He always asked about my mother. “Is she better?” he always said. “Is she doing any better at all?”
“She has memory problems,” I told him each time. “Her memory is failing her. She always asks about you.” This wasn’t true, but I couldn’t help but say it. I wanted him to know she loved him back. I wanted them to continue to recognize each other. They were each, in so many ways, all the other had. I told him, “She has good days and bad days.”
“She always did!” he said every time. “She always did misremember! ’Bout raining outside!”
Whenever I spoke with my mother, I told her I loved her. She always responded, “Your father loves you so, so much.”
“I love you,” I would repeat.
“Your father loves you so, so much, honey.” It was an admission, a deflection, a makeup exam—all at once.
Lately, she’d been talking about when I was born, how happy he was, what a great moment that had been.
And then she said, “When you coming down?” She always asked this. “When you coming down?”
I could not say. I couldn’t go back down just yet. I was careful about the last words. I love you. I love you. I love you. She loves you. He loves you.
I wanted them both to know, to be sure of me. I wanted a tight little circle like that, here with me in the giant look-alike world.
Dave and I stopped going out every week; instead of the happiest divorced couple in West Michigan, we became a divorced couple in West Michigan. He wrote me an e-mail one day. Friends of mine were introducing themselves to him. That morning at the coffee shop, Pat Roehling had said, “Hi, Dave, it’s Pat!” He called it collateral face blindness. David James and Suzy always called out, “Hi, Dave, it’s Dave and Suzy!” They hadn’t done this last year. I’m not the one who can’t recognize people, he wrote. But it was funny and helpful, since he could never remember people’s names. I could tell he was smiling when he wrote it. He closed with a question. Did I want, by the way, to go out for a drink?
Yes. Yes, I did.
It was always going to be hard to know about Dave.
Someone else wrote me. I don’t even remember who it was. But it’s the question that matters the most.
Do you want me to reintroduce myself to you once or always?
I want you to always.
Afterword
Off and on for many years, I tried to write a book about my childhood. I’d bring chapters to workshop, to writing group, and I always got the same comments: How could you live this way? How could you survive this? It’s too raw. You don’t speak to these people, do you? I was deeply hurt by these reactions, and also confused. This was my mother. I loved her. This was my family. My life. How could it be too raw? I sent a completed version of the memoir to an editor who liked my work. She said no one would believe this childhood was survivable. She said something was missing. She said, “You need a perspective.”
I struggled to understand what she meant. Perspective?
Meanwhile, I was a professor, teaching literature to college students. I led my classes through great stories and poems, and we talked about the universal task of growing up: coming into awareness of one’s experience, learning to trust one’s perceptions enough to claim a perspective. I gave examinations on this material. But I couldn’t see my own life clearly at all. I didn’t know what all I didn’t know; I suspected it was quite a lot.
In childhood, it’s our parents who give us our standards for experience: “Here’s an inch,” they say. “And this is a foot.” And a child says, “Thanks! I can make my own yardstick now.” In my family, there wasn’t any kind of calibration demonstration. In the chaos, I struggled to figure out anything at all. In addition, my neurological condition, undiagnosed and unknown to me, made it impossible for me to trust my perceptions. I couldn’t see who I was or where I stood. My parents noticed my confusion and anxiety. They thought I was crazy. For most of my life, I thought they had that much right.
And then one day I went home and turned on the lights, and began to look clearly at my childhood. Gradually I could discern what was, and what was not. The disorder that had plagued me my whole life emerged from the shadows, too, and over time, it became knowable and manageable. More than anything else, laying out the story of how I came to see has brought me clarity.
But I discovered something else in writing this book, something even more graceful and vital than the elusive “perspective.” In all that darkness, there had been love. What I’d felt all along was not a fantasy, not yet another misinterpretation. I loved my parents. I wasn’t wrong about that. And somehow, against all odds, my parents (especially my mother) were able to bring their versions of affection into our world, into our family, as well. I’d set out to write a book about how we learn to trust our own experience in the face of confusion, doubt, and anxiety. What I ended up with is the story of how we love each other in spite of immense limitations.
Readers will no doubt have noticed that my brother is not much mentioned in this book. He grew up with a very different set of circumstances from me, often under a different roof. Out of respect for his privacy and his own point of view, I chose to leave him out of this account almost entirely. His story is his own to tell, or not.
My own perspective I do feel moved, even obligated, to share. The discovery that deeply flawed love and deeply flawed vision can coexist has been life-changing for me, and I feel uniquely able to illuminate it. You could say that the gift of prosopagnosia was the ability to live with uncertainty, to be receptive to all that a person might turn out to be, literally and metaphorically. Face blindness helped me stay open to possibility—motivated me, on the cellular level, to try to know and understand what can’t be easily seen.
I hope that, at least in some small way, this story will help steer others toward clarity, and toward love, in spite of the greatest odds.
Acknowledgments
To the incomparable Rebecca Saletan, I am most deeply grateful.
I am indebted to Michele Mortimer, for all her help with shaping this book, word by word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark, and to Chuck Verrill, always. Dedicated, detailed, and pragmatic editorial assistance was provided by Karly Fogelsonger and the wonderful Elaine Trevorrow.
Thanks to Abigail Thomas and my fellow students in the solstice memoir workshop at the Omega Institute, where this book’s backstory was begun. My writing partners, Ann Turkle, Lorraine López, Debra Wierenga, and Jackie Bartley, have read many drafts and provided much encouragement, insight, and patient fruitless comma instruction.
Sarah Gorham, Jennifer Ackerman, Ron Spatz, and the late Carol Houck Smith supported this work early on. “Tell Me Again, Who Are You?,” an earlier essay version of one of the chapters in this book, appears in the Alaska Quarterly Review. It was reprinted in Lee Gutkind’s Best Creative Nonfiction 2007.
Ken Nakayama at Harvard’s Vision Sciences Laboratory, along with Brad Duchaine and Galit Yovel, patiently explained basic neuropsychology, provided face blindness humor and encouragement, and the turning point in my life: diagnosis. I am grateful for their kindness, generosity, and wisdom.
Mary Brodbeck, Tammy Hillen, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Rosemary Cantor, Kate Sexton Small, and Ellen Darion feed and steady this writer—thank you for your friendship. Hope College provides a particularly nourishing and supportive community; I’m especially grateful to my colleagues Charles Aschbrenner, Priscilla Atkins, Natalie Dykstra, Lynn Japinga, Lorna Hernandez Jarvis, David Klooster, Marla Lunderberg, David Myers, Barb Mezeske, Kathi O’Connor, Jeanne Petit, Pat Roehling, and Carol Simon.
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