In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

  I wish I had asked you to teach me more, I told her. Like how to make biscuits, which she made from scratch, without looking at a recipe. She rolled them out and cut them into perfect circles with the mouth of a jelly jar or drinking glass. She made gravy that was never lumpy, never runny, and that was always better than anyone else’s gravy I ever tried.

  I should have helped her can some stuff, I told her. I need to know these things—how to prepare the tomatoes and green beans you put up. How to prepare the washtub with the hot water that you set the jars into, how long it takes. How to use that same washtub to bathe my grandchildren someday, how to give them baths that they will come to cherish, sitting in an old washtub in my backyard in the summertime. How to have a root cellar that keeps potatoes and jars of food cool all summer long, which will provide an endless supply of sustenance to my grandchildren and thus seem magical even though there might be snakes in there, so they have to watch out when they enter.

  While she went back to sleep, I thought about the other things I had meant to ask, and the things I meant to tell her that I had never taken the time to do.

  How frustrating it was to spend the night with her in the summer, when she would make us go to bed before the sun had set, and she forbade us to get up. How comforting it was that she always had Freedent or Wrigley’s Spearmint gum and would give us a piece, or maybe just half a piece, in church. How I loved the tomato pie she made when I was little and how I didn’t even mind the onions that were in it, because they were overpowered by sugar.

  How I was always afraid of her chickens and never learned how to collect their eggs from beneath them, which Granny did effortlessly, and they let her do it as if they thanked her. How I knew she was the strongest person in our family, killing chickens and bringing in firewood and praying without fail, believing we were always worth her prayers and her money and her cooking.

  How she told my father, Don’t you do that to my little girl, and was the only person to ever say that.

  My stepmother called me a little after eleven one night and left a message saying that my granny had just passed away. The coroner did not get there until after midnight, so her official date of death was the next day. I had been talking to her preacher, who came to the hospital to see her several times and prayed with all of us. I called him after she died, wanting to talk to him about her funeral. He would be speaking at the service, and I wanted to tell him how important it was that everyone know about her forgiveness. She had taken care of all of us for so long, feeding us, sharing everything she had, giving us vehicles and furniture and love that ignored how much we took, how little we gave. She forgave us for not calling as often as we should have, for not visiting as often as we should have, for using her savings to buy drugs or pay the rent because we had used our own money for drugs. She forgave us for not going to church, and she prayed for us each night and cried every Sunday.

  I wanted everyone at the funeral to know these things, to know that Granny had defined forgiveness, and she did it in a way that many people could find fault with but that had finally taught at least one person about love that is not earned. The preacher already had a plan, though, and he dismissed me before I could tell him how important it was that we honor Granny’s forgiveness. At the funeral, he read from the Bible and preached a little sermon and at the end gave everyone an opportunity to get saved by Jesus right then and there, just to the right of my granny’s body.

  My father sat in the front row, next to his sister. My uncle sat in the front row on the other side, in his orange jumpsuit, with handcuffs on. I sat on a pew three rows back, with my son on one side of me and no one to my left. At first, I wondered who I should sit next to, who could comfort me. But it seemed better, finally, to just bow my head and cry, and not look at anyone else or lean on them or have anyone whisper, It’s okay. As everyone walked up the aisle to give their condolences and see her body, a few people stopped and told me how much she loved me. One of them was my dad’s buddy who had held the knife against James’s neck.

  Your granny sure loved you a lot, he said. She thought you were so special. I noticed how his blue eyes sparkled and he smiled too widely, with a strange expression that I so often would have called love. It was how he had always looked at me, the look that made me wonder as a child what he knew about me, what secret of mine he had somehow discovered. I pulled my son closer. Church people consoled my father as my granny’s body lay cool. And something came rushing into my waking memory as a shadow took form, as I realized my father’s friend looked just like the man in my recurring nightmare, whom as a child I had compared to Brutus from the Popeye cartoon. I suddenly remembered what he had done to me, and my tears stopped falling.

