​Week 3 Prompt: 

What needs to be illuminated?

(What do you want to bring into the light?) 

 Part One
 
What needs to be illuminated is the secret beauty in the heart of every soul.
 
Especially now. 
 
To cope with the fact that our country is a hellscape of political, racial and economic division and derision, I meditate in the morning. Ya know, to gird myself for what is to come that day. I'm white, so it won't be that bad, but it will still suck. 
 
Tara Brach had me this morning, as every morning, with “Greetings.” When she says that, I know that she is talking only to me and/or that I'm her favorite, (: and that she can see into the brightest and darkest corners of my heart. 
 
Today, Tara reminded me that if we could just see one another as we are seen in the eyes of the divine, we would not have war, hatred or greed. She was quoting Thomas Merton. Our biggest problem, Merton said, once we saw each other that way all the time -- where neither sin nor knowledge could reach the sacred core of reality -- would be that we would fall down and worship each other. 
 
What an illuminated world that would be. 
 
Merton was Catholic, but he was a Jesuit Catholic. Jesuits, as we know, were the academics and less judgy than the fire-and-brimstone men of the cloth. 
 
Merton’s words struck a deep chord. If we could all just see the humanity, heart and secret beauty in one another, maybe we could heal. 

// 
 
Part Two
 
Arya (we’ll call her) didn’t want me to go to the end of the parking lot and behind the storefront to see the RV in which she has been living for four years. She was ashamed. She’s a 55-year-old veteran, trans, black artist from LA* -- and a polyvictim. In other words, she’s the most interesting person I’ve met in months. She knows from racial injustice and oppression. She knows from sexual assault – twice (once while serving in our armed forces), and she knows from housing discrimination – three times (even in "progressive" San Francisco). Likewise, she knows from her most recent victimization, when the “property manager," a bigot to the bone, tried to unlawfully evict her, turned off her electricity and broke her wrist. He assumed she wasn't aware of her rights and would be afraid of him. He assumed wrong. 
 
I met Arya on June 3, nine days after a murderer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes. 
 
For her pain and embarrassment, I’m angry. For her lifetime of victimizations, I’m sad. I didn’t realize how sad until she shared the reason she can’t find a place to live in her RV is that it’s not “self-contained.” That’s a euphemism for the fact that she has to use a porta potty of sorts and dispose of the waste somewhere. The bathroom to which she usually has access has been closed due to COVID.

"It’s been hard,” she allowed.  
 
For her humiliation and humility, I’m devastated. 
 
When I was safely out of Arya’s sight line, I pulled the car over and wept. 
 
For all of it. For our failure to take care of each other and her.

For our failure to vote and our voter suppression.  

For our failure to see, honor and revere the secret beauty in the heart of every soul – especially hers. 






* Facts changed. Composite, per usual on this blog. 
 

 

The writing prompts in my Tuesday night story sanctuary to date: 

Week 1: I missed the mark when ... 
Week 2: What I want to know is ... 
Week 3: What needs to be illuminated ...
Week 4: What I want to be filled with ... 

My response to the Week 2 prompt: 


 What I want to know is what it would have felt like to look into his eyes. I can’t say I regret not knowing my birth father, but I do regret not knocking on his door in the summer of 1989 when I had the chance. I had gone to visit my law school roommate in Georgetown when we made the short trek to Salisbury, Maryland with her Airedale terrier, “Ella Bella,” in tow. 
 
The decision, to knock or not to knock, would be made in real time. A lot was at stake. 
 
I’d been told by my birth mother, Peggy, who was 16 in 1965 when she became pregnant with his child, namely me, that he had lied to her about his age. George told her, when he repeatedly came to the convenience store where she worked, that he was 21. He was not. He was 25. 
 
He also, as it turned out, lied to her about his marital status. 
 
“I’m pregnant,” she told him, four months into their “relationship,” if that’s what we are calling statutory rape. 
 
“I’m married,” was his terse, shocking (according to Peggy) response. “And have two kids.”*
 
She never saw him again, save once, in a grocery store, years later. 
 
“We pretended not to see each other in aisle five,” she allowed during our first meet up, when she patiently responded to my endless questions. 
 
In what I flippantly and repeatedly refer to as my “CBS After School Family of Origin Special,” in month five of her pregnancy, when she started to show, Peggy's mortified parents sent her to a home for wayward teens run by nuns, where she was blamed, shamed and stigmatized. Picture Philomena, only worse. And in St. Louis.
 
It was the one topic she didn’t want to revisit or recount.
 
“It was just okay,” she said, which would explain my many late nights spent googling the phrase “intergenerational trauma.” 
 
Once Peggy shared with me my birth father’s name, age and the name of his all-boys Catholic high school, it was easy to find him. I spent a decade in my first career chasing down deadbeat defendants, whether they were corporate magnates who made a habit of deceptive trade practices or ageist, racist, misogynistic employers who made a habit of being their worst selves. I knew how to access property, driving, financial, criminal and civil records, among other things.

I started this search process by going directly to the archdiocese library to purchase copies of George’s high school yearbooks – they had his sophomore and senior editions. The librarian was happy to help. Turns out I wasn't the first person who'd marched in there to unearth information about a birth father. 
 
