My mother’s knees, they are misshapen by the lumps and scars of a lifetime.

There she sits, unaware of the lens, skirt pulled high to scorn the wet New Jersey heat that dampens doting offspring. The edema of unspoken words and unknown adventures bloats her joints and cripples her sidestep, yet still she twirls to the tunes of her youth. Though achingly unsure today, those knees have long served her well.

When she was barely tall enough to reach, her powerful joints held her aloft; loath she was to touch the outhouse seat for fear of all the crawling things her older cousins assured her lurked there. And surely they propelled her toward the heavens when the plumbing was miraculously moved inside her grandfather’s farmstead.

Her child’s knees carried her along the rows of nesting hens to steal away the chicks they would have borne had they been allowed. But in times of strife, eggs were dear — and birds that laid no more became a tough and tired stew. Did her knees carry her swiftly from the squawking fowl or did she stay, frozen by the sickening snap of a feathered neck?

When the farm was no more, the knees of the barefoot girl moved to the pounding shock of a city’s concrete. They forsook swinging from the willowy trees along the Gunpowder’s waters and became adept at the rhythm of sidewalk hopscotch tapped out in brown brogues. They hung from Baltimore’s monkey bars and skipped gleefully past the vendors’ stalls of Lexington Market, forgetting the touch of cornstalks and wild berry bushes.

Then the brogues became pumps, and her knees scaled the marble steps of Washington College, learned the dips and twirls of Benny Goodman’s band, settled on benches while a bounty of crabs was consumed, and locked around a man with whom she could saunter into eternity.

And again her knees proved trustworthy and strong as she squatted in the birthing fields. Four times they bore the wrenching pain and stood in wonder at creation. Four times they held her up before the joyful toddling, the tearful adolescence, the anguished abandonment of near adults. Four times they paced spectral highways, searching for broken bodies failed to return home. Four times they leapt in the wake of her dear ones’ victories.

How often, though, have those steadfast knees caught her fall as she was beaten down by the paltry expectations for her gender. By the unreasoning institutions that paid her not to think too well. By children’s choices gone awfully awry. By bitter regrets and stabbing disappointments.

But even then, her stalwart hinges of sinew and bone have risen up to stride the powerful strut of a woman worthy, loved and not infrequently needed. A woman now slowed by the accumulation of eighty-five years of bending.

And when my mother’s knees bend their painful last, I will take a soft and supple sponge to her withered flesh. I will bathe away the dust and dirt of the decades from her knees, smooth the wrinkles of a million million ups and downs, caress the caring hugs and scoldings of her womb’s fruit, and wipe a final farewell to the knobby remnants of her strength and love.

And then tenderly, tenderly, tenderly I will let go.

Love,
K-B

©2011 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Lori Miller

I am listening to Dr. Laura, the famous talk show host-psychologist, give advice on her daily radio talk show as I drive through the canyon. I am thinking how open minded it is of me to be listening so carefully to her, after so many years of hearing about (and rejecting) her so-called “hard love” approach. There’s something oddly off-kilter about her advice I’d heard from friends I trust. But, I think as I’m wending my way towards the 15 freeway, my daughter-in-law swears by Dr. Laura’s advice and, as we’ve grown closer year by year, I’ve become more curious. What is it about the good doctor that my dear one finds so helpful? I’m willing to give it an honest try this day — there’s always more to grow.

A woman caller is on the line, a “regular,” she says, in need of advice because her sister’s daughter, a teenager who is only 14 years old, is pregnant. The father is also a teenager, but will not make a good parent, the caller believes. In fact, she calls the expectant father a troublemaker, although the only evidence the caller offers for this opinion is that he got her niece pregnant. The girl wants to have and raise the baby herself. The plan is for the teenager to remain at home and get help from her mother. The caller is in a quandary. She knows that her own three children, who range in age from 9 to 12, will certainly catch on that there’s trouble in the family. What to do, she asks Dr. Laura? How best to support her sister yet protect her kids from “bad influences”?

The talk show host doesn’t hesitate to say what she thinks. “Don’t make excuses for this girl. She’s a brat with way too much power. Look at the chaos she’s already brought into this family, and she’s only 14 years old. She’s on a power trip!” Dr. Laura is only getting warmed up. “She’s ruining her mother’s life,” she expostulates, “and she’d like to take the whole family captive, if she can. That teenage brat is a baby who’ll be having the baby — one fathered by a hoodlum. And I’ll bet he’s the type of guy who will lose his temper, and even shake the baby when it cries too much,” she prophesies.

