Jennifer Lauck's Blog, page 34

[image error] I wake up. It's late. I've overslept.

I'm in a compact bedroom at an inn on the Oregon coast. It is advertised, "the most romantic place in the world," only I am at this inn alone. No romance. Just me and a dear friend—a fellow writer. Her name is Anne and Anne is terrific. She's a mom with kids all grown now. She loves my children and gives the best "mom" advice. Anne is my BFF. Best Friend Forever.

Anne is in her room across the hall. A world away. In her own dreams. Or so I think.

I blink myself awake and overhead the ceiling is made from heavy beams of rough hewn pine. Angles and edges exposed. The construction of this place is such that it feels something like living in a tree house. Exposed wood overhead and on the walls and floors, it's a forest without the wind blowing through the branches and without pine needles and pinecones. Still, all the wood overhead brings these opportunities to mind.

The windows, at right angles to each other, are like a giant open book and they are also louvered in wood. Morning sun leans through each slat and that's wrong. It's supposed to snow, or be snowing and yet that light is bright. It's like summer light. November.

I blink awake a little bit more and that's when I remember a dream I had. It was the kind of dream I'd rather forget.

It went like this: The Sun Magazine sent me a letter, via email. (Of course, stamps are so passé. So last week. )

Dear Ms. Lauck: (the letter of my dream began)

Thank you for your submission to the The Sun.
We are so glad we asked you to rewrite the essay titled Catherine.
We hated it the first time and upon your revision,
realized we hated it even more.
It's truly terrible, more so with your revision.
Thank you for the opportunity to reject this piece.

Best, Sy (editor of The Sun)

I want to be a person who doesn't believe in the power of dreams. I want to forget I had this one at all. I want to go back to sleep in order to rearrange Sy's words on the page to say, "we love your essay. We'll publish it without question," since these are the words I've been waiting to hear since submitting that essay eight months ago.

The nutty and alive smell of coffee invades my internal study of what this dream might mean. Is it prophetic? Is it anxiety? What? What?

Anne is upstairs. She's making coffee.

I push the covers back and put my feet on the floor.

Betty Jean (BJ) Lifton, PhD, was a writer, adoption counselor and a leading advocate of adoption reform.

She wrote: Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter, Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience and Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness, as well as books about children orphaned or separated from their families by war and the Holocaust.

BJ also lectured and held workshops throughout the US and abroad on the psychology of the adoptive family, and on Janusz Korczak, one of the world's first children's rights advocates, who gave his life for the orphans of the Warsaw Ghetto.

On Friday, November 19th at 11:45 p.m., the accomplished and compassionate BJ Lifton died of complications from pneumonia.

I learned of her death moments after it happened. I had been on Facebook and there it was: BJ Lifton died. I spent several heart stopping minutes in denial and demanded confirmation from my fellow Facebook friends.

Soon enough confirmation arrived. BJ, an adoptee herself, and a voice of sanity in a time of madness around the issue of adoption, was gone.

How was it possible? Did I not just speak her to days earlier, while she was on the coast and about to go home to Cambridge? Didn't we talk about storms and ocean retreats and the lovely need to "get away from it all"?

How could she be gone?

Adoptee and writer, Patrick McMahon wrote: "BJ will always be a relentlessly sane and caring voice in the minds of so many."

McMahon speaks to my own experience perfectly.

Recently I had asked, with some awe and trepidation, if BJ might consider reading my new book Found and possibly provide a quote.

BJ, gracious and available, did both and wrote: There are many ways of losing and being lost, and many ways of finding and being found when you are an adoptee. Jennifer Lauck has experienced most of them. We share her heroic and spiritual journey as a displaced child who has lost both her birth and adoptive mothers and suffers from a series of abusive would- be-mothers. But she finds herself on becoming a mother and forgiving those who failed her, including her birth mother. A compelling and uplifting memoir.

BJ also wrote to inquire into the deeper story behind the deterioration in my reunion story. Via email, I outlined misunderstandings between myself and birth-siblings which had brought our reunion to a standstill for more than eighteen months.

