Mothers, daughters, writers

Last night I watched the third remake of "The Diary of Anne Frank." I wasn’t intending to. I loved the original Millie Perkins as Anne. But this one might have been better. I tried to watch the way I do other programs – while sitting with my laptop. I muted it a few times when the shrill van Pels got to arguing. About halfway through I gave in and set the computer aside; fluffed my pillow; put my feet up, and wrapped myself in a blanket.

I’m a sucker for writer stories, love it when I see them get cranky about their privacy. In this version of the movie, there was Churchill on the radio, calling people to write, and saying that letters and diaries would be the only way people were going to know what was endured. I didn’t recall hearing that broadcast in the previous movies. The young actress in this portrayed the awakening of a mission so well. “I have to write,” she says. “I know what I’m going to be now. I’m not going to be like other women, like mother.”

She was so irritated with her mother! Her mother was the long-suffering type, always speaking gently. Her sister was timid and frail. Anne admired only her father and his integrity and strength but often lashed out childishly and considered herself unloved.

My feelings got so stirred up – as if so much of my life was shown so vividly in the family dynamic of living so contained in their attic. I shed a few tears at the end but felt sick with unshed tears after.

I always liked Anne Frank’s honesty. It was dear to me when I was young. It was different. Anne was different from other writers. I identified with her. There she was, in the most extraordinary and horrific circumstance and she marveled at how life went on…even there…and stood firmly in it.

But for all her wonder and dreams and her belief that people are good at heart, she couldn’t find a way to show love to her mother. And she couldn’t apologize for it. Her dad didn’t escape either. A letter she wrote him made him cry and he said, “I’ve encouraged you to be a writer and then you write this? You write to hurt me?” She cried, “I have to write what I feel!”

Oh, this writing thing. This living thing! It is so awful. So painful. So wonderful.

I didn’t know who I felt for more as it ended. Forgive me for saying this, but I was less involved (for the first time ever) in the larger story. I was feeling for my daughter and me. It was all about us in some way, in a way I’d never before viewed the story or the movie. I saw the pain and hurt of the mother/daughter relationship and the pain and hurt Angie and I cause each other. Sometimes I feel as if I hurt her by breathing; as if she rips my heart out with her strained smile. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder. Why? Why does it have to be this way? And sometimes I think the answer is because I write. Because I want time and space…like Anne…and because Angie is a young mother who cannot expect it and yet must live with me. And I do get it. Me – who complains about my need of it as if it is a right she is depriving me of. Me – who never gets enough.

And yet the feeling in the movie was that this tension had to be! That for reasons compelling and mysterious, it had to be that way. Anne could not pretend to feelings she didn’t have or keep the ones she did under wraps. She was born to be a writer and she had little time and Churchill called her: you writers are the ones who will tell what we have endured.

Why is there such pain and beauty and so much of what we call the human spirit in enduring? By the end of the story/movie, you love them all…poor, simple humans. All stuck together so that nothing could remain hidden. And with a writer amongst them to reveal it all and make it into an enduring story.


After the movie ended, a program on the Buddha came on. The TV was on mute. I watched images of men in meditative positions, very skinny, not interested in material things, eating little…and monks posing for photos for tourists.


I ended up babysitting for Angie’s first Saturday of school. It was a beautiful spring day. I took Henry out to my son’s where Ian is experiencing his first spring in my dad’s old house. We walked up and down the drive and around the house so that I could identify where the perennials are coming up, watched the birds that Ian is beginning to identify lighting on his new feeders, and then down to the lake where we cast fishing line into the water, Henry calling after each one, “Do it again!”

We came home and Henry was so tired he slept three hours. When his mom arrived I felt I had to have words with her about the way she hadn’t made arrangements for the day. We’re standing in the yard. She cries, “I’m sorry I ruined your day,” just before she walks away. We go in the house. The feeling of the attic closes in again.


This morning, I awake with a headache thinking about our freedoms and how central religious or spiritual freedom – well really all the personal freedoms – have been and are. How they look so big and “out there” and as different as the two stories that ran back to back on public television. I thought of how, when viewed from a distance or as issues, they appear this way, and how, up close, they are so infinitely personal and similar…no matter what form they take.

Ambition

I’ve been dying for something to spark me. Holy cow. It’s only been a week but it’s been a long week. Now I’ve got a long weekend ahead of me, the first in what seems like a few years, and I need the spark. I need to get back into the zone. I need to breathe and find my self again. Where did I go?

It was a big week in my household. Angie and Henry both started school. Changes in routine all around. Commotion.