Dr. Laura’s voice lifts and pitches. It takes on an ominous tone, now. “You know what you have to do. Your sister has been taken hostage to this brat, but you have a choice. You have to protect your children. You must cut that girl off, and her family with her. You have to. Don’t any of you get anywhere near that new baby, when it comes. It will probably die, anyway, of shaken baby syndrome. That teenage father will probably go to jail. And then that niece of yours will find some new, stupid boy to play into her power games. Anything so that she can be the center of attention. I know this is hard, but you must be strong. Protect your family. Cut that girl and your sister off!”

I realize that I am gripping the steering wheel too tightly. Memories of my own very difficult years as a teenager rise up in my mind’s eye. I push them back. I’ve come to the onramp at Deer Springs Road and Interstate 15. The soft, green hills roll away in front of me. A light rain is falling. It’s a beautiful sunset, but my stomach is churning. I am trembling with quiet rage. I try to imagine what it would be like if my daughter-in-law were sitting in the passenger seat, listening to this with me. What would I say to her, or she to me? Is this an example of the “tough love” and “family values” she admires in this infernal talk show host’s advice? I think of my dear son, her husband – a very good husband, let me add, and a loving father to two very wonderful, now teenaged sons. He is my only child, born to me when I was 17. Yes, indeed, I was a teenage mother, one of the “brats” Dr. Laura has so soundly condemned. Raised with the help of my mother, sisters, aunts, and my father, the boy turned out more than well.

This fine result is likely due to the acceptance, love, and support of my entire extended family, I think to myself as I pull onto the freeway. I am awash in memories. My baby was nourished by the generous, ongoing attention of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and by his father’s family, as well. His aunt Wendy was particularly helpful. She babysat while I finished high school. We were loved. We were accepted. We got through the trauma of a difficult beginning because the family stepped up, all of them. When I perched my two-year-old baby on my hip and went off to college, I became the first single parent to live in married student housing at the university. I was proud of myself. I knew I would make it, and I did. Not that it was easy, or that I was in any way perfect. Still, my son is now a family man. He and his family serve as testament to something — many things — going well. I wonder whether my daughter-in-law might have realized the implications of Dr. Laura’s advice here? Would she wonder what her husband’s life would have been like if advice like this had been followed? Probably not. But would she at least be able to recognize that taking Dr. Laura’s advice would drive a metaphorical stake through the heart of that girl and her unborn child? That abandoning a sister, a niece, and condemning them, is no part of “family values”?

In author Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Warrior Woman, the narrator uncovers evidence of a long-dead aunt whose name has been stricken from the family records. It turns out that the young, unmarried girl was raped and impregnated at the age of 14. Living in a rural Chinese village, the young girl was blamed for her misfortune, and great shame was brought upon her family. The village turned its back on the family until the situation was remedied. As is traditional, the family forced the girl to jump into a deep well before the baby was born. She drowned, her baby with her. As a final punishment, her name was struck from the family record, as if she’d never been born. That, I think grimly, may have been kinder than Dr. Laura’s advice.

Lori Miller is a writer, a teacher and a lifelong learner. She did her graduate work at USC and holds a doctorate in Rhetoric. Currently, she works as a freelance editor and teaches an occasional English class at the local community college. She lives in Fallbrook with her quite charming Russian Blue kitty. She enjoys walking in the foothills, indie movies, singing alto in the Fallbrook Chorale, reading novels on her new e-reader, and traveling, both figuratively and literally.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Sometimes, if we are lucky, a gentle voice emerges from the monotonous babble to speak a truth, small or large, obvious or not. And as the political left and right wage mind-numbing word wars over U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, author Sue Diaz’ gentle voice rises above the fray and begs our attention — not with glennbeckian outrage, not with self-righteous bombast, not with armchair general postulating, but with the tender and sorrowfully sane tale she tells in Minefields of the Heart: a Mother’s Stories of a Son at War.

