MOTHER IS THE WATER OF THE WORLD (draft 002-zine revision) with notes

“Can’t we ever go home? I asked my mother. We have no home, she told me. I am your home.”
-Janet Fitch; White Oleander

2011
Everyone tells me to
“make a clean break”
and I’m trying.
But the break between
a mother and child is
never clean.
The ties that bind
are messy, wet,
and smell just like the ocean.

1964
When my mother was a girl, her mother, Muriel, forbade her from playing in the rain barrel.

One day, when Muriel was in the fields, my mother could not resist the call of the barrel. She stood on a cinderblock and set her toy boats on the surface, entranced by the little paths they cut across the surface of the water.

The way she tells it, she was pulled from her reprieve by and almost electrical charge the seemed to fill the air.

She looked up and saw Muriel striding across the yard towards her; lips compressed to thin white line.

Without a word she grabbed my mother by the ankles and dunked her, headfirst, into the rain barrel.

“I remember
how the light
looked
coming through the water.
It was so quiet
in the barrel –
everything cool
and amber-
I looked up
to the surface
and I could see
the sky,
my mother
up above me.”

Muriel pulled her out, dunked her again. And again. And again. When she finally released her, my mother spat water, ran to the woods and climbed a tree. She stayed there until it was dark out.

2008
Birth muddles your memory. For me, labor does not start. Claire is due November 2nd – el Dia de los Muertos – the day of the Dead.

10 days past her due date, they begin the induction. First cervidil, which sends her into fetal distress. I am instructed to kneel on the hospital bed, breathe pure oxygen from a mask. I feel silly, loose as CF and the nurses mill around. I make jokes that are not appreciated. I am not afraid. I know in my heart that my baby is fine.

The next morning they start with the Pitocin. Birth is a messy, wet affair.

So much wet –
blood, amniotic fluid, sweat.
Gallons of sweat.
Vomit, too.
Tears and shit.

I had the epidural. My labor went on for 36 hours; epidural refilled 3 times. They ruptured one last pocket of fluid and then she came.

Or rather, began to come. I pushed for four hours.

Claire was born 13 days past her due date. I was her home. She did not want to leave.

2009
During my pregnancy CF was hospitalized. He had been doctor-shopping while I was pregnant-
morphine
methadone
ativan
valium.

By July I had taken to placing a card in his front pocket, reading:
“Hello, my name is CF and sometimes my medication makes me confused. If you find me, please call Gabrielle at XXX-XXX-XXXX.”

The last time, they found his passed out underneath a tree, and for a while, thought he may have brain damage. Eventually he came out of it and was transferred to an inpatient treatment program.

I worked overtime,
came home
and let the silence
crawl inside me.
I rarely wrote.
There was nothing to say.

After Claire was born, he stayed sober for almost a year.

One of the last times I saw him was in October of 2009. The day I took Claire and left him.

He relapsed on a Wednesday.

When he picked me up from work that night, Claire was sleeping in her car seat – no jacket. Just a onesie and some socks. He told me they had been at the ER all day, while he tried to get an early refill on the klonipin prescription he had filled just the day before.

I did not go back to work. How could I? He got crazier and crazier. Every time he left I prayed that he would not come back. I hoped for an overdose, a car accident. Or that he would just vanish.

But he came back. Sometimes with more pills or alcohol. He went through phonebooks; calling doctors, looking for that one who might write him a prescription.

He began throwing things, sometimes at me. He broke Claire’s highchair; our blue rocking chair. I became bruised and silent, picking sharp pieces of wood out of the carpet and praying, praying, for some escape route.

He relapsed on a Wednesday, and on Sunday morning my mother called. She offered me and Claire a place to stay. I said yes. I packed a bag while CF slept, and waited.

He woke 30 minutes before my mother and her husband arrived. I did not tell him they were coming.

He’d sobered up a little and apologized for the past 4 days. I said he’d have to go to inpatient treatment. He refused. He told me it would be methadone and AA meetings.

“Take it or leave it,” he said.

I left it.

He would not let us take the crib
the humidifier
the baby swing.
He tried to keep
the playpen, too.

Memories of that day are fragmented as glass:

his face
as he charged down the pick-up,
slapped the passenger side window.
The sound he made
when my mother’s husband
threw him back
against the dumpster.

Driving away, my heart took wing like a grouse flushed from a wash of pine. I had to swallow down the hysterical, sparkling laughter that banged behind my ribcage. I was free. I had escaped. I could never go back.

1989
My brothers and I
spent summers swimming
Rainy Lake. Rock
islands; we were

barefoot
lichen scrapers.

