Broken

Plus you have the right to tell your truths. I'm here to cheer you on.

Because I’m on deadline with a stack of manuscripts to edit and am making an unexpected flight on Sunday (my first in 46 years - yikes), I still haven’t had a chance to write anything new. So I’m again dipping into the National Blog Posting Month pieces I wrote in November 2023. (Last year’s are already on Substack.)

When I did this the other day, it was a little story from my childhood. What happened was so.long.ago that it doesn’t mean anything to me now. But people responded, kindly, with comforting words. I felt bad that they felt bad. It might be the same with this post. But, really, I’m ok. I don’t like to post about something that might be a bummer, but we have the stories we have, right?

Besides being an editor, I’m a writing coach, and as such a key goal is to help people believe they have the right to tell their stories and feel comfortable doing so, even if it’s hard at first. I went to college in the ‘70s and lucked into one of the first women’s studies programs. It was the era of “consciousness raising,” when it was stressed over and over that women’s voices matter and we should tell our truth. So that’s the tradition from which most of my writing comes.

~

My blog: November 3, 2023

I belong to a small group of women called Creative Spirits. We get together on Zoom each Friday for two hours of art-making. Today’s host tasked us with writing about our brokenness. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with anything in the last half-century, lol, so I reached into my childhood and teens. This is Part 1 because the following week we had to write about wholeness.

I wrote this poem in 1976, four years removed from the incident. I was in a small writing seminar with Adrienne Rich at Douglass College, and she helped me edit it, using her purple Flair to bracket syllables that didn’t belong and to cross out what had been the superfluous last line. I think I still have the original onion-skin pages, possibly a few drafts stapled together. I can see them in my mind.

Broken

Dishes smashed on the floor:
triangles and half-moons.
Gold-rimmed white china
reflects fluorescent kitchen light.
He’s home drunk again,
stumbles from front door to bedroom,
oblivious to her curses 
as each dish hits the floor and breaks.
Flinging each dish at the wall,
watching it shatter to the floor,
she hates him
for his routine, 
for her waiting 
for years
in dark kitchens.
He goes to sleep, 
still in work clothes.
She sits at the table and cries. 
Best china in shards on the floor,
best years ground
like glass 
beneath his feet. 
The sharp edges gleam.

I witnessed this at age 17, standing in the darkened hallway just outside the kitchen. He’d probably been gone a couple days; we’d had the usual nights, my mother and I, where she kept the house dark and stood at the kitchen window watching for his headlights.

Back then, senior year of a new high school on split sessions, the bus would drop me off just after noon at the stop a few doors down from the white, one-story duplex where we lived on the Army base. The bus would go past our driveway, and if I saw my father’s car, I could relax. He’d be home for lunch as usual, and the house was more likely to be safe to enter. I could breathe. But if his car wasn’t there, he was off on a bender. I didn’t know what I might be walking into.

My mother’s depressive rage was a given.

I’d seen a lot in my life. I’d absorbed that rage into my flesh on many occasions, though not since I was sixteen. Still, it shocked me to see the violence of an entire set of dishes – all those place settings of dinner plates, soup bowls, dessert plates, saucers, cups – slamming and shattering against the tile kitchen floor. We didn’t have much money. For all I remember, these could have included the dishes that came, one at a time, in the large box of laundry detergent. As a child, I pulled each new one out of the box, little white powder-crystals clinging to the porcelain.

Whatever the actual value or lack thereof, these were our best dishes, saved for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I cleaned up the mess. Taking deep breaths. Ears keeping watch for any sound that said my mother might bring her rage into the kitchen again. There was nothing left in there but me.

~

This part didn’t make it into my blog post, but it’s sitting in the file folder for that day. Another take, written decades ago. I thought it was pieces of a novel, fiction because the character was named Karen instead of Janet. I never did anything with this.

The table was a ritual centerpiece on dark kitchen nights. Half-prepared dinner pushed to one end, her mother seated at the other, head rested on folded arms warming cold, white metal. Her mother cried; she didn’t.

Her mother was like some old woman mourning her dead. The wet noise set Karen’s teeth on edge like wailing, made her heart beat faster and her muscles tense like somebody had better be dead, god damn it, to warrant all this carrying on. What was dead, she thought, must be her mother, sitting in dark kitchens night after night, moving only from the table to the window above the sink to look down the road for headlights.

The sign of a good evening was his yellow car pulling into the driveway by 5:00. The woman and girl in the kitchen would breathe out their tension. Potatoes continued to be peeled, carrots sliced for the salad. The oven wouldn’t sit hot but empty.

If the car did not show up by 5:00, the ritual was carried through. Half-peeled potatoes left to brown and dry out. Her mother slumped at the table. The kitchen grown darker as the evening progressed. Karen’s tense, controlled movements, transferring the roast from oven to refrigerator.

Eventually, it would end. Headlights would turn into the driveway. Her father would stumble into the kitchen, dodging her mother’s curses on his way sleep it off. Her mother would move to the living room couch.

Karen would stand in the dark kitchen. Her mother cried; she didn’t.