"I worked on the sixth cartoon strip again today. I still have to ink in the first two panels. (I work from right to left because I'm left-handed. That way I don't smear the ink with my left hand.) I did a few things in the backgrounds that are kind of abstract. It's a little different, but I think they turned out pretty well.
"I also wrote a little today on the same story as yesterday, and I was going really well, when interupted by my mother. She wanted me to go pick up J-- [my sister]. I got quite mad. When I came back after picking up J--, I didn't feel like writing, so I read."
MANHOOD REDO: I'm writing this blog entry on Christmas Eve a little while before dinner. My relationship with this holiday has dramatically changed the past few years. My partner and I no longer exchange presents; instead, I've started taking off the last week of December (she's a university professor and not teaching then) so the two of us can share some quality together time at the end of the year. A little extra quality time with her is gift enough for me.
On the other hand, I didn't particularly want to spend any time with the above journal entry. In fact, I had initially decided to pass over this excerpt and choose the passage under it about helping a friend and co-worker at the Avalanche Journal who was in a band named TNT. He needed to move their equipment out of the show band van into the beauty parlor where they practiced because the starter on the van had gone out. I would have been much more comfortable writing about that than what seems to me now a childish and petulant reaction to my mother's request. It reminds me of those moments in junior high when she took me clothes shopping, and embarassed to be seen with her at the mall, I walked two or three feet behind her. That's the age when the pressure intensifies to disassociate yourself from mom and the likelihood of her becoming an object of scorn increases. I wonder whether that's culturally specific? Surely there must be cultures where masculinity isn't predicated on non-identification with the mother (not to imply that's all it's based on)?
Even as I write now it's hard to admit that at 22 I wasn't my own man, that my mother could come into my room and demand I drop what I was doing. But in the spirit of the holiday, I'm going to make as generous an interpretation as I can of both her actions and mine. I probably assumed that she just didn't want to bother to pick up my sister, but looking back, I'm certain her motivations were much more complicated than that. The possiblity that I comprehended the depth of her family responsibilities seems small; it was more likely that I took her for granted. That issue had come up in the recent past; a few years before I wrote the above journal entry she had left the house to check into a hotel because she felt much of what she did at home went unappreciated and we didn't help her enough.
While there were gender dynamics at play between the two of us, they don't capture the entirety of our conflict. When she interrupted my writing, I wasn't angry because this was my time to work and how dare she intrude on it. No, it had much more to do with my overwhelming struggle to put anything down on paper, as is evident in journal entry after journal entry. How many times do I write, "I wrote nothing today"? It was so difficult because I had no reason to take myself seriously as a writer. I had published nothing, taken no classes, hadn't even read much literature. No one read the little I had written and exclaimed how much they loved it, how talented I was, how I would become the next James Agee! (I could've used Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but A Death in the Family is one of my favorite books.) Carving out time to sit at a desk and put pen to paper (no computer then) felt preposterous, felt like putting on a Halloween costume so I would at least be dressed like Mark Twain even if I couldn't write like him. It was already difficult for me to take myself seriously as a writer, and when my mother came in and asked me to pick up J--, I probably felt she also didn't take my writing impulses seriously.
If I had a Christmas redo wish (wouldn't it be nice to have my own personal Jambi? We watched the Pee-wee Christmas Special on video this past Saturday), it would go something like this: I wish the both of us, my mother and me, better skills to practice mutual empathy and understanding on that day so long ago in April 1978. While I'm at it, I'll extend that wish to anybody and everybody at any and all times.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment