The Sandbox: Issue No. 1
How to put a memoir out of its misery ... leaning into friendship and gratitude ... and my really awful drawings of birds: What I've learned so far from Other People's Parents
The drive-in movie theater in my grandmother’s town was a wide, grassy lot on the side of a rural road where the only other memorable landmark for miles was a frozen custard stand. The beat-up metal speaker box you hooked over the car window garbled with static, breaking up the rhythms of the countryside with the congested squawk of a Hollywood soundtrack. It crackled in bold violation of the chorus of crickets and frogs who had been there first, and its lone volume dial seemed to require endless tinkering.
But the place was magic. Beneath all those clear, reliable, undeniable stars that poked out from the black sky was an unpredictable cacophony of storytelling, a place to get lost without going anywhere. You could forget what was real. Indeed, if you weren’t careful, you could drive off with the speaker still straddling the rolled-down window. As a kid, I lived for the stories on that screen. But it was the adults who forgot to put them back when they were over.
As Mary Pope Osborne shared in this newsletter, when we are 7 or 8 years old, we can still see what adults overlook. We become aware of the noise around us, we compare it to what we already know, and we make a childlike distinction between distortion and clarity.
We begin to decide what’s real and worthy, folding possibility gently into the mix.
And then we grow up.
Before I launched this newsletter last month, I had devoted every day of the previous two and a half years to figuring out what was real, tuning the dial this way and that to cut through the distortion of what I thought I knew about myself. Going back, in memory and in essence, to a 7-year-old me.
On a Friday afternoon two weeks before Thanksgiving, my mother had called to disown me. I was broken, and by the following year, I was writing a memoir called Unbelonged. I had no choice but to write; I either had to work through the pain and confusion or continue to lie in the fetal position on my bedroom floor, which was not the optimal location from which to imbue my teenagers with a strong sense of self-worth.
But 40,000 words and two years in, I stepped away. Just for a couple of weeks, I told myself.
The memoir I was writing—the one I thought I needed to write, anyway—required me to answer questions that made no sense. It was an often cruel slog through a familiar script of abuse and shame. Was I really nothing but trouble, as my mother told me? Did I really think—or act like—I was better than everyone else, as she said?
Was I less worthy of affection than my sibling, as my mother had repeatedly made clear? Did we truly not have a writer in the family anymore, as she had casually stated? Had it really been a mistake to send me to college, as she had declared at a family dinner?
Was I really so much different from the 7-year-old she had prepared breakfast for, repaired teddy bears for, the kid who once begged for hug after hug? Had I lost the essence of a girl who could be loved by her mother?
It seemed unfathomable.
A memoir like that never heals the way you wish it would. It was necessary work that helped me understand my glass-half-empty tendencies, and I don’t regret it. It was, as a wise woman told me, grief work. But in a story like this, true healing happens after the credits roll, when you’ve turned the dial down, unhooked the garbled speaker, and returned it to its wooden pole.
The healing happens after you drive away from the static and distortion.
I drove away from those first 40,000 words because I hadn’t been writing them so much as I had been shedding them like spent skin. My real narrative—my undeniably good, real life—was underneath the noise. That’s the story that matters. That’s the memoir I’m writing here, in real-time, conversation by conversation, in this newsletter.
I never intended to reveal the tenderest of my scars on the internet. My other social media accounts look like abandoned small towns I drive through once a year for a good reason: These are not platforms you visit to build or sustain real self-worth. For a long time, I’ve preferred to let the tumbleweeds blow across all of my digital parking lots, to sit out this version of 21st-century life.
To hide, really. To disappear.
Imagine being a writer who avoids being read.
But that’s a story about fear, and I am so done with fear. I am too old for this fear, too young for this fear, all too human for this kind of fear. Sometimes, you must write your way back into who you are, and you need other people for that journey.
The folks I interviewed for the first issues of Other People’s Parents were so giving and supportive of this newsletter’s premise that they quickened my turn toward the present and out of the past. While sharing their wisdom with me, they poured a gallon of courage into my heart.
Shirley Ort empowered me to keep expanding my own family through attentive friendships, Bo Williams reminded me that dark holes are for climbing out of, and Osborne reminded me to check in with someone I had lost track of long ago: a 7-year-old girl who knew the difference between squawking and stars.
