Heartbreaking Exits

I know we are supposed to be objective about what we are reading in this course. Sorry, gang. Couldn't do it with this book. It made me cry.

Joyce Farmer portrayed so much of what I went though for ten years with my mother's deteriorating mind/body health, due in large part to dementia/Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease. This is my foundation for what I now will impart on this book.

Lars put it well on page 85, in the last panel "...Yes, well - things get worse in such small increments that you can get used to anything."

The house, in disrepair and need of assistance was a perfect simile for what was happening to Lars and Rachel Drover.

That is the pace and tone of her parents' aging, which was a similar pace to my mother's aging. Elders start forgetting, losing abilities long taken for granted. It is embarassing, and Farmer portrayed Lars and Rachel's concern over losing abilities - strength, sight, memory, balance, and so on. Simple things were becoming impossible tasks. Rachel moving to the living room couch reminded me of concessions our elders make in order to stay in their homes. This is their dignity being challenged.

Lars and Laura caring for Rachel was difficult, and the decision to have Rachel placed in convalescent care was well portrayed. Lars could not do this and left it to his daughter to do for him.

However, it seemed that there was little investigation or thought in the facility that Laura had Rachel moved to. Communication breakdowns, Rachel's fall and subsequent discovery of a broken hip, staff not sensitive to her complaints. This troubled me -- there are social service staff at hospitals that will direct an elder patient's family to the proper resources, yet this didn't happen in this instance. The final days were depicted so sad, and there is a great deal of anger I got from Laura when she goes to visit Rachel to find that she had died and already taken to the morgue.

The deterioration of Lars' health was something that, sadly, I am seeing in an older sister's husband who refuses to see a doctor. Unfortunately, I have seen this happen with men of that generation who really believe that they can survive anything. The product of surviving the Great Depression and WWII and Korea.

Let's get to the graphics. Facial expressions pretty much conveyed how the characters were reacting. Eyes wide, eyebrows up, downcast looks, smiles of pleasure or reminiscing......Farmer got these down. The physical deterioration of Lars and Rachel clearly showed the ravages of their aging taking their physical toll. Page 48, Rachel is 240 pounds; later on pages 126 and 130 she is wasting away. Rachel's confusion due to her mind's deterioration shows on her face. Even the smells of the old bedding, soiled clothing were conveyed; too often our society does not want to admit that, yes, aging and old age diseases have their odors that need to be addressed.

Rachel and Lars died without Laura with them. Both my parents died without my being present. Four years ago, I spent two nonstop days at hospice care helping my mother with her exit from this plane to the next. In the weeks before my mother's death, I remember her dreaming, reaching out with two thin arms, trying to hold or grab onto someone. Lars' dream about his mother reminded me of mother's dreams, likely of her twin brother.

My mother was also of Lars and Rachel's generation. She was private and I believe she, like Rachel and Lars, chose to pass away privately without her daughter having to witness it. Both times in the book, I had to stop and cry, this book reawakened mother's passing four years ago.

The text included stories of Rachel and Lars' histories. I remember my mother repeating these stories to me of her history. This is something of value our elders tell us, hoping we will learn something from their lived experiences.

Some things were repetitious -- Rachel asking for her Dr Pepper, requesting the same thing over and over, Lars efforts to deal with his wife's illness, Lars not wanting to see a doctor after Laura asking several times until his fall at home makes it a mandatory visit. Especially Rachel's repeated questions and statements could be viewed as filler or the author not knowing where to take the story. However, this went in perfectly with Rachel's progressing dementia/Alzheimers disease -- and I'm speaking from my own experience now. It is part of the disease. My mother would ask the same thing over and over and over. I would always give her the same answers, knowing that the discussion would come around again. It could be frustrating, and I saw that frustration on Laura's face from time to time. Again, this would have been the perfect opportunity for a social service agent to direct Laura to a geriatric counselor. I had to find one, and it helped me deal with my mother's deteriorating mind.

So much in this book touched my heart, so much in this book mirrored things I experienced as I cared for my mother. Like Rachel, my mother had a sharp mind - she was a force to be reckoned with and ended up needing 24/7 care for all of her needs.

