My mother and her sister would often square off with one another on such weighty issues as the color of my grandfather's eyes. Mom would insist they had been green, and my aunt would insist they were blue and she should know since she lived with him her entire life, while my mother had the nerve to get married, move out, and have five girls.
We'll never have a definitive answer as to the color of Grandpa's eyes, but since my mother outlived her sister, she won the heavyweight belt for keeper of the family history and lore, a title one cannot take too lightly.
My mother, sometimes rightly so, but usually just with indignation, will often accuse me of trying to usurp her heavyweight title. For example, when discussing barbecued ribs one day, (you know we are obsessed with food and its history in our lives, which is a topic for its own blog), I innocently remarked that my mother made fantastic ribs, but very rarely made ribs at all. My mother, prone to indignation over lesser digs than at her cooking, reared up and said I was sorely mistaken and that she made ribs all the time.
If you've met my mother, you learn quickly to let these contretemps die a natural death, but in a well meaning and stupid way, I tried to explain that I remembered ribs as a special treat; that she couldn't have made them more than two or three times while I was growing up, but when she did, we sucked the meat off the bones and licked the juices off our fingers.
She was not pleased, at either my insistence or at the imagery, which she considered disgusting and nothing that she wanted associated with her cooking.. I was accused then, as I have been before, of remembering things that no one else does and remembering them as no one else does.
She may be right.
Isn't it the peculiar fate of all writers to be the one in the crowd who is the most observant and has the longest memory? Aren't the writers the ones who can remember the scent of their grandmother's hair spray some 30 years after her death and recall the way her charm bracelets jingled on her wrist when she laughed at a risque joke? And aren't the writers the ones who tally up the scores of who got the most attention in the family of five girls; or at least remember enough concrete details to spin a story out of whole cloth and convince the other siblings that she must be right because she remembers it so well?
Well, the latter rarely happens in my family. We all seem to remember, or invent enough details to satisfy our own inner fact checker and no matter how long and hard we argue, we all remain convinced that our version is the right version and none other.
Facing a milestone birthday in an aging family, I have had too many opportunities over the past year to dwell on my own history. I am guilty of obsessing over what I could have done, what I should have done, what I would have done. I have revised my opportunities, glamorized my choices, and puffed up my sacrifices until they could be floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Re: That apartment in Manhattan that I could have rented instead of getting married and buying a house: I was freaked out enough by the roaches crawling out of the cracks in my friend E's studio apartment with the bathtub and no kitchen sink to know that I needed a parking space, queen-sized bed with matching sheets, and a tasteful dinner service for 12 more than I needed my Sex and the City apartment (actually, in the 80's, it would have been my 9 to 5 with Melanie Griffith apartment.)
Re: Instead-of-becoming-a-lawyer-like-everyone-wanted-me-to-be: the jobs that I could have gotten - in my mind- writing for magazines, freelancing, editing, were gotten by my two friends from college, including the editor of the school newspaper, both of whom landed jobs in the bowels of Manhattan, working the graveyard shift transcribing stories for reporters at The New York Post. One left when she got a better job - writing a newsletter for Emergency Medical Services, where she was expected to address everyone by their rank, such as "Captain Elmo" and "Sargent Bilko" and just report the facts. It was hardly the career I had in mind, had I given myself the chance to consider what I had in mind.
The truth was, I never gave myself a chance to do nothing. I went right from college to law school. I had no burning desire to be a lawyer, but I did want a career. I had watched my older sister fighting tooth and nail to get a decent teaching job and saw her living at home subbing for two years, being depressed and chauffeuring my mother to and from her job. ;Friends were bumming around Europe and I was obsessing over my student loans and moving back home to afford law school.
I'm not whining about any of this, though it sounds like I am. I am trying to make the point that I lacked the courage to turn my back on sense and sensibility and put myself out there to be nothing until I figured out what it was I wanted to be.
It's hardly an original story. Not too many third generation Italian American Catholic girls make it past the wedding lockstep and babies. I considered myself pretty out there for getting a law degree, and then getting married, for working as a prosecutor, and then having babies. Those pages and pages of stories I wrote remained in a box in my parents' attic until a fire destroyed it all.
The truth was, I was in love and I was thrilled to get married; thrilled to buy a house; thrilled to have children. I just couldn't figure out how to do it all, and the writing became the thing that got away. But I never entirely left it, and too many afternoons at my law desk, I'd find myself writing some long, contorted journal entry, then deleting it all in case my secretary ran across it while i went to the ladies room.
So when I start bemoaning my current life, you know, the one that pays the bills and provides financial and emotional security to five people, most of all myself, I do remember thing at times differently from everyone else. My mother's assessment remains true: I remember things that no one else does in a way that no one else does.
I'm working on this character trait. I'm training it away from remembering job offers at publishing houses that were mine but for the asking in my fantasy revisionist history of employment opportunities in the '80's, and regrets about not living in Italy but for the money and guts to do it, and refocusing it on the excitement of buying our first house in the country and the joy over our first pregnancy, and the kvelling over the blond, blue-eyed baby we brought home.
I'm letting go of this "milestone" birthday shit too. I'm turning 50. There I've said it and now all you young bloggers can take me off your blog roll. My stats will plummet! But the truth is that my forties are over, the sixties are the next leg up. I hope to God I live through my fifties. I plan to travel, spend money, drag my husband to outrageous places so I can sketch, and force my kids to leave the nest even if it means pushing their sweet tushies backwards through a sieve to get them out of here and on their own two feet.
I made the mistake of mentioning my birthday, a big one, this year to one of my paralegals. A sweet, very bright, aggressive 28 year old woman, who immediately picked up that it was a big one. I could see her do the mental calculations in her head and her swift glance to my diplomas. "Fifty?" she whispered. I nodded. "Oh, Loretta, wow." Hardly the reaction I wanted, but hey, she's 28; when I was 28, I though 40 was ancient.
But yes, it's 50, 50, 50. Remember Gloria Steinem's line:"This is what 50 looks like today"? Well, I hope to see what 50 looks like, and 60, and 70, and 80, and 90. No more pussyfooting around in shame, no more regrets, reassessments, and counting of the years remaining.
And Mom, I swear you never made those ribs more than once a year. Honestly, I remember. But they were finger-licking good - we just knew enough not to let you see us licking our fingers.