Boundaries and the Mills Brothers and Keeping Your Mouth Shut

Recently, someone said something to me that she shouldn’t have said.  It was a terrible thing to say.  I will never be able to get it out of my head.

I am so angry.  Now I am stuck knowing something I don’t want to know.

I get my feelings hurt easily.  I obsess over things that other people hardly notice.  It makes me leery about hanging out with people I don’t know very well.  I never know if they’re going to toss off some comment that will have me stewing for days.

Of course, this person isn’t a friend or an acquaintance.  She is my mother, and she is almost ninety-two, and she may or may not be suffering from some sort of dementia.  So I have to pretend I’m not angry and be all sweet and forgiving and good-daughterly about the whole thing.

It’s hard.

Words are powerful.  You can say you’re sorry, but you can’t unsay something. 

Part of what has always attracted me to the act of writing things down is a sense of the huge power of words, which is both wonderful and terrible all at once.  I love that words matter so much.  Writing well is a kind of hyper-carefulness.  I may not have the cleanest grout on the block, but I’m persnickety about words I put my name to.

As I’m writing, I’m listening to Pandora, and the Mills Brothers’ song “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” just came on.  (Really.  I swear to God.  Another thing I love about writing: if I pay attention, I can hear the Universe talking to me.)  One of the lines: “It’s better not to talk at all, is my advice.”

Yes.

Black Turtlenecks and What's Really Important

I’ve been thinking a lot about clothes, which has made me think about age, which has made me think about writing.

I love clothes, even though I’ve mostly worn jeans and black turtlenecks and boots for years.  I love shopping and looking at street-style blogs and watching “Project Runway” and talking about clothes with my daughter, who has a wonderful sense of style.  I don’t purport to know anything about clothes, but I know what I like.

Recently, I’ve come to the realization that fifty-four is a rough age to be when you love clothes.  I wear the same size I’ve worn for almost twenty years, but things don’t look the same.  Or rather, they do, but I don’t feel the same way in them. 

I’ve had to modify the black-turtleneck thing, for one.  When I was thirty, black turtlenecks made me feel all writer-y.  Now they just look gloomy and unimaginative.  So I pair them with blouses and tunics and sweaters and jackets.   Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes I have the horrible feeling that I’m wearing clothes my daughter should be wearing.  But I’m not quite a Chico’s or Eileen Fisher kind of gal, either.

Ines de la Fressange is arguably the most beautiful fifty-four-year-old alive.  (Google her.  You’ll see.)  A French model turned fashion icon, she has written a lovely guide to style called PARISIAN CHIC.  In it, she gives much light-hearted, soothing advice to middle-aged women about how to dress their age fashionably.   

I devoured her book and then spent a few days thinking obsessively about how I could follow her dictates without actually moving to Paris.  I went through my closet and tagged some skirts for my daughter.  I surfed a few websites.   I bought a few things.

And then, two nights ago, as I lay awake at three in the morning thinking about whether I would put on blue or black jeans in the morning, it suddenly hit me that I had to stop thinking about clothes immediately, because 1) there is not enough haute couture on the planet to make me look like Ines de la Fressange, and 2) I am a fifty-four-year-old writer, and what I should be thinking about is what is really important to me, which is writing.

So that is what I did.

I was asleep in seven minutes.

Ho Ho Ho

This is me:

I am scared out of my mind.  I remember what it felt like: wordless, helpless terror.  A distillation of terror.

The reasons I am scared are:

1) I am three,

2) I am shy,

3) I am Jewish,

4) I do not like funny hats,

5) I have no idea who Santa Claus is, and

6) I know I’m supposed to be happy about all this, but I can’t imagine what planet I would have to be on that would make sitting on this guy’s lap okay.

This picture made my family laugh a lot for many years.  It was not mean laughing, but still.  I pretended to laugh, too, but inside I wasn’t laughing.  I was screaming, WHY IS THIS FUNNY?  HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT TO DO?  I’M THREE AND I’M JEWISH, YOU IDIOTS!  QUIT LAUGHING AT ME!

