier letter-writing efforts over the last several weeks.  The first took all of one night and much of the next day, was written with great vulnerability and forgiveness, contextualizing (and effectively cushioning the impact of) various calmly related milestone events: those that have helped to construct the interaction between us, sometimes in such subtle ways that the flaws and poisons inherent in that construction have been largely invisible to us (but have been no less flawed and poisonous).  Upon re-reading that letter, however, I had the numbing realization that no matter what I attempted to communicate to you, or how I contextualized and qualified my observations, that it would still be misunderstood, misconstrued, and/or manipulated: my meanings filtered through your Matriarch-Messiah complex, with the resulting distortions communicated to my friends and family members as such. 

So the second letter-writing effort was written in reaction to that numbness.  Its goal was to render the facts briefly and in simple language, while establishing a clear boundary between the facts communicated, and what predictions any reasonable person might make, based on precedent, concerning the likely impacts.  But then, the second letter exceeded the arbitrary limit I’d set for its length (2 pages), so I started a third letter.  That one covered much of the same territory, and did fit the two-page limit, but it was just so… harsh.  Even when such harshness may be warranted, it is still not a tone I am accustomed to using with you.  So last night, I started a fourth letter (scuttled around 4:00 this a.m.); this, then, will be my fifth, and hopefully last, among in the series.  It may, in fact, retain the less desirable elements of many of its predecessors, from apparent excesses of either vulnerability or harshness, to challenges with either verbosity or, in some places, cryptic brevity, but it cannot be helped; I have to finish this now, and move on.

I have finally accepted this: the fact that I can write or say nearly anything, and you can later state, with persuasive arrogance, that I had really written or said, or at least meant, something else entirely. I remain grateful for this simple prayer which you instilled in me, even if you may never be pleased with the extent to which I have, with unfettered sincerity, applied its wisdom: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I recognize that I cannot change your impressions of me, any more than I could have prevented those impressions from forming in the first place, when I was a very young child.  You have always assigned to me qualities I have never possessed, most notably among them: deviousness and wanton sexuality. 

Perhaps have you selectively omitted from your memory many, if not all, of your hateful, vitriolic, baseless, and inappropriate comments made to me in this vein, but that does not mean you did not make them (much less, that this history has not continued to grossly distort our interaction). I consider, for instance, the time I called from college to tell you about a situation of ongoing statutory rape committed by your former lover, whom you’d assigned to be my de facto guardian while you left home for weeks at a time.  Our first “encounter” had consisted of his physically overpowering me, when I was drunk and had been leaning against a picnic table, staring over the ocean – following which I (following an already well-memorized script) assumed what had happened was my fault, and “allowed” it to continue until, thank God, I was able to leave Hawai‘i for good.  As was my habit, I had decided to relay this difficult information to you (while in the company of my supportive partner and roommates) with complete honesty, openness of spirit, and wholly irrational trust, and, as was already part of our entrenched pattern, I was crushed rather than embraced in response.  You screamed so loudly at me that they could hear every word: “Well, I remember when you were eight years old, and you had this hot little cunt that you wanted to get out all over the place….”  (And then I have to consider that you never apologized for those insanely cruel comments.  And then, that you continued to have a friendship with him, later suggesting, as I was approaching my fourth year at Evergreen, that you would bring him to my graduation.  Even if I hadn't run out of money and so been forced to drop out, that would have been reason enough for any reasonable person to avoid going through with the graduation rite.)

How you could have thought such twisted, hideous things about me, whether at seventeen or at the age of eight, is beyond me; I only know that it has always been this way with you.  About the photograph of me – four years old and naked, posed in the lap of one of your lovers, with me facing the camera, and him looking down my body, toward my crotch – you always described it (and the portrait you’d subsequently had made of it), both to me and others, as being so sultry, so seductive. 

