My Blue Gardenia

It’s been hard to write…a struggle between wanting to dig further, and wanting to just let my grandmother rest in peace. I think of my mother,  and I know that she wants to just move forward and stop looking back, but as soon as I begin to think that she’s right, I read something else in the diaries and I know that Deenie’s story needs to be told. And I think that, maybe, we all owe it to her somehow, to let her live on in this way, and to learn, from the story, what she wasn’t able to teach us in life.

Yesterday, I met Aunt Sadie for coffee. We used to spend so much time together when I was little…but now I am busy with my family, and she with her adventures. I really needed someone to talk with about Deenie’s diaries. Sadie’s read them all, trying to find the mother who was only ever a ghost to her. She was a little girl when Deenie died, but of all three of Deenie’s daughters, she is the most like her. It was born in her, and travels in her blood. We know this because no one spoke much of her mother for years after she died. But having grown up the center of a loving family, she isn’t lost the way Deenie was lost. She seems to have all the good of her, and none of the bad. She’s brave, spirited, and not afraid of her wildness. She knows her own mind. She grew up with a ghost for a Mama, a father who adored her, but was often too sad to be what she needed, and two older sisters, who protected her at all costs.

My mother, Sarah, the oldest, held Sadie like a china doll. She was convinced that if she didn’t drop her, someone would bump into her, or something might even fall out of the sky and knock her from her arms. She organized their lives into an order that she could control, because her life was so out of control for so long, or maybe because no one else, not even her parents, ever really stepped into this role. This particular aspect of Sarah’s care always made Sadie crazy. (And boy, can I relate!) When someone arranges your life for you, and forbids you to step outside of the neat and tidy box that they created for you, the implicit message is that you can’t do anything on your own, and sometimes, you even begin to believe that is the truth, until you realize the difference between fear and truth.

Auntie Anna, the middle sister, always understood Sadie, but tried to protect her as well. She was stuck somewhere in between the two sisters, in between Deenie as her mama and a ghost. Anna told me that she thought that my mother was once a lot like Deenie as well, but it terrified her, so that whenever she felt it rise inside her, she pushed it down with the weight of her will and went on as if it didn’t exist. Now that my mother is older, either her will has weakened, or she is less afraid, because I see Deenie in her more often.

I don’t think that her will has weakened.

No one really knew what Sadie could and would do once she got out of the neat and tidy box. Even before Deenie died, she was a wild little girl. But there is a particular trauma that comes with losing your mother so early, and the fear and coddling of her older sisters stunted her wild nature, but only temporarily. Today she travels with what the day brings, its a coping method really, and probably why she escaped this whole thing more intact than any of the others.

Like a baby navigating the world, every time Deenie reached for something, her mother  jumped up to intervene. Her mother was afraid of everything, and had reason to be. In her experience, there were many things that could hurt you, and many ways to make everything fall apart. So she protected her child, and she protected herself, because the way that her dreamy daughter talked, from a very young age, shook her mother’s world in a way that made her uncomfortable.

She never let Deenie dream too much, or reach too high. When Deenie talked about college, she told her to be practical and think instead of a husband. When Deenie and her husband talked about traveling, her mother talked about disease. When Deenie had children and talked about a quiet life in the country, she talked about needing doctors and hospitals, and family nearby.

And when Deenie asked about her father, she told her that she was better off without him …that he would trick her into thinking that she was loved, and then hurt her. She told Deenie that it was best to close that door and forget about him.

Neither of them ever spoke about him again, but neither of them would ever forget about him.

And to Deenie, behind every word was “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You haven’t thought this through.”

“You’re not smart enough. You’re not strong enough. You can’t handle this.“

With her best intentions, she squashed and suffocated every dream her daughter ever had, until her daughter forgot how to dream.

I abhor dishonesty…in every way it comes up. I hate being nice to someone who is not nice, pretending to like those that I don’t…pretending to be happy when I’m not. Being a woman in 1959 is all about dishonesty…the way I look, the way I act, the life I lead…dishonesty.

