You Gotta Start Somewhere

A Prologue

The party room at McGillacuddy’s Bar & Grill filled with friends and family gathering to celebrate the launch of my first book, Ten Tongues, a collection of short stories I’d begun writing ten years prior and at long last was holding in my hands.

It was one of those warm October days in the Midwest when the sun blazes hot and bright against a shocking blue sky that seems illuminated from within.

Friends and family had arrived from Kentucky, North Carolina, California, to celebrate the book’s release. I’d mailed postcard announcements to everyone I could think of, sent out press releases and decorated the space with fresh flowers and a large banner depicting the book’s cover. A photographer friend mingled among the party goers snapping candid shots. Wine, hors d’oeuvres and a raucous energy left me feeling irrepressible.

The day before, I’d given a reading in the Alumni Room at Knox College, my alma mater and where I’d returned to after grad school to teach creative writing and literature. The room had been packed with students, friends, colleagues, even the college president. My four children lined the front row. It was as joyful and affirming an experience as I could have ever hoped for.

Mom created the one notable absence. It wasn’t that she couldn’t come. She didn’t want to. When I’d told her about my book launch plans, a reading on Friday following by a launch party on Saturday, she’d given her head a vigorous shake. “I’m not interested in hearing you read.”

Knowing her prim fundamentalist severity, I wasn’t surprised. Still, this was my first book. I’d delivered a copy to her house earlier in the month on the day the first shipment arrived. I’d been so excited to share it with her that I rode my motorcycle thirty miles to hand deliver it. As I stood in her living room watching her reaction, I couldn’t recognize what was happening but it looked deeply pathological. She exhibited no sense of awareness that I was standing right there as she gripped the book in her gnarled arthritic hands and gave in to an odd, full-bodied rocking motion, her rheumy eyes tearing up. She formed words, but they weren’t directed at me. “This is me,” she murmured. “I’m in here. I’m part of this.” She didn’t see me, didn’t connect me to what she was holding in her hands, and gave no indication that I was even in the room.

Three strokes into years of infirmity, Mom’s personality had changed dramatically in recent years. On the one hand, she’d shrunk into a more docile version of herself, giving off the air of a sweet, little old lady, smiling, agreeable. On the other, every so often a word or circumstance or memory cracked open to expose a darkness amplified by her lack of filter. It manifested in her black eyes, a flash crossing them like some phantom nictitating membrane. Shocking in its ferocity, it became obvious there was an unknowable, unreachable part of her kept hidden all these years but that the strokes had brought closer to the surface. She might not be able to tell you what a refrigerator was for or what it was called, but she could swing for your kneecaps with an incisive insult out of nowhere. “I’m going to get published before you,” or “Why do you want to write fiction? Anyone can tell lies.”

Her reaction that day took me off guard. It wasn’t anything like I’d imagined. No congratulations or job well done! An imbedded darkness overtook her. Whatever atta girl I’d expected had been way, way off the mark.

I left that day confused and crestfallen. I’d seen something I shouldn’t have, peeked into a private perversion never intended for witnesses. I didn’t yet understand narcissistic personality disorder. I’d only wanted to share a major life moment thinking, foolishly, that’d she be happy for me. Instead, some weird contortion hijacked her face and drew her unrecognizable. Even then, I didn’t let it dampen me, telling myself that once she’d had a chance to read it, she’d understand the significance of what I’d accomplished.

Mom had been supportive of my return to college fourteen years out of high school. She’d been a non-traditional student too, returning to college when I was in middle school to earn her degree in elementary education. Twenty years later, when I took a job in academia, she’d said, “You’re just like me!” I didn’t say anything even if I disagreed that her career teaching third graders was the same as mine teaching college. Undertones of resentment pocked her comments like the time she told people that my sister was a registered nurse, and I was a homemaker.

Her aspirations to write never struck me as serious. I hail from a line of women who possess creative streaks. Mom decorated cakes; Grandma drew; her mother wrote poems and so on. These were my mothers’ gardens and I felt native among them. When I began to take writing seriously, after becoming a mother myself, she’d encouraged me, but when it grew evident my dedication and abilities exceeded hers, the undermining commenced.

My sister and I organized a garage sale, and I’d run an ad in the local newspaper. Intentionally funny and creative, I used the ad as a ploy to stir up business, and it’d worked. Several customers commented, laughing at its whimsy. When one lady quipped, “Okay, which one of you is the writer?” Mom shot back, “We’re all writers but she wrote the ad,” tossing her head my way.

Even though her ruthless and competitive spirit emerged, I never called her out because I knew my place, in the background, quiet, obedient, invisible.

Around the time my aspirations grew serious, Mom poured herself into a project she’d toyed with for some time -- writing a study guide to accompany the 1950s era book by evangelist Roy Hession called The Calvary Road, a guidebook to the Christian faith. She spent a great deal of time and energy drafting a companion manuscript guiding readers to unpacking Hession’s work. Once completed, she’d submitted it to Hession’s publisher who rejected it as being unmarketable. This failure marked the beginning and the end of her writing aspirations. In spite of her disappointment, she hated the idea of my getting published even more than her own rejection.

Between my book delivery and the launch party, Mom read Ten Tongues and then dragged my brother and sister into her horrified reaction to it. She’d told them that the book was, “nothing but smut and pornography.” She’d said she was “ashamed” of me and that I was a “disappointment to God.”

My siblings logged countless hours on the phone ahead of the launch defending me and trying to rationalize why she was wrong. Never once did she speak to me about it. I did not hear her damnations nor did I hear any compliments. Abject radio silence. She damned-well refused to attend my reading so I did not expect to see her at the signing, but that day here she came, hobbling into the building on her husband’s arm, lips pursed, dark sunglasses hiding the disapproval in her pupilless eyes.

Glad that I was too busy to speak, I focused on the party while she took up a post at a table next to where my friends were selling copies. A line had formed at the signing table on the opposite side of the room where I soaked up the moment. Friends, family and people I hadn’t seen in many years like former teachers and even people I didn’t know, showed up to offer their support and congratulations. When a cousin, God bless her courage, walked up to my table, slapped down her copy of the book and said, “Your mother is over there telling everybody not to buy the book because it’s garbage” I felt rage burble in my gut.

My own mother. Wracked by rheumatoid arthritis, stroke-addled, partially blind, and fueled by a jealousy, competition and anger, I could not wrap my brain around her actions.

Beyond niceties, I barely spoke to her for five years after that. I let her go to her grave without another word about my writing.

Sometimes we must be grateful for the things that get broken beyond all repair, beyond all recognition, all control. Only then can we begin piecing together something new and spectacular in its place.