In the year before his death – a few months before I could work up the nerve to contact you again, for the first time since September of 1993 – [my uncle] Billie said the most healing thing to me: that he had always hated that photograph, that it wasn’t right.  In retrospect, I am astonished that I ever considered your grossly sexualized impressions of me to be normal.  (Of course, my previous acceptance of this pattern had everything to do with being starved for any kind of attention from you.)  You had those ideas about me when I was younger than even my youngest daughter is now, and it turns my stomach.  Even as my first daughter is maturing, growing into her own sexuality (a natural evolution within her, which I would neither refuse to acknowledge, nor grossly exaggerate), I would never, for any reason, begin to entertain any of the hideous thoughts you had about me at that age, and prior.  Whatever it is you may have been taught about yourself, you did not have the right to confer such distortions to me; for my part, such perverted notions have never even entered my head, in order to have to confront any ridiculous question about whether I should pass on such distortions to my daughters.

Of course it has not only been with regard to matters of sexuality that you have, whether with conscious or subconscious cruelty, attributed hideous qualities to me. With the earnest re-application of the prayer in “God grant me the serenity…,” I have a deepened understanding of, and appreciation for, the fact that I do not now have, nor have I ever had, any power over what you think of me. I’m also not going to allow myself the false comfort of listening to you selectively: only when you say wonderful, apparently respectful things about me: when you are so effusive in your praises, stating and re-stating your love for me.  I have to take your comments (whether made in the past or the present, and whether made directly to me or behind my back) in their entirety. You do love me – I know this – but you also have such a deep-seated hatred and/or fear of me that it has always warped even the most substantive goodness between us; with you, “nurturance” has always been inextricable from the trace poisons that lace your otherwise loving acts.  Nothing about any individual interaction with you (even considering those that have been the most unambiguously cruel) would destroy me, but in bearing the cumulative weight of all those interactions, I have been significantly injured, with resulting impairments that cannot be shaken except through my acknowledging their sources.  It would be masochistic of me to continue in this manner (perhaps, then, “authenticating” your impressions of me as “masochistic.”) But, needless to say, “masochism” is not the example I wish to provide for my girls.

If, after all this, you claim to be at a complete loss to understand my silences, then it is likely they can’t be explained to you.  An honest examination of our history, should you dare to undertake it, would tell you everything you need to know, and then some.  Of course, such an unsparing examination would require a shift in focus: away from my life’s events (as you have catalogued and mythologized them), to your own words and actions over the years. 

Certainly, I will not hold my breath waiting you to summon that necessary will.  Nor will I enter into any arguments with you about this, no matter what illusory “rewards” might be offered (your approval, blessing, faith in me, unconditional love, etc.), and no matter what punishments might be threatened in retaliation for my continued withdrawal (e.g., your escalating the chronic pattern of your ridiculing me, distorting my words, conveying those distortions to others – as if shaming me would be an effective tactic in returning me to my earlier compliant state).  It stops here, whether or not you understand what it is that is being stopped.

I love you and always will, but you are, by far, the angriest person I know, who is also – inexorably, it has seemed – deluded about that very propensity, which you have been brilliant in disguising, through your appropriations of various veils, e.g. Quakerism: a philosophy which I doubt its wholly conscious, sincere practitioners would put to such cynical, self-serving and grandiose use.  (Note: I am not questioning the sincerity of your faith, but rather, your capacity for the full consciousness that would be required, in order to bring the full potential of that faith, in all its unfettered beauty, to fruition.)

I do not now, nor will I ever, close myself to the possibility that you might someday come to an uncompromised reckoning of the path by which we have arrived at this impasse.  Nor would I steel myself against my natural instincts toward forgiveness (once reconciliation has been made possible, by acts of authentic, humble, loving contrition have been made by the party whose forgiveness is under consideration: in this instance, you).  Stranger things, certainly, have happened.

But again, I won’t hold my breath.  My daughters need me to be (as I also need me to be) the whole person I have always been, apart from your fractured, unabated distortions.

