What you don't want to write about: Dearest K

Dearest K—  

I looked at the date this morning—October 22nd—and remembered it was your birthday. How old would you be now? How many years since I last saw you, when you were a budding teenager with the crazy hormones, the sudden craving for… what, you weren’t sure. I knew, though, strange thoughts filling the mind of formerly crass doings, suddenly attractive, exciting. I still remember my own experience, coming from an innocence and a worldliness, unsought and hidden, forbidden. I have often wondered, knowing what I know now, if that had been your experience as well, illicit love between parent and child. So seducing, those thoughts, how can I make him love me more than anyone? Especially, more than the intruder, the usurper, the wicked witch stepmom—no, not stepmom, that’s too accepting, too…  

So, wicked stepmother, interloper, the one but for whom the real mom would have come back to the dad. After she left, following her drug- and alcohol-induced dreams to the States with your dad’s friend; after I hooked up with your dad and you two girls, being a surrogate mom as best I knew how (which I realize wasn’t that great); after I gave up on it because I was at such odds with your father’s ways; after I started seeing him and you again: I saw some pictures you had drawn of you with your father, oh, innocent enough, but you had depicted yourself as adult (though you were, what? 8?), and I wondered…  

Much later I know you accused him of raping you when you were a child, a teenager maybe. I don’t know anything more about it than that. It was your father who told me; by that time you had been living with your mom for a while, your dad had been taken away to prison for some sort of white-collar crime, I forget exactly which one. It was after he got out that he told me you’d publicly accused him of rape. Is it true? I asked him, and he replied after a moment, bitterly… oh, I forget what exactly. Something about you raping him? Thinking back on that now, I can’t quite believe it, because you can’t have been more than 11 or 12 when you went to live with your mom. But the fact is, and I’ve often thought of this: that whatever he said, he didn’t deny the accusation. And I know this about him: he never could tell a lie outright. So I’m thinking that it probably did happen, the rape.  

Oh my poor K—. But it isn’t even that I sat down to write about. I was remembering the jealousy and unease I felt when I saw that picture you drew, of you and your dad as man and woman, mates (in an innocent way). The jealousy I always felt at your father’s protection of you, favouring of you; the way he expected me to be the mother on the one hand, and denied me the right on the other. The sometimes callous way I treated you as a result. How sorry, how sorry… And I know you came to me so long ago in a dream, simply standing before me and telling me you forgave me, even at a time when I was barely acknowledging to myself my wicked stepmother behaviour toward you.  

I found your sister so much easier to love, she barely remembered she had another mom, until years later when your mom came back into her life, long after she’d come back into yours. I have a mom too! she told me, newborn stars lighting up her eyes, after the first time, and I felt a new jealousy then, of sorts. But in a way, too, I felt more free to leave after that, I had stayed so long because I couldn’t bear to be like your own mom, deserting you kids. I wish I had told you then what your mom once told me, and your dad confirmed, that he had told her he would kill anyone who took his kids away from him. And you probably didn’t know that he had already lost a son and daughter from an earlier marriage; that would have been when he was still drinking.

Anyway, I wish I had told you that so you wouldn’t feel so bad, thinking your mom had deserted you, when she was just scared to death of taking you with her then, the first time she left. Or was it the second time? It’s all so long ago, hard to remember. Well, and she was an alcoholic too, and small wonder when you think about her horrendous teenage experience of becoming pregnant and being locked in the basement by her parents during her whole pregnancy. (WTF? God, god, where does this craziness come from?)

Re: What you don't want to write about: Dearest K

oh, my, Ruth. This gives me the chills. It was so complex I had to re-read things, but I don't think this is the writing, it is simply the unbelievably complex story, so multi-layered with twists and turns and knots. All the emotions - and the more difficult, 'greyer' ones, so beautifully explored. I like that it's not all black and white - that the characters are not 'good' or 'bad' but true examples of humanity – in all our complicated and difficult and conflicting actions and feelings. I imagine there is even another 'story' behind the one touched on in the end. This is all so huge - and probably huger than what is here - I'm not surprised it's something a writer might want to not write about, and yet, I'd also imagine the pull would be great too, like a undertow as one swims. It feels like a story that has to be written, sometime.

Thanks for diving. Deep waters.

xo

Re: What you don't want to write about: Dearest K

That was a great dive, right into the complex world of human relationships with their weaknesses, bad choices, and hazy ethical configurations, sometimes down right upside down.  That was really good,

             Thank you,
              Peter
    

Re: What you don't want to write about: Dearest K

Ruth, I had the same sense of complexity and that this story, in one way or another, will one day be told in detail. A complete novel waiting to happen, or that is how I read it.

Beautifully written, complex, evoking emotional responses of sadness, compassion and a sense of the tragic humanness of all these characters and interactions… wonderful material, painfully beautiful and deep.