Right now, I should be fast asleep - in beautiful, fall-color engorged extreme northwest Massachusetts. Taking a writing workshop with Nancy Slonim Aronie.
I am sitting in the computer studio at Squirrel Haven. I am writing, though. And I am writing about something that Nancy suggests in her wondrous book (the one I'm supposed to having a living experience of over this glorious mid-autumn weekend), Writing from the Heart - - write about a secret.
Although I adore Nancy's book - the first book I started marking certain passages with clear tape tabs, after turning down countless page corners, folding entire pages in half, underlining special bits in glaring yellow highlighter - although I adore Nancy's book, have never used a suggestion. This one, in particular, caught my attention & made me want to forget I'd ever read it. Write about a secret.
Yeah.
There are a lot of secrets that came to mind, ones that would make for great dramatic revelations, but the one that has not let me alone since the very wee small hours of this morning is also my dirtiest.
I don't vacuum.
Ever.
And we have 12 cats.
This time, last year, we had 13.
I didn't vacuum then, either.
It is not that I am lazy. A big immense massive block keeps me from vacuuming. It is a place I do not let myself go. It is a "don't go there" feeling in my back, in the section right under my shoulder blades. And it has been forever.
When the cats entered our lives, which wasn't planned, a very strong thought occurred to me ~ "This is the Universe making sure that you HAVE to vacuum the way you did when your mother expected it to be done on at least a relatively frequent basis. Now, you HAVE to."
Except, I didn't.
I haven't touched a vacuum in a couple years. Maybe longer.
Everything about our house is a block. Everything in my head around the house is blocked. There isn't a single room in this house where I feel actually welcome, so none of them look welcoming.
It could be related to the fact that I grew up in houses - two on Alden Road, one on Cherry Lane, one on Woodland Road - where I never felt welcome. Because I wasn't. Needed, yes. Welcome - never. It could be related to that.
Or totally not.
My reality is that when friends paid a surprise visit around this time a year ago, the first words out of my mouth when I saw them talking to John on our front lawn, here on Pheasant Run not over a thousand miles away on N. Vail Drive, wasn't, "What a glorious surprise! How wonderful to see you!!" No, it was, "You didn't let them into the house, did you??"
He hadn't.
And they assumed it was because the house was a wreck. It wasn't. It was because our house stinks to high heaven of cats.
The Universe might have given them to us as a spur to turn me into a reasonable house cleaner, but that worked about as well as my Mom giving my sister family treasures in the expectation that it would give her the incentive to take care of something.
The Universe had as little success with me as Mom did with Mim.
There was an outcome to the phone call a week later from Candy, sharing her deep concern & offer to help make a difference. Now, a year later, the house IS a wreck.
And the vacuuming remains undone.
John cleans off the carpets. He does a really deep clean, sort of combing the carpet, with a cat brush.
In all my years, this morning is the first time ever that I can write think about my vacuuming block & realize there is a way around it. Just vacuum. Just do it once a day. At least in the living room. It will be great exercise. The how when wherefores of the block don't matter. The only thing I know for absolute sure is that if I figured out the underlying reasons in my head, they would be wrong. Blocks don't make sense. They aren't about making sense. They are about blocking.
And this one has been a doozie. A massively successful doozie.
It is very easy to rewrite that short far-from-simple sentence. To "I do vacuum."
Open my heart & energies. See what is right in front of me to do. Literally under my feet.
Make it so.
mim has her voice & i hope she shares it.
this recent news about her has certainly uncorked my own desire for writing memoir. amazing that this weekend's workshop is on that very thing.
coincidental? ha!
a zillion+ thanks to an always generous, amazing, appreciated universe!
No idea why my sister is living where she, as she is, for whatever reasons she is. But am thinking that she has the time & the mind & the ability to write. To write a book. To write about whatever moves her. To write persuasively, in the ways she's always had of capturing people's attention & moving their hearts. That is no small gift. And Mim's always had it.
She could take this time & all that she is & write. Not just for herself, but for all of us. She has it in her. Will she let it out? Will she allow the rest of us to share life through her eyes? It would be epic. But only if she writes.
My experience of my sister is of a remarkable voice that could world-moving. There are many reasons for her to stay silent, to know all that she could write & choose not to. I understand that. And there is maybe only one reason why she should. Because it's her voice & it deserves to be heard.
Am envisioning Mim dying & someone finding her journals & being blown away by all she's written. Or maybe, if she does journal, she'd have them burned.
The image of my sister writing has seized my mind - will take her with me, in spirit, to Rowe this weekend, to Nancy Aronie Slonim's workshop, Writing from the Heart. Because I'll be connecting to my own stories, to my own voice, to my own everything. Sharing the vibe with her, not held down by old restrictions & constrictions, but celebrating & releasing.
This past Saturday, at the very last Bryn Athyn Bounty Farm Market (where I am the Cupcake Lady), I saw one of my sister's closest friends, someone who has known Mim since she was a young girl - a true intimate with a long, deep view of her. She mentioned plans to see Mim sometime next month, which nudged me to ask, "What is it like where she lives?"
Cannot explain the change of expression on the friend's face. She seemed to go ashen, as she told me, in a voice that didn't sound at all like hers, "Mim is living in prison. She's in a nursing home's shut-down Alzheimer's unit. I've begged her to request a transfer to a regular unit, and she won't."
Snake pit. My sister is voluntarily living in a modern version of Snake Pit. Only her story is the reverse of the 1948 novel, where the heroine works her way back to health & sanity. Mim worked her way into where she is now; whatever the reason she was first placed there (not enough room in a regular unit?), she remains there voluntarily.
Hearing about where she lives, that she has refused to make any effort to be moved, was somehow the last piece in the puzzle that's my sister. She is where she's always felt she belonged - with no independent life.