I owe each of these generous people popcorn and Junior Mints for life.
Taking stock
Last week, I put into practice Williams’ advice to “periodically take stock” of one’s life, to collect data points to compare where you’ve been and where you are going. For me, that means examining my writing. I returned to the first of those 40,000 words of Unbelonged for the first time in months and found that I did not recognize the author. I was surprised by her tone, word choices, and gloom. I would have called a neighbor to check on her. She was so starkly different from who I am today that it was jarring. I appreciate what she went through, but I’m glad she has climbed out of that hole.
Here’s a little bit of what I’m willing to share from the prologue:
I have tried to unravel privately, out of my teenagers’ view. I drove to a parking lot by a lake and sat alone in the vehicle, breathing deeply into the amped, jangly ends of my nervous system. It was so silent that all I could hear were my mother’s words echoing in my head. I tried to match them to who I have been, to who I think I am. I could not separate the lies from the truth.
You think you’re better than all of us.
You have been nothing but trouble for this family.
I have booked appointments to rage rooms, beaten the pillows on my bed within an inch of their stuffing, listened to a lot of P!nk, and watched a lot of late 90s television. I have been to therapy. I have written darkly snarky humor pieces and sent them to friends who laughed uneasily. I have consumed metric tons of peanut M&Ms while watching baseball.
I know I am unraveling because no sane person watches the amount of baseball I have watched.1
I have shut myself in the attic and violently ripped pages out of old quote books gifted to me about mothers and daughters (“What do girls do who haven’t any mothers to help them through their troubles?” Louisa May Alcott asked me, unwisely, as she floated to the ground). I then hurled their sappy, shredded carcasses across the room.
I have felt relief, and even a kind of joy, to be free of the woman who raised me. I have felt guilty about that relief and that joy.
…
No one brings you a casserole when you are excommunicated from your family of origin. No one hands you a death certificate. No one comes to the wake, pats you on the back, memorializes what you have lost. No one tells you to clean yourself up and stop streaming “Felicity.”
But I am shattered and broken all the same, and it feels like grief to me.
I’m so grateful to Bo Williams for sharing his story of letting go of the past. It takes vulnerability. He knows what the hard work of being human means.
Reaching out … and getting out of my head
Shirley Ort demystified my inner chatter on friendship, helped me reach out to people who matter, inspired some folks who read my interview with her to reach out to their friends (!), and spurred me to purchase a stack of stationery and a bunch of stamps and start reconnecting in meaningful ways.
Happily, she is also a new friend. If I’m even luckier, one day, I’ll learn her secret to making the perfect pie crust.
Finally, a word about this quote from Osborne:
It’s about appreciating things outside yourself so you’re not the subject of your thinking so much. Because mostly, when we think about ourselves, we’re not that happy with what we think about.
I took her advice and decided to work on appreciating the world outside my window. I have become appallingly bad at listening for birdsong, noting blooms and trees, and seeing the shapes in clouds—something children do naturally. I believe this is a condition of being 51 and fighting all the afflictions and scheduling this age bestows upon you.
But then I walked into a bookstore and found this.
… and now I have an excuse to take terrible pictures of birds that I turn into terrible drawings of birds. Because it’s fun. Dumb birds, ugly birds, beautiful birds. No one is more excited by this development than my 19-year-old daughter, who sees the whole world in a nonstop series of 30-second sketches. Here’s the first of a dozen sticky notes I’ll likely find lying around the house this week with her art:
When she discovers me doodling now, she settles in next to me and grabs the nearest writing instrument and medium, and we doodle side-by-side. (Well, I doodle. She draws.) Nothing makes her happier. As you can imagine, I feel the same.
What have I learned after one month of Other People’s Parents? Call a friend today. Draw a tree. Buy your favorite childhood candy. Grab your laptop and your children or your dog or your partner and watch a movie outside, on the grass, preferably under the stars. Turn down the static in your life, and get out of your own head. It’s worth it.
Happy Wednesday, everyone. ♣
NEXT WEEK: Novelist and poet Steve Cushman discusses belonging as a function of art.
This affliction continues, and I blame Mookie Betts and Shohei Ohtani.