NOTES FROM AN EMPTY TABLE
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ESSAYS, POEMS, AND STORIES (BUT MOSTLY ESSAYS)
ON CULTURE, CALAMITY, AND CREATING BY TOM GUZZIO |
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This is a revised, and greatly expanded version of a piece I published nearly a month ago (and have since deleted). That small essay seems like a thumbnail now; a beginning of a beginning. I didn't know where that sketch would take me, but I'm grateful for the start...  Night sky photo by MK Feeney, remixed by the author. I will not make the bold claim that this paper holds the essence of what my mother is or what she experienced, for I can never present her as she would herself, but only suggest what she means to me, and how her experiences have affected my life as an extension of hers. - “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study.” When my mother died, I got a necklace that had an anchor and a charm that said “memento mori” – remember death. Instead of focusing on the life of the woman who bore me, I reached to the rigging of my heart and hoisted a flag honoring what took her. I was doing my best to rationalize a loss I had already made peace with. During her last few years, Mom sunk into an apathy I couldn’t understand and didn’t have patience for, especially since her chosen ignorance included people who were important to me, like my daughter and my wife. She spent her days smoking pot, watching tv, and doting over her chihuahua. When we talked, our conversations were feather-light and hard to carry. The day after she passed, I posted a copy of a 23 year old essay I wrote about her to Facebook. Written for a college class on modern sociological theory, “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study” told of a woman who leaned into herself and learned to stand up to and apart from the people – men, mostly – who made her feel less than. “Since this is my paper,” I wrote, “and since life for me is best expressed by the soundtrack that fills up those quiet spaces between trauma and joy, I will, from time to time, take liberty with lyric and verse.” And I did. My assertion that Mom’s life repudiated Parsons and Bales’ functionalist theory on gender roles used lyrics from songs like “Hymn to Her” by the Pretenders, lines from a Philip Larkin poem, and her own words. It was a playful way of honoring her rise from a waitress at a casino coffee shop to the role of Assistant Banquets Manager at an exclusive Las Vegas resort; a job that gave her the confidence and financial wherewithal to leave the pink collar ghetto and my abusive stepfather. My paper earned a 96, but it also paved over the fact that my mutinous mother would never see herself as the captain of her own ship. Ultimately, Mom wanted rescue more than she wanted freedom, and when the fourth and final man she called “husband” got terminal cancer and died, the vestiges of the woman I wrote about drowned – swept by a tidal wave of grief for a man she was thinking of leaving just months before his diagnosis. After his passing, instead of looking to the living, like a potential husband number five, or my daughter who had met her only once, or her other grandchildren, Mom spent her remaining years out on the widow’s walk, mourning the one man who left her before she could leave him. Posting that essay was a lazy, performative attempt at bringing that version of my mother to the present without truly facing the finality of losing her. It let me move forward without much work or weight, and was typical of the coping skills my parents gave me. When in rough seas, pick a direction and hope for the best. Sail, so long as it puts the pain behind you. Face the sun. Travel light. Loss, and the indeterminate movement away from it, marked the rhythm of my growing up. After my parents split up when I was five, my father retreated east before completely resigning from my life. Meanwhile, my restless mother feverishly looked for the right man and the right roof to keep over our heads. This going from man to man and place to place took me to eleven schools before I graduated, and made me shy and hard to know and incredibly lonely. Husband number three gave us some physical anchorage, but his unpredictable abuse kept us dreaming of different, calmer seas we desperately wanted but didn’t know how to reach. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. “This be the Verse” - Philip Larkin I thought I was a skilled sailor when, 34 years after leaving my mother’s house, my daughter asked me why I left her small hometown in the Adirondacks when her mom and I split up. Why, she asked, wasn’t she enough for me to stay? Something had been off between Emma and me for weeks, but her question, and the evident pain with which she asked it, was a broadside I didn’t see coming. I was 52, the same age my mother was when I wrote that essay, but I was rooted in ways Mom and her various partners never were. Living just north of Boston for almost two decades, in a steady, healthy relationship for nearly as long, I had built a life that I was proud of, one that very much made Emma and her happiness a priority. I knew I was a good dad, long distance or not. I worked hard with my ex to make sure our daughter had a richer, more stable path to adulthood than I did. Now this amazingly creative, whipsmart young woman who had my nose (sorry, kid), my height, my feet (God bless her), and my artistic eye told me she carried pain I never intended to give. She wanted to know why. I’m not sure what scared me more – drifting back towards a hurt I worked so hard to ease and overcome, or knowing that this hurt held a story that might diminish me in my daughter’s eyes. I talked things through with my wife and Emma’s mother, deciding that the only viable option was to take a deep breath and start talking. So I did. A few weeks later, as Emma patiently listened, I waded into that painful past, and brought back the story of how the failure of my first