childhood

“Divorce,” and Other Words I Wasn’t Allowed to Say by Jennifer Kayrouz

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 8 Comments

Jennifer moved to West Virginia just prior to starting 8th Grade. Some people thought that her family moved to West Virginia on a dare.  That was over 22 years ago and she now claims she would give her left pinky toe to be considered a West Virginian by her hillbilly peers.  She went off to college once or twice, but always happily landed right back in Charleston. She now works for the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine and loves most minutes of it, getting to travel and constantly learning and being challenged. She lives in Kanawha City with her husband, who, while being 7 years younger is still decades more mature and light-years ahead of her in his intellectual and emotional capacity. They are delighted to be the parents of one precocious 4-year-old girl.

Note:  Jennifer worked for a period of months to tell her story in a way that is honest, transparent, and also respectful of everyone involved.  Finding that balance in a story of a childhood where your family is coming apart at the seams is not an easy thing.  I have tremendous admiration for Jennifer and for her difficult work in this effort.  When I read the final version of the essay, I could feel it all just “click.”  As I told her, Damn, girl.  You nailed it!  Well done.

“Divorce,” and Other Words I Wasn’t Allowed to Say

Childhood memories are very polarized. It’s easy to recall that epic Christmas where you got an entire Barbie settlement and to romanticize the moments of your youth, but the bad memories are always there to keep you honest.

The memories I have of our life on 1062 Cloverbrook are certainly some of the best and definitely many of the worst in my life. There were five of us in that house and I can make a fair assumption that all five have a different take on that time in our lives. With every thimble-full of torrential screaming about a dirty bedroom or why our dog fucked up the afternoon, there was a sturdy bucket pouring over its sides with silliness watching a movie as a family and genuine joy at racing down the rapids at New Braunfels. This strange dichotomy was my norm and I began to anticipate the storms because I knew the sun was never warmer than after the rain. There was always a bit of peace that gave some reprieve from whatever caused all the commotion to begin with.

It was within this space between the bad and the after that I seem to remember the most.

My memories are painted all the more surreal because we were living in San Antonio, Texas. If you have never been to Texas, go.  Take your kids. Texas is a circus-like playground. Everyone is a character and life really is bigger and brighter in The Lone Star State. Fireworks were legal (everything was legal in 1982) and beer is as acceptable a beverage at 10 AM as juice or coffee. For the record, my dad drank Busch and Shiner beers.  The weekends in southeast Texas are even more fun. There was always something to do. Always some county festival to conquer or flea market to troll for colored glass. I learned to swim in Medina Lake and to pick strawberries in Poteet. To my childhood eyes, it seemed like it was always the 4th of July; there were just so many people around.

We were a popular family. We had a big yard and there was some type of hutch out back where my brother raised rabbits or guinea pigs.  I took ballet lessons, joined and quit the Girl Scouts before I was ever graduated up from a Brownie, and I was one of the first kids on my street with an Atari gaming system. My older brother was a great athlete and my younger sister was so cute she barely had to speak with all the people falling over themselves to get her to giggle.

My mom had cultivated a beautiful rose garden and we grew vegetables in our back yard. By the time I was eight or nine years old, I could name at least fifteen different types of rose bushes and describe to you their color. I can’t underscore enough the amazing images I have of lush yellow and peach rose petals all over my yard or the way we always had fresh cut flowers on our table. It was as if Georgia O’Keefe had spent time in our yard. What I wouldn’t give now to look at a picture of our rose garden…. It is one of my deepest and happiest visual memories. I can now just barely remember the endless and escalating bickering over how much it cost, who pulled who’s back out digging the flower beds, and who was being ignored for that damned rose garden.

To be blunt, my parents did not agree on much. I am not quite certain about what brought them together in 1973, but I imagine it was because they were both very bright, attractive, and naturally drew others to themselves. In those two ways, they were perfectly matched — my dad, the funny and charming tall drink of water you start chatting with at a party and come to realize that he is brilliant and knows the entire history of everything, and my mom a stunning beauty who  gave off mystery and intellect as easily as breathing. Sadly, they differed in the basics of raising kids, growing a marriage and most everything else.

