Author: Ciel

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Don’t—And I Can’t Stress This Enough—Let Years Go By

I never had a dad, or a father, or a pop. I had a step-father for a while, but that… didn’t end well. I’ve lived over 50 years with no father/daughter connection. It was always my reality, as I’m sure it is for many people, that there was simply no dad.

I’ve often been fascinated by adults who have loving relationships with their parents, but only as a novelty. I could see it, witness it, but that was all. I was never moved by it.

My mom left me when I was twelve, basically wielding a big, shiny pair of scissors and clipping off our love with a decisive snip!, letting it fall unceremoniously to the floor, where it wriggled and gasped for a while before finally fading into nothingness. I’ve been essentially parentless most of my life.

Last month, on father’s day, I finally found the man behind the name misspelled on my birth certificate. He passed away in 2020, but I spoke to his siblings—who each revealed their unique version of him. At first, it was charming, discovering an uncle, an auntie, and a few cousins. But a few days after these telephone conversations, I was left with a prick of sorrow. Aspects of their descriptions felt familiar enough for this man to be recognizable. He was my dad.

And now, about a month later, while I do feel a little more whole, I also realize the immense loss. Certainly it’s regretful that I didn’t reach him before he died. But more than that, what I missed as a girl and as a woman—to not have had that figure in my life—is painfully evident. My perspective on a father’s love is clearer, and almost every day, I’m seeing what I was denied. Also, it turns out I was the only child he had, so he missed out as well.

I don’t know what happened after I was born, why my parents didn’t stay together. I only know my mother was eternally unhappy, and by the 80s, all three of us were just floating around out there, separate from each other. It seems to have been a genuine opportunity missed. It’s unlikely my young life would have played out worse than it did if we’d stayed together, or if I’d at least known him. It’s possible, of course. But from what I’m constantly learning about what it means to be human, unlikely.

So, all I can say is this, find that lost family member; a parent, child, or sibling, whomever it may be. Don’t wait, don’t make excuses, or worry about rejection (though I know that’s a hard one), just find them. Now.

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Excerpt: Latchkey Highway

In June I packed up my room and Ted held a massive garage sale. One more night in the mostly empty house and my uncles would pick me up, then my stepfather would finally be out of my life.

I sat in the only chair in the living room while Ted cleared things out of the family room, hauling them out through the garage. I didn’t talk to him any more than I had to; I’d answered his questions and more or less kept the peace over the year and a half, and now, as our time came to its close, I had nothing at all to say. But the mood was different now, as he also had nothing to say to me. He stomped by me and pushed into my room then into the room next to it, then back to the dining room and grabbed a stack of papers and a magazine off the end of the kitchen counter. I sighed and looked at my sandals. He strode back out to the family room then turned around in the entryway and said, “Get off your butt and help me!”

Without looking at him I said, “If it’ll get me out of here faster,” and got up.

The magazine slammed into the floor near my feet and the papers fluttered after it. It startled me and I looked up at him as he was coming toward me. I tried to get away and fell to my knees and he grabbed my arms. I tried to pull free, and I screamed and started crying. He pushed me down and straddled me holding my arms down.

“What the hell did I do that was so bad that you and your mother treat me like this?!” he screamed.

I turned my face away and he yelled again, “You treat me like an asshole!”

He got up off me and scooted away, settling against the wall at the far end of the room. He sighed and ran his fingers through his thick black hair and said, “You know your uncle won’t take this crap, right?”

I balled myself up on the floor in the fetal position and refused to make eye contact with him, though I could see him through my hair. He got to his feet and disappeared into the family room continuing out to the garage. I stayed there on the carpet, afraid to move. I fell asleep and it was dark when I woke up. The porch light was on and shone into the living room. I got up and went to my room. Ted wasn’t there when Will and Lawrence arrived in the morning.

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Book Review: The Witch Elm by Tana French

The Witch Elm by Tana French

I had heel surgery this past summer and took advantage of the recovery time to devour some books. This one was not a quick read, not that it was overly long or complicated, rather it was a good one to take my time with. I learned a lot of Irish vernacular and idioms but luckily for me, I watch a fair amount of British TV, so I was primed.

The characters were well developed—meaning flawed—and I genuinely enjoyed spending time with them, warts and all. I also enjoyed the gradual unfolding of their true natures. One character, Toby’s girlfriend, was a little underdeveloped, but all-in-all, that’s a mild gripe.