  CHAPTER 37

  The Long Night

  It was probably inevitable that I would grow up thinking about killing myself. When I was working in Lexington, I would look at the grassy area that dipped down to the left of the northbound lanes of the interstate, wondering whether I would die if I jerked my wheel hard enough to flip my car and roll down the little hill. It wasn’t a sure thing, so I didn’t take the chance. I thought about dying mostly as I drove, probably because that was the time I had alone—time to think before picking up a child and going home to fix dinner, wash clothes, clean toilets.

  One day, I had just reached Berea and was thinking that I wanted to die. I didn’t want to hurt my children, which is probably why I never followed through. But on some days, I felt they might be better off without me. I felt like my life had been a waste—too many mistakes, too much trauma—and maybe, despite my stubborn hopefulness, there isn’t really a reason for all this suffering. Maybe there is no god and no angels and whispering trees. No ancestors whose stories matter, and our stories don’t matter, no beauty in the telling. Just children struggling to survive their parents, the psychological and physical wounds growing with each generation.

  As I crossed the train tracks, I heard, Just wait. Wait and see. The day will come when you are glad to be alive. Whether those words came from my own mind, or from Granny, or somewhere else, I’m not sure, but I agreed to give it a chance.

  I remember the day I found myself truly grateful to be alive—it was a year or two later. I don’t remember the circumstances now, but at the time, I thought, This is it. This is the moment I have been waiting for, and you were right—it is worth it. And there have been more since then.

  When I became a mother, I made a conscious decision to devote myself to my child before he arrived. That’s the kind of thing that seems to come naturally to a lot of people—they sure do say it, at least—but for me, I knew I was choosing something that I absolutely did not know how to do and that I would have to work at to do well. I understood the stakes, too—the missing piece that so many people seem to underestimate. I knew how it felt to not really be wanted and adored. I may not have been particularly unwanted, but I was not wanted, and there is a world of difference. And in the effort to save myself from all that entails, I looked everywhere—at church, in therapy, drugs, men. It turns out that putting someone back together is much more difficult than keeping them whole in the first place.

  I got to feeling pretty confident once my son was around six years old. Orion was a beautiful child—blond hair and blue eyes, but also full of sweetness that he never hid. He brought me flowers and he cuddled kittens. He climbed trees and made his best growling-lion face. The people around us told me what a good mother I was, and I knew that I loved him, and I finally understood what people meant when they talked about dying for someone—I was probably already close to that on the birthing bed.

  Around that time, I began reading a lot of Rūmī’s poetry and was enthralled—he was a Sufi mystic, and his writing felt so much like what I felt in childhood, hearing stories about Jesus. Before long, I began praying in a new way, to a god who was a mix between my childhood understanding and this mystical, poetic understanding. In some ways, they were perfectly compatible. I saw myself as the kind of jewel Rūm�
� described—one with sharp corners that the jeweler, God himself, must carve away. I saw myself as the gold that must be purified by burning away the impurities. For once, I thought of myself as a child of God. I saw all my past suffering and all that I carried, all I had seen and felt and heard in the long night of my childhood.

  My daughter was born right after my son turned seven. Rose is a leap-year baby, and every bit deserves the rarity of that day. Her birth took not quite as long as Orion’s, but it was unexpectedly lengthy, given that I was in a hospital and hooked up to an IV full of Pitocin for a little more than twenty-four hours. She had stopped growing at around eight months, and my midwife told me that home birth was no longer an option. I was low in iron, too, so at a greater risk of hemorrhaging—and I had already hemorrhaged enough the first time for her to be concerned. Not being able to have my daughter at home seemed to fit—nothing was making sense at that time. I knew I wasn’t bringing her into a good situation, but I couldn’t sort out what fell on me and what fell elsewhere.