A collection of wartime essays, a mother and son memoir, a letter full of love and compassion, Minefields of the Heart is the result of Diaz’s unexpected march to war when her kind and meandering son, Roman, enlisted in the Army in 2002 and was subsequently deployed to Iraq in 2003. Indeed, despite Diaz’ opposition to the Iraq War, Roman’s deliberate decision to serve put mother and son on an irreversible path that damaged and enlightened them both. It was a path from which Diaz struggled to understand and support her son, as Roman replaced his youth with the mantle of a warrior, set to kill or be killed

As Diaz writes, when a son or daughter, a husband or wife, a brother or sister goes to war, their loved ones go with them.

“Every time an insurgent bomb blows apart a Humvee or a squad on foot patrol, the shock waves from the blast reverberate in small towns like Wheeler, Texas, and big cities like San Diego. A young private takes a bullet; back at home his father’s heart bleeds. A soldier loses a leg; his wife struggles in the days that follow to simply keep putting one foot in front of the other. A sergeant’s eardrum is perforated; his mother hears the explosion in her dreams, time and time again. Truth is, the casualties of war go far beyond the numbers from the Pentagon. Love leaves us no choice. … ‘We are there too, Sergeant Diaz. We are there, too.’”

At times, Diaz presents a disheartening recitation of the slow wearing away of morale of Roman’s unit, a unit caught in the horror of a war crime in the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad. Or she shares Roman’s words sent home electronically:

“I don’t know how many times we’ve been on raids, and we’ll be searching the house. One person pulling security on the men of the house, and one on the women and children. They’ll offer to make us tea, or ask for a picture (if they see a camera), and for a while we chill out in their house and play with the kids. It’s especially weird if we meet with resistance on the way in. I always bring candy in my pockets and bullets in my chamber.”

At other times, her imagination creates a sweet moment following the death of a comrade:

“‘Horton would have wanted you to have these,’ I hear the squad leader say as he hands a box of Marlboros to a private notorious for bumming smokes.”

And at yet others, she recounts the conflicted hope inherent in survival, the homecoming of one soldier, her soldier, shoulder-to-shoulder with the millions of others from wars past:

“‘Roman,’ I breathed.

“‘Mom,’ he answered.

“That was all.

“That was everything.”

Diaz’ book is not a grand or passionate characterization of a controversial war; it is so much more. Minefields of the Heart is wondrous and eloquent in its intimacy, in its simplicity, in the unquestionable stories of a mother and son entwined in a war that will be debated for generations.

Diaz said of Roman in a recent phone call:

“He’s doing well now. He’s in school. … He’s a full time student. He’s married. All things considered — considering the hell he’s been through — he’s doing well. But life is harder because of his experience. … War is a difficult thing, it’s a hellish thing, and it should not be entered into lightly, ever. It affects people not only in combat, but on the home front, the ripple effect. It’s not just a handful of people in a place far away; it really reaches all of us. I hope people will come to have a larger understanding of war’s impact on not just one soldier and his family, but on all of us — as a country. … It was quite something to live through. It was quite something to write about, and, now, I think it’s good to have the book finished and out there.”

Sometimes we are lucky. Because, in the wake of reading the book, the need to hear more of Roman, to hear his mother’s voice just a little more, the need to know that they continue to survive the war, to live and love, serves as the most compelling truth of Diaz’ book: as there is hope for her son, so is there hope for the nation.

Author’s website: www.suediaz.com
Publisher: Potomac Books 2010
Hardcover price: $17.96

Crossposted at the North County Times.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Mama, what do angels look like?

This, my small kiddo asks. In the throes of divorce. Of making a game of beans and rice. Of sorrow. Of innocent query and wonderment. This she asks, but how shall I answer? What can I say that would not be a lie passing my lips?

In the speckled dark of a sleepless, starry sky, I sit on our hill as she chases shadows in the warm breeze and a coyote pauses beyond the fence that separates us. The hill is ours because we love it. I think it loves us. It makes paths for us around the rabbit holes, the tarantula borrows, the grainy mounds of queens and workers in constant toil. The People say it is a holy place; the altitude puts it a peedy bit closer to the gods. But I am distracted from the possibility of clutching a deity’s apron strings by whispered anguish calling to me from places I cannot pronounce and some I can.

Will the ashes of unwanted wives fertilize the next generation? Will tar balls become the tender of shrimpers and oyster folk? Will children who play with spent artillery shells transcribe the booming rhythm of war into the next amazing rap sensation? I search for hope amidst the moonlit carpet of rabbit turds, brown and rich, the prickly stubble of deer grass, recently shaved by a peon’s scythe, the manzanilla, its soothing ways unrecognized in the wild by those who buy it by the box.

