Writing, Food, and Scars

When I was twelve, I started writing my first book. I bought a little paperback-sized journal with a flowered cover at Chicago Ridge Mall, which had opened just that year; it seemed to me that if one was going to write a book, one should write it IN a book.



It sucked, of course. It was the old "write what you know" problem: I was twelve years old and didn't really know too much of anything, other than what I'd read in other people's books. It didn't get very far.



My next real attempt at writing a book was when I was fourteen. I had developed a fascination with nuclear warfare--my dad had worked on one of the atomic-test projects, for one thing. Also, it was 1984, spang in the middle of Ronald Reagan's personal apocalypse, and there were plenty of items to pique a geeky freshman's interest in destruction.



The novel, written on my Commodore 64, wasn't quite so much about nuclear war as it was a love story set -after- a nuclear war. At the same time I was working on that story, I was also hitting puberty like a brick wall. I was finally out of the hell that grammar school had been, and I felt like there might be some hope for me yet; I was at a coed high school where nearly no one knew me and no one knew my reputation as the weird, smart fat girl.



Yes, I was always "the fat girl"--at least, in my own head I was.



It's a funny thing--I look back at pictures of myself through that era, when my mother was buying me diet books and sending me to nutritionists, and I think I looked perfectly normal. I often think to myself that if my mother had just fucking RELAXED and left me alone about the whole weight thing, I might have had some sense of perspective about my own body and the ability to judge FOR MYSELF when I needed to make changes. As it was, food became my rebellion--particularly when I came home after college and discovered that even though I had a job, an apartment, and a man, my mother still thought it was her place to run my life. Even now, to this day, she's always telling me how much weight I need to lose, how much heavier I look. I have managed, thus far, to stifle the urge to say What, you think I don't fucking KNOW that? You think I don't have a fucking MIRROR? I remember when I was a kid, and I'd take an extra helping of noodles or a bigger piece of cake, she'd say "Don't blame me when you're big as a house..." Well guess what?? I do. But not in the way she thinks. I never had an accurate body image. NEVER. When I was five I thought I was fat--because she said so. I had a little tummy all my life--big deal. But to her, that was "fat".



My dad wasn't any better.



I haven't too much mentioned my dad much in this blog; I've realized that. Outside of a couple of anecdotes, it's all mom, mom, mom (and her relatives) when I talk about my family. There's a good reason for that.



Of my parents, I'd have to say I got along better with my dad when I was a kid. I get my brains from him, and my sense of humor, and my interest in computers. But most of all, I think I got along with my dad because he stayed the hell out of my business....for the most part. As you will see.



It was probably very easy for him to stay out of my business, though--he was a very distant, self-contained person. To some extent I get that from him too, but I don't take it to his level. He'd go to work at 10 or so--he was smart enough and necessary enough that his bosses never squawked--and he'd come home around 6 or 7, we'd eat dinner, and he'd disappear into the basement, where he kept his little office. I didn't see much of him during the week.



It hadn't always been like that. When I was a very little child, sometimes after dinner, we'd pull the toys out of the TV room cabinet--the Weebles with all their accoutrements, the little Fisher-Price people, back when they were straight wooden pegs with round heads and painted-on features--and my dad and I would play in the living room while my mom did the dishes. Or we would take empty paper-towel tubes and play light-sabers, like in Star Wars; he would use the tube to enhance his Darth Vader voice.



I don't know what changed, exactly, as I got older. Maybe he didn't know how to deal with a girl past a certain age; maybe he got more worried, as I got older, about how he was going to put me through college or whatever. I know my parents were having problems as I got older, which my mother blamed on him. I used to wake up in the night and hear them arguing in the basement.



Or rather, I'd hear HER arguing. He didn't argue. He just listened, implacable and calm, and agreed with everything she said, no matter how dramatic and unfair.



He didn't listen to her. He didn't do his share of work around the house. What work he did, he didn't do when she wanted it done. If he REALLY loved her he'd clean out this basement so they could have a civilized room down there like everyone else, instead of a rat's nest of useless junk. He didn't keep to the kind of schedule she wanted him to keep. Why couldn't he go to work from nine to five like everyone else?



And he listened, silently, as she harangued him--and then he'd just agree with her. Yes, he needed to do more around the house. Yes, the basement was a mess. Yes, he should get up earlier.



How mad this made her, I can't BEGIN to describe. She didn't want capitulation--especially since she knew it wasn't going to change anything. She wanted a fight, and when she didn't get it, she slammed doors, threatened to leave, went off on long car rides by herself and didn't say when she was coming back. Which was just fine for HER, I guess, but which scared the crap out of me.



You remember "me", don't you? The little kid without the life experience to know what all this was about? The one who was always afraid that someday I might make her that angry too--angry enough that she might go off and leave ME and not come back?



As you might imagine, I always took my dad's side, in my head. It was the simple algebra of peace and quiet: Mom yelled, Dad didn't. Ergo, Dad was right.



Except he wasn't, exactly.



I can't really know the circumstances of their fights; what I do know is that my mother often goes for obvious things in fights without ever bringing up what's REALLY bothering her. It's one of her less-tolerable traits, which I've experienced first hand. (I've listened to her harangue about my lifestyle for an hour at a time and much later found out she was angry because I didn't say "thank you" for something. Which I had, but my mother tends to ignore praise and focus on what she feels she should be entitled to. I'd said thank you--I hadn't said it repeatedly or extravagantly.) So it's possible there was more going on than I knew about.



That's one thing. The other: My father, whatever good traits he had, was pretty much devoid of sensitivity. He would say things matter-of-factly without thinking too much about the consequences, and most of the time he got away with them--because he was smart, because he was necessary, because he was a good provider, because he was intelligent.



But you can be as smart and as necessary as you want, and it will not erase your daughter's memory that when she was nine or ten years old, you used to serenade her in Spanish with a song about how fat she was.



You can be the best provider and the most intelligent human being in the neighborhood, and it will not make up for your verdict when you read your fourteen-year-old's first sustained attempt at writing a novel: "I wouldn't pay $9.95 for it..."



I think that was when I gave up on the notion of having a career as a writer. The message I was given, over and over, was that writing wasn't a career; writing was something to do when the REAL work was over, if you had time, if you still had energy or the heart to do it. And if you were good enough, which I wasn't.



The closest I ever came to believing I could actually be a writer was--of course--when I was with JP. When we were together, writing was something I couldn't NOT do; that first summer, when I was seeing him and wrestling with the question of when and how and whether to leave my husband, I wrote over 100 poems. I still say those were my best work--the only things I've ever written fearlessly. And of course he loved my writing, just as I loved his songs.



I've blogged about what led to the end of my writing--not JP's death, so much, but CR and his betrayal. But people keep telling me "you should write a book".



I want to, really; I'm just lost in my own history, and in the lack of time. Mostly the last, I think, and that's the frustrating part--that I'm nearly ready to break out of my self-imposed cocoon, but when I do, I'll find that even butterflies have to pay the bills.



Well, that, and they also have to come up with an idea. Which I ALSO haven't got. So in the meantime, I guess, I'll just keep blogging about my past, and my parents, and the really kick-ass lasagna I made for dinner last night. Not exactly what I was hoping to accomplish with my life, but it'll have to do for now...