So I get out of my zone with all that. Out of touch with the “me” that I like and feel happy to be. The “me” who feels I’ve got some freedom. Get that freedom feeling going and it doesn’t matter so much what I’m doing. It is hard to know where that feeling goes or even why. Yes, there’s the pull of obligations going in five directions, but I’m not sure they’re the cause of why I feel so enslaved.

I didn’t get inspired this morning by anything lofty at all, but by a book review of a Minnesota author, shown sitting on Brighton Beach in Duluth (where I’d thought of going for a getaway this weekend only to find all the rooms booked). It was a case of something that felt a little like envy at this woman’s ability to state her ambition without shame. She says, “I was going to keep writing until I sold something if it took until I was 90. I wasn’t content with self-publishing. I wanted a big New York house and I wanted to see my book in every Barnes & Noble and independent bookstore in the country.”

Mary Ann Grossman, who didn’t review The Given Self, even though she’d said she would and even though I’m a Minnesota author (and it feels like she reviews everything by Minnesota authors), ends the article by saying that’s exactly what this author did. This ambitious writer sold her book to a New York house and got it in the bookstores.

That, too, is what I feel wistful for, that feeling of doing what I set out to do (even though I don’t exactly work that way – with a feeling of setting out to accomplish something). Maybe that is what ambition is -- “setting out to accomplish something” and why I’m saying I feel something “like” envy.

I don’t set out to accomplish anything.

What this writer has accomplished is like the dream of my youth, my imaginary forays into fame, my seat in the chair next to Johnny Carson. When I hear of such things I remember those dreams. ‘Oh,’ I think, ‘how lovely it was when it was so straightforward. When all I wanted to be was one of those New York published writers.’

Now I just want to be me.


Quote from "Booksellers are loving Duluth author Wendy Webb's 'Tale of Halcyon Crane' by Mary Ann Grossman, 4-9-2010, p 9A

An Easter Observation

At Easter morning Mass, Fr. Adrian called the resurrection metahistory. I’d never heard of that before. He mentioned other feast days and holy days, including Christmas, and said they were observation of historical events. But not Easter. What happened at Easter – the resurrection – was beyond history, beyond event.

For one thing, it wasn’t a one-time deal. Maybe that’s the only thing.

Anyway, I got excited about it and wrote a note to myself on the book page of the paper, a big scrawling M e t a H I s t o r y over the picture of a memoir’s book cover, and then added a few other things I might forget. I know money was one of them (I actually do forget about money on occasion) but it was a shorthand reference to several things like banking. The other two items on the list fail to come to mind even though I just looked at the note a half hour ago.

That’s when I got excited again about this word, this idea. I turned on the computer and went to metahistory on the internet right away. I was curious. Here’s the only definition I found:

The overarching narrative or ‘grand récit’ that gives order and meaning to the historical record, especially in the large-scale philosophies of history of writers such as Hegel, Marx, or Spencer

Hmmm.

Far too heady for me this morning.

I’ll leave my Easter observation as this one of metahistory though because I get it. I get it that this is a quality of eternity; a different kind of continuity than what gets inserted into the calendars we hang on our walls and then celebrate as events, and how wonderful and bizarre it is. In year-after-year cyclical this and that, it is the only beyond-history phenomenon.

It reminds me of how when my dad was dying he said he didn’t want to send any more Halloween cards.

Merton: My hero for a reason

My hero, Thomas Merton, was always about the “good” fight – first fighting his hedonistic nature, and then fighting the authorities of his Order who wouldn’t give him his hermitage, or his time for solitude, or his transfer, or his freedom to protest or to stand in solidarity. If he hadn’t fought that fight, I don’t know that he’d be who he was, and he’s so beloved, you can’t help but feel he was meant to do it. Those are the things I remember when I’m up to my eyeballs in a fight…those and that he got his snippets of the life he fought for and that they were so fruitful. It makes me feel it’s worth it to keep fighting, and yet then, there are mornings like today when there’s nothing to fight for or about and it all seems a little silly…or not even that so much as that I’m feeling how hard it is to drop my arms and enjoy the respite.

What I have this morning is temporary. A brief respite. A circumstantial respite. And yet again, maybe that’s all there is. Like Merton. He’d get heavily into contemplating leaving his order and then he’d think of all the problems that would come with it and his commitment, the promise he made, and his love of the Kentucky hills, and he’d decide leaving was too awful to face or staying too lovely to leave and he’d be back with himself and trying to make things right in his life from where he stood. But it was as if he was always yelling inside about the unfairness: “There’s no good reason that I’m denied what I know will most suit me. It’s no skin off of anyone else’s nose. I want to stay, want to honor my commitment, want to be this writer/monk I’ve become – but damn – why does it have to be made so difficult??”