8+ hours a day
in the water;
at night we cracked
crawfish
scaled northern
and walleye.

Fish guts thrown into
border bushes.
Tough green
spring like magic
from fissures in stone.

2011
My mother and her husband, MRK, come to my house. I am not expecting them. Claire’s birthday has come and gone, but Thanksgiving is still a few days away. The night is bitter cold and black as a bruise.

My mother and I sit at the table. Fluorescent lighting makes us all look terminal. This is the last house that I will rent from them.

My house smells like
tandoori chicken
lemon juice
ume plum vinegar.
My house smells like
exhaustion.

MRK plays with Claire a few feet away from the table. My mother slits her eyes, purses lips, launches in.

I do not remember exact words. What I do remember is that I had classes 8a-5p 3 days a week; worked Fridays and Saturdays 7p-3a, Sundays 8a-5p. Finals were approaching and it seemed that I could never sleep.

My mother announces that I am using drugs. She is sure – suspects it’s heroin again.

Years later the repetition is what I remember most-
“You’re on drugs. You’re
on drugs. You are. You
are. You are. I know
it. Say it. Just say
it. Just tell me you’re on drugs.”

As if repeated like a mantra, her lies would all be true. Fears granted like a wish.

How long she says it? 45 minutes? An hour? MRK interjects – my daughter’s hand in his – tells me I am a liar, I suck my teeth and bob my head. Sure signs of drug abuse. Defiance.

I try to keep my head, my neck, very very straight.
I concentrate
with each reply.
Keep lips flat to teeth
face empty
eyes calm.

I do not remember what it is she finally says. What drives me to my feet, heat rising in my face.

“Bitch. Get the fuck up out my house,” I tell her.

She stands and shoves me but she is old and I have 4 inches 15 pounds of muscle on her. I life weights, bike and run each day. I step closer to her smiling slightly, whisper behind my teeth, “Well come on then.”

Underneath my rage I feel absolutely nothing.

Then MRK pulling her out of the house backwards, me repeating “Out. Out. Get. Out. Of. My. House.”

And her:
“It’s not your house.”

“My rent is paid through January, bitch,” I snap, shut the door in her face.

1970’s
“. . . and I TOLD her not to get married, but you know how young people are . . .” my grandmother tittered.

My mother set her jaw and walked from the room.

My grandmother always tried to rewrite history, but the truth is inscribed, tattooed on tongue. For years atop the list “things we should not say.” Every summer, leaving for Rainy Lake, my mother would remind us, “Don’t say anything about me and Uncle M being married when we were younger, because Aunt J doesn’t know.”

It was before M was our uncle, before my parents married, before my brothers and I were born.

My grandmother coerced my mother into marrying M, the older brother of (the man who would later become) my father, the older brother of my future aunt, my mother’s best friend.

My mother (age 16) and M (age 18) were staying in a room at the Dutch Mill Motel/Video Rental store. My grandmother was livid, and told my mother that she was disgracing the Ranisate family, and if my mother did not marry M, she would never be allowed to see her younger brothers and sisters again.

“So I got married,” my mother would tell us, “moved to Illinois, and never saw my younger brothers and sisters again.”

She and M divorced within 2 years – she had worked 2 jobs to support him while he went to nursing school and slept with other women.

3 years after that, pregnant, she married AC, my father – M’s younger brother.

It did not sit well with either family. It did not sit well with my parents.

My mother always told me that if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with me she never would have married my father. She would have moved someplace else. Someplace different. A place where no one knew her family, or who she was.

She would have been an artist.

My mother was always a very good artist. She took a community ed painting class when I was 7, maybe 8, and I would marvel over the canvases she brought home and hid in our basement, far from my father’s scornful gaze.

I do not know where my mother hides her paintings now.

2011
She did not like it that I went back to work. After 2 years on unemployment she thought I should get on cash assistance.

She did not like it that my classes necessitated daycare for Claire.

But when I started dating again – a match.com profile because I did not drink or know anyone, could not imagine how to meet them – that was when she could not bite back the words anymore.

That was when fear overtook her.

And she was sure that there was something, something going on.

1982
“Oh my,” my grandmother Muriel said, holding me in her lap as the car bounced along the gravel road, “She’s feisty in a sluggish sort of way.”

My mother fumed silently from behind the wheel.

It did not end there. Through my childhood and teens, Muriel kept up a running commentary on my weight.

My mother never spoke up and I blamed her more for her silence than my grandmother for her cruelty.

The rest of my mother’s family of origin took the cue, and my brothers and I were always the outcasts. The unwanted. Barely tolerated at family functions. Black sheep.

