The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [101]
How she was there for me though was that she took me. She didn’t flinch. She took the full force of my adolescence and young adulthood and all the hatred and rage I had stored up and she didn’t move a muscle. I yelled. She yelled back. It’s a survival skill. A skewed one, to be sure, but one that carries an unusual strength. Sometimes I think our fighting bore me.
The last time she tried to “spank” me I was 10. She broke several blood vessels in her hand. I already had a muscled up swimmer’s butt. I just stared at her after she hit me as hard as she could on the ass. I think she knew in that moment what would rise between us. All the rage we carried to survive my father. Everything it would take to enter “woman” in this still dumb world.
When my daughter died I broke. Open. Into stories. For the first time in my life, I wanted to know what my mother’s story was. Badly. So I asked her. When I explored what my mother’s story had been all I felt was compassion for the girl of her. Someone should have done something to save her. No one did. It’s a wonder she was alive at all.
Maybe forgiveness is just that. The ability to admit someone else’s story. To give it to them. To let it be enunciated in your presence. It’s your job not to flinch.
Another subject that you name, but don’t go into detail is your father’s sexual abuse. Throughout the narrative there are references to the narrator’s experience such as, “Or all the nights I made him [Phillip] break into other peoples’homes the way my father had broken into me,” and during a conversation with Andy after the narrator tells him that her father was abusive and he asked what the father did, the narrator’s reply is simply, “Sexual.” Your father moved to Oregon from his home in Florida so that you could help care for him. Did you come to find forgiveness with your father? Was it the same as with your mother or different? How so?
Another narrative that’s supersaturated the literary landscape at this point in time is the incest narrative. Someone in my writing group actually called it “cliché”… Though when she said it I went into the bathroom and cried, I know what she meant. She meant that the incest narrative has been marketed and disseminated to such an extent that it’s running out of meaning.
That sounds so horrible to say but talk to an editor or agent or publisher and you will hear rhetoric about the incest narrative and how to sell it or what will prohibit your book from selling.
As if that’s what matters.
So like the drug and alcohol monolithic narrative, there are so many stories of incest out there yet to be told. But if you don’t tell the right incest narrative, you got butkus. My goal in offering my own story isn’t to claim that abuse suffered from my father is any more important than anyone else’s. Nor is it to “claim” the incest narrative to sell books.
My goal is to put the reader into the space of childhood and young adulthood where fear and confusion and rage get born - like they do in us all for different reasons. To put the reader in their body through language. Because when I teach or give readings or workshops, I meet a hundred people who know what it feels like to be shamed, or beaten, or molested, or just made small. We all move through the waters. Language helps us feel less separate.
When my mother died my father was stuck in Florida. Alone. With not much of his wits left. With major heart damage. With a lien on his house. Andy and I visited some nursing homes in Florida. I threw up. They were simply awful. Whoever I am, I could not leave him there. I couldn’t leave Hitler there. It simply wasn’t possible for me to purposefully kill him or torture him or neglect his body. Ironic.
I don’t believe in god. I don’t particularly believe in the cult of sin and redemption. But I do believe in energy. What I hold my father most responsible for is for not facing his own darkness - not acknowledging it as his. I think that is a flaw a great many of