Tom's story is difficult. He and his sister live in Australia with their beautiful, complicated, mood-swinging Chinese mother. Glamorous Mama speaks limited English. She has an ever-changing cast of lovers ("Uncle This, Uncle That") and she attempts suicide several times, always promising afterwards that "Mother will be better, make all things good."
Finally, she gives up on pills and hangs herself from the ceiling, and her screaming children have to cut down her lifeless body.
Unlike Tom, in
Home Song Stories, I had a happy and secure childhood that is the bedrock of my life. When one has a secure childhood and is loved, there's little impulse to write about it because there are no undercurrents to try to figure out, no fears to unravel, no perplexing insults to replay. My defining story is not "ill parent" or "alcoholic parent" or "suicidal parent" or "divorced parents."
But parts of my "defining story" began too soon--when at 14, I began dating my future husband who was seven years older. At fourteen, we are still wet clay, easily shaped by others, especially if they are older and know things we don't know. Before I knew who I was, I set about being who he wanted me to be--and that became a bad habit.
Mine is the story of a baffling and unhappy marriage that lasted way too long, almost three decades. For many years, my diaries and journals skirted the truth and reported
only the facts, ma'am--where we went, what we did, who came over. I didn't tell the hard parts, even on the page. I couldn't see what I couldn't see, and when I started to see through the film, I didn't have the courage to put it on the page for many years.
It was as if I were living on two tracks at the same time: the marriage track (unhappy) and the mother track (happy). I tried so hard to turn down the volume on one so I could listen better to the other that I wound up blunting my ability to hear or see. Turn down the volume in one part, and the nuances of the other parts are hard to hear. When we shut down some of our emotions, all the others become muffled as well.
But I related to Tom's needing to tell the story of his mother--because he (like me writing about my marriage over and over) was trying to get at the truth that he couldn't grasp while he was a little boy. Maybe he thought that the writing would be the door to figure out and understand the mother he loved and feared. Maybe writing would lead to an epiphany--which, actually, it did.
The kind of vivid joy I feel now, as a grandmother, I felt less vividly as a mother. It took so much energy to stay upright and balanced on the thin wire I was walking that--even if I'd had a blog at the time--I wouldn't have observed my children as freely as I now observe my grandchildren.
When a tooth aches, all one's attention goes to the bad tooth; it's hard to feel the pleasures of the rest of the body when one is focused on the flaring ache in the mouth.
Tom and his sister were unable to be children because their job was "taking care of mum"
A mother walking on eggshells can't run freely with her children or play on the floor for hours; she's distracted by her own fear of being yelled at if she lets the house gets messy or if they make too much noise.
This kind of mother (let's call her an Eggshell Mother) notices one day that her voice has shriveled like an unused muscle. When she gets her voice back, years later, she wishes she'd been able to speak and act with confidence back when her children were young. Even though she wouldn't change a thing about the way her children have turned out, she has regrets. If she got a chance for a do-over, she'd never let ridiculous fears blunt her days!
At the end of the movie, Tom reports that he and his sister have turned out "kind of normal"--in spite of their rocky childhood.
My happily-divorced friends and I have all turned out okay as well. We've been on the single-road (together) long enough that we are (as Sandy said) "echo chambers" for each other.
What Happened Back Then doesn't have the charge on it that it once had. But we Single-Friends-Traveling-Together often wish we'd met each other back when all of us were on something of the same page without yet knowing it!
As children (or child-brides) we weren't mature enough or skilled enough to speak up. What happens to children lacks the context of many people who can make our perspectives larger. There's usually no one around to say, "What's happening is crazy!" Whatever goes on in the walls can start to feel, well,
normal.
The film ends with Tom sitting at the same keyboard, finishing the story. On the night his mother died, he kept thinking, "I should cry now," but he never did. "In all these years, I've never shed a tear for her."
"Instead I
write about her,
bringing her back to life, over and over.
Trying to understand her.
Or perhaps to punish her.
Or just to remember....
To feel...To accept...
To forgive...To love...."
If you've ever loved a person who's abandoned you, who's been cruel in ways you've kept secret, who's bullied or ignored you, whose illness has paralyzed you--this is definitely a shaping story. Write it over and over, as many times as it takes.
Read it to a writing group. Or publish it. Or post pieces of it in a blog. Someone will see pieces of her story in your story, just as you do in hers. When she says "Me too!" (or something close), you'll know: this is why we write the hard things.
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