Sleeping Under Trees and other micro-memoirs in no particular order...

Heal the root so the tree is stable. (unknown)

Excerpts from the memoir in micro-doses…to be read in micro-doses if it’s too much, and I can assure you it’s probably too much.

Sleeping Under Trees

When we finally attempted boundaries rather late in the day, our son began to sleep beneath a tree near our home. He could no longer live with us - too much chaos and a wild refusal to seek help for substance issues la la la - it's the same sad story told a million times over, and so he left our home and made his home under a tree.

“Treatment-resistant” is what they called it. Sometimes, I would leave food beneath the tree, or a book or blanket - things you’re not supposed to do, but I could always justify my behavior.

What is enabling? I’m his mother. We’re different. You don’t understand. You don’t get it.

Phone Numbers

My son can’t hang onto a phone, and it’s hard to reach him. Every so often, he gets a new phone, and I wonder if it will be the number to last. I have saved and named every one of my son’s thirty-some numbers, thinking - maybe this will be the one that lasts. Once, I hoped he could get his first number back because that would somehow erase everything, a clean slate/old number, but that didn't turn out to be the case. His old number was taken.

Thinking I knew what I knew...

I thought I knew about raising kids. If you hung their art on the wall and encouraged them and showed up, created an art table, made them do chores, be sensitive, show kindness, be responsible, listen, be affectionate, and love them...blah blah...then they'd be okay.

Brother's Keeper

Somebody wrote to me: Can you still find that boy in the person you see now? I don't need you to answer me. These were just my thoughts...

I wrote back: Sometimes…in his smile or when he's sleeping, and I can touch his head or heart with my hand, I remember.

I cannot remember who asked me that question. There is so much I don’t recall, and I used to pride myself on my memory, so maybe you shouldn’t trust my words.

I am my own unreliable narrator.

Why did the person ask that question if they didn’t need me to answer them?

Wild Things

Let me go back to the beginning - back to a studio apartment called Valentino Place in the shadow of Paramount Pictures where we brought home a new baby boy the day George Bush, the older one, was elected. I thought I might vote on the way home from birth, the way one does, but I just couldn’t.

Our boy was born in a birth center and we had to go home a few hours after he was born. He was born at 1:15 in the afternoon, and we were home by five or five-thirty because it was still light outside in early November.

The sky was so bright blue against the California palm trees. It’s funny what you can remember.

As a baby, I read to him “Where the Wild Things Are” so many times that I can still recite it today from memory.

We made up our dance to the “Wild Rumpus.”

It was rumored that Valentino’s ghost haunted the apartment building and played tricks with the ancient birdcage elevator.

Placenta

We are people-pleasers to the hilt. So when the midwife gave us the placenta in a Ziploc baggy, we took it out of politeness. We are southern and we gave birth in California, and the midwife asked us if we’d like to take the placenta home. It was only a few hours after the birth, and we were packing up to leave, and she offered it to us with such hope and eagerness, detailing what we could do it with from gardens to milkshakes.

So we thanked her and took it home to our studio apartment in the Ziploc baggy and my husband put it into the freezer.

When my cock-of-the-walk, strutting, know-it-all brother-in-law came to visit his new nephew and learned of the placenta in the freezer, he blanched and cussed - his appalled expression changed from horrified to insulted to outraged to grossed out - all of it all at once - so much so that his rapidly contorting face became funnier and funnier and then outright hilarious to me. Maybe I was hysterical, but I had to turn my head into the pillow on the futon and laugh until it hurt while he ranted.

I wish I could even begin to describe to you how funny it was.

I put the placenta in a play called “Blood and Marriage.” In the play, my brother-in-law’s character comes to a bad end, which I got to watch night after night in rehearsal and during the run too.

Maybe One Day I Won't Chase You

During my kids' teen years when things started to spin out with teenage parties and such, I said to my son as he was either heading out the door or coming home from a late night or maybe just standing in the driveway, I can't remember, but what I remember saying is, "Maybe one day I won't chase you. Maybe one day I won't go looking for you."

We both looked at each other in amazement, and for a split second, neither of us believed my words, but in the next moment, I think we both knew it was true. He didn't argue - maybe he was thinking - finally, some peace in my life! But the expression on his face said something different. It was almost like I'd said to him, "One day, I'll stop loving you."

But I held that thought because I thought, maybe one day, I would stop trying to chase him from one party to the next. That method wasn’t working anyway. There was always another party. There was always another night to get through. The “wild rumpus” had morphed into something unsustainable and a little mean.

Round and round and round and round and round and round and around…Round and round and round and round and round and round and around…Round and round and round and round and round and round and around…Round and round and round and round and round and round and around…Round and round and round and round and round and round and around…Round and round and round and round and round and round and around…Round and round and round and round and round and round and around…

When I left California and took a job teaching college students creative writing in the Deep South, I stood before one of my first classes, kids close to the age of my children, and I thought - it’s none of my business what time any of y’all come home tonight. Halleluiah!