Now that I’m fifty-four, I can see that it’s sort of funny.

I keep this picture in my office for two reasons.

One is to remind myself that if this is the worst thing that ever happened to me when I was three, I was a pretty lucky little girl.  No one hit me or locked me in a closet or shoved the edge of a dining room table into my chest on purpose.  I had nice clothes, enough to eat, a family, a healthy body.  No one I loved had died.  Lucky.

The other reason I like to look at this picture is to remember that you shouldn’t ever laugh at other people’s fears.  Even if they are afraid of something you think is benign or even wonderful: cats or roller coasters or the out-of-doors or feathers.  (The fear of feathers is called pteronophobia.)  You don’t have to get it.

 

Just don’t laugh.

And also, don’t make children wear funny hats if they don’t want to.  Be honest.  You’re doing it because you want to laugh—not meanly—at them, and someday they will tell you how really pissed off they were about it.

Why I Write It Down

Nineteen seventy-seven was a big year for me.  A lot happened.  Some of it was wonderful and some of it wasn’t, which can probably be said about most years.

I was 19 and 20 in 1977, a college student living 3,000 miles away from home most of the year.

These are some of the things that happened to me:

--My father died;

--I fell in love;

--I read Madame Bovary in the original French.  It was the first time I was able to read a “real” book in another language;

--I took my first road trip without my family (from Pennsylvania to Fort Lauderdale for spring break);

--I worked during the summer in a friend’s gift shop.  I remember wearing a beige, knee-length, thin-wale corduroy skirt with an elasticized waist a lot that summer.  Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” always reminds me of that skirt;

--I met the man who would eventually become my husband and who is now my ex-husband (but I didn’t fall in love with him until 1978);

--I learned to do the Hustle.

Nineteen seventy-seven bisects my life, even though I’ve lived far more of my life afterwards.  I do a tally with every memory as it occurs to me, mentally inserting it in the “pre-1977” or “post-1977” slot.  It was the year I grew up, the year I became myself.  Everything that came before is sepia-hazy: fuzzy and ancient.

This is a picture of my mom.  She’s the one on the right.  I think she was in her early twenties when the photo was taken, which would mean that it’s from the early forties, probably snapped on the streets of Cleveland, Ohio.  The woman on the left is her friend Estine.  One of my favorite stories about Estine is that my mother was going to fix her up with a man whose last name was Key.  They figured out that if they got married, Estine’s name would sound like Stinky, so Estine said to forget it.  She never did get married.  The last I heard, she had advanced Alzheimer’s. 

My mother still knows who Estine is, but she doesn’t remember her name anymore.  More and more of her memories have faded, bleached away by age.  If she’s upset by this, she’s doing a good job of pretending she’s not.  But really, I don’t think she’s pretending.  I think something in old age protects you from this particular horror.

I don’t want to lose 1977.  Or anything.  I know that the odds are against this, that if I live long enough, I won’t remember the things I do now.  How the late spring looked that year from my dorm window: the trees lush and green and heavy in a way that California trees aren’t, the air thick with the smell of cut grass, the sun as warm as it is possible to be without slipping over into hot.

What the Hell Am I Doing in Fresno?

Actually, that’s rhetorical.  What I’m doing is taking Robert out for Armenian food for his birthday.  Fresno has a large Armenian presence and several excellent Armenian restaurants

Fresno is the Rodney Dangerfield of California cities.  I have lived in California for all but seven years of my life, and this is what I know about Fresno:

--It’s the city you drive through to get to Yosemite;

--William Saroyan was born here;

--If you have to get out of your car to get gas in the summer, it occurs to you that it is physically impossible for any human to survive for more than seven minutes in this heat;

--Just about anything you like to eat that comes out of the ground is grown here;

--I would not live here under any circumstance.