Without hesitation, BJ wrote back: "The regressed adoptee wants full attention from the mother -- every baby does -- but it sounds like your mother was being pulled by her other babies -- who wanted her attention too. A form of sibling rivalry, as ridiculous as that seems. Not unusual. The mother is not free to play out the reunion drama with the returned baby when her other babies can't tolerate it.

With one email, BJ helped overcome what had seemed insurmountable and in days I was again in contact with my birthmother.

And now she is gone?

BJ was no less than an angelic presence. She changed me in the eleventh hour and fifty fifth minute of her life. How blessed am I?

How blessed we have all been by this miraculous little woman who spoke with a voice of deep resonate authority. She was so young in her appearance (like so many adoptees I know) and yet so solid.

I pray her journey is a peaceful one and if she should reincarnate among us, that she fall into the womb of a wise and powerful mother who keeps her and holds her very close.

Safe passage, BJ.

As I wrote on Wednesday, I had the great good fortune to study under Jim Heynen at the MFA program with Pacific Lutheran University and Jim is simply a delightful human being and an extraordinary teacher. Thanks to one of his suggestions, I made a change to the point of view in chapter 13 if my upcoming book, Found: A Memoir and it made that section sing. He has great instincts.

[image error] Jim has written so many books, it's a bit daunting but I'd like to feature You Know What is Right and I found this sweet little blog post by fellow Oregonian/Writer Matt Briggs that sums the book up in such a lovely way:

Everything I know about what is called the short short or flash fiction or whatever you want to call it, I learned first from reading a small red hardback with a yellow dust jacket I found at a used bookstore in Seattle in the early 1990s called You Know What is Right by Jim Heynen. It had been published years before, in 1985, by a small press named North Point Press that, in turn, was bought by Farrar Straus and Giroux in the nineties where the name continues to exist as an imprint.

Heynen writes mostly about farms and rural life in the midwest. I guess these are regional stories if you want to get right down to it. They are written in a kind of plain and laconic style that reminds of the kind of talk used by my relatives from Iowa. Compared to the nattering rush of my Kentucky relatives, my great aunts and uncles from Iowa are reticent, even mute. When they make an observation it cuts to the quick. They say what they mean. They don't mess around with problems of context or irony. They have faith in language's ability to describe what they see...

...Each story executes a transformation. They occur in less than two pages or 500 words, and yet they are complete stories with beginnings and middle and ends. Unlike so many very short stories, Heynen's stories are not crushed into sharp fragments. They seem almost leisurely, belying the great skill and literary cunning necessary to create such fully-formed narrative in such a brief space.

To read the full posting, go to this link. Matt does a great job with his insights.

In speaking with Jim and his philosophy on words and storytelling, I learned a great deal about word choice and the importance of being thoughtful with each word. Jim offers this teaching in his own writing, time and time again. A few of his titles include:

Sunday Afternoon on the Porch (2008), University of Iowa Press.

Old Swayback (2006) Midnight Paper Sales.

Schoolhouses of Minnesota (2006), Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Harker's Barns (2003), University of Iowa Press

The Boys' House: New & Selected Stories (2001), Minnesota Historical Society Press

Standing Naked: New and Selected Poems (2001), poems, Confluence Press

Why Would a Woman Pour Boiling Water on Her Head? (2001), Tribolite Press

Read more about Jim's books and his philosophy at his web site!

Last summer, I took a course with the wonderful, generous and so gifted Jim Heynen while at the Pacific Lutheran University MFA program.

Jim taught a seminar on Short Shorts. I had no idea what this was but went because I so enjoy Jim and his teaching. Here is an interview with Heynen, from his own site, giving some insight into the flash form:

Q: You've written poetry, short stories, young adult novels, and a nonfiction book on centenarians. Which form comes most naturally to you?

JH: The short-short stories. There's a groove in my head for them. I often polish them the way I would a poem, but they come quickly, effortlessly. I hope to write more novels, but they don't come effortlessly. I suppose they don't for anyone--except maybe John Updike.