2011
And as it was bad, it soon got worse.

I still do not know for certain whether she and MRK believed the lies that they told. I do not know if they believe them still today.

That fall I work, finish school with a 3.23 GPA, and care for my daughter.

According to my mother, I am a prostitute and drug addict.

She watched my home. Searches trash cans for proof, and repeats, repeats her stories over and over again. This time she is determined – eye of eagle wide open – she will not miss the signs she missed those long years ago.

This time she will not turn away. This time she will be different. This time she will get her chance. She will make her move.

She will redeem herself. This time, she will get to save her daughter. She will save us all. Mother, daughter, granddaughter.

Redemption. Salvation. The promise of it clouds her vision and haunts her waking hours. Sours her mouth and poisons her words with lies borne of fear and memories of a time when she chose to look away.

2009
7 years gone. I came home to the coldest July I remember. My grandmother Muriel came to meet Claire, and see me for the first time in close to a decade. As soon as my mother stepped out of the room, Muriel said “My, Claire really is beautiful. She doesn’t look a thing like you. She must favor her father.”

2000
My mother and I saw the ocean for the first time together. I was 18. She was 40. It was Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Late August 2000.

My mother had had a subarachnoid cerebral hemorrhage earlier that summer, in June, just 7 days after my high school graduation, but by August, she was ready for the drive out to Goddard College.

We get to Cape Elizabeth late in the day. Past 4pm. Everything is grey – sand. Sky. Water.

I watch my footprints fill with water and snap a photograph:
my mother playing on the shoreline. Overalls rolled up
past her knees. White t-shirt; one arm up, one down.
Head tilted to the side.

We wade out deeper, past pubic arches, sacrums, to the crest of out iliums. We stand.

The bowl of my pelvis (a dish that has not yet held fruit) is pulled gently by the salt water. I want to bring fingertips to lips; see just how salty the Atlantic really is.

I still remember the bone deep sensuality of it – how my jeans looked plastered wet against my hips; the water lapping up and up and towards my waist.

Back at shore, self-invited Muriel scuttles along, picks up dead crabs, abandoned lobster traps, misc. bits of nautical garbage.

Long past dark my mother finally insists that we begin the drive back to Vermont, where college and the strangeness of life waited. Poised to break me into so many pieces.

It was the last time my mother was ever pleased with me.

1963
(a story that my mother told me)
“When I was
a little girl
I used to pull
my skirts
up
over the back of my head.
I thought I looked
so regal.
Queen in her cape,
willow switch
for a scepter.
When I realized
other people
could see my underwear
I was humiliated.”

2013
This second pregnancy is strange for me.

While pregnant with Claire, I lived each day with a creeping sense of impending doom. I worked 60+ hours a week to pick up the slack for CF, who would rage and threaten in drug addled fits, then vanish for days at a time.

I gained so much weight, so fast, with Claire. I felt trapped. Sealed in the tomb of my own flesh. Sealed in the tomb of a relationship I did not dare to dream of escaping.

But escape was mine – wrapped in a bloody ribbon, gilt-edged box. Escape was mine and I rose to run from the catacombs I lay shrouded inside.

With this pregnancy, I am in yoga teacher training, walk and ride bicycle. My body is powerfully mine and I live and breathe joyously within it.

At 19 weeks my son begins to turn backflips in my uterus; little flutters that make my stomach drop with pleasure.

2011
This time we strip it to the bone.

The last move was just 2 months ago – from Spruce 215 to Spruce 221. My mother and MRK own more houses in Bagley than I can believe, remembering how we grew up poor, despised. Now they collect rent, send out eviction notices to the families that tormented ours for generations. For decades.

Each time I move I throw things away, examine artifacts, decide – what parts of me to keep, and what to leave behind.

I stack discarded items – clothes toys books – in Claire’s bedroom.

This time we will leave the beds. The desks. The kitchen chairs. The table.

I want to get everything in one trip.

Once we are gone, we will not go back.

2008
My mother and I did not speak for most of the 5 years of my drug addiction.

She took it hard, bitter hard, when I got kicked out of the private Vermont college I had chosen to attend. Our relationship never recovered. Just became more and more strained the more addicted I became.

In August of 2007 I got sober. In February of 2008 I got pregnant. Made calls to mother, father, brothers.

I did not speak to my mother for another 6 months.

One day she called, asking “Are you really pregnant, or is that just something that you made up?”

I wanted to lie then. I wanted to say there was no baby. Or play dumb – like it was such a preposterous story, I could not even remember telling it.

Instead I told her the truth. And slowly, our relationship began to re-emerge.

But . . .