Then he’d think he was arrogant to feel the way he did and that he was making himself special. He went through it all. The arrogance and the doubt, the self-worth and the self-loathing. That’s why I love him; why he’s my hero. I so love him for sharing all of that with me. I can forgive him his arrogance because of his doubt. I can relate. It’s so clear to me that this is “him” – the fighting and the surrender – not a surrender to man but a surrender to God, and the fighting always about what he needed to be in that state of surrender to God – sort of unencumbered by the fight. Real paradoxical that.

But then he’d get his respite – and no matter how temporary he’d dwell there and marvel and be so grateful and let down his arms, and share from that place too – that’s the stuff most people love him for, I suppose, and maybe if you just read that stuff – the fruits, you’d think it was easy and that he was a peaceful sort all the time. That he looked at all the big questions he contemplates from some place up above them, or something, but when you read his journals you know he looked at all the big questions because he confronted them in himself, and did all that wrestling with them.

He’s my hero for a reason.

Negative but True

I talked to a friend yesterday who said she’d been reading my blogs.

I said, “You have?”

She said, “Yeah. I try to keep up with what’s going on with you. Your blog is interesting, but it doesn’t tell me much.”

I thought, ‘It doesn’t?’ Man. I feel like I’m right out there.

I’d just been thinking a few days ago about what another friend said to me, a guy who’s done a lot of reading of a lot of my writing. He said that much of my former writing (scads of unsubmitted manuscripts) was like journal writing, but that with The Given Self I had written with that little bit of distance that allowed for more perspective, and it worked.

I was thinking that I had achieved that with these blogs too: Still personal, but not so personal that they had that overly inward and sometimes narrow perspective of the journal, where I, at least, write my way through all kinds of daily stuff and junk. But really, that was still true with The Given Self. I had that feeling of personal immediacy as I wrote it.

I love reading journals though, and so I wonder this morning if I’m getting away from my roots. I’m wondering…not in an anxious way…but in a pondering way. Is the blog a place where a good friend ought to be able to know what’s going on with you?

Meanwhile, I read an article in the paper this morning about on-line complaints. It caught my eye because I was thinking about posting one about my website company and my inability to get them to make updates. The article was about the line between criticism and defamation. A lawyer gave a definition. He said that when you write something negative but true, it is not defamation.

My website complaint is pretty straight forward and I’ve got tons of evidence (begging, pleading, negotiating, e-mails sent – always giving the benefit of the doubt – Is there something I haven’t provided you? Isn’t this our agreement? Let’s clarify our agreement. And finally, “Here’s what I need and if you can’t do it tell me so I can go elsewhere” after which I was made promises that were not kept.)

I’ve got a lot of “negative but true” stuff going on in my life. Some of it isn’t quite so straightforward. Some is. It feels like a stage I’m in. One of those “Everything you need to take care of is going to be in your face until you take care of it,” stages. My daughter has accused me of being negative more than a few times and I’ve responded (more than a few times) that I’m not being negative, I’m stating facts or truth.

So let’s just say there’s a bigger privacy element to this kind of thing – to the “negative but true” matters in life. In some ways, I feel the privacy issue lets me step beyond the details of the particular to the feelings that are more universal, but it could be that it’s this that makes my friend feel as if she doesn’t know what’s going on with me.

Maybe it’s not “spiritual” to call anything negative, and the ability to see it all as a gift that lets you work through a challenge or two (or thirteen) ought to override the negative. But if you’re getting a divorce, dealing with job or financial or sandwich generation issues, if you are working to change any of the really major patterns in your life, make mid-life adjustments, or even just to create the space for a new direction to unfold, the “negative but true” is going to rear up and make you forget, on occasion, that some things are just plain true and that you’ve got to look at the actuality of the situation.

Even worse, is when some things aren’t just plain true, and you’ve got to worry about perspective and do a little discernment. Neither place is much fun.

There’s a story Carolyn Myss once told about a trip from hell. After many, many “negative” things occurred, she complained to the man sitting next to her on a train, who turned out to work for the Dalai Lama (this could only happen to Carolyn Myss). The man says to her that when a bunch of stuff like that happens in a row, the Buddhists believe that you are being distracted so that something new can be born.

Now there’s a different perspective – the distraction part. To me, it seems that all these “negative but true” things need my full attention and that NOT letting myself get distracted from them is the way to see them through to conclusion.

The negatives of a trip from hell are not the same thing as the negatives that sit on your chest for being there in your life day after day. But I suppose the actions are still the same, and that if I’m being distracted by all of this so that something new can be born, it’s still the exact result that’s being hoped for.