Originally mailed on December 22, 1995
I know, I know, you wonder why I haven't written in so long. I love to write letters, and I've been thinking about you a lot, but you wouldn't believe the fall I've had. First, in September [While Harriet makes the usual excuses, which we're sure you've heard a hundred times from your flesh-and-blood friends, the publishers here at Mad River Press would like to take a moment to explain the real reason why you haven't received an issue in several months. In September, a chronic health problem Su has struggled with for several years took a turn for the worse, and much of her autumn has been occupied in dealing with her health. She's on an upswing now -- and has actually found a treatment that provides some relief -- and is finally well enough to get back to the computer and write. We continue to have as our goal the production of an issue each month, and want to reassure subscribers that your subscription will always be fulfilled by number of issues, and not by calendar year. Thanks very much, and back to Harriet.] and suddenly here I am smack-dab in the middle of the holidays, and I swear I don't know how it happened. Seems like one day I was getting ready to go to festival and waiting for Splash to come home from Europe, and the next day it's months later, Splash has been home so long I hardly remember she was gone, and I've finished another semester of school. Where does the time go?
The holidays are a whirl for me this year. Grandma's church has decided to celebrate Hannukah this year, to mark the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine; to educate themselves about the Jewish roots of Christianity; and, quoting from the church bulletin, "to build bridges of peace by worshipping as our Jewish brethren worship." It was all Grandma's doing; they made her chair of the religious education committee, and she decided that instead of doing the same old tired courses on how to be better Christian, she would offer a series on comparative religions. She set up a course this fall to study Jewish history and religious practices, culminating in the decision to celebrate the Festival of Lights at her church. Like many of Grandma's contributions to her church (such as her lobby display on "Gay Men, Bisexuals, and Lesbians: Beloved of God" during Pride Month last year), this has caused some controversy. Some members who opposed the plan called a meeting about it a couple of weeks ago, claiming that it was blasphemous to carry out the rituals of a people who "live in sin, not accepting Jesus as their Lord." Grandma told them that if it made them feel better, they could dress in period garb and tell themselves they were trying to get closer to Jesus by doing what he might have been doing at this time of year. Interestingly enough, several of them took her up on it, and have been attending draped in brown bedsheets to simulate the robes of our nomadic desert ancestors. These are the same bedsheets they'll wear to portray Joseph and the shepherds on Sunday during the Nativity. And possibly the same bedsheets which grace their beds during more secular times of the year -- I can just imagine them in the linens department at Sears saying, "Better get brown sheets again, Irma, we'll have the Nativity Scene come Christmas."
Grandma recruited some student volunteers through Hillel, and they've been coming every night to lead the prayers and singing in Hebrew, teach everyone how to play Dreidl, and share stories about the origin of Hannukah. I've been attending because I'm chauffeuring Grandma and Emma, and because I've been in charge of cooking the appropriate foods, like potato latkes, and helping the children make chocolate coins. The first couple of nights the atmosphere was tight and awkward, but by Wednesday people had quite warmed up to it. Attendance has actually increased during the week, and people are doing things like offering spontaneous prayer. Grandma says people begin to worship by rote when their rituals stay the same for so long, and that stepping into a new ritual has let them experience it fully, with all of the power and religious meaning behind it. Formerly skeptical members of the congregation actually wept as they talked about how it must have felt to re-enter a place of worship which had been defiled and re-dedicate it to their faith, and they keep giving Grandma these heartfelt hugs and thanking her for helping them to have this experience despite themselves. She hugs them back and says, "Remember in the future not to be so afraid of new ideas."
Tonight Grandma is coming with me to celebrate the Solstice. Some dykes organize a ritual every year. We'll talk about the darkness, light some candles, weave a big web among us with yarn. A beloved lesbian from the community died unexpectedly a few weeks ago; I'm sure we'll speak of that. Grandma worries that, without a "faith community," my life is adrift, and I hope to show her that the lesbian community is not unlike a church in the ways we care for each other.
Grandma's other holiday project, besides teaching tolerance to her church cronies, is reconciling her family. She's been making noises about it since I moved back to Lansing, but got serious a few weeks ago. She even tried to manipulate me with her age: "What about when I die, Harriet? Can't I hope to have you and your mother at my bedside together to say good-bye?" She described in detail the warm Norman Rockwell scene of all of us at Christmas dinner together. We hold hands around the table to say grace; we smile warmly at each other as we pass the gravy boat and oven-warm rolls; we gently tease each other about that second slice of pie. It was almost hypnotic as her soft voice described the scene; in a trance, I moved toward the phone to call my mother-
but I stopped. I said to Grandma, "I have a family. I don't need to talk to that woman." Grandma said, "Harriet, you don't have any idea what it would mean to me to have my whole family under one roof again, after all I've lost." And she cried.
