Looking for the Pearls

On Writing Truth

Photo by Marin Tulard on Unsplash

I watched the second video last week. Mom looks tired but her energy is still up. She still sounds like her. No detectable cognitive slips yet. That will come, and soon. The few times she would post gibberish to Facebook thinking she was typing into a Google search…

(Oh god. I just realized I have access to her entire Facebook page. Okay. Okay. Not today.)

The recording date was December 17, 2021, my niece (her first granddaughter) Lauren’s 27th birthday. Also the 17th birthday of my cousin, James Patrick—son of mom’s youngest brother James, who she basically raised. She tells me during this session that when he was born, her mother (who had already birthed 11 other children, half of them still at home), handed the baby to her and said, “Here you go. He’s all yours.” She would have been about fifteen years old.

We covered 1959-1969 in this video, and these were intense, formative years for her. Years that planted many a seed that would later bloom poisonously into her life. I’ve been wandering around for days giving my husband the often horrifying highlights. There are many to share and to be honest, I’m not entirely sure how to do that.

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Last week I also visited a colleague’s class and read from my new essay collection, which grew from the whole life I’ve lived in the shadow of my father’s early death. After the reading, the students asked me questions. One that I get regularly is, “How do you do it?” Meaning, how do you share such personal details of your life? Meaning, aren’t you worried? Afraid? Aren’t you embarrassed?

I published my first poem in a literary journal in 1999. I was 29 years old and the poem was about pawning my diamond wedding ring for (very little) cash after my first marriage ended. Hello, world, I waved, more than naked.

But I had already been writing personal stories via poems for years and years. Since high school, probably, and surely in college. Some of those poems were about my parents and their dysfunction, about my longing for stability for and from them. I didn’t worry, or even think about, hurting people with those poems. I knew the only people reading them were my professors and classmates. They were really just for me.

With that first publication in 1999, all that changed. But I didn’t miss a beat. There was no part of me that hesitated to write or publish it. It was my story, after all. My ex-husband was free to disagree with my crafting of the scene, but there was no point arguing it didn’t happen. (Sidebar: when I went on to win a contest with Glamour Magazine for an essay that was explicitly about our demise, he told me over the phone that while he didn’t necessarily remember the details the same way, he understood that it was my perspective and felt okay with that. I still appreciate him for that understanding, which made my life as a writer easier.)

1999 was also the year I started my MFA degree and for the next three years, I continued to write from my life—first poetry and then also nonfiction. My thesis was a collection of poems, largely about my father’s death, and my mother, who was actively drinking during this time, causing substantial tension between us, asked for a copy. I was reticent. She was insistent. Finally I agreed, with the following caveat:

“Mom, I’ll send you a copy if you promise to remember that poems are not nonfiction, and that if you read anything that upsets or confuses you, you’ll talk to me.”

With her agreement and against my better judgment, I sent the thing. And then heard nothing at all for many months, until she’d had enough wine one day to call me. We fought about something unrelated (she may not have meant to fight, but I could always hear alcohol in her voice in .02 seconds flat, and we were off to the races), and then at the very end of the call she said, "

“And if you dare publish that book before me and all of my brothers and sisters are dead, I will never speak to you again.”

Ah, okay. I thought. There it is.

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I did publish that book and others and she did not, in fact, disown me. Instead, she, with a lot of self-work, became someone who trusted me to receive the most personal facts of her own life and write them into some kind of art to be shared with the world. This feels important to emphasize: my mother wanted me to write about her life. It would be too easy to note that of course she doesn’t need to be worried about hurting anyone—she’s dead. But that’s not who she was.

My mother was a truth-teller. I think she always was, but spent so many years blunted by trauma and drink and loss that she lost herself for a long time. At the end of her life, after fourteen years of sobriety, she was clear-eyed, unashamed and not about to hold back.

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What will I do with all of this? There are people reading these very words who might feel anxious about it. Who might be afraid I will write something hurtful. Will I write things that might hurt? Possibly. But like it wasn’t my mother’s intention with these interviews to wound those she loved, I do not write to cause harm. As a memoirist (and sure, call those poems memoirs, too), I live by two cardinal rules: 1) No writing for revenge, and 2) No angels, no devils. Both of these maxims require me to grapple with the truth inside of a larger context, with all of its complexity and nuance. It requires that I hold myself accountable, that I hold the mirror up to my own face as much as I shine a light onto others.

We tell our stories to help make sense of them and ourselves. Mom wanted the story of her life to create safety for others. She wanted it to be of service.

My mother had a memoirist’s heart. In this interview (in all the interviews), she recounts living through traumas that literally dropped my jaw to hear about. But with each accounting, she says we have to look for the “pearls” among the darkness. She means that we have to consider context and intent and love and fear and knowledge and complicity and everything and anything. She says the pearls are hard to see, but we absolutely must look for them.

“It’s a matter of survival, Sheila. Of choosing to survive.”

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When there wasn’t enough food, when my mother and her siblings were hungry, she tells me, they would sometimes chew on pencils.