I don’t want to demonize either of them. I am a parent now and I know that ‘the best I can do’ varies by 100 degrees from day to day. I truly believe that they were doing the best they could with the skills they had at the time. This was pre-Oprah, pre-Internet and pre-other people can poke around in your family’s business. Folks didn’t pour their wash water into the streets like we do now and certainly, if you caught a whiff, you smiled and pretended not to notice. Both of my parents grew up in Catholic families, went to Catholic schools, and were taught the fundamentals of life from immigrant parents who possessed a sharp focus on a narrow line of tolerable behaviors. Mom and Dad were each very intelligent, and each was exhausted emotionally from being themselves and our parents.

You aren’t supposed to see your parents as people. You are always supposed to gaze upon them in their exalted station as safe-keeper to all in their manor. They are not supposed to be the ones who scare the children. I watched my mom stab my dad in the back with a Bic pen over what seemed like folly at the time (she laughs at this now as if it were all an inside joke). I was often so afraid of what miserable disgusted venom might spew out of my dad’s mouth over the smallest of childhood indiscretions that I had almost no fear of what would happen when I really screwed up. They played hard and they fought with equal measure. As I spend time with my seven-year-old self now, I see them as I would see my own peers. The year I turned seven years old, Mom was thirty-five and Dad was thirty-three, both younger than I am as I write this. I see their flaws as people, not as my parents. It has made all of this much easier to swallow now that I know how easy it is for any of us to fall off that cliff. I don’t necessarily blame either of them; I just wish they had been better at hiding it.

For so many of my adult years, I didn’t know all this and I wished that I hadn’t been partner to their marital demise. I know it wouldn’t change the outcomes if I could process all that detail. Mostly, I just don’t want to remember the cruel words that my parents said to each other, the acts of a marriage breaking down, and the three kids who got flung into the abyss like General Zod into The Phantom Zone. I watch the three of us kids floating in space trapped in our panes of glass; none of us knowing how to escape or stop from shattering into pieces. We aren’t those kids any more and none of us ever want to be again.

If you were to ask me 15 years ago to paint my story, it would look very different from how it does now. Fifteen years ago I was angry and self-serving and most of all, self-righteous. I blamed everything on those two people and how they shaped my life. Everything from my fear of commitment all the way down to my student loan debt was because of Mom and Dad. Deep down, I harbored a grudge so fierce that my mouth tasted like metal and salt when I thought of any of it. In an ever more twisted angle, I relished this station and used it to draw my power.

Sadly, in my twenties, I was stupid and short-sighted enough to believe it was working. Thankfully as my youthful duties began to wind down, I began to gain perspective on life in general and how I came to be standing at that point. I wouldn’t characterize it as an epiphany (although it was certainly as powerful) as much as a slow and steady ascent towards understanding. Finally, I was able to look in the mirror and see my dad. When I saw this, it made me want him back in my life. So I started the wheels in motion to enter his world and make a big space in mine for him. As I got to know him as the adult I had become I realized that the best parts of me come from him. Amid many other traits, his sense of humor and silliness are painted all over me, not to mention my sense of right versus wrong and honor among men. I see it plain as the nose (also from Dad) on my face and I relish these parts.

While I had always remained close to Mom, when I looked in the mirror I thought I saw my defenses against becoming her molding my face and heart. I was wrong. Every woman eventually turns into her mother; mine is wonderfully complex and gets funnier every year. The logical and intellectual side of me is the exact same shade as hers. We are both smart enough to bend our reality and I am grateful each day for a tiny dose of her sex appeal. I am stubborn and irrational and just wise enough to get away with it. I have her to thank for that. It serves me well still. I am the perfect recipe of the two people that made me and I am delighted for it.

All in all, I think this is a story of redemption. For twenty years I thought it was my parents who needed to surrender, to apologize, and to beg forgiveness. I always expected heart-felt letters and poetic lectures about why all of that stuff happened. For a lot of it, I just needed an explanation. The daughter needed to know how certain events came to be even if I understood that I would never be able to reconcile them in my head. I thought my dad needed to make reparations to my mom for his part and she needed to mend the ties to me and my brother and sister for how she reacted and lived out the rest of her young life. It was a neat package of justice I held and I thought I should be the one to deliver us all into a full emotional recovery.

None of that happened.

As with everything else ironic in my life, the change and redemption happened to me. I s-l-o-w-l-y released my anger, fear, guilt and contempt and it was I who ultimately was set free. My heart is the one that was pushed open and flooded with love — love for my family and forgiveness for myself. All those years I thought I needed to forgive my parents and be given an apology for my sufferings. They never owed me either.  I owe a great deal to them.

