April in Review

Before it's May....

Let's see - started off with The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, the nonfiction account of a little Hmong girl with epilepsy and the treatment conflicts between her parents and her doctors. Religion, literacy, economics, etc. all played a part in the mess that Lia's life becomes, and you wonder how two groups who both want the best for a child can both be so wrong and so incapable of finding common ground to work together. Fadiman also exposes some critical flaws in mainstream medicine - the inability of many practitioners to treat patients as a whole, the inability of professionals (and patients) to accept death, the belief that modern medicine knows most and knows best.

I wondered if things wouldn't have gone more smoothly with some of the acceptance present in Franz Lidz's account of his uncles, Unstrung Heroes. The Lidz men all suffered from mental illness in some form, and as a result, often lived along the margins of society, but through Lidz's account of his uncles, frank and unembarrassed by their struggles and idiosyncracies, the marginalized of our society begin to seem more entertaining and interesting. Frustrating and unreasonable, yes, but also whimisical and unselfish. How can you not love someone who collects found shoelaces? Everyone, especially anyone struggling with mental illness, should have someone who loves them as Franz Lidz loves his uncles.

In a month that now seems filled with somber topics, I also waded into Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. All academic work should be so honest; Gordon-Reed admits from the beginning that her belief on whether or not Jefferson and Hemings had a relationship can change from one minute to the next, and that's an important admission, because her research is not, as is often thought, intended so much as to make a case for the existence of the relationship, but to expose and question the belief that such a relationship wasn't possible. For instance, scholars have historically been skeptical of the late-life remembrances of Sally Hemings' children, while accepting unquestioningly the accounts of Jefferson's grandchildren. Gordon-Reed, an attorney, puts the basic structure of trial evidence to work and rightfully questions inconsistencies like this. If we can't rely on the Hemings family oral tradition, why should we rely on the Jefferson family oral tradition? Sadly, the discussion often leaves little basis for the difference in treatment beyond race, but reading Gordon-Reed's lambasting of various historians and their sloppy scholarship will guarantee that you never read histories or biographies the same way again!

Part of the reason I only made it through four books this month was Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden. It was one of those books that I enjoyed so much, I kept picking it up and putting it down again, wanting to read it and knowing that would mean it would end. I read her first novel, The House at Riverton, last year, and found this to be almost as enjoyable, if a little convoluted. It's hard to avoid convolution when you have four female leads spread out through as many generations and on two different continents, a more ambitious undertaking than The House at Riverton, which was told in flashbacks, but mostly focused on one family, one manor house, and one generation. Still, it was just so carefully paced that I enjoyed moving through it and took my time. She's an Australian writer, and the recent globalization of publishing has added her to my list of authors to follow, along with Kate Atkinson, Steig Larsson, John Harwood, and Susan Fletcher.

Just My Imagination

So, once again, Mother's Day, otherwise known as the day I would prefer to spend under the bed. Honestly, I think about draping blankets over the side until they touch the floor and just crawling under there until I feel like rejoining the world. I cry every day for a week beforehand, feeling sorry for myself and then berating myself for being so silly. I wish I didn't feel this way, and I realize it's probably not very adult, but when everything around you is about celebrating something you don't have, that you barely remember having, avoidance does seem to be what comes to mind.

That's probably one of the saddest things about death. The reality is that the farther you get from it, the fewer people still care or at least are still aware. The people closest start off with the sharpest memories, and as time grinds the edges off, most people end up with memories that don't poke and prod at them very often. You end up struggling with something that's invisible to everyone else.