It shakes me to the core, to look at the miracles that happen all around me. I can’t understand how people go through a day without being astonished at the wonder of their own bodies, let alone the perfect interconnection of the trees and the bees and all of it.

I feel like the only person in the world who sees things as they really are. While all the other women around me are flying through their lives buying lipstick and appliances, I can’t stop wondering at the stars.

And they think I’m crazy.

She called it a wolf moon, the full moon last night that made me stop and hold my breath. The moon that put me in my place.

Like the night we drove through Kansas, a bowl of stars over the land, and I knew that I was floating in space, and insignificant. The wolf moon is timeless, she said, the earth is timeless, and we are only visitors.

I can’t explain the peace that brings me.

The weight of the guilt, the expectations…it all melts away when I realize that no matter what I do with this life of mine, the moon will continue on it’s journey, the earth will turn, and maybe it’s okay if today I just enjoy the way the light plays on the dormant raspberry bushes and read a poem, or ten.

I know that all of the people that I’ve loved who’ve passed on, have done so from the warm peace of a room that looked out at blizzards, windswept glittery snowglobe snow, and biting cold.

I am humbled by my own connection to the other world. Perhaps every family suspects that they are special this way, have some kind of psychic connection that others don’t, but all of the women in my family feel the pull of spirits. Maybe it’s just my mystical Catholic upbringing, or maybe it’s a legacy of strong women, oftentimes forced to stand on their own without support from anyone but God…women guided to trust the one thing that they could, their intuition.

I believe that it’s a practice, senses that sharpen with regular use. Once you’re more in tune with the inner workings of your own mystery, you begin to pick up on the mysteries around you.

Presents…a reading by local writers Deesha Philyaw, Christina Springer, Melissa Sokulski, Kelli Stevens Kane, and Robin Monroe, along with Amanda Gilby, Hip Mama short fiction contest winner, reading “Blue Gardenia” featured in Issue 44:The Creativity Issue

This latest issue honors and celebrates musicians, writers, and artists who can nurture their kids and their art.
Let’s get together hip Mamas! We want to hear from you!

Friday December 4th 7pm

Rebellious Nature Radical T-Shirt & Fair-Trade Gift Shop & Art Gallery

Located At the Corner of Penn Ave and N.Graham St.
-Side Entrance at 104 N.Graham Street-

for more information check out:

http://www.rebelliousnature.com/

http://friendship-pgh.org/paai/unblurred/

When you feel abnormal in a world of normal, you find ways to cope. You carve a little niche for yourself that is safe. You create a story that you can believe and you tell it to people…you tell it so many times that you forget which parts are real and which parts are fiction. I wonder if that is how I became a writer, or if this is how most writers begin.

There are days when I shine. I am my own hero. But some days, I can tell that no one is believing my story. The lacey veil that I’ve been so carefully twisting and braiding falls into threads around me and there I am.

And I’m not sure if I’d like me, if I met me.

My way of coping, when it all becomes too overwhelming, is to shut out the world of details, and look for the little miracles. I watched a sunset behind the Tucson Mountains that took me right out of my body and made me happier than most anything else in my life up to that point. I read a poem that spoke right to the most vulnerable part of me and I could feel the heat, the healing as it was happening.

That’s why writing here is important. It’s the feeling that I have right now with my pen to the paper. It’s a release of something into my blood that makes me feel like I’ve discovered a secret, or figured out a riddle that has been puzzling me all night.

And I so often feel puzzled, as I navigate my way through life, and those moments of discovery are so few and far between.

The irony is that I actually really enjoy this housewife gig when I’m not fighting the inner battle between me and decades of feminist rhetoric. Just like everything else, I can’t sort out the truth from the bullshit.

But I really love cold autumn days, like today, when my entire day revolves around nurturing…cooking, snuggling, reading to, creating with….making a home that is a sanctuary, creating a place where others are free to be themselves. I just never feel completely at ease with it all, expecting someone to expect more.

If a function of art is to validate the experiences of others, to point to a higher truth, then isn’t making a home an art?