At its core, this story centers on how we find out who we are as our adult years play out. It’s also about our relationships with others as much as with ourselves, as those relationships ebb and flow over time. I connected personally with the idea that we get some of our opinions about ourselves from those around us—especially when we are either younger, or vulnerable in some other way. In the case of this story, Toby is recovering from an attack and his memory is in question. His self-doubt resonated with me. My less-than-ideal teen years were brimming with self-doubt, as the adults around me scapegoated me with seeming ease. Authority figures have the power to project, and manipulate, and convince, as the police detectives in The Witch Elm do to Toby.

Notably, and frustratingly, the Irish justice system is similar to the American one in that ‘affluenza’ exists there, too. I was disappointed to learn that. That’s not the only similarity, but I can’t say much more without dropping a spoiler.

The only thing I struggled with was picturing the house and garden at the “ancestral estate.” At first I thought it was some grand acreage, but I had to scale it down in my mind as it becomes obvious that this family is likely middle- to upper-middle class. Heck, there’s a row of apartment buildings at the property’s backside. It would help, I’m sure if I could visit Ireland, get the lay of the land. Sigh… someday…

All in all, The Witch Elm was a decent mystery. I would recommend.

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Review: Violin by Anne Rice

I devoured Rice’s work in the 90s, I love gothic horror as much as the next gal. I picked this up at a yard sale, never having heard of it and looked through the reviews online. Holy cow, are they polarized. Anyway, I dug in.

Here’s the short version of my impression: it’s a slow-burn portrait of profound sorrow. The prose is luscious and poetic—Rice, distilled. A widow in her early-fifties is haunted by the specter of a virtuoso from another era and his ethereal music as she manages her grief. She herself had played the violin, but not so well.

Sorrow is a permeating theme.

She listened with glistening tears, oh, yes, the requisite tears, the eternal tears, let tears be as frequent in this narrative finally as any common everyday word. let the ink turn to tears. Let the paper be soft with them.

FYI, where she says, “this narrative,” she (the narrator, the MC) is referring to the scene, not the book itself. The entire first four-fifths of Violin is exposition. The ‘action’ starts when you’re pretty much almost done with the book. I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing, just an interesting note.

Bold of her to write about music, and from a specific instrument, but I suppose if any writer could find the right words, she could.

It was a lustrous song I couldn’t name, perhaps his own, dipping into the dissonance that marks even the early music of our own century, a twist, a throb, a thundering protest of nature and of death. She cried. She lay her head against green velvet, a stylish creature, as if painted on stained glass in her frivolous gown, her pointed shoes, her soft ringlets of red hair.

This is classic Rice; storylines and vignettes across the ages, and sumptuous gothic settings, of course.

MILD SPOILER AHEAD

I expected a crescendo of horror in the finale, but none came. I would describe the wrap-up as her version of a ‘happy ending.’ This interpretation reveals something about myself. I’ve read a number of books—even memoirs—where the author has tacked on a tidy, feel-good wrap-up to what was otherwise a dramatic or downright dark narrative. I always notice it, and I’m usually disappointed by it. I’ve even done it, so I understand the reasoning, but I’m no less irked when it’s from my own pen. To me, life is mostly banality at best, and at worst a fair amount of misery, with maybe a handful bright spots. Where the hell are these gratifying conclusions coming from? The suffering doesn’t just… cease.

This book isn’t for everyone, it isn’t even for every Anne Rice reader. I’ll confess something to you right here and now; I’m one of those readers who doesn’t always finish a book. I’ve probably only made it through about one in every five or six books I’ve started. Violin is one that I should have wandered away from, but somehow I made the journey. I’m glad I did.

 

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Those Ubiquitous Oregon Brewpubs: a Love/Hate Story

Oregon Wine Country on an overcast day

I met a couple of my friends back in the 90s when we were cooks in these popular local brewpubs which I won’t name. Let’s just say there are dozens of them in Oregon and Washington, and they are restaurant work dialed up to eleven. Something about toiling in this harsh environment slingin’ burgers and beers leads to long-term friendship—at least it did for us. I personally have a love/hate relationship with these pubs, they’re so kitschy and cozy inside, but I gave so much of myself, so many little offerings of blood and bone, metaphorically speaking, during my years working there. I look back now and realize I had no business being in those kitchens. But I didn’t know at the time I had Ankylosing Spondylitis, only that I was in a heluva lot of pain. At this point I often think about how different things could have been if I’d known.