Side note -- too often we focus on the needs of the elder being cared for and put the needs of the caregiver on the back burner. It was refreshing to see Laura being dated by her husband, Art, and seeing her son and Barbara and Nick stepping up to be sure that Laura was getting a break every now and then. Caring for a deteriorating loved-one's health -- whether it is at home or in an assisted living or convalescent facility -- is mentally taxing. Without loving people in one's life to help out, a person can feel lost and overwhelmed.

I need to close this now, reading this (twice) and writing this has affected me. That said, I'll step away from the critique of the memoir to state that this, thus far, has been THE favorite of all the books for this class that I've reaad thus far.

Ball and Chain and Pieces and Extraordinary Visuals

This book grabbed me, took me for a ride, Janis Joplin and I were in the front car of this roller coaster, and it was wild. Suffice it to say that one reading of this book will not do justice to the layers of meaning in it. I've done three readings, and went through it today with a magnifying glass to inspect the images and reprocess the story again.

This is an intense story dealing with drug and alcohol addiction, child abandonment and child endangerment issues, and broken hearts. Some people, I'm afraid, would read this and not consider how prevalent this scenario could be in today's society, but wake up and smell the coffee in the screaming coffee cup chained to a nail with a pop pill on the head on page 6 and tell me you don''t see the baby angel's wings being torn off her body because the baby cannot, and never will, hold her parent's ill relationship together because of the effects of her parent's reality of pills, coke, alcohol, and numbing-down-to-cope-world that her soul elected to be inserted into.

The drawings, oh my...some thoughts on random neural firings on various pages:

Page 1 -- broken Christmas tree, innocent yellow rubber ducky and two hearts pierced by the tree.
Page 3 -- look at her hand, LOOK at the engagement ring shackled and chained! Look at her index and middle finger, broken at their ends and bound like the Japanese geisha feet of the 1800s, look at her ring finger, past the ring, do you see her finger drawn, quartered, and bleeding into the glass of wine??? Time bomb theme, ticking, ticking..... so many small things adding up to disaster.....the dice....

Dice. many images of dice in so many pictures. Gambling on life.....It won't happen to me.....He won't hurt me, hit me, leave me, take my child.......gambling on  vocation, choices, leave the children for a while, a pill will make me feel better. Daughter gambling that mother will come home for my birthday, she left her pills, she hugs me, she leaves me, she is gone....I have lost her number and can't call........gambling with life choices, affections, responsibilities, who is mom, who is really caring for whom?

Page 4 guitar with heart tuning the strings of my heart, take a piece of my heart.....

Page 6 screaming from cup tied down, wings being torn.

So many images of broken home, broken hearts, broken lives, broken children, broken mother...

Page 10 images, glass with fly under, fork with coke spoon at end, cigarettes, nostrils bleeding, lines of coke, eyelashes from - what - crying? broken child's bicycle, rubber ducky on stove, glass of two glasses - we were two as one and you left me - pills, hearts.....Page 13 we are bleeding, you hurt me, so much pain, so much we don't want to see but we are bleeding our emotions.......take my brother and hide and hold and hope.....

Daddy wasn't Santa but he took her brother and left her with a broken woman coping as best as she could....leaving, returning, pills, coke, window washing for what, getting the next hit or the next meal....?

This was a dark story, but I was caught up in it and captured and affected. Too many images to relate, but some that captured my imagination. Her teddy bear shows up quite often, probably a talisman of security? Lots of broken things - furniture, glasses, cups, wine glasses, hearts...... Pills with hearts on them, X's on them,,,,,mother's shielding her heart with pills, trying to lessen her pain. Hoping mom will show up..........

The story Somebody's Mother was interesting..... Not really judgemental from the author's stance, but the other mothers giving Her mother the firey eye told of their judgement. Her mother affected them in a physicality way - she's too thin, she has my child's attention, what stories....... The firey eyes of the children (p 30-31) tell of their enchantment with mother's stories as her "elegant arms" weave in the air, adding to the drama of what is verbally unfolding. The moon is connected to her hair, the man-in-the-moon not appearing to have any sort of emotion. Baby on mother's back, baby in the oven, child at mother's knee, kids rapt attention to the tale being told -- sounds like a very lovely recollection of the mother that other kids thought was somewhat cool, interesting, and we want to hear more of ther stories. Sun, firey eyes and gem on mother's finger tip the only color in this black/grey and brown/tan world.