Q: Those effortless short-shorts you're referring to are your stories about "the boys'--that group of farm boys who inhabit the pages of The Man Who Kept Cigars in his Cap, You Know What is Right, The One-Room Schoolhouse, and your most recent selected collection, The Boys' House.

JH: Yes, those little guys. But many of the stories about the boys were published as poems--or as prose poems. An editor might take some of them and I'd assume they were going to appear in the fiction section--and, surprise: I'd find them squatting there among the skinny poems. This has happened lots of times.

Q: So if editors don't know what they are, what do you think they are?

JH: Some of them are cross-dressers, especially the ones that are lyrical rather than narrative moments. I don't blame editors for putting these in the poetry section of a magazine. It just surprises me, catches me off guard and makes me have a second look at them. The label I prefer for most of these little stories, though, is tales, like telling. When I am writing these stories, it's as if I am hearing the voice passed down to me through an oral tradition. A really good story that has been passed down orally glistens in a pure and simple language, yet sounds natural, sounds easy--as if anybody could have written or told it.

Jim gave me a chance to play and practice this "little" form and while I found it to be a particular challenge (because I am so "wordy" by nature), I was intrigued. Only this week did finally write something that hit the mark and thus the little short I wrote on Monday--which is so damn short--I'll print it again:

Her lover swore he was infertile.
Her test came back positive.
"Impossible," he said.

INSTRUCTIONS: Now you try. Write three lines that are an entire story.


EXAMPLE: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." This was written by Hemmingway.

WRITE & SUBMIT: No more than twenty words. Good luck! Share your writing by emailing me via this site.

At the time my books came out, between 2000-2004, there was no such thing as the promotional trailer! But does that stop me? Indeed, no!

watch?v=pG_CAkCsksA

Check out this new modality of spreading the word, via You Tube

12.
The Little Boat

Peggy is a heavy set, thick woman, with dark hair she keeps back from her face with a hair band. She has wide, thick hands and wide hips. She is tall and stout. A sturdy German woman, Grandpa likes to say.

Peggy is a housewife who stays home with her baby, Kimmy. Peggy does laundry, shops for groceries and plans meals. At the end of each day, Peggy prepares dinner for Richard—tacos, enchiladas, Salisbury steak, chicken fried steak, and something called rigatoni which is a mashed up beef stuffed into pasta shells and then covered with red sauce.

Richard is even bigger than Peggy but where her shoulders are wide and strong, his slope and his pants ride low on his narrow hips. When Richard bends over, half of his behind is there for everyone to see. His stomach is so round that he looks pregnant with twins.

Richard works as an appliance repairman. At the end of the day, his fingernails are black with the grease of his profession. After dinner, Richard takes his spot on the sofa to watch episodes of Bonanza and Wild Wild West. He carves grime from under his nails with a pair of nail clippers. He does the same to his feet. Toe jamb.

For the rest of my life, I will remember the sight of him in front of the T.V. and the way he could bend his leg wide around his belly. Richard was a contortionist.

And Richard smokes. Chain smoker—one after another—all day, all night (until sleep finally makes his mouth go slack). When he speaks to me, it is usually to replenish his dwindling supply of smokes, locate his lighter or to empty his overflowing ashtray.

He calls out, “hey, No Neck, get me a pack of cigarettes.” “Hey, No Neck, get me my lighter.” “Hey, No Neck, clean out this damn ashtray.”

I go to look at myself in the mirror in the bathroom. I look right and left at my own neck. I have a neck and I even feel up the back of it to make sure. My neck is long and obvious. Why does he call me that? Richard does not explain.

Richard and Peggy’s house is a one level with three bedrooms and asbestos siding. A chain link fence surrounds the yard and the grass is burned to brown, tan spiky nothing.

Every house on the street is the same—ranch style, asbestos siding, dead grass and chain link.

If beauty has an opposite—it lives in this neighborhood and in the hearts of these people.

