by Sonja Larsen
I focus on the pattern of my breath, the expansion and contraction of my muscles. These new things that must be forgiven: Mortality. Frailty. The body itself.
By the next day my mother is feeling better. She shows me her newest work, wildlife prints and words stamped on her preacher father’s old Bible. She says some people find them sacrilegious but she meant it just the opposite. A way to honour the spiritual. Her father never even wanted to become a preacher, that was just something that was expected, a job in his father’s salvation business. He’d been a gambler and a cheat but he’d also been against the Vietnam War, a reader, a man who loved flowers. She gives me a print to take home. In good we trust, it reads.
Kevin and I get ready to go. We leave some cash to pay a dog walker. Just before we go my mother shows me a cardboard box.
“Here,” she says. “I thought you might want to have this.”
Inside are pages of my letters and writing and copies of my mother’s letters to me, as well as ones she never sent. Letters, poems and essays going back to my early teens, the weight of the box proof of both the separation and connection we maintained during my childhood.
In almost every letter I’ll find evidence of how we can remember and forget. The fine balance between knowing and not knowing that my childhood seemed to require. But first it will sit for weeks in a corner. I habituate myself to its dimensions, to its existence. And then I start to read.
The letter she wrote to me in Montreal not long after I left Redding.
When I think about you and wonder if I will ever get to be a mother again and when the emotions well and the tears start I just read what you wrote on the book you gave me, about revolutionaries shedding blood and not tears and I find something I need to do so I don’t dwell on it.
The first letter she sent to me after I told her about Karl.
I knew.
The letter I sent back to her.
You knew why didn’t you tell me.
“When you were little you could guess the suit of the cards before I even turned them over,” my father said.
“You were a very loved baby,” my mother told me. “But you were so slow to sit up we worried there was something wrong with you.”
My sister said, “You just liked being taken care of.”
From these stories came my own. That I knew. That I hung on to my dependence, to all the love and power my chubby baby fingers could hold. Because I knew it wasn’t going to last forever.
I was a loved baby who was born into an interesting time. Bullshit, the Old Man said and like everything else about him that was part terrible truth and part terrible lie. In a year or two from now when I finally tell my family I’m going to publish a book my mother will write to me that she is “honored to be the mother of a writer.” My sister will ask if there’s anything she can do to help. And my father will call me and say, “If you have to choose between my feelings and the truth, pick the truth. Say whatever you have to say.”
But on the Sunday as I carry the box out to the car all I know is that this moment is a page in the story, this history and its weight are a page in the book that I was always writing, a fairy tale, where I fell down a rabbit hole. Where I could be magic if only I learned how. The true history of the revolution. Or maybe only what I was sure happened. But it was always about people who wanted to be loved. Who wanted to be happy. And how hope made them both blind and free, one transforming into the other, like water to steam and back again. Smart and stupid, fearful and brave.
And when I write it all down will I say that my mother is clearing away the memories that fill up the small rooms where she needs to live, making way for the self, the self that not religion or motherhood, not communes or communists could contain? In that version I am—still—too small to compete with my mother’s beliefs, but big enough to be in the way. Or will I say that my mother is not clearing out boxes but offering me pieces of the postmarked truth, evidence for the stories she knows I need to tell?
These are some of the things I think about on the drive home.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When you are writing the acknowledgements for a book about your life, are you thanking people for the book or the life? Both I guess.
To the hundreds of people in my childhood who talked to me like I had something to say, who gave me books or snacks or advice when it looked like I could use them, thank you. Some of you are friends, some of you I lived with in communes or field offices and some I met in moving cars or at parties or in meeting halls. If it takes a village to raise a child, thank you for being part of my village.
To the front-line cadre still inside the organization, thank you for caring about the poor, the disenfranchised, the exploited. I have never doubted your spirit of hope and justice. Maybe things are different now. Maybe you are free to speak up or walk out, to hold your leaders accountable. I hope for your sake that is true.
It goes without saying that you cannot write a family memoir without a fucked-up family and so I thank my family for the bad decisions that made for good stories and for the good intentions that made it bearable. I decided early on I could only speak for myself, for what I sensed, what I felt, what I understood at the time. That was hard enough. I am especially grateful to my family for understanding this. My mother who gave me the qualities that I admire both in myself and my sister—creativity and courage—and whose values I continue to honour in the work I do. My father who taught me that sometimes life isn’t as complicated as it looks. That happiness can start with a really good meal, and Janice, who cooked us that meal. And for Patricia, my big sister whose big love has saved me more than once, and reminded me always that I was worth saving. Larsen twins forever!
Of course I am indebted to my friend, editor and Scrabble opponent Pamela Murray, who took a chance on me even without being blackmailed about our university years and whose insights have made my life and this book better. Many thanks also to Barbara Pulling, for both her editorial advice and her introduction to Trena White of the Transatlantic Agency, who has been such an advocate for my work. I am also deeply appreciative of the writing community I have met in the years I spent working on this book. To Joan Flood who said, “That’s just your fear talking,” when I started to doubt myself and to the many people who reminded me to be generous with myself and others, to work hard, to develop good habits, to be honest. To be brave. The things you sometimes need to be reminded of not only to write but to live.
And finally to Kevin, who I have loved possibly from the moment I held his hand and who has been there to hold my hand through every page. You are my special friend.
Sonja Larsen has written articles for magazines, short stories and poetry for literary journals, and term papers for rich, lazy students. She is a graduate of the Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio and her work has been published in the Globe and Mail, Room, and Descant, as well as a number of other print and online literary magazines. She works with youth in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.