So when Rhonda, Ella Bella and I turned the corner onto a bucolic, serpentine road that traced its way around a duck pond surrounded by cattails, I was armed with the following knowledge about my bioDad: high school wrestler who took part in student government, had a second home in Coral Gables, Florida, was Dutch, Irish, lily-livered, looked like me. I had his exact address and the black Escalade in the driveway of the quaint Cape Cod house on the corner also matched my research. He was home.

I got as far as getting out of Rhonda's car while pretending to casually walk Ella Bella -- to get a closer look. 

The Big Wheels in the driveway, wedged between his car and the garage, stopped me in my tracks. The Big Wheels, the sand toys, and the kiddie pool propped up on the side of the house. He had grandchildren. He was home, but not likely home alone. And although HE knew about me, THEY most certainly did not. 
 
 I could not, would not, did not knock.

Consequently, I never got to know what it would be like to look into his hazel eyes, to see or not to see, a reflection of me.

He died a few years later. 


 



* I’m not positive about the timing of the two kids. This part of my conversation with Peggy is hazy. After he died, I spoke to his (very surprised) sister who resides in Illinois. She confirmed that I have two half-sisters – I’m just not sure if they are older or younger than me. It's hard to tell from their Facebook photos. I also know that his wife is still alive and bears a striking resemblance to Susan Sarandon ... and that his other sister resides not far from me in the East Bay. He told none of them about me. 
 

Coach Carrie (we'll call her) hails from LA, so she is unabashed in the Zoom room. She likewise wants us to be shameless when we write our first thoughts/best thoughts for five-to-eight minutes in response to her writing prompts every Tuesday night. 

We have no time to edit before sharing with the group, some of whom have performed one-woman shows in LA. One guy danced all over NYC in the 80s with Bob Fosse. One woman -- who has been a dear friend since 1985 -- is an A-list film editor. These writers are nothing if not comfortable with vulnerable. 

Then there's me. I've been conditioned to be silent. I was once told over coffee "If you ever write about [your failed marriage/new relationship] again, I will not be your friend." 

"Promise?" is what I should have said. Instead I groveled, "I won't." 

"Although it would make a great screenplay in ten years," she allowed, just before organically fading out of my life. 

That coffee was about a week before someone's proxy, who called herself a therapist, contacted my publisher and asked her not to publish me in her anthology. Thankfully, my publisher ignored her and called me.

"Do you know [this person]?" she asked. 

"No, but I know who does," I responded. I keep meaning to mail the good therapist a copy of the book. 

This was also about a year after the same someone contacted my employer to try to get me fired by way of false allegations. Thankfully, my boss, a small business owner, had walked in my shoes and understood Rumi's meet-me-in-the-field-of-no-judgment mandate. We empathized with the caller, but I got to keep my job which was great since the money I earned wasn't "extra." Rather, it put food on the table for our children.

It was also a year or so after someone else texted my now-husband: "Hey dude, get this worked out before ski week so we can ski together!" The same person texted me the following day: "I don't think we can be friends again ... BUT and this is a big BUT, people get sick and die. We'll see." 

Since then, people -- like both of my parents -- got sick and died. We are still not friends. Because we never were. When I became a political liability rather than an asset, having presumably and catastrophically ended my first marriage, I was discarded. (He still sends the occasional breezy, funny text, whilst declining my Instagram follow request, thereby demonstrating a lack of courage and character.)

I wasn't allowed to feel angry, hurt, sad. Only contrition, humility, deep shame. I wasn't allowed to be human, fallible, vulnerable. Only flawed, selfish, blessed to just be banished from the kingdom, not drawn and quartered.  

I was certainly not allowed to seek solace or sympathy in my zip code. "Try a support group well up the 101," my other former bestie said, just before calling everyone she knew to relish in my original sin and consequent anguish. After all, she had a job to do as the alpha. Her subsequent apology to my children ("I'm sorry I wasn't there for your mom") was swiftly retracted when I had the gall to write about my loss, my love, my journey. 

Then there was the highly-medicated Marin mom, who asked that I not play Aimee Mann in my classes because it was "too triggering." She left the love of her life behind in Ireland, she told me, and chose to stay married to her "best friend." She made no bones about it: I should have done the same. (Too many assumptions to count.) Perhaps this is what she was thinking when she approached my daughter years later to let her know that she too had a "toxic, narcissistic mother," and would it be okay if she dropped a book off to her dad's house on the topic? My daughter, blindsided, declined her offer and called me. My ex had the sense (and grace) to take my call to discuss the damage wrought. He also declined this meddling mother's offer to drop off the bad-mother book. Her persistence was only eclipsed by her wholesale lack of self-awareness. Shout out to her -- the filterless harridan who made my daughter sob the night before her hardest final exam as a junior in high school. 

Finally, one former friend never allowed me to apologize or explain, much less mend. Not even by phone. My actions cut too close to the quick, I suppose, for my former friend in a Marin shell marriage. She and I both know why. 

"Emotionally constipated," is how one writer describes her. 

And still, it took almost a decade (and moving out of the county) for the unresolved anger to come up and out onto the page. 

But there it is. 

Path cleared. 


///  

* Details changed to protect the innocent/not innocent.