  We had started the Pitocin drip at five o’clock the night before. It slowly took hold, and I knew from reading journals for doctors at college, and then at work, that Pitocin was contraindicated for pregnant women. Still, I understood what it was meant to do—set my uterus in motion, start the contractions, get the baby out. At noon the next day, I started worrying about what it meant to be here, in a hospital. I had an ultrasound before they admitted me—they were concerned, they said, and if I was their patient, they would give me twenty-four hours before inducing labor. But I could have forty-eight, and then I needed to come back if I wanted to have the baby there. I had thought I still had a couple of weeks left to get everything together but made sure to return within their time frame. I realized I wasn’t progressing well, though—I asked the nurse to check me at noon, and she said I was about two centimeters dilated. I asked her to break my water. Are you sure? she asked. Yes, I’m sure. I knew I had been lucky not to have a C-section with Orion. I knew I couldn’t labor with this baby for too long.

  The nurse broke my water, and the serious contractions set in—the real contractions. These came on top of the medication-induced contractions from the Pitocin, so there was no relief, no break between them, and my body had not had time to prepare itself for this level of labor. Suddenly, my mother and stepfather arrived. Thankfully, I still had my hospital gown on. I greeted them and tolerated them for a bit, but then had someone ask them to leave—or maybe I did it myself. I couldn’t really say.

  My labor to bring Orion into the world had been filled with moans, but I was quiet through so much of it. Not this time. The nurse walked in at one point, and instead of my earlier smiling yes, please, and yes, thank you, she found me naked on my hands and knees, howling every obscenity I could think of. The nurse said, Oh, how things change, and even in my anguish, I could appreciate the wry truth of her remark.

  I knew that the odds of pushing my baby out naturally would dwindle soon, and every muscle in my body was tensed with these contractions—there was no way to breathe through them. I wanted to climb outside myself, escape this unnatural pain, but instead I was crawling on a tiny hospital bed with an IV still in my arm, hooked to a pole. I asked the nurse what my options were for pain relief, and she offered an epidural or Stadol. I remember her quickly telling me that they could give Stadol only when there was at least another hour of labor left, because they didn’t want the baby born with the drug in its bloodstream. She checked me—three centimeters—and said that I could have it if I wanted it, that it would make me feel drunk and give me about an hour of relief, but that I would still have contractions. My massage-therapist friend was there and reminded me, You wanted a natural birth, and I didn’t bother telling her that at that point, I was just waiting for my midwife to arrive before asking for an epidural—I wanted to give my midwife a chance to give me any reason not to. Though she couldn’t assist in the birth, she had agreed to come to the hospital to support me.

  They added the opioid to my IV, and almost immediately, I was able to sleep. I still had contractions that shook me from my slumber, but I moaned through those, and the anguish was gone. I dreamt during a lull between them: I am walking through a forest, next to a tall man with brown, curly hair. There is a lovely cabin nearby. I tell him, I can’t do this, and he says, Yes you can, it’s almost over.

  I woke up and felt like I needed to shit, so I asked someone in the room—who, I don’t remember—to help me to the toilet chair that sat beside my bed. The same nurse as before walked in at that moment and urged me back onto the bed while I insisted I had to shit, and she gently told me, That’s fine, just do it on the bed, I’ll put something under you, just please get back on the bed. The last thing I wanted was to lie in a bed and relieve myself when I was fully capable of sitting up, but I eased back onto it. I still had sense enough to cooperate.

  It turns out the nurse knew her stuff, because in fact I didn’t need to shit—it was time for the baby to come out.

  I lay there pushing with each contraction, and someone told me, Don’t do that, wait until the doctor comes, and I thought, Fuck that, and kept pushing. Soon, perched between my legs, there was a grouchy doctor I had never met—I found out later she was sick. Earlier, they had asked whether I would allow students to observe, and I said yes, but I didn’t realize that when it was time for the baby to come, they would turn on spotlights aimed at my naked body and desperate face. I didn’t expect the students to watch without expression, as if they had no idea that when we give birth, we flirt with the edge of death. I searched the room frantically for eyes to lock onto and finally found my midwife, present and full of care and love. I focused only on her eyes, and about forty-five minutes after I started pushing, my daughter was born.

