Notebooks Left Unhidden

         1969 was the summer of Apollo missions and troop withdrawals from Vietnam, The Woodstock Festival in upstate New York, and the Brady Bunch. I was twelve years old and already subject to my mother's disparagement. She considered me overly-dramatic, too imaginative. The most peculiar look would cross her face; the stare that said something was horribly wrong with me, the piercing eyes that meant she would call my dad's office and ask him to come home. I was acting odd, again. Would it be time to call a psychiatrist? The call they'd been putting off, willing me to normalcy.

         I learned to cast aside her aspersions.

         "Oh, Mom, I was just kidding around. The jacket in the closet did not reach out to grab me."

         I kept notebooks full of what Mom considered peculiar observations, documented my abnormal behavior, committed to letter any part of me that didn't fit into her box. There were a lot of parts. I wrote to hear my voice, to listen to me and wonder if the problem was in my mom's head. When that thought surfaced, I entered the stage of guilt and visualized the whiteness of my soul. During the times of self-doubt and recrimination, my soul was overcast with gray and no amount of praying purified it.

         She wasn't the kind of mom who searched rooms, but there were no absolutes with her, so I left the notebooks in plain sight. What better way to hide something? I remember a few budding scribbles. A story about a family watching a circus and all the happy faces, but as the day progressed, Mom grew angry, Dad more stoic, and by the end of the outing only the clown was not wearing a frown.

         Even though my younger brother was Mom's favorite, he cringed beneath her skewed observations. I remember the day she denounced him for playing with younger children. He was such a bright kid. A tow-head with blue eyes. She minimized and humiliated him. Before fear of repudiation paralyzed me, I ran to my room and grabbed a notebook. A wild joy burst from me when I dared pen, "I hate her."

         She was robbed of power and became a prisoner of my forbidden words. I owned the words; they took possession of me. That summer I realized I was a writer. I composed stories and poems for family and friends, and their thoughts favored me. I knew nothing, not even the horror of being the object of Mother's scorn could stop me from being who I was, who I am. An author.

         And maybe, part of my success rose from enduring those bitter, abject years of adolescence.



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