Dismembered body, doll like stitched; holding mom together through her addictions, disappointments, gambling in life that isn't working but one more roll of that dice and we will be fine..... broken home, broken dreams. Shield my face, don't hit me, I'll make ends meet...wash your window????

New Lesson -- mother saves me at the beach....so many people, look at the sand crabs, mommie where are you? The world is very big, the child is very small, my parent is my hero, there you are? Take me home, bathe me, wash away these things I've experienced, it's not the sand that bites my flesh but the memories that bite my brain, make me sad, I want to protect you, mom, but you gambled our relationship away .....

And I didn't even have her number any more....
*********************

And I felt sad for her and wanted so much to ask Kalamity J if she and her mother reconciled, or even if she found out how she was doing, was she alive, what about her brother, did she find her MIA father?????

However......here's a couple of quibbles.....
Back cover Kalamity says, "...I've bundled up my life's most painful essential occupant and bound her essence on the shelf." Okay, but there's a contradiction here. Wind back, inside front cover: " *This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) and events is purely coincidental."

So, how much is the revealed truth and how much is not?????

Still, a powerful story.

"....take another piece of my heart...."

Mother's Urn -- Piece of My Heart/Ball and Chain

I read and reread Mother's Urn last night when I got home from class. The cover had intrigued me.

What a story -- the images are complicated (need to get a magnifying glass for closer inspection), but some things -- like ball and chain images -- grabbed my attention.

The story reminded me of Janis Joplin (yes, aging myself here) -- she had a couple of songs that could have served as background for Mother's Urn:

Piece of My Heart http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/janisjoplin/pieceofmyheart.html
She belts it out here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJb7cBfrxbo

The other song is Ball and Chain -- that song immediately sprang into my head in the first story on page 3 -- look at the engagement ring!!!!
The lyrics http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/janis+joplin/ball+and+chain_10147286.html
and Janis doing it justice at the Monterey Pops when she exploded on the scene
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1zFnyEe3nE

I'll post more later, but woke up and knew I had to get this out. Suffice it to say that this story -- narrative and images -- got to me and won't leave for quite a while.

She really was good enough....

Apologies for the lateness of this post -- I had a nasty bout of an intestinal virus. 'Nuff said about that.

This was a story asking the question "Are you my mother?" Allison is in a search for a mother, whether it is her biological mother or a therapist or significant other. This would have made for a wonderful foray into her journey, but for all the psychological background on noted practitioners ad nauseum. The amount of data she gave clouded my interest in HER story -- who in her life is her mother?

Her relationship with her mother was complicated, at best. I could relate to Alison's historical references and social cues of her mother; we are not that far apart in age and having had an East Coast mother of her mother's generation, I could relate to the secrecy, privacy, and "checking out" after dinnertime. I saw similarities in their relationship to the one I had with my mother; however, I did not overthink nor overanalyze the "why's" as Alison does. And that overanalysis can crowd out the obvious.

Her mother, for all her faults, foibles, and challenges with her marriage and raising three children, did the best she could. With what she had, she really tried. She was good enough.

Considering the times, her mother may have felt trapped. She becomes pregnant early in her marriage, and there were intonations that it was unplanned, with all the emotional angst that went along with her husband's clear indication that he was not happy about it. Plans of travel through Europe went flying out the window, and that window closed on Allison's mother.

She does the best she can; however, knowing she routinely "checked out" every evening tells me how stressful and, perhaps, overwhelmed she was.

Perhaps that was why, when Alison's father is taking her and her brothers out for the weekend and
Allison returns to retrieve a toy, she hears her mother crying behind a closed door.

Was her mother available to her? Not 100 percent, but it would be interesting to know how her sons viewed their growing up.

A couple of scenes struck me:
When Alison asks her mother to kiss her goodnight (ch 4), her mother tells her, a seven year old child that she is too old for that, and mother leaves the bedroom. Mother is building distance between herself and her daughter.

When adult Alison is helping her mother pack up the home to sell, she asks (at her therapist's suggestion) what she learned from her mother. The answer was, "boys are better than girls." How painful to grow up believing that, and unknowingly passing that bit of pedagogy along to one's offspring. Was that statement a framework for the distance her mother had constructed between them? It would be interesting to know.