I haven't thought much about how our family split feels to anyone else. By turns I hate my mother passionately; dream of her love with a puppy-like pathos; and pass months indifferent to her. Sometimes I think I must have been unlovable as a child for her to abandon me (after all, she's holding onto Ron and Al, Jr); mostly I think she was a sick and hateful woman; often I don't think about it at all. But I never thought that it upset Grandma so much. Grandma said to me the other day, "Put yourself in my shoes, Harriet. You go home and think about my life, how I lost my husband twenty years ago, and my younger daughter when she was just seventeen. You think about how you and your mother are all I have left and then you come back here and tell me you won't do this one thing for me, call your mother up and have a conversation with her."
Well, need I tell you that a heaping dose of guilt from the woman who raised me like her own child, the woman who loved me with a mother's love though she was not my mother, the woman who took me under her roof at great personal sacrifice -- need I say a heaping dose of guilt from that woman had its effect. I called my mother.
"Hello, Ellen?" I said when she answered the phone. "This is Harriet, your daughter."
"Yes," she said warily.
"Grandma asked me to call you," I said. "It upsets her that we don't speak at all, and she says she hates having to worry that we might fight or something if we happened to run into each other at her house one day."
"Well," my mother said. "It's too bad she's upset."
"Yeah," I said. "So I thought I'd call and... Well, I thought I'd call. It's Grandma's dying wish."
"I didn't know she was dying," Ellen said dryly.
"She's not," I said. "I think she just wants to beat the rush." We both laughed, and then lapsed into an awkward silence. "Well," I said, "Merry Christmas to you and Al," and I started to hang up.
She said, "Wait, Harriet. I've always wanted to tell you how very sorry-"
I said, "No, no, no. Don't start. If we start, we'll have to make explanations and dig up nearly twenty years worth of emotions and tell each other painful things neither of us wants to hear or say. I'm just not interested in that. I'm happy if we're on speaking terms and can be polite to each other if we happen to be at Grandma's at the same time. That's all I called for."
She was quiet for a minute, then she said, "I suppose you're right. Merry Christmas, Harriet."
I said, "Merry Christmas," and hung up. And that was that, I thought, until I opened my mail the other morning and found the following letter from my mother:
Dear Harriet,
It was good to hear your voice on the phone. I know you don't want to open up a dialogue about our past relationship, but there are a few things I do want to say to you. One is that I wish you had been with me all these years. If I had known Al back then as I know him now, I would have told him about you and we would have raised you together. But he seemed like my only chance at a better life, and I was just too afraid of losing him. It seemed best, then, to leave you with your grandmother.
I know from talking with my mother that you have turned out just fine. I wish I could take some credit for it.
Finally, I'm not trying to buy your forgiveness, and I know there is no way to make up for nearly twenty years of neglect, but Al and I have been talking, and we want you to have a little something from us. We both wish we'd had the opportunity to know you better.
Love,
Your Mother
And in the envelope is a check for $5000. I took the whole package over to Grandma's. "Check out the revisionist history," I ranted. "She didn't leave me with you; she hadn't spoken to you in years. She dropped me off at the mall to shop and see a movie one afternoon, and never came to pick me up! When the cops took me home, she'd moved out and left no address. A social worker finally tracked you down, which was quite tricky since I hadn't seen you since I was 5 or 6 and couldn't even remember your name! She didn't even know I was living with you until two years later, when she called to tell you Al, Jr, had been born. For all she knew I was dead, or on the streets. Can you believe it? Left me with Grandma, indeed. And they wish they'd had the opportunity! As if some power outside themselves took me away from them! Who do they think they're kidding?"
Grandma said, "You know Al believes she and I made a decision that I should keep you. Maybe your mother has come to believe that, too, after all these years. Or maybe Al helped her write the letter, so she felt she had to go along with the story she's told him in the past."
I said, "Well, why not tell him the truth? Maybe I should call him up and do that. Let her finally face the consequences. Or maybe I'll buy her a Christmas present: a nice book on what happens to runaway teens, let her see what kind of danger she was putting me in. She seems to think everything turned out just fine so what she did must be OK, especially if she can buy me off."
Grandma said, "I know you're upset, Harriet, but I don't think that's what she's thinking."
I said, "And just look at that check! What's $5000 compared to raising a kid from 12 to adulthood? They're not only trying to buy me, they're trying to buy me cheap!"
Grandma said, "Maybe it seems cheap to you, but it's a lot of money for your mother and Al. That's probably most of their savings right there in your hand."
I said, "Oh, so now I'm supposed to feel sorry for them?"
Grandma sighed and said, "No, Harriet, just recognize that, when it comes to making amends, your mother is doing the best she can. What option does she have? You already told her you didn't want to talk about things with her."
I said, "I hate this. I can use the money; I don't think I've ever had so much money all at once before. But if I accept it, what am I saying to my mother? That all is forgiven? That she's not so bad?"
Grandma said, "No, Harriet, You're just saying that you can accept what she has to give you now."
I said, "You're the one who raised me. I should give this money to you."
Grandma said, "Keep the money, Harriet."