Since my mid-20s, Mim struck me as a person who hated having been born.
Up through the late 1970s, she was prone to deep, quiet anger. Not like my own bursts of utter frustration, which flame out & vanish, directed against myself rather than others. Mim's anger was definitely against others. It was her anger that had me, in 1980, on the verge of leaving.
As I said, Mim seemed to be a person intensely unhappy at being alive.
I never could understand her intense feelings of resentment against Mom, but total adoration of Dad.
Her darkness seemed to lessen over the years, but I remember the depth of her feelings back when we lived on Cherry Lane & our early years on Woodland Road. I can still remember sitting on Mom's bed in the Woodland Road house, telling Mim that I was moving out because I couldn't handle her chronic... rage is the best word, and her promising to change. And she did.
Or maybe the anger just went even deeper, muted but still there. It was never really against me, but against something bigger.
For some reason, Pam understood how the family felt about Mim. (Kerry never seemed to get it at all.) Soon after she & Peter married, Pam commented on how the family was afraid of Mim. Mim & Mom & I thought that hilarious. The rest of us - afraid of Mim?? What a hoot! Am still amazed that Pam got what no one else a) did or b) refused to acknowledge.
We were afraid of Mim, from Dad right down to me. Not once do I remember either of my brothers making negative comments to Mim about her weight, her general appearance. To Mom, yes. To Mim - never. That is unusual. I do not recall my parents ever taking her to task. Sure, I resented that, but it made sense to me. When you crossed Mim, you felt it.
It is impossible to describe the negative energies Mim could uncork, energies that did no physical harm but were unimaginably ominous & threatening. It felt like holocausts simmered just under the surface.
Mim only physically threatened me once, in the kitchen of the Cherry Lane house, holding a knife. I can see it as if it was yesterday. I was in senior high school, Mim would have been in her mid-20s. She was shaken with anger over something I'd said. I remember going stone-cold calm, looking into the face of something indescribable.
Mom used to describe how, as a little girl, Mim would act up all day but become good as gold whenever Dad walked through the door. She recalled how he'd take HER to task for making out that Mim had been difficult. That always got to me - Mom telling me, as if it was nothing, that her husband didn't believe what she told him about his daughter's behavior, that he faulted her instead. Mim learned early that she could be totally awful to the people who didn't matter to her, as long as she acted differently with those who did.
This most recent twist, with Mim living voluntarily in an Alzheimer's unit - in "prison," as her friend described it - is the coup de grace to my trying to figure Mim out. It is the poetically macabre expression of what she always conveyed to me, if no one else, she felt was her just due in life. No real life.
And I seemed to be the only one who cared about it. Mom wouldn't, maybe it was that she couldn't, do anything to help. She & Dad had Mim see a psychiatrist when she was young, but all that happened was she'd come home bragging about how she turned the tables on the shrink & took charge of the appointment.
Mom & Dad were the ones who should have sought counseling - Mim was already lost. To her last day, Mom could not deal with Mim. Easier to leave the room when things became unbearable then face it, acknowledge it, work with it.
No one cared about Mim, except her baby sister. In 1994, when Mike & Kerry stayed with us over Christmas, I tried to talk to Kerry about my worries, describing Mim's history of meanness cruelty toward Mom, toward me, toward children. She wanted to hear none of it. Can still hear her saying, "If I believed what you say, then I'd have to believe she was a monster." Remember sitting there, at the dining room table, my heart sinking, as I said, "Mim is not a monster, but she does monstrous things."
Kerry was my last hope of someone, other than myself, helping Mim. The information I shared were things that happened, things other people could, if asked, confirm. But KCL shut me down.
Writing this, is sounds like my family was a small-scale version of The Snake Pit. With the person pointing it out - me - tagged by others as the psychotic.
Mim living - of her own free will - in a nursing home's locked-down Alzheimer's unit, resisting a beloved friend's entreaties to be moved into a regular living space, has liberated me from much of my past. It is what she's always seen for herself, has always seen in herself. It makes no sense. But it does to her.
This latest is just the last of a long line of similar damaging behaviors present throughout her life. Well, at least throughout my life. And yet she was THE person held up by everyone - except Pam - as the apex of what lesser lights could only faintly aspire to be. Voluntarily living the way Mim is now is no less unreasonable than how my family treated her. Was it that they couldn't see, that something I can't begin to envision blocked their sight of what was right in front of them? Did they just not want to be bothered? What dynamic in play caused them to see ME as psychotic while they placed Mim in the center of our family solar system?
My guess is that no one has a clue. About any of it. And they certainly had no interest in asking, in finding out.
Years ago, when we were talking about some of the autistic children she was working with, about their families, Mim made a comment that was immensely illuminating, at least to me. "When I look at their lives & their struggles, my life looks so much better." Wow. It took the depth of darkness of their lives to make hers look good, in comparison. Have never forgotten that.
Mim is physically handicapped. Am not clear what the situation is. Dicey questions were always off limits. She has tremendous problems walking. Maybe the reason she prefers the nursing home's locked-down Alzheimer's unit - the place her friend describes as a prison - is that when she looks at the lives around her & the struggles they face, hers look so much better. Maybe, in comparison, she feels relatively whole.
Or not. Maybe it's something completely different. But whatever it is, it sure ain't healthy or whole or what would be experienced as life affirming to 99.9999% of the rest of us.
And some form of Mim's present-day reasoning has been always & forever - literally - with me. Her brokenness always held up as the golden mean, my constant striving for health regarded by everyone, parents included, as an ugly aberration. Well, my take on it all was an aberration. A glorious one that's finally liberated to me the norm, unhindered by the fiction that my sister is anything other than whatever it is she is.