Which brings me to my point. I now live in rural Oregon—wine country, specifically. It’s picturesque out here, but I’ve discovered something important about myself. I don’t like living in the boonies. I’ve tried, but it’s not for me. I recently went back for a visit, and all doubt was removed while I was there. I’m. A. City. Girl. I would not have ended up here if I’d known I had AS. We made our plans to move out of the city with incomplete information, which is a crappy way to make big life decisions.

Those of us with undiagnosed, untreated, or otherwise invisible diseases are left to do the best we can with only half the story.  It took me years and a dozen doctors to get diagnosed. For whatever reasons, my complaints didn’t ‘land’ with many of the doctors I saw at first. It took time to learn how to be my own best advocate while also being a good patient.

So here I am, with not enough stimuli to keep my mind off chronic nagging pain, my precious friends are 75 miles away, and I swear I will not die in this funky little town. I’d rather die in a funky city, and be able to occasionally hang out in one of those goddam brewpubs before I do. So I’m making plans. . .  with all the intel this time.

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Work in Progress: Fiction: Magical Realism

A moonless night

A peculiar 23-year-old named Olive leaves her mother living in a hoard and her husband in Lashona, Washington, to find what she thinks is her alternate life being lived by someone else.

She has hitched a ride with a woman named Alanna who is on her way to visit her aging father. Olive crashes overnight on the couch, waking in the pre-dawn hours to snoop around the house.

Olive abandoned the quest, instead making her way to the stairs. She climbed with soft steps, and once at the landing, she looked to the left then to the right at the two closed doors before popping into the bathroom. 

She left the light off. No stars or moon were visible out the small window but there must have been something on the other side of that cloud cover, she thought. She heard one of the doors open. The floor on the landing uttered a creak. She stopped with her hand on the faucet and listened. 

She was just about to wash her hands when the bathroom door started to swing open and she called out, “I’m in here.”

A profound, startled howl came from the figure on other side of the door followed by a calamitous shriek. The door was pulled closed with force and Olive could hear a series of sickening thuds as well as the crack of what could have been wood. She drew in her breath and clasped both hands over her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut tight. 

Olive didn’t hear the other door open, but she knew Alanna was in the hallway. Olive turned the bathroom light on and flung the door open, and Alanna screamed, “Oh god!”

“Dad? Oh nooo, nooo!” she moaned at the top of the stairs, and made her way down, gliding her hand along the wall. 

Olive came out and leaned on the landing rail, and she stepped on something soft—a slipper. She descended the stairs, stopped a few steps from the bottom and crouched. She clung trembling to the wooden balusters, one of which broke away in her hand. She tried not to cry, as Alanna rifled through her purse for her phone then dialed. 

“What happened?” she shouted through tears at Olive, as her purse tipped off the dining room table, spilling its contents. Alanna put the back of her hand to her upper lip and paced, pressing the phone to her ear with the other hand. “Come on, come on, come— Hello, hello! … Yes, up on the hill, please! My dad fell down the stairs— I don’t know!” she sobbed. “Please, just hurry!” She bent down and wobbled onto one knee in front of her dad. “Yes, he’s breathing, but he’s— just hurry!“

She hung up and dropped on the wood floor fumbling for the dying man’s hand. “Dad, stay with me.” 

Olive struggled to pull herself up. “Is he going to be okay?”

“Ohhh,” Alanna sobbed into her dad’s shoulder. She looked up at Olive and wailed, “What the fuck happened?” as she looked over her father.

“Nothing.” Olive croaked. “I was in the bathroom and he came in… I just said I was—“

“Why’s he only got one slipper?” Alanna said.

Olive scrambled up the stairs and grabbed the other one. “It’s here, Alanna,” she warbled. She picked her way down the stairs holding the slipper out in front of her. 

The sound of the sirens came up, low, like they were bouncing off the ceiling of clouds. Olive stopped, one foot a step above the other. “I can’t be here,” she whispered. 

“Just hide. And drop the damn slipper!” Alanna barked at her. “Go. Go hide in my room, and don’t come out until they’re gone.”

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The Start of a Lifetime of Skills Procurement

Adults (are supposed to) teach young people skills—not just things like how to swim, boil an egg, care for a plant, or clean a car, but how to problem-solve, reason, resolve conflict, and protect one’s self. All these skills and many more create a foundation for success, hopefully building a well-adjusted person.

You take what your parents taught you, what you learned in school, and what you discovered through mistakes, mishaps, and blunders and present it [yourself] to the world for consideration. For the love of all that is fabulous, let’s hope your family taught you to be a staunch combination of confident and self-aware. Independent and loving. Assertive and respectful. Etc., etc.