Lately, I shop for her in my imagination, ticking off books that I've read that she would have loved. (That is probably the greatest sadness for me - my mother was the only person I've ever known who read nearly as much as I do. I'm sure there are other people who do, but no one I've meet, let alone know well enough to chat with.) Imaginary retail therapy, kept to myself, seems to help. I can't buy for myself - unwilling to spend money on small vanities like nail polish, persuading myself that hard water would only damage a copper kettle, noting how infrequently I'd have an opportunity to wear a cashmere scarf. Besides, if she were here, sometimes I think I wouldn't want for those sorts of things. I don't know, but I suspect they are the kinds of things your mom buys you for no reason. Buying presents, however, would likely be the quickest path to bankruptcy for me, and I always see things that I would buy for Mom. Dichroic glass pendants, red brocade wallets, heavy pottery mugs with vellum-esque glazes. This year, I'd be leaning toward Sing Them Home, some pricey organic coffee, and one of the beautiful bleeding hearts from the Italian greenhouse down the road. Imaginary shopping for an imaginary relationship seems appropriate.

Of course, in my imagination, she's always whole and happy. Her eyes are bright, her hands don't shake, and she laughs. She squeezes my hand, tucks my hair behind my ear. She is who she was on the good days, and she gets to be my mother instead of me being hers. That's the best part about imagination: when you're telling the story, you can tell it however you want.

My Brother

Yesterday, my little brother had a birthday. He probably wouldn't want me to announce his age, but I will say that he's old enough that I don't remember his first one. That always amazes me, the fact that I don't have any memory of his advent in my life, because when it comes to someone's whose existence, whose entrance into the world, I'd want to celebrate, he's at the top of the list.

But, still no memories. I don't remember Mom's pregnancy, staying with grandparents while she was in the hospital, or the red, wrinkly, suspicious bundle that became my brother coming home. No, really - he was suspicious. Even in his first hospital picture, suitably dated by lighter-burned edges and shellacked wood plaque, he's turned partially away from the camera, squinting with his one open eye in a manner that clearly says he suspects everyone and isn't really sure about anything. Either that, or he's reacting like a hamster to the bright camera light, but knowing him as I do, I interpret it as a cosmic wariness that's never really left him. I don't remember being consulting on the naming of the at-the-time-hypothetical brother either, but have been told that I had creative suggestions. (I was two, I wanted a dog, I suggested the name Shadow - what can I say?)

Later, I remember his blue footie pajamas, his constant smell of baby shampoo and dirt, his fascination with tying knots in my jumprope and disassembling my dollhouse. I remember his presence in the dark, when we were both working hard to keep each other from being frightened. I can still conjure the memory of his hand in mine at a funeral, of the quick lie to cover for my mistakes, of Saturday morning arguments over channel 5 versus channel 12. I see a glib teenager vaulting off the edge of a moving haywagon to chase down my baseball cap and a little boy surveying a dammed creek with his hands on his hips. In my dark moments, I hear his voice in my head, the words he used to encourage me to throw caution to the wind when we were small: "We're Davises. We can do anything." Twenty-five years later, when I married, those words are the reason I didn't change my name.

Still, there's no milestone to mark his arrival in my life. Despite that fact that I have memories as early as 12-18 months and that he came along when I was 2 1/2, my mind didn't mark this momentous occasion in any meaningful way. Maybe that's as it should be. I have no first memory of him, just like I have no first memory of the other innate loves of my life. No memory of learning to read, no memory of first loving the presence of a kitty cat, no memory of my brother - he's just always there.

Innate love is a deceptive thing. People think unconditional love is something pleasant and easy, and perhaps it is for the recipient, but not for the giver. For the giver, unconditional love hurts. It worries, it disappoints, it frustrates, it angers, it infuriates. It's not that you don't experience those things with unconditional love, I learned early in life, it's just that they don't make it go away. People look for different metaphors for the enduring timelessness of love - oceans, mountains, rivers - but love's really not that elegant and majestic. In fact, if I search the landscape of my childhood for a symbol, love is multiflora rose - introduced without warning into my environment, it took root and spread with the tenacity of steel. You can hack a multiflora rose down to the ground, pour gas on the roots, set it on fire, and within months, it will be flourishing again. As mentioned, it's not elegant, but frankly, neither is love.