The moon laughs at me and catches my girl, catches her dark curls and darker eyes, twirling into a glowing tornado, spiraling up toward the night, up into a future I fret I cannot affect, and my fear pulls her back to earth. The coyote howls across the hill, and answers echo from a distant canyon. I peer through the grasses to watch her, stymied by the impassable chain-link fence. A border to me, it cuts her world in half. And so she paces, her prey on the other side. And I chew a manzanilla bud, rub the tender skin beneath my skirt. The grass makes me itch. It makes me itch because I love to scratch. And so I scratch as I look out over our little town, ours because we scratch each other.

Why do I love it so here? How dare I raise my child in this place? This place of bitter anger and sweet Peruvian chocolate. Of testicle trees, our avocados, and shocking scarlet bottlebrushes. Of well-repressed, grey-green groves and lusciously chaotic words wending their way behind closed doors, between tussled sheets, into fearful hearts. The heat of conflict radiates from our bodies, our beds, our lands, entangling the legs of a bawdy blend. And I wonder, what’s not to love?

I lie in the dry grass, caressing the stars, eyes languid and wet, and I sense the loss of something, something I might not have ever wanted. The coyote, impatient with human encumbrances, glances at us and trots across the border, free to dine and commune with her own. My kiddo, delighted with discovering her ability to dance, moves deeper into the dark.

Angels? I call.

Oh, never mind, Mama. I just saw one!

And she spins, spins into the sweeping night. Soars out of reach. She is gone. Gone.

Love,
K-B

© 2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This piece is crossposted at The Progressive Post.

Note: Painting by Kate Gressitt-Diaz.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The book was a struggle, but I felt duty bound to stay put in my yard chair and honor the author’s effort to finish the thing. Consequently, even a trail of ants, Fallbrook’s ever-present organic waste abatement crews, distracted me from the chore of reading. I watched the good little refuse engineers tidily toting to their nest the remnants of a mourning dove egg, probably dropped from its cedar nest by a murderous Blue Jay. I’d heard a ruckus the day before and ducked inside to avoid its calamitous end. But damn if fate didn’t catch up with me! At least the ants were swift and effective. Perhaps too effective.

I remembered the gift my father sent to my kiddo when she was small enough to still handle insects as though they were playthings. It had been a surprise, a special grandfatherly treat. And, according to the accompanying literature, we all — yes, children and adults alike — were in for hours of entomological fun as we played audience to the life’s work of the inhabitants of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.

Actually, said inhabitants of the green petrochemical-based farm were shipped separately, which meant a wait for all that fun we knew was coming our way. In the meantime, we filled the bottom couple inches of the farm with the lily-white synthetic sand provided, and eagerly anticipated the ants’ Herculean feats, their mind-bending commitment to earthmoving, their fastidious exercise of home economics — all the requisite behaviors of a proper ant.

The estimated day of arrival drew near, and we tacked the ant poster that came with the farm to my daughter’s wall. Together, we reviewed Milton’s ageless discourse on the wondrous world of ants. With a couple of honored bugologists in the family, I thought this might prove a prophetic science experience for the kid, soon to graduate from daycare to real school.

At long last, our ants arrived — as expected, only soldier-workers of ambiguous gender. Queens were prohibited from travel. In we poured our new housemates to their escape-proof quarters, while I considered the years of effort I’d previously expended to keep the little bastards out of our home. Nonetheless, we gave them a welcoming honey-water spritz and set them in a place of honor at the dining room table.

Thankfully, Uncle Milton had adequately forewarned us, so we were not surprised when a few ants died the first day or two. This was to be expected. What was a bit disconcerting was the ants’ method of disposing of their dead: They broke down their brethren and, piece by piece, added their teeny black body parts to the white synthetic hills. And, to my maternal dismay, the ants continued dropping like, well, flies. Every day, we awoke to a grislier scene of death and dismemberment as the lily mounds became speckled with the black grains of dissected ant bodies.

In fear for my daughter’s psyche, and not a little grossed out, I poured through Uncle Milton’s brochure, a desperate review in search of advice I might have missed, critical guidance for keeping ants alive and well, but to no avail. The ants continued their unthinking hill building and their dying, only to be recycled as pepper to the sand’s salt by their surviving peers.