marriage converged with the loss of a job I loved, and how I wasn’t expecting or prepared for either ending. Devastated, depressed, and unable to function, I took a page from my father’s book and ran – all the way to Las Vegas and my mom's couch (Keep moving. Face the sun) – hoping to find my bearings. I didn’t last a year before Emma, who was almost three, drew me limping back to the Eastern Seaboard, determined to find a way to be her dad and stay upright under the weight of my depression. She knew the rest; like how I landed a day’s drive from her, and worked hard to build her a home away from home. I fell in love and brought another caring adult into her life; gave Emma pets, places, and people. I wanted what made the Greater Boston Area different from her small hometown – the history, the museums, the concerts, the sports, the ocean – to be as available and familiar as the beautiful mountains and lakes that surrounded her in the North Country. I gave Emma moments and memories she now shares with the boy she loves. I gave her movement, too. For me, the 255 miles between us was an inconvenience; something to make the best of with audiobooks, music, and podcasts. It was also a buffer that kept the radiation from a life I lost when my first wife told me she didn’t love me anymore – a life she was now living with someone else – from contaminating the new one I built out of the ashes of that devastation. That distance was different for Emma, she explained. It reminded her of something she lost that she was too young to remember having but still keenly felt: my daily, physical presence in her life. Each visit’s ending brought the sadness of me staying or me going to where she wasn’t. When she was really little, the fact that the adults in her life got along so well only made our geography more confusing and painful. I thought her questions about why everyone in her life couldn’t live together were cute; evidence of how very loved she was. For Emma, they weren’t really questions, but attempts to articulate and understand the deep pain she felt when we parted. Through our conversations about my leaving and the introspection they inspired. I began to understand how the choices I made with Emma’s best interests in mind were both good and bad for her (They may not mean to, but they do). I had been a reflective, active parent; doing the best I could with no regrets, and yet I fell short. To move forward with Emma, I had to face the pain I caused all those years ago, and recognize and own the damage my very visceral and necessary need for self-preservation had done. This took me back to Mom (how could it not?). I couldn’t reconsider my life as a parent without reconsidering hers. I had to give what she did and did not do for me the grace her trying deserved. After all, she stayed. Those things that make us alive cannot be captured and held by the conventional means of remembering, for life surrenders only unto death, and death will concede to nothing else. - “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study.” Rebecca Solnit, in her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, discusses the different meanings of the word “lost,” like the one associated with a lack of awareness as it relates to place; to geography. Explorers were always lost because they had never been to the places they traveled. Travelers today get lost not because they reach for the unknown, but because they don’t pay attention to or trust their instruments. For Virginia Wolf, Solnit notes, “getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity… to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.” There’s also the kind of lost that’s external to and apart from you, like the remote control that’s hidden in the cushions, or the family photos gone missing in a move. You can lose at love, and other competitions. The “lost” I’ve been for much of my life has been a combination of these things, and I think it was like that for Mom, too. She was abandoned by her parents when she was too little to remember. When you’re a child someone intentionally misplaces, the rest of your life can become a quest for the validation you were denied. This was my mother’s modus operandi. Her search for self-actualization carried her across the country, gave her five kids and four husbands, but little lasting happiness. So she kept moving, getting rid of the literal and figurative things that could have been passed on to me because they were too painful to hold. All of it – pictures, people, pets, places, and events receded into the blue distance. This desperate, hopeful losing was done to make room for treasures from a new, less painful country she never found until, finally, Mom just stopped. She put me on the same course, without even realizing it: longing for love and security without knowing what it looks like. Fleeing from pain and upheaval like a calf from a kill chute. I’ve since learned that this reaction was a trauma response handed down the evolutionary ladder; a biological imperative that can only be balanced by the nurturing and validation my mother never got, and therefore could not give to me, even though she tried. Rudderless children become rudderless parents. We move blindly, often in circles, looking for a country hidden within and from us. For home. I have never doubted my mother’s love for me, but love is a dull tool in the hands of an unskilled craftsman. So when my daughter’s question led me to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of my past, I looked at my choices and saw how the map of my life was both a reaction to and a mirror of my mother's. People and experiences would come into, and enrich my life the way they do for most of us: actively pursued and readily welcomed. But when pain inevitably and unpredictably disrupted my calm seas, I’d throw it all overboard, just like Mom. Even good memories were tinged with too much emotional radiation to be seen as anything other than damaged and dangerous. I did my best