I sleep in the sewing room at the back of the small house and for the first few weeks, I have a fantasy that our arrangement is temporary. I am sure some upset will happen and whoosh, I will be swept out of all this ugliness. There is reassurance within when I dream of leaving. I tell myself that anywhere would be better than this stagnate, dreary place. I’d even welcome going back to L.A. and living in the commune. At least in the commune, I had been relatively free. Compared to Richard and Peggy’s, the commune was a little slice of heaven.

This vision gets me through the rest of the summer and then three things happen to whittle all hope to dust.

One, Peggy puts me into school. She has a terrible time doing this because there are no records of my going to school in L.A.

I try to tell her about living alone at the commune and how I dropped out of school. Peggy did not believe me and said I had one wild imagination. She made calls and tried to get some evidence of my education but the facts were the facts. No school records. I tried to tell her, again, how I had only done a small bit of school, here and there but was constantly being pulled out for all the moves, the deaths and so on. Again, Peggy rolled her eyes. She said I knew how to read and write and did math too. That kind of thing didn’t come from magic. There is no use in telling the woman how I taught myself to read and write and learn a bit of math. She doesn’t listen to a word I say.

That’s when the second thing happened.

When I was finally signed up for school—taking some tests to place me in 7th grade, which was a full year behind—I overheard Peggy explain that all my records had been destroyed due to deaths in the family. She also said that she was now my, “legal guardian.”

The third thing was the arrival of my princess bedroom set. Deb sent it, in a moving truck, all the way from L.A. While I set up my furniture, I realized that I wasn’t going anywhere.

❃


The only thing to do is stay in my room, read a book and hope nothing else goes wrong. And that’s what I do, all the time. I sleep and I read.

Sometimes, Aunt Peggy will put her foot down and make me leave my room.

“Go play with kids, get some fresh air, it’s not natural the way you are inside all day.”

Outside, I sit on the curb, in front of the house until she lets me in again. I do not play with other kids. No one is like me.

❃


The rules are simple. I help with dinner, I clean the dishes, I set the table, I fold laundry, I look after Kimmy, I change her diaper, I get Richard his cigarettes, lighter and ashtrays. And I do not back talk, which is any conversation from my side of things. I am to be seen and not heard. If I do all this, there is a kind of peace. I adapt. This becomes my life.

❃


When a holiday comes around the calendar, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Peggy and Richard cut themselves out of the house in the military subdivision and set up an exact duplicate of their life in the woods. They bring their trailer, a cook stove, coolers of food, packs of cigarettes and pots for making coffee. Kimmy comes too and with her comes all her baby stuff: playpen, diapers, high chair and toys. The only thing they leave behind is the TV.

It’s Labor Day and Richard is in a fold up chair, his foot close to his face. The canvas of the chair strains against his bulk as he picks at his big toe with his pocketknife. Kimmy is down for a nap. Peggy plays solitaire at the picnic table. There is nothing for me to clean or cook. The campsite is all picked up. I wander off into the woods, following a trail that leads to the creek.

Richard calls out, “Don’t go far.”

“All right,” I say. I push my hands deep into the pockets of my shorts and my foot glances off a pinecone. I kick it a couple feet, catch up to it and kick it a couple feet more.


I have been living with these people for close to a year now. I am twelve years old. Each day passes pretty much the same as the one before.

A part of me, watching them in action, wonders if they represent a true family. Is Richard a genuine husband? Is Peggy the model of a good wife? Is this what “normal” looks like? I don’t feel part of their triad or the rituals of their lives—I detest camping, doing dishes and taking care of Kimmy. And I cannot comprehend how Peggy is in complete service to Richard. She doesn’t even read a book or have friends. Her entire existence and meaning circulates around Richard, which seems so odd. He’s such a jerk. She insists he’s misunderstood and there is so much good to Richard, as if she needs to convince herself.

The air smells like pine and earth and things that grow and die at the same time. The ponderosa pine trees stand tall and solid and their branches unfold high on the trunks, holding pinecones and long needles.

