Category: Family of Origin

Dear Character Defect

I need to let you go now.

Because you interfere with my ability to experience the joy of doing something for the simple love of doing it.  Because you have me spending too much of the limited time I have in this head focusing on who or what is better or worse instead of what is.  Because you rob me of celebrating my successes and those of other people.  Because you are an aging artifact of the behavior of insecure, immature people who could not make good decisions but were in charge of my formation.

You are a portrait painted by hurt people, no less a construct than the fairy tales I was nursed on and rejected.  Believing in you perpetuates the hurt and fear of your creators; keeps that hurt and fear spinning out into the world.

This doesn’t mean I give up my right to practice discernment.  I intend to use brain and eyes to the best of my ability.  I intend to be right sized.

I have people now who hold me in their strong hands – neither blind to my faults and humanity, nor disgusted by them; neither dazzled by my gifts and talents, nor jealous, fearful, and dismissive of them.

I can breathe.  I can stretch.  I can fall.  I can get up.  I can smile at the mirror and at the rest of this raggedy family.

Call

Call I’ve got the telephone cradled against my shoulder and through the receiver, soft and pushy like the cat’s cheek or Nat King Cole’s voice you keep saying It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right. I’m hanging onto a telephone, a bleak voice speaking to me from a black space … Continue reading “Call”

Call

I’ve got the telephone

cradled against my shoulder

and through the receiver,

soft and pushy like the cat’s cheek

or Nat King Cole’s voice

you keep saying

It’s going to be all right.

It’s going to be all right.

I’m hanging onto a telephone,

a bleak voice speaking to me from

a black space where the inevitable

might not happen tonight.

Francine

Francine M. Provost O’Connor, 4/08/30-10/10/07

Mouse’s End

Mother, farm bred and practiced,

fills the bucket to the very top

while staring in the direction of

the greasy green ceramic tile –

too good to replace yet.

The cage is sent for.

My sister returns, sobbing and stumbling,

stepping on the chalky white polish of her own shoes.

My father, the still center of the storm,

sits in gaping cotton boxer shorts

with his head forward saying,

“It’s the most humane thing.

Get your father a beer.”

My sister sets the cage down,

delivers the beer, wills herself invisible.

We’re ready.

Whitey drops head first

into the cold tap water.

Mother clamps the scratched plate on.

A roiling,

then the gift of silence.

 

Good Friday

From 12 to 3 you have to sit on the couch

and not do anything.

Our Lord was suffering from 12 to 3

and usually now it rains because the world is sad

about the suffering of Our Lord.

You can’t even jiggle your foot

because God the Father will see

and be very sad that you are jiggling

on the day his Son died.

You can’t color or even read,

you have to just sit and think about Jesus

and the nails in his hands and feet

and how the soldiers took his clothes off

and how someone poked him with a sword

to see if he was really really dead

and how the blood came out.

It’s okay if the dog plays

but you can’t throw the ball for her,

because you are the one made in God’s image.

And no matter how much you want to go outside,

you can’t.

You have to sit and think about how

you have it good in this country

with lots of food and cars and

the freedom to worship Jesus however you want.

 

Something to Thank my Mother for

I was born first.

I was the largest, hanging low and heavy like wet sheets on the line.

Her mother was two months dead and her husband in the service,

so she rode to the hospital in her father’s truck.

Massachusetts in January was dark as the grave.

Her fingers had swollen, so she couldn’t wear her wedding ring.

My eyes were brown at once, oxidized by the sterile air.

So the nurses judged her abandoned, me a half-breed,

and brought her coffee and smokes.

As for me –

I was so round, so satisfied, so wombful,

I slept and slept.

I never woke for food.

I was already left-handed and dreamy.

My whole first year she had to tickle the bottoms of my feet

to wake me, crying:

Look at this.  Look.

Eulogy for my Mother

4/8/1930-10/10/2007

My mother enjoyed life and a wide variety of things in it.  To her, whatever was up next was going to be great!  She loved her family, all children, books, crossword puzzles, teddy bears, dolls, the Catholic church, seafood, cigarettes and coffee, the Secular Franciscans, and jazz.  Hers was a world in which Precious Moments could groove to Oscar Peterson.  As a child she’d taken acrobatic ballet lessons and late into her life she could still do perfect cartwheels for her grandchildren.  Without any formal education or training she made a successful career of writing and publishing; and she made it look natural and easy.

My mothers life was not easy.  And it was populated by some difficult people.  For many years I was one of them.  And yet she absolutely insisted on seeing the world through the eyes of love and grace and beauty.

Ever my father’s daughter, I can’t tell you how many times I tried to explain to her (and these word are all capitalized like in Winnie the Pooh) The Reality of the Situation.  She would just say, “I know, Peg,” and go right back to seeing the world of love and grace and beauty.  And no matter how many times I tried to warn her, she always talked to strangers.

I want to tell you my family’s iconic Francine story:  It is the mid-sixties, a time when going out to eat was for very special occasions only.  We’re in one of my father’s awful cars, let’s say the Rambler, and we drive past a pancake house.  My mother says, “A pancake house!  Those are always so nice.”  A pause.  My father says, “Fran, have you ever been to a pancake house?”  She hadn’t.  But she knew that if she did, it would be great.

In her final days my mother’s body was broken from the accident and she had pneumonia.  It hurt her to move and it hurt her to breathe.  But, typically Francine, because her family was standing around her bed she said, “Hasn’t this been the best week ever?”

Myself, I’m not a believer.  But for her I am sure that whatever is up next is bound to be great.

Two for my Father

on his death

Hauling my Father Away

The man who hauled my father away

arrived at the trailer park in a black Chevy Blazer

with funereal curlicues painted on the back window.

The trailer was disintegrating, my father was big,

and though it was a grey February day

the man was sweating through his black polyester.

When the wheel on the gurney hit the hole on the floor

my father flopped sideways like a tuna

trying to catapult itself out the door.

My brother and I laughed

in spite of ourselves.

We were so tired.

And our father was so gone.

 

For my Father, Five Years Dead

I said I love you as I left that day.

You didn’t hear me say it, I suspect.

I’d turned to go, the machines were in the way,

and I wasn’t even sure it’s what I meant.

The dark familial clutter clears away

as years and failures all my own amass.

I say I loved you easier today,

not just because you are not coming back.

When I was a Boy

 

Back when I was the boy of the family

I used to jiggle step in my father’s shadow all Saturday.

At the barbershop there were Hulk comics

and pictures of ladies in their nighties

and I learned how to say JEEEEEEESUS Christ

and not make it sound like a prayer, either.

We’d go to the bar to sit in cool darkness

and drink 7-Up right out of the bottle.

I learned jokes and shaking hands with the guys.

Or we’d go fishing – catching pumpkin seeds or clumps of grass.

I had to be quiet then, but it was serious quiet and easy,

not like mom’s nap quiet when I always needed stuff.

And we’d sit together against a tree.

Blue eyes and brown eyes didn’t make us different then

like breasts did later.

Oh, we were a club, just us two.

At night he washed my little hands in his big ones

and dried them hard,

even between my fingers.