THE MEMOIR NOTES #2 : A Portal In A Picture
The attempt at a confident slouch of his hips. The childlike way she holds her thumb. The shadows. Clues to a time I desperately want to understand.
Hi, Friend! Thanks for joining me here again today.
The Memoir Notes is a series of real-time notes inside Heart’s Content documenting my process as I write my memoir. I share story drafts with my private community in each month’s intimate, bonus newsletter for paid subscribers. Subscribe here if you want to follow along and read what I’m writing and have a chat about it.
Welcome to our new subscribers and a special thank you to those who have upgraded your subscription to paid! Your support and encouragement keep my fingers tapping away on this keyboard. THANK YOU!
Let’s get into it.
Current Writing Focus: My Young Parents
Meet my parents. They were babies. Mom was only 15 years old. Dad was 19. I’m pretty sure that this snapshot was taken right before they drove over the state line from Louisiana to Texas to elope in May of 1959.
I cannot stop staring at this photo. I am hungry for every detail. My young parents with their lean figures and sweet, fresh faces. Their innocence. The attempt at a confident slouch of his hips. The childlike way she holds her thumb. The crispness of her dress. The shadows on the grass. The shadows. Clues to a time I desperately want to understand.
I have a confession to make and you may as well know it upfront. I am fairly obsessed with trying to understand what happened to my mother and why her life unfolded as it did. It is clear that I cannot comprehend what happened to me without better understanding what happened to her.
I always knew that my parents had run away to get married, but that was about all I knew. Once I was old enough to consider their reason for eloping, my only question as a 14-year-old was whether or not she was pregnant at the time. She wasn’t. But she was young and they knew her parents wouldn’t approve. They were right.
Recently, I texted a copy of this photo to my now 84-year-old dad who still lives in Louisiana. “ I’ve never seen that picture! Where’d you get it? “ He loved it as much as I did. I told him I’d found it with some other old black and whites mixed in with our family photos. Likely it was part of the photos I inherited from my maternal grandparents. He told me he thinks it was taken by his sister, Mary, who likely wanted to ensure that they had a photo to remember their wedding day.
He shared his recollections of that eventful day and filled in some details I’d never known. It turned out to be a great story. I’d love to hear my mother’s feelings and memories about that day, but since she is deceased, I must rely on intuition, imagination, and inspiration for her perspective.
I have so many questions about that time in her life. I wish I could talk to her about it now. (I do, in my own way.) It’s a sentiment that I hear echoed again and again from my girlfriends, “I wish my ______ ( mother, grandmother, aunt, sister) was still alive. I wish I’d thought to ask her these questions then. What I wouldn’t give to talk to her now that I am older and have more perspective. I wish I had known what she was going through. I wish I knew what really happened.” And on and on the questions go.
While it shouldn’t have come as surprise to me, it’s clear that my inner guidance is urging me to look more closely at my parents' lives from a new perspective.
Theirs.
Most of us have only a rudimentary understanding of the events that shaped the lives of our parents if our parents were even willing to talk about those events. Mine mostly weren’t. Ours was a family of well-guarded secrets and misdirection. Although now, with decades of distance, my dad is open to discussing many of those events with me. And to be fair, I didn’t ask my parents much about their lives back then. I was trying to make my way through a dense jungle thicket of my own.
For those of us who lived with a parent with mental health issues and whose pain spilled over onto us, our work is already cut out for us in dealing with our own childhood trauma. It can leave us with little room- or quite frankly, desire - to examine theirs. So the proposition of considering their perspective can feel like a big ask at times. But to do this healing work, we must.
It helps to know, even if just intellectually at first, that they received their own “painful bundle” from their parents, who received it from their parents, and back it goes ad infinitum through all our ancestral lines. A seemingly endless line of people who were unable and unsupported to heal their generational trauma, so they cannot help but pass it forward. To us. There we all stand, as innocent children, accepting a bundle we cannot comprehend.
If there is a common quest among memoir writers, it is likely this - to try to understand what the hell happened back then and why.
This work isn’t for the faint of heart. The “can of worms” we open can be a squiggly untamed mess. And so is the process of our grief. There is no avoiding revisiting the hurts of my history. The old feelings can come rushing forward at times from the smallest of nudges. But thankfully, I have built a storehouse of resiliency over the years and I have a community of support to face them. And yet, equally unavoidable and often just as surprising, is the experience of being suddenly overtaken with compassion for my mother’s plight. All I want in those moments is to offer her love, and “ to ease her pain.” Hat tip to Field Of Dreams.
The grieving. The unfolding waves of compassion. They are like two sides of a coin. You flip the coin into the air and you take what you get. Heads or Tails? Both are necessary. Both heal us forward.
I am on a quest that is not entirely of my own making and I know it. I feel the guidance of Spirit and I feel my mother and maternal grandparents near. They have made their presence and support known to me. They are cheering me on. We are finding our way and stumbling along.
Often the process starts with just a glimmer of a memory or a feeling.
Or a question that arises quietly from a deeper part of myself.
Or a dream offering.
Or I find a portal through a photograph.
3 THINGS WORTH SHARING:
Ready to make steady progress on a project? Jerry Seinfeld and The power of the Big Red X. This simple “Seinfeld Strategy” can help both your creativity and productivity. Full Article here.
“He told me to get a big wall calendar … and a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. Your only job is to not break the chain…You'll notice that Seinfeld didn't say a single thing about results. It didn’t matter if he was motivated or not. It didn’t matter if he was writing great jokes or not. It didn't matter if what he was working on would ever make it into a show. All that mattered was “not breaking the chain.”
My friend Linda loves to sew and gift her sewing to others. She is now participating in this “random act of kindness “ sewing project: I FOUND A QUILTED HEART PROJECT. The IFAQH community of volunteers place small quilted hearts around the globe to brighten the day of a stranger. Isn’t this a sweet idea?
My friend Emily joined me in my Hip Hop class last week. You can tell by our smiles how much fun we shared! This is one of those beautiful relationships that began as Mentor/Mentee and has become a multi-dimensional friendship over the years as we continue to “mentor” each other. Friendship is one of the most profound gifts we ever receive, don’t you agree?
OUR COMMUNITY CARE DONATIONS FOR APRIL:
A portion of this month’s paid subscriptions will be donated to: SIERRA’S RACE AGAINST MENINGITIS. Thank you!
WANT TO READ WHAT I’M WRITING?
»> Come on in! You can subscribe here if you want to follow along with what I’m writing and get a true sneak peek behind the curtain.
Thank you for reading!
I hope you found some support for practicing more compassion and empathy in your own life.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
xo Mary