Peace to you – 

Written to my former co-worker, with whom I have continued my friendship (in fits and starts more than with any sustained attention).  An interesting postscript to this entry: only a few hours after said friend replied, in kind, albeit brief terms to the correspondence that follows, I received a call from the Richmond field office of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with which I had initiated a process - in October! - of filing a complaint after my being terminated from my last job; the agent there wanted me to know there was still time for me to finish that process, and that I really should do it, given the nature of my case, about which I shall not elaborate here, at this time.  Suffice it to say that whether or not my situation requires me to produce "witnesses," the confluence of timing here has convinced me that I should in any event follow through with the complaint.  The letter follows:

"I want to write this with some haste, forbidding myself to re-read or edit: thus making good on two always-elusive goals: 1) actually sending stuff I've written to people I care about before whatever it is I had to say has already become irrelevant, cold to the touch, etc., and 2) not subjecting you to the usual floods that have typically offered the only available punctuation between my silences and sputtering efforts to speak.  (Hopefully I can make good on at least the first thing.  I'm not sure I'm even capable of making good on the second one.)

"What happens with me and anxiety, no matter what meds I'm on or not on, is that something provides a trigger and my heart obeys whatever instinct is called for by that trigger, and then I stay there: occupying the trigger-space, unable (usually for months at a time) to command any cognizance of that that trigger was: what placed me there. 

"And then, once I finally identify the moment of psychological derailment, it's generally too late for me make amends to anyone I've apparently blown off along the way.

"Please note (for whatever it's worth, which I'm inclined to think isn't much) that I wasn't always this way - or at least, I wasn't this way, to this grossly exaggerated degree.  The trigger --> panicked, numb limbo -- > 'aha, that's what triggered me' cycle was a lot shorter before I made the mistake of getting the job I thought would facilitate a great number of long-deferred educational and economic self-repairs.  While there, I signed onto a particularly cruel delusion that I was authentically respected in my position, blithely ignoring the numerous instances in which I was shit on by a broad variety of individuals (yourself being the especially remarkable exception who was certainly not trying to 'prove the rule').

"When I left there, I still had limited reserves of self-confidence, all of which were almost immediately exhausted as I began to comprehend the enormity of the humiliations I would have to subject myself to in order to do what the lawyer assured me would secure some modicum of justice (whatever the fuck 'justice' means), when he was immediately willing to represent me on a contingency basis because the circumstances were that immediately and obviously egregious, 'slam-dunk' worthy in other than the 'Iraq definitely has weapons of mass destruction' sense. I actually remember precisely where I was when it hit me: driving down Lakeside toward a doctor's appointment, talking on the phone with you.  I had been going over the bureaucratic paperwork I was then intending to file, and the forms required that I add the names of any witnesses to specific events, of which I already had a clear list enumerated.  At the time, you were still at [our former workplace] although you'd given notice, were on your way to [your new job], etc., and in our conversation I said something about how I wouldn't feel comfortable putting you in the awkward position of having to say whatever to whomever about the whole disgusting ordeal while you were still working for my own former supervisor.  And you said, I don't know what, something benign like thank you, and it hit me: it didn't really matter whether you were still there or not - my putting you in that position, having to answer whatever bureaucrat or lawyer's questions about stuff, felt ugly.

"Maybe it's because I still harbor a belief that I don't deserve justice, even when it's easily obtainable (for once).  I guess that's part of it.  But it's also because you were my only real friend there, the only person who never lied to me, never manipulated me, never used me, never behaved in a blithe and arrogant fashion whenever excessive demands produced the extremely predictable response of my being overwhelmed, never contradicted me when I assumed any state of overwhelm was entirely my own fault, never sabotaged my work (while simultaneously doubling, then quadrupling my workload) in retaliation for my standing up for myself for once. 

"My friendship with you has been the only piece of redemption I have been (at least until recently) able to excise from that humiliating morass.  Which is why I never filed that paperwork.  Hell, I couldn't even bring myself to deal with the unemployment people until around one month ago, when I'd run out of saleable books I could actually bear to part with, and had no other option.  The last damned thing I have wanted was to bring you any further down with any of this.  Which, when I've seen you, has meant vacillating between three modalities: 1) conversation that goes to enormous pains to avoid certain obvious subjects, largely concerning specific actions (both those already known to you and not) of a specific person with whom you still have some degree of a friendship; 2) conversation that attempts the first modality, but becomes diverted: pointing in both obvious and oblique to that proverbial living room elephant; and 3) silence.