As the ant population rapidly dwindled and the hills darkened, I wondered about the significance of the ants’ unnatural existence on my table. Even when confronted with increasing mortality, the soldiers just plodded along, following the mandate of their biology — until the sad day when but one ant remained alive.

A lousy way to start the morning, I groped my way to the kitchen for day-old coffee and the eye dropper of honey-water, and returned to find the sole survivor atop the tallest hill peering skyward. I was grateful that the poor thing was too brainless to experience the bitter isolation of such utter aloneness, too rudimentary to beseech some great ant god in the artificial green sky to end this brutal abandonment. Unwilling to expose my daughter to such angst, I shattered the plastic and dumped the last ant outside in the garbage — to eat himself to a happy end.

I was certain then, as I am now, that we are not intended to keep ant farms on our dining room tables. Any more than we are intended to live in petrochemical plastic and perpetuate our soulless behaviors into our own extinction — our reckless Wall Street finanigans, our natural resource guzzling, our political demolition derbies, our hate-mortared border walls.

But, hey, it was just a bunch of ants, you might say? Yes, and if we don’t do any better than Uncle Milton’s ants, the species in my yard is likely to outlast us all, tidily toting our remnants back to their nests.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My mother planted lilies of the valley along her garden’s edge. It was a rare mundanity, and the memory has remained with me. One early autumn day, wearing her orange clamdiggers, matching gloves and shoulder-banging earrings, she carried a bag of bulbs, a spade and a small braided rug to the garden.

She rolled out the rug to kneel on, to protect her knees from the damp earth. She had shattered them both in an accident years before I was born. A truck, oblivious to the winter’s effect on the winding country roads, skated around a bend and over the top of my parent’s little car. I’ve imagined her lying there, a mouthful of shattered windshield burrowing into her gullet like seventeen-year locusts into the ground, her bright blood sketching her outline in the sterile snow.

Mother was not expected to live. Even Maud, the mighty Southern Baptist mother-in-law, abandoned her latest disownment to declare a bedside farewell. But, as is Mother’s wont, she outraged the family yet again. With a turban around her shaved head and extravagant rings dangling all from one ear, she left them slack-jawed at the hospital as she traipsed off with a limp to other eyebrow-raising pursuits.

Indeed, planting bulbs with me was one of the more temperate of my mother’s moments. She knelt on the rug her mother had braided with remnants from her prodigious sewing basket: scraps of worsted wool from Grandmother’s childhood skirts, bits of camel’s hair coat handed down from the generation before, remains of the blanket she had suckled when her mother was not at hand. Settled on her legacy, Mother dug down into the rich, moist soil to place the bulbs, to bring definition to her garden path. While she sowed, she taught me the lilies of the valley song in her voice that had lost its music to the ravages of swallowed glass.

White coral bells upon a slender stalk
Lilies of the valley deck my garden walk
Oh, don’t you wish that you could hear them ring
That will happen only when the fairies sing

In the spring, she said, we would see the graceful stalks and ribbed leaves draw the garden’s border, and the blossoms would soon follow. I watched and watched where the bulbs had disappeared and cared only to hear the bells ring and to catch a fairy in the house I’d made of twigs and berries. But autumn prevailed, spring would not come, and I was distracted from my vigil by the joys of lining up pilfered apples, roadside to roadside, and watching cars press them into apple butter as we, my siblings and I, rolled in hilarious fits behind the hedge, delighted with our miscreant deeds. I suppose my mother watched us from the window, pleased with our simple pleasures and wishing they could stay that way. She certainly knew better, though — she has forever been anything but simple.

My mother did not bake cupcakes. Instead, she filled our little brown bags with cream cheese and caviar sandwiches, a dash of lemon juice and grated onion to temper the salt. We desperately tried to trade them for peanut butter and jelly or baloney or even Velveeta, but to no avail.

She did make her own green tomato relish, for the bridge club — the best in town, so they said — and she decorated the tally cards with whimsical caricatures of unnamed women. Little did they know that the buxom gal with the rhinestone beauty mark, the card that set them all atwitter, was one of their own. She delighted in telling the ladies, as they politely nibbled her cucumber and watercress sandwiches and savored her relish, that the tomatoes grew wild over our septic tank.