Splash says I should use the money to buy a computer. Louella says I can buy a house with it if I get an FHA mortgage. She even gave me brochures. Fang and Speedball want me to buy them one of those floor-to-ceiling cat posts with sleeping shelves, dangling catnip mice, and assorted hidey-holes. Nobody but me seems willing to even entertain the notion that I should send the check back. "Harriet, cash the check," Splash says. "Cash the check, Harriet," Louella says. "Harriet," says Grandma sternly, "cash the damn check." It's sitting on my kitchen table. I stare at it while I eat my Cheerios in the morning. I lost it for almost a whole day because it got sucked up into a pile of junk mail. Once I had to fish it out from under the refrigerator, where it had been blown by a draft. I need to make up my mind -- if I'm going to cash it, I need to do it before the numbers are completely obliterated by hot cocoa stains. But accepting the check feels like something is ending. When I'm an old woman telling the story of my life with my mother to a group of spellbound schoolchildren, it's going to be much more dramatic if it ends, "And she left me at the mall and I never heard from her again," than if it ends, "And when I was 29 she sent me a check for $5000 and I cashed it and bought a computer."
January 23, 1996
Don't you hate it when you come across something on your desk that should have been mailed a month ago? I might as well add a little note as long as I've yet to put this in the mail.
Splash and I have had a little falling out. You know I've been seeing her for more than a year, and she's tended to run hot and cold on me. One week she says she's in love with me, but later she changes her mind. She tells me in June that she's never felt so close to anyone, then goes to Europe for 10 weeks and never sends me so much as a postcard. I've gotten used to it; I decided some months ago that I'd just take her vacillations in stride, not let myself be tossed about by her emotional swings. So she says she loves me, and I say, "That's nice." She says she wants to try being monogamous with me, I say, "OK, if that's what you want," and the next Friday she can't see me because she's going dancing with a woman from her senior seminar in advanced topics in women's studies. I say, "Have a nice time." She's just so changeable that it's hard to take her seriously.
Well, she's graduating in May and has got senior-year, find-a-job-and-face-the-real-world anxiety pretty bad. Her fluctuations have gotten ever more extreme. In December, she had decided to get a job in Lansing and buy a house we could both live in. By New Year's Eve she was seeking adventure: "They need engineers in the oil fields in Alaska, Harriet. I know it's ecologically incorrect, but think of it -- the frontier!" I try to be non-committal.
So, last week, she's in a tizzy of indecision. "Harriet, what should I do? All my friends are here, you're here, my family is nearby. But I'm young; shouldn't I have adventures? I want to make a commitment to you, Harriet, not a monogamous one, of course, but we'd be like each other's primary lovers. I think it'd be great. But what if I regret it? What if I realize when I'm 30 that I never did the things I wanted to when I was young? I should go to the oil fields or into the Peace Corps or just drive around the country in an old van having lovers in every little town. But wouldn't it be nice, you and me and Fang and Speedball in a little old house together? We'd have separate bedrooms, of course."
Normally I just say, "Um-hm. Yes, that would be exciting. Yes, that would be nice." but this time I decided I should help Splash by defining exactly what her options with me are. I said, "Splash, it would be lovely if you stayed in Lansing and we went on as we are. But you need to know that a committed relationship with me is not a possibility, neither the monogamous committed relationship you wanted in December nor the nonmonogamous primary-lover thing you've been talking about lately. Nor will I live with you. I think you're wonderful, but you change your mind nearly every day -- I couldn't take a commitment from you seriously."
Splash said, "I'm in a period of indecision, Harriet. Once I make up my mind, it will be made up, and you can count on that."
I said, "Splash, you've made up your mind a dozen times in the past three months, in a dozen different ways. Whatever you finally decide, you need to know that a commitment with me is not an option, though continuing our relationship as it is would be fine with me."
"Fine with you, eh?" she said. "Fine with you? As in, 'either white or wheat bread is fine with dinner'? As in, 'I feel fine. Not great, but fine'? That's how you feel about seeing me? That it's fine?"
I said, "Perhaps that was a poor choice of words. Splash, it would make me very happy if you stayed nearby and I could keep seeing you. I'm just saying that, at your age, you should be making decisions based on what you want, and not because of your relationship with me."
Did you notice the point at which I put my other foot in my mouth? I though Splash would be relieved to have some options eliminated, since the burden of decision-making seems to weigh so heavily upon her mind, but all I managed to do was to convince Splash that I don't care about her, and that I don't care about her because she's young ("at your age") and flighty. I nearly said, "But, Splash, being young and flighty is part of your charm," but wisely kept my mouth shut.
I did help her make up her mind, though. She decided, right on the spot, that she never wanted to see me again because I patronize her, and she went home.
My final bit of news is that I cashed my mother's check, and used some of it to buy the cats their elaborate cat post (they love it). I used some more of it to buy a computer, which arrived by express mail this morning. Splash is coming over in about an hour to help me set it up and learn to use it. I'd better get dinner started -- it's always best if I feed her after a fight.
Love,
© Copyright 1994-1999 Su Penn. Design by David Dierauer.
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