Thank you, Maya Angelou

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

picture from Maya Angelou website

This quote by Maya Angelou appeared in The Writer's Almanac, April 4, 2011. The brief article commemorates her birthday, which also notes April 4 as the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, on what was then Maya Angelou's 40th birthday.

Once a friend took me to hear Dr. Maya Angelou speak at event held in a university arena, a large venue so that thousands could see her in person. Maya Angelou seemed small against a backdrop where competing teams in sporting events devour that space, a poet's tiny voice crying in the wilderness.

Unimpressed by the speaker, for me the best part about being there was being there with my friend. 

Now, years later, a connection between Maya Angelou and me sparked when I read that quote, as if an arc of current suddenly breached the philosophical and physical, as well as theological space that separates us.

I bear an untold story. It helps to know that someone understands that agony, the weight of bearing. 

Every day I confront my writer self with the question of whether I will ever tell that story. If I write that story, will someone publish it? If published, who would read it? Does anyone care either way?

In a way, I wish I had someone else's story to tell. I continue a love affair with reading other people's stories. Captivated, I fully appreciate the writer's ability to tell their story well. Reading The Pioneer Woman's Black Heels to Tractor Wheels, I wish I had a frolicking love story to tell. 

Reading Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood, the writers chronicle the literary journey from book to film. The story shows through Margaret Mitchell's experience how a book takes on a life of its own, quite apart from the author's best intentions or hopes or aspirations.

That's what scares me. What happens when a writer releases his or her words to readers? Best line from Back to the Future, "I don't think I could take that kind of rejection."

However, I want to write the book I was born to write, to somehow tell a coherent story that makes sense of my life. Rather than report facts or record incidents, I need to craft the story. But I have been trained to write reports. About writing, I still have a lot to unlearn. 

The reporter me has a just the facts detachment, a kind of third eye, which keeps me a safe distance from the emotional pain of a childhood fraught with uncertainty about everything. You never know what's behind Door Number Three. Surviving a tumultuous, extended period of confusion, all I ever wanted was to feel safe. 

Writing about your life is not safe. 

What has occurred to me though, looking in the rearview mirror, all the really dramatic stuff happened at the beginning, as I held on for dear life to my mother's flapping coattails.

Near the end of her life, knowing she would die with cancer, my mother wrote a brief summary of her life. "My checkered life," she called it, and while not her obvious meaning, if I envision a chess board, I can see that my mother never did anything in an ordered way.

Yet in living my life, I have tried to overcompensate for her disorder. A curious tension between us continues long since her departure. 

Thus, I bear the burden of an untold story inside me. My story involves the most interesting person I ever knew. I seek to honor the life that my mother lived because with all her wild and random choices, she managed to shape mine.

Today, I have Maya Angelou to thank for inspiring me to keep writing.

Memories Have Holes

Going through pictures last weekend with my husband, my son and daughter-in-law, I came across this one with a hole.

“Look at this. My dad is cut out of the picture,” I said.

But what struck me before I said anything: I didn’t know I had a picture of the doll—the doll they buried with my sister. She died seventeen days after her seventh birthday, four days after this picture was taken.

I wrote about that nebulous memory in one of my Door essays, “The Duck and the Doll,” an inchoate creative writing assignment for a class at DTS. Stunned to see a picture of Renée holding the doll she had gotten for Christmas—the day this picture was taken—the glossy black and white image refreshed my shame. I had asked for her doll when she died because my gift was a cradle without a doll.

But back to the picture with a hole.

A wistful feeling swept over me that my dad was missing. He died, too, not quite three months later. It would have been the only picture I have of the four of us together before they died: my mom, my dad, Renée and me. Unc, on the far right next to me, died in 1992. The two boys are cousins, Joe and Mike. Auntie, my mother’s younger sister, took the picture.

My mother, who died in 1998, said she hated pictures. Few of her pictures have ended up in my possession—these timeless-ageless mementos that root me to a reality lived through while their substance remains as murky and fluid as a river.

My daughter-in-law held the picture in her hand to examine it. “My mom cut my dad out of pictures after their divorce.”

We all agreed that my mom had to have cut my dad out of the picture. 

“Who knows why?” I added. “Maybe Mom blamed him for Renée's death.”

Still the picture itself bore evidence to the memory that caused me to swallow hard and fight the tears. Keep sorting, I told myself. Forget about the doll. Forget about the duck. Forget about the dad.

The next morning, on our way home, my husband and I pulled into a Sonic in Amarillo. The crate full of pictures I had carted on this trip sat behind my seat; I kept thinking about one picture with a hole.

“I cut the picture.”

My husband said, “What are you talking about?”

“I remember a gold-plated locket that I wore. I don’t remember who gave it to me or when, but it’s coming back to me. I cut the picture of my dad’s face out and put it in that locket.” The memory came to me as if I had floated through fog, an unsubstantial spirit seeking rest.

“That makes sense,” he said.

Yes, the sharp angles of the cuts in the picture—it looks like I used a knife instead of scissors—imprecise cuts. The extracted piece would have revealed a tiny image of my handsome dad, a piece of my story to wedge in a cheap locket.

On the back of the picture with the missing daddy, my mother wrote, “Gone so soon!”

And I think, "Gone for so long."

Here, There and Everywhere

When I finished reading The Glass Castle, I expected to cry. I had fought tears and fury in balanced measure, relating personally to both the author’s truncated childhood and to her fierce loyalty to the persons she called Mom and Dad. I understand a child’s devotion to a parent that others think unworthy.

I had wondered throughout the story about the writer’s ability to recall so much detail of early childhood and to tell the story evenly from that childhood point of view beginning at age three. I had also wondered why a friend had given the book to me, eager for a response, as if anything I had endured could compare. No way. 

I recognized the characters Jeannette Walls drew; I had heard firsthand most of the snide, denigrating remarks spoken to or about someone; I did have a similar pillar-to-post, wild ride for about 16 years during the same era in the same three states of my early childhood—Arizona, Nevada and California. But the differences struck me too. 

First, she had two parents and I had only my mom after my dad died when I was nine. Secondly, she had three siblings who united with her to make a family that stayed together until one by one, they figured out they could leave. And then the siblings remained close in the sense that their memories bound them to one another in ways that ennobled them, each of them seeking to demonstrate love for their parents despite parental neglect bordering on abuse.

And then, perhaps most important, her dad loved her; he made her feel special.

The things I suffered as a child, I suffered alone. And that made the suffering acute. No reassuring voice from the lower bunk after my sister died the December she turned seven and I turned nine, just three months before my dad was killed. And though Mom tried in fits and starts to make a life for us both, she kept falling deeper into pits of her own tragic and twisted upbringing, or falling off the wagon—another of those expressions all too familiar.

Jeanette Walls did not offer a defense of her parents so much as an explanation of her own survival. When I look back, I expend emotional energy trying to exonerate my mom. Like Jeanette, I know the same self-recrimination for being ashamed of my mother.

Okay, so why did I like this book? It was painful to read. What struck me though was how life prepared the writer to tell the story. Each of Rex and Rose Mary’s four children dealt with their sorrow in different ways. Jeannette did the hard work of remembering.

Writing it out from experience rather than from an unbounded imagination can prove excruciating. I felt her pain.

When I finished the book, I didn’t cry because the writing was so beautiful. 

The writing eclipsed the pathos. Her story rose above the perfect metaphor: turbulence in chaos theory.

I believe God is here, there and everywhere.