On occasion, though, Mother did try to comport herself within the bounds of normalcy, she tried in her way. The day she stood behind the elementary school lunch counter, lovingly handing out milk cartons to my peers, she wore her outrageous hoop earrings — two on one ear — and her flowing caftan reached well below the accepted hemline of the day. The children wanted to know if that Gypsy was my mother. I fled the milk line to hide in the girl’s lav until lunch was over.

Some years later, they redefined my mother as she sat on the floor of my attic room amid my circle of friends. They liked to come to my house, they said, because my mother was groovy. She let me sleep on a mattress on the floor, with Indian beads and fabrics decorating the slanted surfaces of the garret and incense poking out of the fieldstone chimney’s chinks — incense she’d selected because it reminded her of me, she said. That night, the savory smoke filling our adolescent heads with unspoken notions, Mother asked if we got high. Then my friends knew she was truly cool, and I knew the only thing to do was crawl behind the decorations of my groovy room and silently suffer a humiliated teenager’s death.

But eventually, having a daughter of my own, I came to wince at how my mother must have ached while I hated her. I’d been so certain she didn’t — couldn’t — understand, and I did punish her for that. And I feared my daughter would be as cruel as I — and her daughter to her. Yet, when I first gazed down at my nursing child, I was finally able to define that warmly, wonderfully safe feeling that thoughts of my mother often bear with them today. She, of course, had nursed me as well. Even now, I can rest my face on her bosom and know indeed all will be right.

Except when mother told me she ate in lieu of sex. I had come of age, and I understood, though it saddened me, that she and Father had sex and that they didn’t. A little loss of weight was a cheery sign they were once again intimate, and it made me squirm. Midnight raids on the fridge meant the worst, and allowed my puckered fanny to relax. That fridge was the source of so much consolation.

When I chose to no longer be pregnant, my mother reached into the fridge and fed me comfort, all my favorite things — chocolate éclairs, Napoleons and, yes, caviar and cream cheese. She put her hand on my brow and asked me about it. I told her of the vacuum, slurping from my womb like the dregs of a strawberry soda. She cried with me and brought more tasty morsels to sooth our sadness.

Now I wonder, where does my mother end and I begin? I’ve always been afraid of becoming her. Would I have her girth? God forbid! Or her bent toward excess? Please, no! But her social grace and her clever humor: that is my unattainable desire. Oh, to make the most awkward of guests feel honored at my table or to give the dyspeptically staid a case of the vapors with a line as smart as it is unseemly or to bring back to earth the loftiest of egos — all with the eloquence and wit of a finely-crafted quip. Well into her eighties, Mother could still be a contender at Dorothy Parker’s table.

But one day my mother will die. And I, I will wade along the shore of sorrow, waves lapping at my legs, in and out, in and out. I will look to the fridge for solace, searching for sweetness to surround the pain, opening and closing the door fruitlessly. I will resort to cinnamon toast, sprinkling more at the edges, as she did, to make the crusts easier to bear. I will dream of her, burying my face in her pillow-chest. And I will re-braid the unraveling ends of my mother’s mother’s rug with the clothes of my childhood. Then I will take my daughter to the garden. We will kneel on the small and well-loved rug, and we will plant lilies of the valley while we sing.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My daughter loves balloons. Me? I’m uncomfortable with the little bastards. They burst mid-blow, slap your lips with stinging rubber, startle the boogers out of you.

My kid, though, she loves them. How could she not?

The day my daughter was born, my best friend brought day-old, helium-filled birthday balloons — her husband’s — and she and my husband tied the flagging orbs to the ceiling fan above our bed.

Earlier in the evening, we had planned on a movie — I don’t recall which one. Beetlejuice, perhaps, Tim Burton’s image of death and a darkly disturbed daughter. He must not have yet had one. Or Bagdad Cafe, Percy Aldon’s story of luscious rebirth in a Southwestern desert. No matter: We didn’t make it. I left a trail of dribbles back to the car.

And settled at home, when we were all certain it had started, we lowered the lights. We played Mozart — or was it Brahms? Maybe some womanly Celtic stuff. It’s all a bit fuzzy.

I remember going to the kitchen, to make chamomile tea, to move, to breathe, to wonder what was coming next. She wanted to help, my friend, as did my husband, but I think I wasn’t ready for that. Our midwife knew better than to offer.

