A string of birthdays in our family begins with mine on the 7th. I was born without much fanfare, after merely 1 hour of labor. My mother called my Grandmother to tell her the news, saying into the phone,”Well, I had it.”
“You had it? Well, what is it?”
My Grandmother took over most responsibilities when it came to my upbringing,thankfully.
On my 17th birthday, I celebrated with a dinner of shrimp lo mein and chocolate cake. Hours later, as I was finishing up forgotten homework (conjugating Spanish verbs,if memory serves me right), I started to feel queasy and lost all my birthday dinner…and then I realized I was in labor.
13 hours later,Dylan Thomas was born, marking the start of my motherhood. Nurses milled around ,whispering,”The poor thing…having a baby for her birthday.Now she’ll never be able to put this behind her.”, (as if I could ever just put such a thing behind me). The adoptive parents were waiting patiently for me to spend my last moments saying good-bye to the newborn so they could claim him as their own and officially name him Todd Robert instead of the name I would have chosen for him. I broke their heart when I couldn’t give them the baby they wanted because I wanted him just as much if not more than they ever could.
March 8th this year marked my son’s ascent into adulthood ,the day he turned 18. The path I chose made it certain I was there to celebrate the day with him instead of being a woman who had just celebrated her 35th birthday, wondering how that kid was I had given up for adoption when I was just a kid and whether or not he would come looking for me now that he was an adult.
The 9th and 10th of March also marked other familial birthdays - aunts,uncles cousins. The 11th is my Grandmothers….the woman who took it upon herself to provide a motherly influence in my life,especially after a day when I was just an infant and she walked upstairs to answer my cries to find my own mother angrily shaking me and screaming at me to shut the fuck up. She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever known. I wish my children could have known the real her,not the woman who now lives in a world full of riddles and confusion thanks to Alzheimers.
Every day since the 7th, she has called our house to wish someone a “Happy Birthday”. She knows it’s someone’s birthday but can’t quite remember who. On my birthday,she wished my daughter Happy Birthday. On Dylan’s ,she called to wish it to me.When it comes to conversations with my Grandma, everything is repeated about 20 times a day. She’ll call to say a simple Happy Birthday and 5 minutes later call to say the same. It’s all new in her brain, the previous call never having been completed.
Normally, I act as if every conversation is just as new to me as it is to her, even though I’ve already been through the same dialog 20 times. It’s like the movie Groundhog Day but sadder. On Sunday, I broke my usual pattern for whatever reason and informed her that it was not my birthday anymore….that it was Sunday.”Oh,I thought it was Thursday”, she said before starting to cry over losing days somewhere.
There probably is a book out there somewhere that explains Alzheimer’s Etiquette but I haven’t read it yet. I’m learning as I go and now I have learned that when she thinks it’s a Thursday and it’s not, I should just pretend it’s Thursday.
The 12th has another family birthday significance but I have chosen to erase it and replace it instead as Jack Kerouac’s birthday and NOT Uncle Jack’s. This particular Uncle was a fat man who was perpetually dirty,both in appearance and in spirit.Engine grease and cigarette smoke was soaked into his skin .”Come sit on Uncle Jack’s lap” meant that he would bounce you on his lap as his hand worked it’s way up the inside of your thigh to your crotch. With the bizarre attitude towards child abusers within a family, my Grandparents were too “polite” to never let him in their house but after having their own girls sit on Uncle Jack’s lap one too many times, they guarded me closely in his presence and I thankfully never had to experience it. As it was,Pisces intuition told me he was not a man to trust and I steered clear of him anyway, not knowing until I was older the evil he was.
As a teenager,I fell in love with Jack Kerouac,intoxicated by his words. Despite the biographies that told me he was a misogynistic drunk who shirked his paternal obligations to his daughter, I romanticized him and excused any personal flaws he had. Already a budding feminist in my early teen years, I learned that the line between being a strong woman and submitting yourself to being a willing personal sex slave is a fine and one I’d admittedly cross in another time and place where I coexisted with a living Jack Kerouac.
Therefore, I erased the negative association of The Bad Jack and replaced it with one that is positive in my own mind. Strange,I know..but it helps.
Jack’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty “essentials.”
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