Even though I wouldn’t want to live through any of it again, I have turned out to be a complex and multi-faceted woman with lots to offer to my partner and my community. On some days, I am downright brilliant and funny. Had I been born under some other moon to some other couple, I fear the under-bloomed yeast of my white bread existence. Because I am who I am, however, I will weather life’s rains better than most. I even found my own happily ever after and started my own little messed up family. My husband is very much like my dad and we have a little girl who eerily resembles the four-year-old me.  She was lucky enough to get me as her mother.

God help her be strong – she will need all the faith and patience she can get.

The Simons House (part 3) by Margaret Ward McClain

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 8 Comments

This is a story about a house.

Today, my walk in meditation begins as it did then, and I am as physically present in mind now as I was then in body.  I take a deep breath, then up the concrete step to the heavy wooden front door.  The door swings open to the ground level, a cinder-block and concrete first floor that anchors the wooden structure of the main house upstairs.  The air is still, slightly musty, cooling without the chill of air conditioning.  I start down the narrow hallway, past the laundry, past the dormitory-style ladies’ and men’s shower and dressing rooms.    A green beaded curtain separates the main living space from an extra fridge, a rusty freezer and piles of fishing equipment and hardware.  I pause to run my fingers across the smooth wooden beads, smiling at the click and shimmer of the absurdly avocado green strands.  Décor is a jumble of vintage yard-sale furniture and a cheery green-and-orange color scheme, best of the 1960’s floor-to-ceiling.   I move on past the brown-and-gold plaid polyester couch to the twin-bedded downstairs rooms:  sky-blue for my parents, orange for me and whichever itinerant family member would occupy the other twin bed.  Slightly curling posters and paint-by- number portraits of horses and ships line the walls.  A box fan sits in the window, turned backwards to pull the hot air out.  I turn the knob and a cross-breeze fills the room.   I sit for a moment on the narrow bed against the wall, drinking in the scent of salt, scrub pine and bay.

I would linger here, lay my cheek on the cool cotton sheets, drift off to sleep to the hum of the box fan and the murmuring ocean, but I have another place to go.

In the middle of the downstairs space sits the staircase.  The narrow wooden stairs are almost a tunnel, rising steeply and emerging abruptly from the floor on the second story into the main house.  My feet fall into the grooves worn on the stair treads by decades of flip-flops and sand.  Upstairs is a different world, all dark wood with bright borders of porches and windows.  To my left, three small bedrooms with creamy floor-to-ceiling bead board line up like soldiers, doors opening to the shotgun passage from front porch to back.  To my right is the small kitchen with its cracked linoleum floor and rickety butcher-block prep table.  Leaving the kitchen behind I turn for the open passage leading past the bedrooms to the great room and front porch.  The first bedroom has bunk beds (bunk beds!)  for the children, first me and my sister, later my younger cousins.  The middle bedroom, a room just large enough for the double wrought-iron bed, sheltered my aunt and uncle and let them keep an ear out for the children.  The front bedroom, for my grandparents, has twin beds and a window-unit air conditioner, then the only air conditioning in the house.

On my way down the passage I am caught, as I always have been, mid-stride, captivated.  A tall oak curio cabinet stands against the wall, honey-colored wood intricately carved, glass-front doors revealing shelves piled with a wonderment of shells.  There is a collection of hundreds, some carefully labeled with a Latin name on a tiny strip of paper, others stacked to overlapping.   Conch shells, purple striped urchins, varicolored mussel shells spread like wings.  Some are familiar, like an entire shelf of pale lettered olives, the South Carolina state shell, sometimes found on the island by the sharp-eyed and lucky.  Others are messengers from exotic shores:  giant conchs with porcelain-smooth pink centers, a curving cream-and brown nautilus, and tiny wentels spiked and whorled.   My mind is pulled past my horizon to another shore, where the life of these creatures begins, the thousands of watery miles of life and death between, the wave that carries them, the hand that carries them here.

I could spend hours here, gazing, but I move on.

Beyond the curio cabinet the passageway opens onto the great room, connected to the front porch by a door and a wall of double-hung windows.   It is paneled floor-to-ceiling with dark cypress furnished with white wicker, a Morris chair, and a lobster trap with a glass top serving as a coffee table.  I move to the center of the room, letting my glance drift across the walls decorated with netting spangled with shells,  yellowing Audubon prints of brown pheasant, a rowing oar above the passage to the upstairs bath and kitchen.  I step through the small doorway and let my fingers brush the knob to the pantry door, but I do not open it. Across the narrow passage is the upstairs bath, a small space filled with a pull-chain toilet and massive claw-foot tub perched on the bead-board on elaborate feet, enameled a spectacular shade of orange.