And then we waited, while I tried to imagine her an adult — I knew it was a girl, untested but certain. Would she be an artist? Would she be whole? Would she survive?

I went to make more chamomile tea, to move more intently, to breathe deeper, to get down on all fours and howl. I knew what was coming next.

The pain, the abstraction, the focus, the detachment, the pain again.

And in between, I thought of Mother, the four she birthed, the one she lost. She also had been born at home, in the safe comfort of loving hands that would swaddle a healthy babe and let loose those not ready to join the living. Did Mother remember, could she recall her sequence, the progression from water broken, the length of her labors, the moments the contractions gave way to release and bliss?

Why don’t we ask these things, ask before it’s too late for answers?

But no matter; we were done. My daughter lay on my chest, umbilical cord still pulsing. Her father glowing. Balloons fluttering between gently turning fan blades, too soft to lift drenched hair from my forehead.

And to this day, my daughter loves balloons. Me, I remain uncomfortable with the little bastards. Although if someone else inflates them, I admit they make me smile. And still, I try to imagine her, well into her adulthood. Will she be an artist? Will she be whole? Will she survive? I don’t know.

But I do know that home births are slightly more common today than in recent years past, as they should be, though not yet the norm they were before hospitals took over. And if Congress has the resolve to reduce the cost of healthcare, insurers will be required to cover them.

© 2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Balloon photo by Aaron Hockley via a Creative Commons license.)

Prayers for Bobby

Based on a true story, Prayers for Bobby portrays the Griffith family’s struggle to adjust to a gay teen son, Bobby, amid his mother’s belief that God will “cure” him. For Bobby, suicide is the resolution; for his mother, finding faith in unconditional love is the cure.

Prayers for Bobby might enlighten parents who believe God condemns their homosexual children — and it could save a child’s life. MAMMA says give unconditional love a chance.

The book is available in paperback and the movie, currently unavailable for purchase, can be seen on youtube.com, in nine segments.

Learn more about the story at Lifetime.com.

And, thanks to MAMMA Kim for the heads up.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

She sent me a link to the pictures, blithely posted on Facebook. Her closed eye was engorged to the size and tone of a plum, a large, ripe plum big enough to stifle — oh, I don’t know, Rush Limbaugh, perhaps. Surely big enough to indicate serious damage and pain. Indeed, big enough to pucker my motherly derriere up to my earlobes and launch me from Fallbrook to the University of California Santa Cruz, where my precious, bloodied child needed me.

And then she stood before me, teary-eyed, swollen and bruised, waiting for me to fix it.

But what could I do?

Well, try not to cry, for starters. Pull her to the comfort of my maternal bosom. Hold her and tell her it’ll be okay.

“But, when?” she implored. “And what if my eyebrow doesn’t grow back? I hate my life.”

So much for my comforting bosom.

At least we could both take comfort that it was not an abusive fist that battered my kid, but an unkempt road, a road harboring over-sized, bicycle wheel-grabbing gaps between old train tracks and lumpy asphalt.

It’s a road that deserves a good jackhammering, but it’s too low on the Santa Cruz totem pole compared to the need to invest in social awareness campaigns; for instance, the Domestic Violence Awareness Month banners I noticed driving into town. Those puppies were well hoisted, while the dastardly train tracks dumped a near-death experience on my baby.

Well, okay, I exaggerate. And, truth be told, I like the banners. In fact, I love the banners. I pointed them out to my daughter on the way to pick up copious amounts of feel-good food. I asked her if anyone had tried to rescue her from an abusive partner, a black eye being such a common red flag for domestic violence — you know, the old “I walked into the closet door” alert.

But nope. In this enlightened town of progressive academics, gracefully aging hippies, medical marijuana peddlers, tree-loving hemp wearers, locally roasted and cold-brewed coffee vendors, devoted political activists and banana slugs,* no one checked to make sure she wasn’t a victim of abuse. Not a professor, not one feminist studies student, not a single concerned and domestic violence-aware person.

So much for the banners.

Oh, she did get plenty of stares — from students, from kids in the grocery store checkout line, from the equally battered and downtrodden homeless on Pacific Avenue — and her adorable Latin professor kindly asked if she were okay.