"I am a very literal pain to be around.  (I should know, since I can't get away from me.)  You've had to hear enough of my shit.  You shouldn't have to hear any more.  Especially since I've regressed (even though my husband claims it's progressed) into some really biting and unsparing anger that I really can't seal tightly into some invisible, non-combustible place.  Which means that I rant, ache out loud, complain. I mean, sure, my complaints and snarky comments (I've renamed her Cricket* if that tells you anything) are entirely ineffective, and will never begin to facilitate any kind of comeuppance, but they're still abrasive, difficult, pathetic, embarrassing, burdensome, sad. 

"I'm afraid to see you, talk to you, write to you.  Because this is what will happen.  I'll complain.  Possibly even spurt multisyllabic, metaphorically intricate invective. I have wondered, sometimes, if the aforementioned insect belonging to the Gryllidae family* (okay, now I'm just being gratuitous) has, since my ouster, subjected you to her own bitch sessions about me, and then I think to myself, well, if she has, then that's certainly her right (you were friends with her long before you ever knew me, etc.) followed by and even so, I should be above that.  (Funny how I can internally, and fruitlessly, fight for any shred of dignity within a humiliating situation, when I could be fighting for much more than shreds; I could be fighting, for example, for Department of Labor sanctions, payment of my tuition which came due right as I got canned, etc.) 

"I am not always so 'high maintenance' to the people I care about.  But you've had the misfortune to know me in a context which has produced ongoing, raw agony for me which, on a variety of levels, you witnessed, which has resulted in my finding it impossible, for the time being, to fully dissociate you from an experience I can neither excise from my history, nor repair, nor forget - and my communications with you (sporadic as they have been), through no fault of yours, necessarily remind me of all that.  While I'd like to hope there might be a time - and soon - when that was not the case (let's say: we could get the kids together for a romp around Maymont, or just hang out on your lunch break, or whatever), but that's the way it is now, and pretending it has been otherwise hasn't made it otherwise. It's bad enough as it is; I don't want to exist as that ugly, alternately self-silencing and loquaciously grieving (not to mention selfish) bitch.  (In theory, this apparently 'purging' communication might serve as some kind of ephiphany-facilitating, productive trigger, but that's just a theory; if I promised, right now, that I could go forward even from this point as an All Healed Up person, I'd only be setting myself up for more embarrassment, and setting you up for further burden.) 

"The bottom line is, I couldn't bear to ask you to do anything more for me than you already have.  That was the trigger that shot through me on my way to the doctor's office that day. It's been an open wound all this time - my guilt - and pretending it wasn't there, or else that it was there, but it wasn't that bad, has only led to its infection.

"I'm trying very hard to deal with it, detoxify, recover.  I want very much, and with unceasing sincerity, to be your friend.  But I surely don't want to be your burden, in any sense of the word - bureaucratic, emotional, whatever.

"I hope very much that you and [your husband and baby] are well.  (Yes, I finally make some mention of you in here, about your welfare, and it falls in the last paltry paragraph of yet another unintentionally novella-esque selfish missive.  Great.) I miss you a great deal; I hope very much that you can believe that, despite my embarrassingly self-obsessed state.

"V."

*Note: the references here to "Cricket" and "the aforementioned insect belonging to the Gryllidae family" pertain to an incident in which my supervisor, evidently terrified of crickets, issued a series of blood-curdling screams when one such innocent creature appeared in her office. Despite the fact that she was in the process of trying to fire me, I came to her rescue, and, after considerable effort, captured the cricket. Alas, while I would have liked to have simply released the cricket into the parking lot, it would have been difficult for me to procced through either of the two sets of doors that were available to me as exits for our office - without dropping the cricket - and so, I am sad to say, the cricket was compelled to "move onto the next plane," as mourning Buddhists might say. Later, when the inevitable occured - my being canned - the wisdom of that old adage, about how it's bad luck to kill a Cricket, presented itself to me in a dream, and I woke up feeling incredibly ill.

Fucking karma.

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