Having said that, a socially awkward person can get by just fine. I did okay in my early 20s for a few years. I had youth on my side, and a complete ignorance of how unusual my situation was. I was a cute and dumb former foster-kid with—at the time—a relatively clean bill of health and a penchant for physically active work. I was a hotel valet for a while, and I loved the job. It kept me in great shape. I do wish I’d had better skills at handling workplace sexism and misogyny, but, live and learn, I guess.

And then it all went sideways…

By the end of my 20s my undiagnosed diseases had become a real problem, and none of it would get any better any time soon. So there I was, a young adult without a family, in the U.S. at the turn of the 21st century, and my health sliding down a mountain.

20-some years later I’m in therapy, and this, among other things, is what I’ve learned:

All those skills I was never taught—as I didn’t have an adult in my life after the age of 12 who was committed to my success—I could have picked up down the road, had I been in good health. Conversely, I could have managed better as my health deteriorated, had I had a supportive family, or at least one stable person on my side. But overcoming both disadvantages in what people are calling late-stage-capitalism was too much for one girl, even a White girl. Maybe some can do it. And my gosh, I applaud them! I couldn’t. Call me what you will; weak, lacking, worthless. Maybe. But I did the best I could, and even so, my future is uncertain as an American. I could not succeed with a failing body and being completely on my own… though not for a lack of trying.

Now that I have this knowledge, what do I do with it?

I have a platform to write about what it’s like to be economically challenged and have chronic health issues. I don’t write about this for me, I tell the story so that someone might look at a disabled or homeless American differently next time. If you don’t know why someone has failed to achieve the so-called American Dream, maybe part of the answer is in my story.

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The Hard Work of Making Other People Comfortable

February Along the South Yamhill River
7 minute read:

I’m disabled. I have been for a number of years, but not many people are aware of it. For one thing, I don’t have a lot of people in my orbit; a handful of good friends whom we left behind when we moved out to the sticks, a spouse and a son, and about a dozen doctors, PAs, therapists, etc. Aside from cashiers, pharmacists, and gas station attendants I don’t interact with a whole lot of people. And when I do, it’s a treat as I’m mostly home alone six days a week. When I’m around others, I’m usually chipper and friendly despite being in pain and living in a fog.

This is where things get dark… and a little sexist.

In the world I live in, women are expected to make others (generally, men) comfortable. I’ve been trained, starting when I was a teenager, to not disrupt the genteel existences of the few adults around me. So I quietly internalized having been abused. My guardian—my uncle—made it clear (without actually saying the words, of course) that he didn’t intend to deal with what my mother’s estranged husband had done. As a teenager, I had strong opinions about what I’d been through, and in response, my uncle expelled me from his home, washed his hands of me. I learned at 15 not to make men uncomfortable.

Maybe we shouldn’t be comfortable with the way those in power treat those who are vulnerable?

I want to pause and acknowledge I’m obviously writing from the cis-gender perspective. The movement to recognize that human gender is more complex than a simple binary breakdown is another conversation for another time, and one I support with enthusiastic hopefulness. I’m no expert on gender fluidity, or really anything, but it seems a number of societal problems could be relieved by not pigeonholing people into a rigid and limited system of self-identification. But, again, that’s a whole ‘nuther conversation. I’m a cis-woman, that’s where I write from.

Moving on… For a while there, health insurance was hard to come by for a lot of Americans. I needed it and didn’t have it for a decade, so I masked through the pain to work so I could hopefully earn it. And I still mask, as a survival strategy. Animals do it, too. They mask so other animals don’t kill them. I masked so I could be employed.

The effect of this was that I was usually dissociated from my own body—which had its pros and cons.

Pro: I could get a temporary placebo effect from pretending everything was okay, but it was temporary (con). Pain serves a purpose. It’s there to tell you to stop and tend to the problem. I was telling my body to shut up and wait its turn, and it shouted back, “Fuck you! Pay attention to me, now… or else!” 

I’ve been living in the “Or else!” stage since the early 2010s. And today, the Social Security Administration is asking me to demonstrate how hurt I’ve been, and for how long.

Now I have to experience my body and learn how to live in the torturous truth.

I’m still afraid of making people uncomfortable. I tend to apologize for being sick. One of my doctors is wonderful about it. She’s a good egg. I’m lucky to have her. She’s the one who finally figured out that I have Ankylosing Spondylitis. But I’m careful with the others—especially the men. When men are uncomfortable, generally they disengage. Apparently many of them can’t help it, I guess it’s a human weakness. So I read the room.

