I yearned for a story,  the missing pieces, that would either allow my heart to break for him or cast him into the pit.

Each new bit, each tantalizing piece of information sent an electric charge through me, consuming me, preoccupying me, shorting out all my circuits until the information suddenly “clicked” into or out place. Some pieces snapped together. Some beliefs were pulled apart. 

It had never entered my head that what I was writing had any connection with art… C. G. Jung

Everyone knew more than I did about who had done what to whom and when.

The image of the baby swallowed up in the muddy water repeats. What disturbs me the most is the subtle thrill, the relief, that is entangled with the horror of the image of a drowning infant. I walk hunched over, skulking back up the pier hoping that no one saw me drop the baby.

“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.” ~ Chekhov

But my Mother-complex was thankfully formed from the love and courage of many mothers – a long line of them – not only my mother and my step-mother – and I suspect this tap root from my family reached into a deep underground spring of clear water, and that it traveled through many rings, many generations and sustained me when there was little in the surface environment that could.

So here I am,  - I keep showing up at this church, while I’m trying to sort what happened to my family, realizing how little I knew about Father’s life before or after the seven years of chaos he inflicted on our household.  I can go back into a traditional church because by now  the intense “post-traumatic/spiritual abuse” emotional charge has been drained enough for me to discern what I may have cherished there, what I lost, what I still yearned for, what I might need, what I reject, what has died, and what is entirely uninteresting to me. 

March 16,  1979

I made the auditions for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I am a no-necked monster.

Mom is getting married Sunday.

Band Festival is tomorrow, I gotta get up at 7:30 am. Oh well.

I’d grown up in a Rashomon tale – where facts and motivations were constantly shifting to shore up each adult’s idealized self, and erase all of their failure and culpability, and none of their stories fit together.

All memory is false memory, and all memory is fiction, but memory can be confirmed and questions can be both asked and answered. 

Nostalgia for one's childhood does not necessarily mean that the childhood was a happy one.

~ Observer 8 February 7/5/1959   - from the Oxford English Dictionary

The binding is of the whole body but particularly the tongue…

The search is for lost narrative, for discarded memory, for those things that we might have considered worthless”

~ Barbara Glasson, A Spirituality of Surviva

A strange parthenogenesis – not quite a like a great black snake who creates her own offspring without a reproductive partner. But also not a father-Zeus who generates a daughter on his own and pulls her out of his own head.

Father said he was an exorcist. He told stories about a poltergeist that haunted his seminary dorm.

None of these ghost stories scared me. The only thing that terrified me was Satan himself.

I want emptiness, open space, unexplained and inferred things, disjointed time. I want it to be like a dream. To go in and out of past and present, personal and professional. Like a dream does

Sometime the presence of goodness is incidental, and not redemptive.

Maybe it is never safe to look back.

“Remember Lot’s wife: those who try to make their lives secure will lose it, and those who lose their life will keep it.” Luke 17:32

Ellie was gone. But not questions she had opened up that night. They were still swirling in my head in the moments when the waves of grief for her, for my mother, let up. “Unnie, you know what he was doing in the back basement don’t you?