The passageway ends in the small narrow kitchen, connecting to the back porch with a door and a double hung window behind the stove.  Passing through the kitchen I end where I began, at the staircase.   Doors and windows honeycomb the upstairs.  Solid wooden three-paneled doors with round glass knobs connect each room with at least two others, windows open to the exterior, doors and interior windows open to the porches.  With doors and windows open, the lightest breeze has run of the house, ruffling bed sheets, stirring the sea-oats plucked and propped in containers for decoration, flipping cards on the table, sending paper napkins fluttering.  Closed up the house is a hollow tree, dark wood enclosing sturdy wooden doors and shuttered windows batten down to keep out the tropical weather.  In summer we lived with doors and windows flung wide, open to the light, open to catch the cooling breeze off the ocean, open to the beautiful sight of a distant storm.

I return through the upstairs the way I came, through the great room to the front porch.  I step through the door into bright space, gray painted wood under my feet, sky-blue bead board above, ahead a lattice of white-painted wood and screen and beyond it the ocean.  The hammock hangs at the far end, a white curve of rope and wood against the gray, the rope’s open weave casting a patterned shadow on the floor.  A small green lizard napping underneath startles and skitters off to a shady corner.   Inhaling deeply, I smell salt and the ozone coming off the water, wax myrtle and bay and sand baking in the sun.  Sheltered for a moment under the crooked eave of the porch, I allow myself to think of my son.  Already half-grown, his long-limbed body would span the length of the hammock on this porch he has never seen.  He won’t know this house.  The voices that flowed through me many long evenings on this porch are as still as the summer night.

The losses began one by one, far from here, and rolled on unrelenting for year after year.

Now dates file in like headlines:   1989:  My parents’ fragile marriage finally crumbles.  1993:  my aunt dies of colon cancer at the age of 44, leaving my uncle widowed, my two cousins motherless.  1998:  my grandfather dies a painful death from bone cancer; two weeks later, my grandmother suffers a stroke that takes her movement and her voice but does not kill her until two years later, 2000.  2003:  my own marriage does not survive.  2005:  retired five years and remarried for only four, my uncle dies of pancreatic cancer at the age of 61, and my cousins are orphaned.  My mother and her sister have lost their nuclear family, alone but for my sister and me and my cousins, now two young ladies they have pledged to love.

The Clan is much diminished, and we who are left will never be the same.

Many families have the same story.  For us somehow it should have been different, because of the Simons House.  The house remains, unchanged, a physical place of us, where we were and became.   It should have done as it always did:  stopped the world beyond, shielded us, sheltered us together .  Today, when I walk through the house in meditation, I am alone.  What story will I tell my son?  That the price of love is grief and loss?  That lesson will come unbidden soon enough.  That precious memories of time spent with loved ones can fill a hole in your soul?

No, my darling, they cannot.

I breathe in deeply again, place my hand on the screen door, and push it open.  In a step I am outside on the deck above the trees, facing the ocean.  The door bangs closed behind me.  I lean against the deck railing and see the view as it was:  no new road, no row of million-dollar mansions between the old house and the ocean.  Just bare dunes crested with sea oats, blooming with mallow and lantana; a wide swath of creamy sand beach curving to the inlet; huge vertical towers of white cumulus clouds over a slate-gray ocean;  low tide, a few whitecaps barely breaking, flat and calm to the horizon.    A splinter from the wood rail bites my palm.  Through layers of past, present and future, the tactile presence of living in this place urges me on.

There isn’t time; I have another place to be.

Maybe it is another beach house, on another island.  Maybe it is a house on a lake, cool and green and blooming with flowers in the summer heat.   Maybe it is a log cabin above the river, the slow-flowing water the very color of my son’s hazel eyes.   There is a house where there is a family, where my boy is a child for a  moment.   I must be present.   I must make sure:  when he is grown and lies awake at night, when the price of love is paid in grief, there will be a door for him to step through, a place he can enter body and soul, and breathe.

(This is the conclusion of The Simons House.  Thank you for reading!  Previous posts represent parts 1 and 2. Click here to read about Margaret.)