I Guess It Skips A Generation

by Giselle Renarde

I took my mother for a walk a few weeks ago.  She won't go on her own.

We walked through the neighbourhood where I grew up.  It's not the ritziest area.  According to the Rap Dictionary, it has "the dubious distinction of having the highest concentration of subsidized housing in all of Ontario."  Lots of gang violence--the kind that's not widely reported because, hell, it's just black people shooting each other so who really cares?

When I was growing up in the 80s, the community had its sights set on cleaning up one particularly noticeable aspect of my neighbourhood: the rampant street prostitution.

I was young back then, and my family had problems of its own, so I'm not sure street prostitution was something I really noticed.  Actually, I remember seeing many more anti-prostitution signs than actual prostitutes.

But, as I said, I was a kid.  Sometimes kids take things at face value because, if you see something every day, it seems normal.

Although, realistically, of everything that goes on in this world, I'd say prostitution is right up there with falling in love on the normalcy scale. It's always existed, and it always will.

When my mother and I were out for our recent walk, the topic of prostitution came up--kind of weird, in a family that NEVER talks about sex.  And it was my mother who brought it up, too.  We were talking about the controversial proposal of building a casino here in Toronto.  My mom was against the idea because "people get addicted to gambling, and a casino would probably attract prostitutes."

Huh.  Is that what casinos do?

Anyway, my mother's general opposition to prostitution surprised me, and not just because I believe so strongly that sex work is real work and should be widely recognized at such.  My maternal grandmother and I have talked at length about sex work and we're 100% on the same page:

We believe that sex work is a valid career choice.  It existed long before we did, and it's not going away any time soon.  We recognize that some people are forced into the trade or enter it for reasons related to poverty and systemic oppression, but we have hopes that decriminalizing prostitution would ease many of the dangers faced by sex workers by allowing them easier access to protection from the forces that now tyrannize and harrass them.  That said, the biggest shift is never a legal one.  Stigma and sin are so deeply attached to sex work that very little can be gained until those perceptions are dealth with.

My grandmother and I have spoken at length about sex work.  For her, it's a feminist issue.  She's been my feminist inspiration for as long as I can remember.  That's why it always boggled my mind that my mom, wedged between her own mother and me, held such brazenly different opinions.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised.  After all, isn't it normal for a kid to rebel against her mother's ways and beliefs?  My grandmother was (and is) an unapologetically strong woman.  I now realize my mother's got more strength than I gave her credit for when I was younger, but she's rather more on the Marge Simpson side of the scale.  And then along came me, and I rebelled again, swinging back in my grandmother's direction.

Prostitution, like pretty much everything else, is a divisive issue among feminists.  I'm starting to think there are as many feminisms as there are individuals.  But my grandmother laid a path for me, and I walk it whether I'm in my cozy neighbourhood or the rough but familiar one in which I grew up. 

I'll mention one more thing--a bit of a tangent to the conversation I had with my mother that day.  I'm not sure why, but I asked what her favourite song was.

She said, "These Boots Are Made For Walking."

"Really?"  I wondered if maybe she didn't understand the song.  I asked, "Why do you like it so much?"

She said, "It's about being a strong woman and standing on your own two feet."

Oh, mom.  I'd never have guessed.

Selling My Heart

by Kristina Wright

The stories I find the hardest to write, to finish, to edit are the ones that are the most personal. The ideas that tap-tap-tap at the back of my brain until I put down some words on paper and then step back and read what I've written... only to delete them or close the file and bury it in some "Works in Progress" folder on my hard drive.

I should say, it's never fiction that causes me this angst. Even fiction that might possibly be based on some true life event doesn't make me falter, fingers poised over the keys, wondering, "Should I write this?" For better or worse, I am a fiction writer at heart and though I may wail and moan about how a particular story or book is driving me mad, at the end of the day it's still fiction and I have some emotional distance.

No, it's the nonfiction I write that are my problem children. These nonfiction blog posts and essays are far more intimate glimpses into who I am than any piece of fiction I write. And so, I find it hard to finish these bits of literary DNA, harder still to share them with the world. It's like taking a scalpel and slicing open my chest and peeling away the flesh to show you vein, muscle, organ and bone. And though I can stitch myself back up when you are done poking and prodding and making sense of my parts, the scar remains as a reminder that I was open. Exposed. Vulnerable. Forever changed.

I have written some things here at Oh Get a Grip! that I never imagined I would share. For awhile, I adopted a persona of fearless writer-- nothing was too personal to share. That's laughable, of course, because even on my best day I am not half as fearless as some writers I know. I may put the words out there, but there's always something I'm holding back. Always some emotional truth I keep close. I may give you a glimpse of an ultrasound, but I hide the scalpel.

One of the most personal-- and therefore hardest-- piece to write was my post about my mother's death: July 25, 2007. I probably spent longer writing that blog post than any fictional story I've written since. That piece is a problem child for me, still, because I know what I intended for it to be and what I had to cut to make myself comfortable posting it. I have reread it a few times-- the words that I edited out lost forever-- and I know it's honest and true and that I have sold my heart as Fitzgerald would advise. And yet, and yet...