And yet, there is no denying the moments when I’m stifled, when I crave escape, when I imagine a different life, a different path. The simple truth is that motherhood is stifling, no matter how you do it. Unless you completely neglect your children…if they are at home or in school, if they are young or all grown-up…loving someone like that is stifling. You can’t understand it if you aren’t a mother.

Sometimes I feel that in telling Deenie’s story, I’m telling my own story. God, that terrifies me. I feel like I’m tiptoeing near the border of real honesty with myself about who I am, and I don’t know if I like her as much as the person I’ve spent a lifetime convincing myself that I am. I’m actually afraid to find out.

This is a particular kind of fear, the moment you start to realize the truth, but it isn’t clear enough yet…there’s still time to go back. There’s still time to forget. I have opened a door and caught a glimpse of someone, but if I close it very fast, I’ll never be sure.

To be sure, I’d have to open the door and really take a look.

I know that I was a strange child. I just never felt that I could handle things that others seemed to handle without any trouble. I watched my mother flawlessly juggle 10 different plates with perfect hair and a winning smile, and I stood trembling next to her with one plate precariously balanced in both hands.

When I was child and found myself overwhelmed, as I often did, I would turn off all of the lights in my room and pull covers over my head. But as hard as I tried, I simply could not crawl into myself. Consequently, the world continued to spin and there was no real escape from all the things that made me sad and scared and all I could do was breathe and hide and wait.

I was too afraid to run away, even though it’s all that I thought about. What a paradox, to care so little about your own life, to feel so numb to the world and yet, be afraid of everything.

Shouldn’t you be ready to risk anything when you feel there’s nothing to lose?

But that first night when you came to me in the dark and I crawled into the deepest darkest place in you, the world stopped turning and everything ceased to exist and I finally found the peace that I’ve been searching for my whole life.

Thank you.

You came, and showed me how to make the world stop, and loved me back into my body, and taught me how to run. Now you’re here, with your hand outstretched and you’re waiting for me to say the word.

One word from me and we run, together.

How did you do it? How did you find in me, in a few months, what I’ve been searching my whole life to find? How does your love seem to give me permission to be who I really am, to be free, to be wild? How did you do it?

I hope one day to repay you.

My mother alluded to the diaries once years ago. By that time, I had given up trying to get her to talk about my grandmother. When I was little, I harassed my mother constantly about Deenie, but she wouldn’t budge. That didn’t stop me from getting information. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly, but I was fascinated.

When I visited my Grandpa across the street, I’d sit in the attic for hours looking through old pictures. Grandpa was hesitant at first to talk with me about her, but I found it came a lot easier after we walked down the street to the beer garden together. He would give me change for the jukebox and buy me a ginger ale and some pretzels, and I would twist on the squeaky stool and swing my legs back and forth and listen to his stories.

Aunt Sadie loved to talk about her mother with me. She was the youngest sister, still living at home with Grandpa when I’d come to visit. Deenie had succumbed to her passion in the garden by the time Sadie was old enough to remember anything else. It almost seems like she was spared some pain that way. My mother and Aunt Mary Ann watched Deenie fall apart, but Sadie just seemed to accept and love Deenie as she was because she didn’t know her to be anyone else. That could just be Sadie though. She is a glass half-full kind of person. She’s a lot like Grandpa.

I think growing up with those two sisters, Sadie was just as happy as I was to find someone to talk with about Deenie.

Of course, Deenie told me her story. She found a way to me even before I read any of the diaries, in her old pictures, her jewelry, the flowers she planted that kept coming back. I knew we had a connection, she and I, although until I became a mother myself, I didn’t know just how much of a connection it was. People always say that we look alike, both with dark wavy hair and blue eyes, but she was 50′s glamorous, red lips and dresses that accentuated her curves, and I am a tired, frumpy mama, no make-up and pony tails, wearing t-shirts that look like tents and cursing my boobs.

But I see her in me when I look in the mirror, and it isn’t just the crazy. There was a spark in her that lives faintly in my eyes, and that’s why I need to know her.

I feel like she is a door to a place in me that I need to find.