My mother said, on more than one occasion, that I acted as though I thought I was too good for the family. That was never the truth. But I did think I had once been too good to be treated as I was. There is a time when everyone is too good for that. And then, after, they’re no longer good.
What does the word good mean to you? Be good. Be a good girl. Obedient. Untainted.
There’s the cognitive dissonance, Baby.
And my mother’s accusation? A projection of her knowing what she wouldn’t know.
These aren’t riddles, but you do have to get down on your hands and knees and crawl through the burnt marijuana seeds in shag carpet to understand. There’s a sitar oozing from the turntable speaker. There’s a man grunting after a hit from the bong. Secrets are pebbles in her shoe. Secrets are the kernels of sand under the elastic of her romper.
They are the 10 year-old’s wet bed sheets.
Estranged, in the original Latin, means “not of the family”. I was not of the family—early on, as they say—I was outside the family, outside myself. The shadow self smiled, and washed the dishes, and went to school as though everything were fine.
So all those years later, when I changed my name and disappeared, it was a relief really: what looked like a deep dive into a dark pool, was a small step into tepid water. That part wasn’t hard.
Tepid is an interesting word. And it was all so anti-climatic it was a disappointment. Years of estrangement had worked both ways. Don’t we all secretly want to be chased down, grabbed by the arms and told how loved we are like in a scene from some ridiculous After School Special? Any attention is good attention. Sappy fantasies included.
Not of the family. In one way. But what is actually in those coils of DNA?
I tell my psychiatrist that I’m living my mother’s life over again. A kind of shadow spiral. My psychiatrist asks me how I’m living my mother’s life over again.
I don’t answer.
A lawyer sends me a pdf of my mother’s handwritten will. I’m not in it. I have a legal right to contest it. I think it’s funny that contest as a noun is defined as a competition to obtain something, as a verb it means to oppose something as wrong.
It’s funny in that kind of laugh or it will kill you kind of way. Who wins? And what does anyone get out of calling out the monsters under the bed. In the bed.
I print the will, ripped it into strips, put it in a blender with this mossy Norwegian water, and I make new paper out of it. Then I make collages in the shapes of wasps.
And only then do I write to the lawyer, removing myself from her obituary.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack, or go to the Dramatic Roots chat, where note sharing becomes an act of literary citizenship. Post a link to your work, and share another. You can find more about my work, including my mentoring and accountability services, at renpowell.com.
I’ll be back next week with a new poem.
Warmly,
Ren
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I haven’t lived your life, Ren, but having lived mine, your words are echoing down the inescapable gravity well where my family was supposed to be. People can be black holes, pulling down every bit of light and time and hope. How could you not have run from that? I’m sad for the hugeness of your loss, but I am so glad you got away.
I keep returning to your writing, I don't want to miss it. I just want you to know that your gift and your craft and whatever else you use to do what you do... turns me inside out in a way that we can only hope writing will. You deserve to be read and heard. Respected and comforted.