On Rabbit Holes and Stevie Nicks and
I’m not usually one to share my very personal things widely, but there’s an important story behind this one.
My mother died over the weekend. It was after a long and painful illness after nearly 12 years of dementia. We knew it was going to happen, and we’d been readying ourselves for it since September of last year. There was one day - then - that I came home from being with her and thought to myself, “This is the beginning of the end.”
I spent the year trying to mask a full-on basket case underneath a very weak veneer of almost-but-still-not-quite normal. The basket case snuck out every now and again, and I did my best to out-run it, out-work it, out-laugh it, out-talk it. I did my best.
Its voice was so loud, and it told me all kinds of things that all distilled down to one thing, and that was that I would never be any of the things I wanted to be because nothing I did would ever be good, because I was the wrong kind of everything.
The voice laughed especially loud at something that I returned to that September, the one thing that gave me solace, that, in all honesty, was keeping me sane: writing.
And as I wrote more and more and more, the voice had more and more to say: that it was dumb. A waste of time. Not even very good. And my favorite: Who are you to think that what you do will ever be so important that other people would want to know about it?
When I was 10, my mother asked me why I read so much. “Because I want to learn how to write,” I told her. She laughed. At 15, she asked me why in the world I spent my time typing Hemingway short stories. “Because I want to learn what good writing sounds like,” I told her. She laughed harder.
It wasn’t nice laughter. It sounded like a basket case.
I started writing All in the Golden Afternoon about a week after that initial “This is the beginning of the end” thought. I wrote and wrote and wrote. One piece. Two pieces. A third.
On Wednesday, five days after her death, the third piece, Can You Hear Me Calling? will come out, despite (or maybe because of?) so many of the things my mother told me my whole life long, about what I could and couldn’t do, what I was and wasn’t good at, if I was or was not valued.
I’ve often said that this year was like a massive hole that just kept getting deeper; like that one in Alice in Wonderland.
When Alice finally made it to the bottom, she found a key to a door she couldn’t fit through, a clear bottle labeled “Drink Me” and a dish of cookies that said “Eat me.”
And she sat there, our Alice, and cried herself a pool of tears that she nearly drowned in, because she wasn’t what she should be: the right kind of anything to walk through that door.
She made it through the door, and on the other side of it, she met everyone and did everything, and figured it all out on her own, unless people helped her, and didn’t really care (that much) if somebody didn’t like her. On the other side of her door, Alice could. And, in fact, was encouraged to.
If I learned anything down at the bottom of my hole, it was this: You can. You should. You are. Go forth.
On the other side of my door, I found myself in the middle of a garden surrounded by some very sassy flowers who seemingly never stopped talking, and who somehow managed to get me to disprove so many useless things I believed about myself.
So. Find your key. Open the door. If you find yourself in a pickle, don’t forget to eat and drink.
In a matter of hours, Can You Hear Me Calling will ready for anybody to read.
It’s about dreams, loves, people, and becoming who you are.
P.S. My mother wasn’t all bad (no one ever is). Every single weekend morning, I woke up to her blasting Fleetwood Mac. During the last few weeks, I would play them for her on my phone, and we would sing along. She remembered every word (she didn’t, for the record, remember me). When I left her on Friday night, she reached out to me and said, “I want to go, too. I’m ready to go.”
Thinking for sure that I would see her the next day, I squeezed her hand and said, “Go then. Do it.” And I turned to walk out, my left hand nervously squeezing my right forearm, my thumb resting on the word very recently tattooed there: BE.