We did not talk about the past.

And so, we did not forgive.

She never forgave me for writing a letter on my father’s behalf when she sued him for back child support; for failing to make good on opportunities she had been denied; for using drugs and making porn; for the week I spent on life support; the track marks on my arms.

I never forgave her for guilt-tripping me out of calling the police when her brother attacked me in my bed; for staying silent while her family treated me and my brothers like second class citizens; for letting her friends drink and do drugs in front of us; for never protecting her children.

The ties that bind are garrote wires running back and forth-

mother’s hand to daughter’s throat,
son’s hand to father’s throat,
cousin to cousin
brother to sister.

Fingers splayed and chins raised, you could play our bitterness like a harpsichord, plucking gently on old grudges, broken promises.

I need only twist my wrist, bring hand to fist, and breath will stop.

2012
At the end of the year my mother writes to me. It has been 12 months since I stripped our possessions down to one trailer load and left Bagley, note on the counter, no forwarding address. She wants to see Claire, wants to see me.

I write back – you may see Claire, and I will be civil. I will be polite. I will do these things to facilitate your relationship with her.

But I do not want to talk about what happened last year. There is no excuse or explanation you could offer me. I do not want that old English standard:
who
when
where
how
and why.

I will show you this kindness because you are human. Because you love my daughter and she loves you. Because you are my mother, and in the end that does count for (must count for, it please, please must count) for something.

2013
“This is a cute little house you have here,” my mother says.

“Yeah.” I quickly add, “I need to clean it, it’s such a mess.”

“Oh no,” she says, “it just looks like a busy mom’s house.”

That night, lying in savasana, I hear You need to forgive your mother.

2013
I bike the beach to Diamond Point Park and watch waves lapping in and out, to try to understand the circular nature of a woman’s life, of my life and my mother’s: conception, birth, growing up, conception, birth, motherhood.

I sit at the edge of the sand, stone steps, and try to write the circle, try to see how I might swim the current back from anger, despair, to forgiveness and love once more.

I sit at the edge of the sand, and wonder, is this a raft that can be patched. Will my mother and I float together once again, gathered back into the ebb and flow of each other’s lives.

But this is a freshwater lake, overfished and greasy with pollution; not the ocean I have only seen that one grey day, at the cape with my mother’s first name, my daughter’s middle name. This is a freshwater lake and instead of the amniotic sac scent of salt I smell dying fish and algae rotting on the shore.

draft 002 – zine revision
December 2014
Bemidji, MN

 

PROCESS NOTES
MOTHER IS THE WATER OF THE WORLD

This piece was written last year, and published on my blog http://www.wtcmss.wordpress.com. I don’t post there anymore – but if you like you can find the first draft there.

I decided to do a “one of” zine using this piece, and it is the longest zine I have written to date. 60 pages, not counting the covers. In the interest of revision, I decided to handwrite the entire thing on graph paper, rather than just editing it on the computer.

Let me tell you – such a tactic leads to sweeping revisions. Another one of my favorite revision tricks is to use a typewriter. Reading poetry out loud is another great way to encourage honesty in the editing process as well.

As you have read, this piece deals with my very complex relationship with my mother, and touches a little bit on her relationship with her mother and my relationship with her mother. Even though this is the zine version (which is of course spaced differently on the page for visual appeal/impact), I am not done with this piece yet. I mention my daughter Claire in this piece, but I really want to expand on my relationship with her. Eventually, who knows – this may end up a novella, or it may end up as a part of a book-length collection of my work.

There are some questions I have to ask myself as a writer in regards to this piece – for example, this piece is about mothers and daughters, and water plays a big role throughout. In March of 2014 I gave birth to my son, Jorah, in an at-home water birth. Is that something that belongs in this piece? On one hand it would appear – water birth? OBVIOUSLY. But I think that keeping the piece on theme in terms of the mother-daughter connection is essential.

I think the reason I have not added in more sections showing my interactions with Claire is I’m not quite ready to turn that keen poetic eye onto the ways I have failed my child. There are many ways I’ve done right by her and continue to do right by her; I love her dearly and delight in her. But there were times during the years I was a single mother where I let my own selfish nature get the best of me, and if I’m going to write the truth of my love for my daughter, I also want to write the truth of my mistakes. Especially in a piece of this scope.

My work has for many years now dealt with my history as a sex worker/heroin addict, and my recovery from both. It still does, but lately, as my life changes and grows and I change and grow, I write more about the love in my life today and less about the pain that was in it not so long ago.

The zine will be published early winter or spring 2015 on Snotter Press. My partner, Jake, will be illustrating it.