to keep that past from impacting my daughter’s present, but in creating a false equivalency between “past” and “pain” I ultimately hurt us both. (Death) leaves words and pictures behind to take the role of proctoring the mind through remembrance, which is itself only another way of imitating the act of living. - “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study. Solnit recounts how her family was shaped by tradition; customs kept for the kids. Keeping these things, and the giving inherent in doing so, is more important than believing in them. Things like the glass of wine Solnit’s parents left out for Elijah every Passover – that Solnit got drunk on when she was eight – become our stories, and stories can be stars we navigate by. I wanted my daughter’s sky to be full and bright. By staying in her life I had already eclipsed the mark for parenting set by my father, and I was determined to be the kind of parent my mother didn’t have the tools for. So I kept things Mom did not. School pictures, craft projects, play programs and newspaper write ups; these crowd shelves in my office, are sprinkled throughout my home, and take up residence in my cloud storage. But like posting that paper when Mom died, this keeping is an easy, performative act made with more intention than depth. It measures my daughter’s growth and success, validates my contributions to both, but does little to fill the pages of our shared past because they are stories written by, not for her. My daughter wanted my story – or at least the part that related to my leaving. Without it, she explained, our relationship risked becoming feather-light. Hard to carry. So I added ink to the empty pages of our past, and gave us both a constellation. …for now, all I can give is my understanding – my explanation that what I do has been influenced by what she did, and that who I am is largely the product of who she is, and how hard she has fought to be an individual. - “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study. My mom was a star in that sky. I never questioned the choices she made when raising me until I became a parent with choices of my own. I excused her role in the loneliness and self doubt that marked my itinerant youth because she and I were trenchmates trying to survive my stepfather’s abuse. “Mister Tommy,” he would say, “why don’t you bend over, reach between your legs, and pull your head out of your ass.” He treated Mom worse. I was so proud when she left him, even if she was only making way for someone else to be the True North she could never find in herself. I thought I was better at parenting; better at adulting altogether, until my daughter reflected my loneliness – and my mother’s – back to me through her own feelings of abandonment and isolation. Then I understood. I used to think Mom telling me, “I did the best I could” was an excuse, if not a lie. What arrogance! The best you can do does not always line up with what someone else needs, but that shouldn’t diminish the beauty inherent in giving; in trying. There’s strength in trying, even if you fail. My mother failed me many times, but most were the accidental failures that come with doing a job no one prepared you for. When your parenting skills center around what not to do, something’s bound to get fucked up. But course corrections are possible. I’ve lost most of the pictures of my pre-Emma past, and the ones I’ve kept I rarely look at. The same is true of the stories that made me who I was before “father.” This was part of that running away from, rather than moving with life’s pain. I always assumed that the answer to the equation of my past was negative, and that to hold on to it would make my present less than. Now I see that assumption was not a given, but a perception; maybe a choice. The pain of losing the dog I pulled from a feral pack when I was eight; a dog who would wait for me at the bus stop each day, pushed aside the sheer power and beauty of my time with him. The ending of the marriage that gave me a beautiful, glowing, force of a daughter is remembered more for how it ended. I almost got it right when I posted that essay after Mom died, but instead of embracing her best, I buried it with her. No more. My painful memories will no longer push away a past that’s been touched by love’s blunt, clumsy hand. I’ve lived a better story.  One of two pictures I have of my mother and daughter together, from the first and only time they met. And she will always carry on Something is lost But something is found They will keep on speaking her name Some things change Some stay the same “Hymn to Her” - The Pretenders Roughly six months after Emma and I discussed my leaving, I told her how her mom and I met and fell in love. Taking tentative steps with visits and voice, Emma and I had worked our way back from a ledge, and were on our way to Montreal for the day – just us two. Under gray skies, I did my best to convey the awkward, shining beauty of a shy boy suddenly brave enough to approach his oblivious crush. He was temporarily an art major, nervously asking a beautiful girl if she’d look at his slides, expecting no more than the electric pulse of her presence, but hoping that she’d see him, not just his art. She didn’t run away screaming…
Neither did Emma, though I imagine it was strange – maybe cringey, even – my painting her parents as people not much different from students she might run into at school; kids who could be fumbling towards a shared future, maybe from behind a slide projector one of them barely knew how to operate (are slides still a thing?). Or maybe it was sad to see the people her parents were then – at least my version of them – in light of who they are today: happy, but apart. Still, now she knows; she has that story. I see now how that’s a gift; another thing my mom gave me without realizing. Not all stories need a happy ending to be beautiful; they just need to be yours. They need to be told.
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