I want, I desire, to live in the dark, torturous truth.

I want to learn how to live there; I will be pissed if that superpower was ‘nurtured’ out of me by adults who were really shitty at adulting. I need to occupy that pit, to hang brocade curtains and burn scented candles there. I will make that pit my homely home full of books, dog toys, and home-baked bread, since those adults failed to provide one for me. I will live out my days in my comfy-cozy pit of despair, and not sugar coat a damn thing for anyone.

 

 

 

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Morons and A Fine Unpaid Job

5 Minute Read:

If you get too many men alone and leave us alone for a while, we kind of become morons.  —Andrew Yang, Businessman and 2020 Presidential Candidate

That’s a glib statement, with or without context. Yang can get away with saying it, but I can’t without sounding like a misandrist—which I’m not. My agreement with the sentiment is limited to this: there’s nothing at all wrong with the male perspective in the broad national discourse, but it needs to be tempered by other perspectives. That’s a fancy way of saying the U.S. could do with a bit* more diversity in the halls of power, and I know I’ve probably said so before on this blog.

Anyway, what Yang is saying is that too many guys in power for too long eventually leads to… well, what we have here in the U.S. I’ll drop the term; inequality. And I’ll say it out loud; because the (mostly) men in charge have become moronic by world standards, and are holding us back from being a truly great nation.

[W]e can […] start recognizing the work that women in particular do in our families and communities every day.
—Andrew Yang

You can check out the video of this interview here, and/or read the transcript. Yang was explaining the advantage of his UBI (Universal Basic Income) and arguing for including the work that mostly women do at home —caregiving, child-rearing, home maintenance, family finance, etc.—into the GDP. Kids who would flourish with parents whose labor is valued are the next generation of small business owners, teachers, farmers, drivers, retailers, medical professionals, and on and on—basically the backbone of America.

A Couple Questions

Am I paranoid if I entertain a loose theory that the last fifty years of wage stagnation is petty revenge for women entering and staying in the workforce? Shouldn’t women technically get paid more not less than men in the same positions since we mostly do more of the domestic busywork?

Of the hetero couples you know, how many of them really share the chores and domestic tasks equally, assuming they’re being candid about it?  I know it can be lopsided in gay couples too, but that’s a different conversation. I’m talking about straights as a way of highlighting those pesky traditional gender roles on this issue. If things are starting to even out and a lot of your straight friends share the chores, then our work here is done. *claps hands together in an up and down sweep But as long as there is still a disproportionate amount of gals coming home from work and starting second shift on dishes, laundry, and vacuuming, etc., we need to acknowledge the value of that labor, because somebody has to do it or it doesn’t get done. Somebody is doing it. Every. Day.

Is Yang’s UBI the answer? Maybe. It could help. Should we pay attention to what we’re teaching our little boys? Oh yes. Do we need to talk to our kids about the media messages they’re exposed to? Oh hell yes. It seems there are a lot of ways we can recognize the value of women’s contributions to society, and the first thing to do is to discover how badly under-recognized the background labor has been, and still is. Somebody is doing this work and doing a fine job of it. Every. Day.

 

 

 

*quite a bit more, and now

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Excerpt: The Littlest Shadow

The Littlest Shadow by C.L. Herridge: Horror, Mystery, Cli-Fi, Thriller
Quick Read:

The young mover stepped into the kitchen nook from the garage, and introduced himself to the family’s daughter. The chubby girl was still in her pink and green nightgown, accessorized with her trusty snow boots and scarf. She was accompanied by her favorite dolly whose face had been upgraded to purple with all the possible ink from some unfortunate marker. The girl tapped a plump hand on a particular box, her saucer eyes trained on the college boy in workwear.

“Is that one ready to go?” he asked with a smile, charmed by the tiny siren.

She pushed her dolly against the box and slid it down the side onto the tile floor, apparently indicating that dolly has approved it for loading at this time. He picked up the box and swung around to haul it out as a cool blade swept across his neck. The baby girl crouched, looking up at him, and backward-crawled under the dining table as the life faded from his eyes. The box dropped on its corner and some glassware crunched inside. The college boy’s body folded to the floor, deflated by the gape in his throat. Little fingers reached out from under the table and dragged the dolly out of the flow of  the boy’s blood.

Available Now in Paperback