October is a Memory Hammer

Last night I dreamt I met my birth mother. I woke up not recalling anything about the dream but that. October always brings an onslaught of nostalgic dreams. I don’t know why. The heat wave broke and today marks the first time it feels like a real October. The aquamarine sky is clear and the barometer settled in at 70 degrees. Autumn has arrived.

I was planted in the Earth by a woman I’ve never met, whose name I do not know, whose likeness is the wind. Plucked from the crib at 3 months of age, observed laying on my back in a cotton onesie, baby fists and baby legs pumping wildly, by my adoptive parents. They chose me because I smiled at them, two expectant faces full of the breathless desire to have a child after years of trying for a little one of their own.

I smiled and coo’d, they said, I melted their hearts. I always imagine this moment…the two of them standing in the bedroom of my foster home, like a couple clutching at each other in a shiny new car lot, turning to the social worker and saying, We’d like this one.

So I grew up in the arms of a red-headed housewife with a penchant for yarn and pottery; and a black-haired engineer with twinkling James Dean eyes. I lived in a tract home in the suburbs of Los Angeles. I was the definition of precocious. I garnered the attention of everyone from day one. I was a living, drooling version of a Gerber baby food commercial with my thick blonde ringlets, pink lips, rosy cheeks and midnight blue eyes. I chased caterpillars, dug my chubby little fingers in the mud, ate rose petals like candy. I pretended to be the secret child of faeries. I spoke their language before falling asleep in my crib. Apparently, only faeries understand baby gibberish.

About 10 minutes after putting me down for the night, just as they settled in to watch Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, I would appear, crawling right to the middle of the living room. This had them baffled. One night they left the bedroom door ajar and a few minutes later came back with mouths agape to witness me maneuver to the edge of the crib, tuck my head between the mattress and the poles, swing my legs up in a sommersault and VAULT over the crib to land on all fours. Thank God for shag carpet. I never wanted to miss a thing. Even then.

As a toddler in my hi-chair, Mom and Dad fed me Applesauce, because I pronounced it “Ass-o-sauce”, clapping my hands in excitement. They did this every night over dinner. I love applesauce to this day, to me it tastes like loud belly laughter.

At 3 1/2 years old, I screamed at some nurse in a hospital. Unlike me, my baby sister was a private adoption. We were there the day she was born, squalling and red-faced, into this world. The nurse insisted on carrying her to our car for safety reasons. Hospital policy. I remember being angry… She’s my sister, you give her to my Mommy NOW!

My sister was born with a hole in her heart. In 1975 they performed open heart surgery. They cut her hair short like a boy and for weeks she lived in an oxygen tent that covered the length of her hospital bed. Tubes sticking out of her skin everywhere. I was very, very afraid. Every day we’d drive home and I’d stare out the window of our red Oldsmobile Cutlass, the horizon changing shapes and flickering past me like life eventually does, fast and in technicolor snapshots. She made it through the surgery just fine.

All she has left of that time is a long knotted scar down the middle of her chest. Her heart pumps just like mine and I think she often misses how much mine swells inside my chest, because of her.

I used to tease her with the sing-along Fee-Fi-Fo song…

Shannon Fannon Fo Fannan, Fee Fi Fo Fannon, Shannon!

Eventually this grew into Fannah. I’ve called her that ever since. I am the only one that uses this nickname. True sisters can have nicknames and secrets and Daddy scars.

We lived a childhood full of hand sewn Halloween costumes, birthday cakes shaped like monkeys and carousels, tricycles, scooters, marbles and jacks. Peanut butter filled pancakes, Cabbage Patch dolls, and chemistry sets. Piano lessons, dancing on our bed to Summertime by Mungo Jerry, and playing hide-n-seek until the street lights came on. I had walls of books and books and more books. I stood in line for the Space Mountain roller-coaster at Disneyland and convinced myself I was the youngest and only female Jedi Knight. There was no such thing as fear. Life was good and beautiful and forever.