The pinecone I kick is half the size of a football and when I catch up to it, I kick it again. It wobbles off toward the creek.

About three months ago, at the end of the school year, Peggy sent me on a trip to San Francisco to visit a cousin I didn’t know. The woman had a little girl, maybe seven years old and I got the feeling that maybe, just maybe, Peggy decided to send me away because they didn’t want me anymore. I tried to ask but Richard got steamed. He yelled, “Do as you’re told, you good for nothing no-neck kid.”

So I went to San Francisco, stayed a few days and in the night my cousin’s boyfriend came into my bed. He was a big man with a beard. He put his hand over my mouth. I could not move with his weight on me. He spoke in my ear, told me to enjoy it.

“You know you want it,” he said. “Come on baby, relax.”

I told my cousin what her boyfriend was doing and she sent me back to Richard and Peggy. My cousin told me not to tell.


I kick the pinecone one more time and it pops up, arcs into the air and drops into the creek. The pinecone bobs downstream and I watch it go.


When I came back from San Francisco, Richard seemed very upset. He said I was a real screw up and that’s when I knew he wanted me to go away. He was hoping I would have stayed in San Francisco—even though no one said that out loud.


I squat at the edge the creek. It’s a wide span of fast moving crystal clear water and in the bottom are stones and twigs. I press my hand into the water, icy cold and move the earth of the creek bed through my hand. The earth is many colors, brown, tan, white and black.

I’m like an apple, not yet ripe, that’s been cut into over and over again.

When I was six, my cousin Steve came to stay at Number One on Twenty-Eighth. He was there to take care of Bryan and me while my mother was in the hospital. He only stayed for a few weeks. He smoked marijuana and made B.J. lay on top of me without clothes. He told B.J. to touch me, the way girls liked. He wouldn’t let me leave the room. I got all dizzy and passed out while they laughed.

The next time, I was eight and the Adonis swim instructor took me to his room, pulled his swim trunks off and did things I cannot remember. Terrible things. Thank God for slippery memory.

Now my cousin’s boyfriend and I can still feel his hand over my mouth. I can still taste my tears mixed up with the taste of his hand—salty, bitter. I can still feel the pain.

When I finally told Richard and Peggy what happened in San Francisco, Richard said I was lying and Peggy just rolled her eyes. They both said I was quite a little storyteller.

If I wanted to lie, I would lie up a good one about rescuing kittens from drowning or helping an old lady across the road. I would not, under any circumstances, lie about something as nasty as this. “Why?” I wanted to scream at them. “Why would I lie about this?”

But I didn’t scream. Speaking up was back talk.

The only way to survive is to forget. I bury the memories and lose track of where they went.

I dry my hands on my shorts and sit at the side of the creek for a long time. I hold my arms around my knees and get quiet in a way that is different for me. The voices that are usually in my head go away and it’s just me and the water and the sun.

A little cut of driftwood floats past and it’s wide at one end and narrow at the other.

I snag it from the water and turn the wood this way and that way. I size it up.

At my back, Richard is still crouched over his foot and Peggy deals herself a new game. With the driftwood in my hand, I go up the dirt path that runs along the side of the creek. I climb a small rise and stop when I find a still pool of water. With great care, I release the wood and go back downstream.

In a few minutes, just like I suspected, the bit of driftwood floats down. The top is still dry, even after its journey down the fast water and I decide it’s a boat. I go back up the trail with the little boat, picking a few tiny wild daisies as I walk. I lay the flowers on the flat surface of the boat and release it into the still water again.

A kind of excitement is in me, to see if the boat will carry the load down without tipping. I jog to my waiting place.

The boat bobs on the current, safe and sound and I can’t help but smile. Such a good boat. I take the flowers off and add some pine needles, a rock and a couple other things.

Up and down I go. I don’t even know how many times. It’s just me, that little hunk of wood, water and sun. It’s good. I’m happy working to find the perfect equation of balance. Eventually, inevitably, I name my boat.