But no one uttered the most important words, the most hopeful words, the words that can mean the difference between life and death for a battered woman: Did somebody hit you? Because if somebody hit you, it’s not okay. You don’t deserve it. It’s not your fault. It’s a crime. If somebody hit you, let me help you.

These are the words of someone who is truly aware of domestic violence. They were spoken to me one hot summer’s night in a hospital emergency room. They saved my life — and allowed me to eventually have my daughter.

I like these words. In fact, I love these words. I suppose they’d make a lousy patch for the crummy road, but I wonder if maybe they’d make a good banner.

For more information:

If you want to help, use those words whenever you find yourself wondering, and visit your local domestic violence prevention agency or the Family Violence Prevention Fund.

If you are a victim of violence, leave your abuser, go to your local shelter, visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline website or call 800-799-SAFE (7233). Save yourself, Sweetie.

Love,
K-B 760-522-1064 — call me, because being hit once is indeed domestic violence

*The banana slug is the UCSC mascot. No kidding.

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Note: This piece is cross-posted at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

(Photo from the Santa Cruz City Commission for the Prevention of Violence Against Women.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

He left through the side door of the court building and started across the street mid-block, leaning with years, awkward but sturdy, the sun igniting his silver hair. His blue overalls were hitched up at the waist with a workman’s belt, a trick of the shrinking elderly.

I slowed down, not annoyed by his jaywalking, but certainly noting it. Then his pace got the better of me and I enjoyed the moment it allowed to watch the sun find its way through the wind and the trees to drop blind spots on my windshield. The city isn’t so terrible when there are trees, and I imagined the old man, pruning his own.

He would trim them with care, cutting only the weak, the unnecessary. Strong arms shaping strong arms. And tending a small urban garden, perhaps. Tomatoes, certainly, some peppers, maybe snap beans. He’d bring his grandchildren to the plot to teach them the miracle of planting and nurturing food from the earth. For them, only the crisp sweetness of beans fresh from the vine, the warm joy of afternoon tomatoes, blood red as God meant them to be.

The old man stumbled, hesitated for a moment and hopped a step or two. I pulled up, not too close, and waited for him to finish crossing, hoping for his parking place. He was not, after all, so old, maybe a middle-aged man, Latino perhaps. The thick, purple-black hair of his ancestors remained with him still, shielding him from eons of heat and rain. Its sheen must have reflected the sun’s rays. That’s what I had seen, not the halo of a silver-haired old man.

And what had seemed the stoop of age, was, more likely, the twisted result of bending over to pick the produce of another man’s vines. Bending and reaching, bending and reaching, but never tasting the fruit. Maybe he left a family in his homeland, as eager for the spare words he scribbled to them each month as for the currency he sent, while he risked his dignity to a hostile nation. Cowering in a canyon at night, among his compadres, they would seek flickering warmth from their shared misery, feed one another on the constant desire for something better.

In the center of the road, he stopped and looked toward me, so I waved him on. He raised his hands slightly, oddly, gesturing something, I wasn’t sure what. I smiled and nodded to reassure him he was safe, I would not hit him, and I waved him on again.

He turned back to his destination as an animated branch blocked the sun from my windshield, and I saw his workman’s belt become straps and steel, and the chain forcing his slight stoop, thick enough to keep a bull in tow, shackled his limbs to the impenetrable leather at his waist. Then the sun meandered through some shifting leaves and found the man’s hands, only to be frightened off by the muzzle of the flat-black gun he clasped.

He stumbled again, and the chain snaring his legs clanged against the ground before him. He squinted at me once more over his shoulder.

Looking around the sun’s rays, I caught his eyes, dark and frightened. He was eighteen at most, and sad, fearfully sad — a lost soul loved only by a mother fettered to her child’s failure. A mother hoping to save her boy who was hopeless. She would kneel every night and pray to the Madre de Dios for his salvation, for him to know some peace, for him to escape his anguish. Then she would sob, not trusting God to give her weak one this miracle.

Did his mother know, deep in her heart, his only escape would be found the next day in the angry aim of a policeman’s gun, in the speckled shade of a backyard garden, his crimson fluid seeping into the earth, feeding the tidy rows of tomatoes and snap beans?

The boy ran a hobbled race the final yards, his prison blues marked with the sweat of his effort. A passenger door swung open, an engine revved. He looked back toward me one last time, and I waved him on again.

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo by Vicky Sedgewick via a Creative Commons license.)