I long to take my problem children out of the darkness and line them up in a row-- these stories that I keep buried because they rest too close to main arteries-- and then I long to put the scalpel in the reader's hand and say, "Have at it. Here I am. See it all." And maybe that's why, as I near the fifth anniversary of my mother's death, I find myself more and more drawn to the idea of writing a memoir. Not a journal that I can tuck away in my underwear drawer or a blog post that only scratches the surface of the truth, but a memoir for the world to read (should the world want to, of course). Do I dare? Is it worth it? The fact that I ask the questions tells me I should and it is.

My life has been filled with stories that are problem children. They are still here, tucked inside my heart, waiting for the slice of the scalpel that will reveal them.

July 25, 2007

by Kristina Wright

My mother and me. She was 29, I was 5.

The phone rang a little before 8 AM. I'm not a morning person (even now, with two babies under 2) and no one who knows me would call me that early. It was too early to be a friend, too early to be a solicitation. I reached for the phone, sleep still clinging to me like cobwebs even as a feeling of impending bad news settled into my bones. Do you know that feeling?

"Hello?"

"Hello. It's Chuck," he said. "Your father."

Stepfather, technically. And it was the first time I'd heard his voice in over a decade. Close to fifteen years, in fact. Not that I needed the clarification of our relationship. The name, in his gruff voice, was enough.

"Yeah?"

I was being rude. Deliberately so. No, "Hello" or "How are you?" or any of the polite things people say when they haven't talked in years. Just, "Yeah?" We had no relationship, no bond. There was only one reason he would be calling me. I knew without being told. I waited for it.

"I was calling to let you know your mother passed this morning."

I hate that word. "Passed." It's the worst euphemism for death, I think.

"What happened?"

The details followed in short, choppy sentences punctuated by my equally short and choppy questions. I'd already had an inkling something had happened after a cousin mentioned my mother's heart attack several days earlier in an email. A heart attack I hadn't heard about from my stepfather. This was the only phone call I got. To tell me she was dead. "Passed."

I know I had questions--when, how, what caused it--though I don't really remember much about what I asked or what he told me. I remember long pauses and breathing, in-out, in-out, willing it to be over so I could go back to sleep. I remember him rambling on, telling me the minutia about the hours leading up to her heart attack. What she'd been doing (watching television, first Army Wives and then Bill O'Reilly), where she'd been (on the couch), what she said about not wanting to go to the hospital. I do clearly remember asking if she had been in any pain before she died. He said no. I think I said, "That was days ago. You could have called me before she died." He made some excuse about being busy at the hospital.

He said something about funeral plans. I told him to let me know. He didn't.

Then the conversation was over. He finished with, "Well, give us--I mean me--a call sometime." His voice broke and for a minute I felt sorry for him. Almost 40 years of marriage. Rocky years, mostly, but he probably felt lost without her.

I hung up the phone and looked at the clock. We'd talked for less than ten minutes. There was no closure, no "I love yous" or any other heartfelt sentiments you'd expect between a father and his daughter upon the death of the woman they called wife and mother. It was what it was.

I didn't intend to call him any more than I planned to attend the funeral several states away. The only thing I did was look for her obituary online several days later. Under her surviving relatives, I was referred to by my maiden name. My stepfather's last name. A name I hadn't used in nearly seventeen years. Figures.

I didn't go back to sleep that morning. The tears came about five minutes later while I lay there trying to feel something about her death. I cried for about as long as we'd talked, feeling the permanence of a loss I'd lived with for most of my life. The mother I wanted and never had. The mother I needed who didn't exist. I cried, not for her death, but for the loss of what could never be. The fantasy. The hope that someday we might find a way to be the mother I needed and the daughter she wanted. It never would have happened, of course. Even if she'd lived to be 100 instead of only 64, we never would have had that fantasy relationship. I knew that. Had always known that. But death brings with it a finality that destroys even the most optimistic hope.

I called my husband who was out of the state at the time and I called three friends who knew about my non-relationship with my mother. No one knew what to say to me and I couldn't have told them. There really were no words to make it better or easier. It was what it was.

That afternoon, I went to an amusement park with one of those friends, a date we'd planned weeks before that I refused to cancel. I stubbornly stuck to the plan even though I would have rather crawled into bed and stayed there for the rest of the day. In retrospect, I realize my stubbornness was mostly grief-stricken shock. It was a child-like celebration of life. I rode rollercoaster after rollercoaster until I was dizzy and sick from it and at every flip and turn I screamed.

A rollercoaster is a good place to scream. No one is startled. No one even cares. You could murder someone on a rollercoaster and as long as no one saw you do it, the screams would go unanswered.

I screamed as loud and as long as I could, until my voice was hoarse and raw from strain. I screamed as if my heart were breaking. I screamed as I hurled through the air, head over heels, the ground above me, the sky an upside down blur. I screamed into the wind, my voice lost among other screams and the sounds of machinery and carnival music. I screamed, not caring that it would hurt to talk the next day. I screamed with my hands in the air in defiance of every instinct that said hold on tight and protect myself.

Yes, I cried on the day my mother died. But mostly I screamed.