At the end, I wanted to know more, especially how their relationship was evolving. I do believe that Allison wants to square things and enjoy a relationship with her mother. Accepting someone as who they are and, especially with an older parent, unlikely to change is liberating and I would hope Alison would experience that liberation and move on to a different, yet thoroughly enjoyable relationship with her mother.

At the book's end, I know they love each other without having to go through the socially-mandated verbage of it: I am alternately envious and contemptuous of people who finish their phone converations with a rote "I love you!" My mother and I know this; there's no need to jabber about it.
A few frames later, She could see my invisible wounds because they were hers, too.

I wish I had been able to ask my mother, "What did you learn from your mother?" before she died. What a useful question to help you know who you are.

An interesting Fun Home

I enjoyed this, reading it twice. I then re-re-read the chapter A Happy Death.

I should insert here that I have been really ill the last few days, so will keep this short.

Her father's death left Allison with quite a few questions and I feel unresolved feelings around her father and the relationship she had with him. Was it an accident? Was it suicide? We may never know, but what seemed to linger in my mind was her almost fascination with pinning the suicide on her coming out letter. I had a difficult time negotiating that. If it were a suicide, well, her father came up in a time when many gays were closeted, living double lives. Could his trying to live two lives - one false - have been the impetus? His wife certainly knew (I wanted more on that relationship, alas), and her request for a divorce may have triggered a suicide.

However, seeing her father depicted as a lover of restoration of older homes (and he was starting a restoration project), his love of books, landscaping, and his engagement in life, I could not buy that his was a suicide.

The tragedy in her father's death was another individual who was only mentioned -- the bread truck driver. How horrible for that individual to be at the wheel of the truck when her father jumped back into the traffic lane.

I am hoping that in reading Are You My Mother? I will find some answers to her parents' relationship, as well as her relationship with her mother, and perhaps more information on her father.

...depends on perspective

I thought I had published this, but had merely saved it. Sorry for the lateness!

I read this, then re-read it. I'll be really frank -- it's been 30 years since I was in my late twenties. Yup, we can talk about my pet dinosaur roaming around Mills at another time.

So, after two reads, I was able to put my head into the twenty-something lifestyle I had eons ago.

You know what?

It doesn't matter if it was the 70s, 80s, 90s, new millenium, and now the teens of the 2K century.

It's all still the same sort of angst we have when we are in our twenties and trying to make our way in the world.

It's just a mess of trying to go from job to job to find that job that makes you think, "Yeah, now, Now, NOW! I'm finally doing some thing that relates to my <pick one of these> -- education/passion/interest/level of debt to creditors.... You get my drift.

We all go through this. It is heart-wrenching.You realize you don't have the world by the tail, it has YOU by the tail and you are being swung around and around! In reading Gabrielle's stories, I realized that we go through this multiple times in our lives. We all have the same questions and fears. She captures it very well for the twenty-something crowd. I want to see her work in her 30s and 40s and 50s grapple with the questions and philosophies we are faced with with at each milestone/decade of our lives.

Part I put me into her timeline trajectory. Reading her journal, I have a sense of time passing. I missed that in the other two parts of the book. Parts II and III had no reference to a "when" in time. Perhaps that was done on purpose? Perhaps Gabrielle did that, stating in a way, "These situations could happen to anyone in their twenties, in any given time from 1970 onward." True. However, in dating entries from story to story, it gives one the feeling that our characters are/are not maturing/growing.

Gabrielle's story is poignant. No, really. Okay, like my mother would say, you'll understand when you are older. It is perspective. For example: She's trying to make sense of her relationship with Tom. So was I. It was sort of nebulous with a touch of establishing a boundary. They were wanting something, but not wanting to risk. It was only in the Extra's section when he disappears in the hole in the bathroom that we are given evidence that she cares for him, maybe loves him.

INDIVIDUAL TAKES:
Page 7, second row, left panel --going into a place inside yourself to be creative.
Page 94 -- her take on a job, and believe me, sometimes you take a job just because you need the dough. Jail....warden.....inmates. Priceless!
Page 95 -- the southwest panel was right-on (okay, dating self, oh well) -- it is so true.