Sleeping On Planes

I am jealous of people who can sleep on planes, in deep untroubled sleep even in wicked turbulence. How do they do it? Why do I stay awake, wide-eyed and vigilant, sending good thoughts to the pilot to keep us aloft? 

Stagehand Parents at Halloween

When the children were small, we were Halloween stagehand parents. In the old days, we busied ourselves with carving pumpkins, roasting pumpkin seeds, and making costumes - we never bought costumes, because my husband was a master with cardboard, fake fur, and stage makeup. I am thinking of the costumes over the years.

Baby Elvis
Vincent Price
Kitty Cat
Grinch
Mummy
Edward Scissorhands
Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein
Hunchback of Notre Dame
Turkish belly dancer
Warm ballerina
Charlie Chaplin
Tin Man
Pippi Longstocking
Ted from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
Hamburger
Neanderthal
Lucille Ball
Invisible Man
Medusa
Phantom of the Opera
David Bowie
William H Macy from Boogie Nights
And also…Courtney Love, Jack Nicholson From "Chinatown" with a Band-Aid across his nose, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Bill from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure…so many costumes…

Scary Street

What can I tell you about Scary Street in Lincoln Heights? I became an expert at knowing this street. The day we tried to find him in Lincoln Heights, we first went to the park by Frank Capra’s house. Hey, wake up ghost of Frank Capra, have you seen our boy? But our boy wasn’t there. We combed the baseball field, and the picnic table where we ate picnic suppers when we'd pick him up from Project Room Key in Chinatown and go to Lincoln Heights to throw the baseball. We searched the roads leading to the park where men and women played soccer and other families picnicked. Nothing.

When we couldn't find him, we drove to Scary Street, a few blocks away. It’s Avenue 18 between Main St. and Barranca, and there’s nothing scary about it unless you drop your kid off at 10 pm and he walks away into the darkness toward vans, RVs, and tents. But in the light of day, it’s not scary. Or it wasn’t. Not so scary, by the light of day, but I am an expert at getting ahead of myself.

I am an expert at missing my son.

We found him that day, he was filling up jugs from the fire hydrant, putting the filled jugs into a shopping cart, and delivering each jug to each tent or van. He was busy, and we were interrupting his work. He had a job to do, and we were in the way.

We were experts at getting in the way.

Monsters

On the way to Sea World once, my mother looked into the review mirror to see her grandchildren dressed as twin Quasimodos in the backseat. They had each shoved a pillow under the backs of their t-shirts. Big brother helped little sister with her hunchback.

Mother sighed and said to me, "Could the children lose the humps for Sea World? Please?"

Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring

As a child, I remember watching a made-for-TV druggie movie as a child starring Sally Field called "Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring." A bearded guy (David Carradine) walks through the glass window or door in slow motion, and it shatters. I watched the movie with my younger siblings in our family den with the rust-shag carpeting on a Sunday afternoon in Pittsburgh.

Dad was on the phone recruiting a football player. Dad was always on the phone, trying to get football players to come to Pitt to play for him. We watched the movie, riveted, and we couldn't understand why this bearded guy kept walking through a kind of glass door in slow motion and why there was so much yelling with Sally Field and her parents and her little sister. Was this what it was like to be on drugs? The shattering glass scene played on a kind of flashback loop. As little kids, we were thunderstruck.  

Dad hung up the phone and came into the den, took one look at the TV, and said, "Turn that sumbitch off!"

When we didn't move he walked over and turned off the movie.

Wails, protests, howls! But no amount of begging budged him.

"Nobody needs to watch that crap. Get outside and play! Now! Move!"

"But Daddy! We need to find out what happens!"

"Like hell you do. Out now! Bunch of hippy crap. Don't do drugs. Bullshit life."

I would not find out if Sally Field came home or stayed home in the spring.

My father didn't have time for drama or people with problems or drugs, but he came with me to Betty Ford years later when we went for a week of Family Therapy. My son didn’t attend with us, so we all had to speak to an empty chair during group therapy. The other participants got to speak directly to their family members, but we (in four separate therapy groups) had to talk to an empty chair.

Much later, my son learned about the empty chair, and as I yelled at him during another argument to get him to see reason, he said calmly, “Tell it to the chair” and walked out the door.

You can’t really blame him.

Phone Tag

My sister said that I told her, "My addiction is my son, and the phone is my needle."

I can't remember saying this, but when you put it like that...

I texted his number over and over throughout the years, and the tune went something like this.

Me: Where are you?

Me: I will find you. Don't make me come and find you because I WILL!

Me: ???????

Me: Answer me, Mister. THIS SECOND!!!!

Me: I'm going to start texting your friends.

Me: Daddy is on the way.

Me: ???????

Me: ???????!!!!!!!!

Me: ??????? Please.

Son: Sorry. My phone died. Sup?

Who's the unhinged one?