It’s Catherine with a C, like a queen, or maybe a princess. The name Catherine feels magical, divine, inspired and even unique. I don’t know anyone named Catherine and I feel proud of myself for coming up with such a good name, all on my own. I say it over and over again. Catherine, Catherine, Catherine.

❃


When we were all done camping and drive home, I sit in the back seat of the car and look out the side window with a harried feeling under my skin. Packing to leave is one thing after another—Richard yelling and Peggy bossing. He calls me a “no-neck” and a “good for nothing.” She rolls her eyes and sighs a lot as if I am a test on her nerves. Between the two of them, it’s like being in a blender. My nerves are shot.

Richard and Peggy are up front and Kimmy is on Peggy’s lap, asleep or on her way to sleep. She sucks her thumb and is cradled in Peggy’s arms.

Afternoon sun comes through the forest, making streams of light fall sideways. As we drive out of the forest, all the craziness calms down and that’s when I realize I left Catherine at the side of the creek.

I put my hand over my mouth but not before I say, “oh my god,” out loud.

Peggy jumps a little and twists her head.

“What?”

I think about saying, “I left my driftwood boat at the side of the creek,” but I don’t. It sounds too stupid. Peggy is never going to understand. Richard will say something stupid and mean.

I burst into tears.

“What’s the matter?” Peggy asks.

I shake my head. I don’t want to cry. I want to make myself stop but I can’t. I am just mortified I left my little boat behind.

Richard adjusts the mirror to look back at me.

“Shut up already,” he says. “You’re going to wake Kimmy.”

“Richard, enough,” Peggy says. She reaches over the seat, touching my knee. “Are you hurt?”

I shake my head to say no and I’d do anything to just grow up and stop being such a baby. I wipe my nose with the back of my arm and look out the window like that might help but nothing helps. Catherine is at the side of the creek, alone in the dark. I left her. I abandoned her.

I can see her in my mind, surrounded by leaves and daisies and rocks. She was my boat. My good, sturdy, wonderful boat, with the best name in the world but I left her. I just can believe it. I want to die.

Peggy keeps her hand on my knee and I know she is worried and confused and even a little sad. I can see goodness in Peggy that makes me forgive her for being with a jerk like Richard. She’s not terrible; she’s not a monster. She just has bad taste.

Richard says I’d best shut up or he’ll give me something to really cry about and Peggy sighs since she doesn’t know what to do.


When we get home, I go to my room and close the door. At my desk, I pull out a sheet of paper and write “Catherine, all time favorite girls name.” I put the sheet of paper into my Columbia Viking Desk Encyclopedia, under the letter C, so I’ll never forget.

Brush teeth for 2 minutes.
Drink 1 pot of tea.
Eat 3 squares of lavender chocolate-secret treat.

Lower 3 shades in her room.
Open 2 curtains in his.
Hug each child 2 times. (Remember they need at least 12 hugs each day.)

1 TBSP of fish oil &
1 TBSP of Vit. B in the fruit smoothie for the boy.
12 cashews for her and 1 pop-tart or 1/2 a bagel with cream cheese smear.

For me, drink 36 oz. of water.
Eat, 1 slice of toast
1 TBSP of sunflower butter.

The ride to school arrives at 8
The late bell rings at 8:30
Write until 11:30 ~ 3 hours equals 7 pages

70 minutes of yoga
Home by 1:30
Answer 3 emails, Read 3 web sites

Leave for pick up at 3:00.
Get 3 kids in car by 3:30
Home by 4. Dinner at 5

Hugs. At least 8.
"I love you's" sprinkled around.
Homework 1 hour. 1 glass of wine.

Tae Kwan Do at 6:30
The boy needs 60 minutes of cardio exercise 5 days a week.
Read to her for 30 minutes.

Bed at 8:30. Go over 12 hug min & hug them until they protest.
Read for 1 hour while she falls asleep against my shoulder.
One essay. Three chapters of a novel. Hug son 5 more times before 9.

50 kegals
Brush teeth for 2 minutes and
finally fall asleep after 5 deep breaths.