  She was so small, no one had to cut me, and she slipped out with so much less effort than Orion had taken. I was still feeling drunk from the Stadol when she was born, and she came so soon after the drug was injected into my IV, she was probably born with it in her bloodstream. What can I do but mourn that?

  It was not the birth I wanted to have, nor what I wanted for my girl. I knew she was a girl when I felt the first difference in my body: my mouth watered too much one day. My herbalist said, That’s not a symptom, but I knew. The pregnancy test came back negative that day, a Friday, so I drank as much beer as I could that night and sat alone, crying, knowing I would have a girl. I took another pregnancy test on Monday, and it was positive.

  But looking at my daughter’s face over the next days and weeks and years, I understood why people compare cheeks to apples. She doubled her birth weight in the first six weeks. I carried her everywhere, just as I had my son. I fell in love with her as I had never loved any other girl.

  I didn’t even love myself at that point. I still struggled with the guilt and shame of what I had experienced, what I had done in response. And there was so much I had been told about women—how catty we are, how manipulative—that I didn’t acknowledge but believed to be true. I still carried the idea that everything that had happened to me was somehow my fault.

  Rose was always sweet, but she was also fiery and wild. I found that I had to discipline her differently. I quickly saw that the tone of voice I sometimes used with Orion—to convey I mean it and you’d better do what I say—would crush her, and I knew what happened when a girl was crushed. I learned how difficult it is to take care of a wild and free girl, not to squelch her into obedience and silent resentment or, worse yet, self-loathing. I found that when I cared for her, though, it changed how I felt inside. I started thinking it was okay that my parents didn’t love and adore me—I could love and adore this girl, and that was enough for the both of us. And when it was time to fight for her, I fought with everything I had and then some. I prayed to anyone who would listen to show me how to protect her and help her, and I think they answered.

  CHAPTER 38

  Defiance

  Still, I stumbled as a parent. I used to spank Orion—my mot
her saw him act out once, when he was still in diapers. You’d better start spanking him, or one day, he’ll be bigger than you, and you won’t be able to control him. I knew what she meant, but I didn’t want to believe it. I read everything I could find about raising children and discipline, knowing I needed a new model, an example that had never been shown to me and that I would have to patchwork together myself. I already loved him with such ferocity and knew our bond defied description. I was sure I could find the right care to give so he would be neither spoiled nor broken.

  I flicked him on the hand when he was little, teaching him that my simple, calm no was something to listen to. He was exceedingly easy to teach, and I taught him please and thank you, and when he was difficult, I was the benevolent dictator of our household—authoritative, without being authoritarian. Loving, without being permissive.

  I spanked him for a while. Once, he threw a handful of gravel at our neighbor’s back as the neighbor and I chatted beneath a weeping willow tree. I told Orion to pick up a switch and go sit on the porch and wait for me. When I was pregnant with his sister, I found myself spanking him with anger that I knew had nothing to do with him. He started telling me the spankings didn’t hurt, no matter how hard I smacked his bottom. That was when I decided I had to find a new way. I apologized to him when he was about sixteen, and I couldn’t help but cry. I’m sorry I ever spanked you, I didn’t know what else to do. I did my best, but it wasn’t good enough. In his usual kind way, he said, Oh, it’s okay, Mom. I’m glad you spanked me. I needed it. I told him no, he didn’t, and no one did.

  On the cusp of adulthood, he asked me what I really would have done if he had disobeyed me as a teenager—he didn’t ask out of defiance, but with curiosity. And I told him that the most important thing we had was the love and trust between us, and though I could threaten him with any number of things, the loss of trust is worse than anything else. He agreed.