the old-school guestbook archives
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home movies ~ March 2, 2002 - 12:49 a.m. here I am. it's been a few days. the date header on this reminds me that I have to remember my dad & brother's birthday in two days. everyone in my family was born in the spring except for me, who arrived in the dead of winter. and my brother, my parent's first child, arrived on my dad's birthday. happy birthday, dad. so hard to imagine my parents as this young couple starting a new family. or maybe not so hard. I remember how unprepared for it all my mom seemed to be. she never really "played" with us; I don't think she knew how. I remember the thing that gave me more insight into my mother than I'd ever had before. I was, I don't know, maybe nineteen... and for either mother's day or her birthday, my dad got her what I thought was a really cool present. he'd dug up all the home movies they'd taken when we were kids (in the days before video), and a bunch of home movies from my mother's childhood, and had them transferred to videotape. our old movie projector broke down when I was a kid, so I hadn't seen most of our movies since I was little. some of them I'd never seen before. my dad, looking so young and goofy, making faces and jumping around in front of the camera. mom, looking so hip and insecure, both of them in their twenties. drinking beer in the yard with their friends. we discovered that there was a movie we'd all forgotten existed. when I was a kid, I'd been told the story about my first birthday party. one of the few stories that comprise our scanty family mythology. how my mom had made a giant giraffe cake for me (she always made great, funky cakes), and they put it in front of me with a big "1" candle, and the next thing anyone knew, I had yanked off an entire leg of the giraffe and was stuffing it in my mouth. no one remembered that this had been captured on film. and suddenly, there I was, in my high chair with a birthday hat strapped on. the giraffe, candle flaming. a pan shot of everyone there, in my family's dining room, and then back to me-- stuffing the giraffe leg in my mouth. my mom actually took it away from me and tried to reattach it to the cake, so she could get a shot of the cake in one piece. I laughed and laughed and laughed. but the thing I remember most. is how quiet my mother got when we put in the tape with the movies from her childhood. I remember a shot with those old-style gangster looking cars from the forties, and realizing that I'd never really known that my mom grew up in such a different world from mine. not really. but the scene that's engraved in my memory: my mom is a toddler, probably not much older than I was in that giraffe birthday movie. she's sitting on the porch steps with her mother, who looks very carefully put together, the way they did back then. elaborately waved hair tight around her head. lipstick, makeup, plucked eyebrows. wearing a neat little suit. knees together. hose. certainly a girdle, under that skirt. and that tense, unhappy look on the mother's face. maybe a tinge of fear, but maybe I add that in because I know that my grandfather, who is holding the camera, is an alchoholic and prone to abusive behavior. that later in life, he will tell my mother that it's a waste of money to send girls to college before he sends her anyway. that he will call her at college when she is twenty to tell her that her mother is dead, and that now her blind and developmentally disabled sister is all he has left to live for. but it's long before all of that. my mom is a laughing little girl, chubby and playful, with wild hair. a lot like I was. and like I would have, she's playing with, poking into everything. she reaches up and toys with a curl of her mother's hair. and this is the moment I can't forget. her mother, with a grimace, removes her little hand, places it firmly in her lap, and pats the curl back into place. I don't think she even once looks directly at her little girl. and so that is what I remember. when I remember how lost my mother seemed. how overwhelmed. how little she seemed to know about children. I sincerely believe that my mother did the best she could with what she had. I know that those twenty-somthing kids drinking beer on the lawn made all kinds of promises when that new baby boy landed in their lives (happy birthday, dad!) I know that one of them must have been never to lay a hand on us, never to abuse us the way they were abused. they kept that one. they made their own mistakes, as I know I will make mine. those beer parties on the lawn would turn into something else as they got older; the parts that aren't on film include screaming fights late at night and their youngest daughter (born in the dead of winter) cowering behind her bedroom door. a montage of shots: mom surprised while drinking alone in the kitchen, her mouth startling open to say something, but just hanging open in the tension silence tightening the air; the six-year-old taking the beer glass out of her father's hand after he's passed out on the couch, a service she will repeat for her twenty-one-year-old boyfriend when she is sixteen; back to the little girl at 3, with wild curls and wide eyes, sitting rapt on the kitchen floor gazing at the meditative patterns of the smoke from the cigarettes that will nearly kill her mother in five year's time. that same daughter, at the age of fifteen, opening the door to find her dad standing there, looking bruised and beaten, blood down the front of his shirt. I hit a parked car, is all he will say. she puts him to bed, runs to the drugstore for his pain prescription, picks up the reese's peanutbutter cups they both love as an extra treat, to cheer him up. he will do five days in jail for that, his second DUI. and it is that, finally, which will inspire both parents to quit drinking once and for all. which will cause them to suddenly begin to notice details they'd missed. like the fact that their youngest daughter, having recently discovered boys, pot, and alcohol, can't always be accounted for. isn't accustomed to calling home or being missed. they will begin to invent rules that never existed before, which will infuriate a fifteen-year-old who feels she's done a fine job raising herself to this point, thank you, and would just as soon finish the job. power struggles like lightning strikes will sear the space between them for the rest of her adolescence, the daughter drinking like a fish, the parents mystified by how she picked up such a habit. there are two other children, of course: the big brother (happy birthday, dad!), and the middle sister who will always believe that the siblings at either end were loved more than her. but I am the star of this particular movie, and the movie the three children made while left to their own devices has its own flavors of brutality and bitterness, the ending not quite hammered out yet, limited release scheduled for some later date. in this movie, my movie, the laughing little girl grows into an angry adolescent grows into a nineteen-year-old recovering alcoholic. and somewhere in her twenties, our heroine realizes that her parents, both of them, did the best they could with what they had. that they made all kinds of promises to their children, and kept as many as they knew how to. that she has always known she was loved. that all the storms and nightmares along the path have brought her to a place of strength and joy that she wouldn't trade for any number of happy childhoods. and somewhere on the edge of thirty she remembers that once upon a time she was the happiest of little girls, with wild curls and a big grin, and somehow along the way she finds that little girl again, finds her dancing barefoot in the sunshine with tangles in her hair, living in california the way she'd announced she would at the age of five. somewhere along the way she begins to wish for a baby of her own. begins to make a list of promises. she knows that when the time comes, the right daddy for her baby will come along. that they will keep as many promises as they know how. that they will make their own mistakes. that their daughter will blame them for at least some of her unhappiness, for at least some part of her life. but she also believes that, in the end, it will all be good. *** persephone, my angel, became a big sister a few days ago. I went up to visit with her and tim and sam and their new baby girl today. welcome to the world, letonia.
(((rings))) |