My stories

Published April 9, 2011

I am, in essence, a cheery optimist. To the point of idiocy.

I believe in the goodness of people, of kindness, of laughing babies and sunny days at the beach and the mantra of “everything is going to be just fine.”

Even when, quite obviously, it isn’t.

And so, although I have promised myself that I would write my stories down, of where I came from, of who I am, of my journey here, I haven’t. Because they’re not pretty stories.

They’re not clever or cheerful, though some of them are quite funny. Well, they are now. At the time I wasn’t too thrilled about them.

I’ve decided to skip the dark parts and stick with the wonderful. 

The day to day. Not quite unicorns and rainbows, but raising children and visits to the swimming hole and the man I have loved and adored for fifteen years and the stories of him. And of strong, fierce boys who amaze me with their insight. Of lessons learned.

Yet.

How did I, in fact, get here?

If you know me in real life at all, you know parts of it. 

If the stories were about battle scars and old wounds and tales of heroism and bravery, I’d tell the stories.

But a lot of the stories are about people I love, deeply, who have deep emotional pain, with invisible, but still-fresh scars.

In fact, they have places that haven’t healed, that break open every so often, to reveal festering, nasty, oozing things that infect anyone around who tries to help.

The stories of how these happened is not one for a cheery optimist. I still think, in my cheerful idiocy, that maybe the wounds can be tended, they can dry up, and the person can be cured. 

But some of these hurts happened years before I was born. 

Some I watched happen when I was a child. If they haven’t healed by now, perhaps they aren’t going to.

To go and revisit the causes is to relive it.

And to write about the experiences that have crippled lives and wrecked generations is to reopen wounds yet again.

The stories, though, are how I got here.

And they are, as all good fairy tales, cautionary stories that cause the reader to reflect on good versus evil and the ways of the universe.

A four a.m. trip in a taxi in Paris, frantic and hysterical, dropped off at the back door of a crumbling wreck of a hospital built by Napoleon, with my companion’s screams and rantings drowned out by the sounds of the mental patients mocking us as we found our way to the emergency room.

My mother, calling from England to say goodbye -- she’d just swallowed poison since I was such a terrible daughter, and to please find a home for her cat.

Fires where the entire house went up. Over and over again. 

Fistfights at weddings, and at funerals. 

People I love in jail, and then out. 

In mental hospitals, and then out. 

Starting over, this time, with a clean slate and a fresh start. 

And this time, with the right medication. And this time, she’ll stop drinking. Or really leave him. 

Or will never burn down another house.

Floods where I lost everything material that mattered, only to find out that it was planned. 

Having to hear that someone I love is hurting. Again. And this time, jail or a mental hospital won’t help.

Watching the crimes that happened in 1946 come back in 1978. And again in 2001.

Being powerless to fix any of it.

Having to manipulate, and lie, and bargain with the devil to rescue children from those crimes. And watching some of the children thrive, and some sink slowly beneath, with the weights of the past too heavy to tread water any more, as I begged them to take life jackets or allow me to help. 

Pleading, begging, struggling to save anyone, and finally having to let them go.

No. I’m already crying, just from this. 

I have two boys full of glee and mischief, a handsome husband with a wicked sense of humor and a deep appreciation for me, and a baby girl who is the light of my life.

I might be able to write about how the shadows make me notice the light a bit more.

I know I can tell stories about how I do things differently than most people do, and why I think through my parenting more closely. And I might muse on how to parent without a map.

But the dark parts, the sad parts, the oozy stuff?

That’s not for a cheery optimist to get into.