I went from sharing a room decorated in Holly Hobby, to my half of the room covered in Star Wars characters, to finally, my own room…with a 13” TV, a $50 stereo and a wall covered in Sci-Fi movie posters and prints of horses framed in wood. I listened to My Sharona by The Knack until my ears bled. I ran track and played volleyball and beat every challenger at 8-ball on the pool table in our garage. I was a tom-boy with tanned skin and golden Farrah Fawcett hair.

I do not recall the moment where it all begin to sour. The exact moment when we are given a glimpse of dark, dark things to come. I’ve just always thought it must have been a day in Autumn. When the leaves turn red and the air is crisp. There is nothing in the air in October to slow down the pain that leaks from one person and into another. It transmutes like lightning. Flashing and burning the skin.

So sometime in Autumn my skin began to scorch. I would leave my bedroom in the middle of the night when my head buried beneath the pillow wasn’t enough to drown out the sounds of my parents fighting. I’d walk a few houses down to the end of the block and sit on the curb, never paying attention to the gutter water pooling around my ankles. I would sit for hours. Sneaking back into my room only when I was certain there was silence. I longed for silence.

My Mom turned into an angry thing and my Dad slowly rotted from the inside out. It started in his brain and ended up in my heart. She did not recognize his ravings as the beginnings of severe mental illness and he never considered himself anything but sane. All my sister and I knew was, they were at war…and we were left ignored in a rancid hurricane of angry madness. Alone with no rudder.

There were no more birthday cakes, holding hands around the dinner table, or begging for extra cash to buy that new pair of Jordache jeans. There was no teacher/parent conferences or checking homework or food on the table. They separated but lived under the same roof. Then Mom got skinny, started wearing mini skirts and telling me stories about her sexcapades as if I were a best girlfriend and not her teenage daughter in pain. Dad began developing a sophisticated computing device that allowed you to cheat at Blackjack. He traveled the country, from casino to casino, as I sat at home and waited for the bomb to go off. It did. It always does.

Dad ended up in prison and Mom moved out of the house with her boyfriend Roger with his wrangler jeans, handlebar mustache and lisp. I sat in the living room with all the lights off, every night until dawn, the only illumination from the flickering of the TV screen. With these vampire hours, I’d sit in front of the TV in that empty house and slowly turned into the ugly thing that matched the ugliness around me. It was in the air I breathed and the water I drank and the food I ate. I recoiled inside at the value of my nothingness. I spoke to myself in a language of loathing.

October is a memory hammer, causing me to travel down the slide of that childhood descent. It wakes me up in the morning with a pounding like some dark seismic churn. I walk around with an itch in my fingers and an ache in my gut. The kind you get when a wound starts to heal. Needing only to write it down. Get it out.

And even now, as I sit here typing this – with the ink pouring out and no hope of staunching the flow. I revel as I do in the reborn beauty of me. I skim over the surface of that blackness. And that is enough. That is enough. Because there is nothing wrong with dancing in small measures of joy on the tops of things.

October is a memory hammer. As I drive home the nail into the blood of my blood. Thinking I should buy my nephews a carousel-shaped cake for their birthday. Place it on a spinning plate so we could watch it together go round and round. Saying to them, my sisters children, as I kiss the sides of their little cheeks, I cherish you. Oh how I do.

And in the midst of that healing, this recycled journey, I promise myself in a language of love, to reveal to others the color at the center of me…

Trace, let it all burst forth from you like an exploding star
Light up the night sky with it
let it be seen for miles
far enough and strong enough to be seen by thousands
or millions
or billions
Know that someone, someday, will see that borealis
and with wanderlust, travel the last hundred miles of your frozen terrain,
a nomad no more.
They will kiss your brow, take you in their arms and
with hands caressing the small of your back
squeeze tight
so tight
and whisper
Trace, sweet Trace…its okay to melt.

(c) 2008 mstrace

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Tags:

bittersweet, childhood, disgust, divorce, family, hammer, hate, loathing, love, memory, october, pain and sister