One of the reasons we are here is that I like to visit places I wouldn’t want to live.  I am curious about who does live here and why (and if) they like it.

Dinner at Diana’s (inauspiciously located in one of a seemingly endless array of strip malls) was wonderful.  Maybe the best hummus I’ve ever eaten.  Lovely chicken and lamb kebabs.

Robert and I have celebrated six of his birthdays together.  The first year, we spent the weekend at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, where we had massages and drank martinis.  Other years, we ate at Plouf in San Francisco, the French Poodle in Carmel, and Picasso, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.  I like being able to say that we can now add Diana’s in Fresno to the list.

Tomorrow we’ll poke around a little and see some of the neighborhoods.  We will probably go out for breakfast.  Tonight I realized that I won’t be able to eat a doughnut, which is a treat I always used to allow myself on car trips.  Wheat allergies suck.  

To torture myself, I just googled “Fresno doughnuts” and found several establishments.  Donut Hole, Donut Queen, Christy’s Donuts, Best Boy Donuts, Dough Boy Donuts, Fresno Donuts. 

This is killing me.

On the plus side, tomorrow’s weather forecast calls for showers and a high of 60.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that my mother is speaking to me again.  I don’t know if she’s forgotten that she said she didn’t want anything more to do with me.  She doesn’t call me “dear” or “honey,” and she only says “I love you” if I say it first.  I’m glad that she isn’t telling me I make her life miserable anymore, though.

The bad news is that she was in a car accident.  She drove to a consignment store to buy fake plastic leaves ($6), and when she got in her car, she put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and plowed into a cement wall.  She knew that she had a suspended license.  She bruised her sternum.

My brother, aka Mr. Crazypants, brought the car back to her house the next day.  He thinks we need to believe her when she says she won’t drive. 

I have been up to visit my mom four times this week.  That’s 800 miles of driving.  On one of my visits, I asked her if she would mind if I borrowed her car while she was recuperating from her injury.  She reluctantly gave me the key.

I took her to the doctor so he could check her bruise again.  I heard him say, You mustn’t drive anymore.  She told him she is an excellent driver and has never gotten a ticket.

My heart is bruised.

On the way home, I said, What if you’d killed a kid?  Someone’s baby?   She said, cheerfully, But I didn’t.

I have a lot of people gathering information, trying to decide what to do: doctors, geriatric social workers, lawyers.  And friends, and my kids, and Robert.

But I still feel all alone.

Tomorrow I am going to work on final edits for my new book, due out next year.  Then I’m going to fill a plastic water bottle with pomegranate juice and vodka and go down to the beach and look for dolphins.  And not think about any of this.

Casting Off

Last Friday, I got my cast off.  Also, my mother told me she didn’t want anything more to do with me.

My mother has had some sort of mild dementia for quite some time, but it’s apparently getting worse.  Her anger at me stems from my having made a request to the DMV to give her a driving test.  An actual driving test, in a car, not a written test.  You would think that the state of California would assess the driving skills of 91-year-olds routinely, but it doesn’t.  You have to ask.

I got my cast off a few hours before my mother told me she didn’t want anything more to do with me.  In the car on the way home from the “fracture clinic,” I thought about other things I had cast off recently:

--glasses;

--anything made with wheat;

--curly hair;

--gray hair;

--suburbia;

--people who blame me for their own unhappiness;

--jobs in which I have to wear suits and have a boss;

--friends who aren’t really friends;

--the conviction that I would always have a dog;

--as many delusions about myself as thirteen years of therapy will allow;

--tax returns from 1997;

--aluminum pans.

I’ve talked to my mother almost every night since she first yelled at me.  She has hung up on me twice and been rude and nasty.  Every once in a while, she has called me ‘dear’, as she used to.  She sounds scared and confused.  She is steadfastly unwilling to accept any kind of assistance with grace.

I don’t know if my mother is going to continue to take her fear and frustration out on me.

But I am going to call her every night.