ARTWORK -- because you know that is important! Most/all of the characters in Gabrielle's stories do NOT look happy. People look anxious, questioning, insecure, "where is my place in the world," WTF!, and just "deer-in-the-headlights or blank stare because we are just trying to figure out who the heck we are and where the heck do I belong and why is this stuff harder than we were told about !" looks.

Examine at the cover! Even there, with a videographer doing a staged project that friends are participating in willingly, people DO NOT look COMFORTABLE but rather, they look uneasy.

One exception -- page 63, southeast panel, Tom has a kind, gentle look.

EXTRAS -- I have to admit, page 103's John Ashcroft was a hilarious bit of political humor. Her boss' comment on Bush's reelection strategy -- priceless.

At the end of the evening, this is a good book, one that deserves more than one or two reads. Keep this memoir, read it once every year or two. See if your perspective with Age changes how you interpret or feel about Gabrielle's stories.

Imposter's Daughter

The title caught my attention with the addition/editing of A >true Memoir. I was to find in reading that our author's quest to find out the truth about her larger-then-life father was also to lead her to discover the truth about her capacity to participate in life, forgive, understand, as well as uncover the inner workings of her immediate family and her father's distant family in South America.

 First, let's look at how the images in the story were presented. The drawings were colorful, the set-up for scenes were written up at the top of the frame, with dialogue in all caps (emphasis in bold) in talk boxes. The representation of Laurie intrigued me the most as she grew older. In key scenes with her father, there were times she was represented first as a woman, then her face softening and resembling her more as a young girl.  pages 77 thru 79 captured it; subtle, but there.

Being the oldest daughter, her father sort of takes her on as a project, someone to teach; almost as thought she should have been his son. Not knowing at a young age whether her father's stories are fact or fantasy, she believes him and puts him on a pedestal. Even his eventual job loss and quirky behavior (storing items in the basement as though preparing for doomsday) seem somewhat normal initially. All this starts to change when she turns 12. My impression is the change in her father's behavior towards her signals that he is paranoid that in Laurie's growing up years, she may discover the truth about him, or at least question his stories and authority over her.

I was disturbed by her mother's and middle sister's reaction to the fights between father and daughter. It seemed to me that mother knew something was not right with her husband, but he was her husband do or die and she was going to "stand by her man" and disguises the noise of the father-daughter fights in the basement by playing her cello. Laurie's middle sister knows something is wrong, but stays out of it by remaining in her room. Throughout this stage of the relationship with Laurie and her father, all I could think was "what a fucked up family this is." Mom knows her husband is more than likely mentally ill and mentally AND physically abusing their oldest daugher; others just ignore it.

 Laurie's father's stories ARE larger than life. When she realizes these are not the truth, she essentially divorces herself from her family and embarks on four years of her effort to live larger than the life she has had up to that point. She returns and then makes peace with her dad; but this to me was a fabricated peace as she was wanting to get to the truth of who he was and needed to talk to him to get that information. The subsequent drama with her publishing the story about him really drove home how her mother knew what type of man her husband was, but she was going to stand by him and protect him come what may.

Considering whether he was mentally ill was an area in Laurie's story that I wish she had explored more. Her father had behavior that could have been bi-polar, manic-depressive, paranoid-schizophrenic, or who-knows-what-else. Certainly, he had abandonment issues from his childhood, and that could have been looked at. His capacity to charm people then lie or wheedle them out of money, use his daughters' identities for credit card fraud, his attempt to take from his step-sister after their father's death showed me a capacity for sociopathic behavior. Even with the knowledge of lawsuits, credit card fraud, and outright lies, Laurie's mother and sisters tend to gloss over the entire mess and reframe it in a nicer shade. Was this his influence over them? Their anger with Laure? Their effort to sugarcoat a truth they did not want to face? I wanted to know!

Instead, the story goes into Laurie's addiction to sleeping pills and wine. I was curious about more of the depth of her transformation from her stay at the treatment center, but the only thing we were given  substantial information on was the family visit. I had the feeling that during that visit, her father was only playing a role. Heck, he had been playing roles his entire life, from the stories and detective work that had been done to expose the veracity of those stories. It's what he does!

Overall, this was a good memoir; however, this reader wanted more detail, more depth, more about what made Laurie and her dad tick inside.