Finding a New Way In

At a family party on a sheer, cloudless day, I’m crawling around my mom’s patio combing my way through the mossy pavers. What I’m looking for is an earring, a small opal stud. It used to be mine but, just an hour earlier, my mom handed the pair down to my daughter who left the earrings loose on the table and subsequently dropped one. We moved the heavy, wrought iron chairs out of the way and I’m on my knees tracing stones and moss, hopeful I can find the earring.

I’ve been reading Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir and thinking about my own stories again. A few weeks ago, after a dream I had about one of my childhood homes, I realized I might have more to write about than the same old stories that were handed off to me like a bouquet of balloons. I’ve lived these old stories, heard them, rehearsed them time and again, but now there’s something new—new rooms to explore, another way in.

Karr says the hallmark of a memoirist is her ability to look at stories from different angles. Doomed is the writer who thinks she has it all figured out. There’s always more than one way in. For many years, that wasn’t true, not for me at least. I could only see one way in and one way through, the way of pain and strife, disorder and chaos. Beneath it all was the hope for a new way but I couldn’t find it.

Last year, I was merely beginning to figure out what stories were begging me to tell them. I got some of it down on the page, but I was writing so fast, hoping to outrun the past and bypass the emotional wave that seemed doomed to crash and pull me under. Something wasn’t connecting. These old stories and the old way of telling them made me uneasy and anxious. I felt less curious than burdened, desperate that writing it would absolve the past and finally set me free.

In Inheritance, Dani Shapiro gives this advice to her students who are waiting to write their stories until someone dies so they can write whatever they want:

“I tell them that they may as well just start now, because it can be more difficult to write about the dead than to write about the living. The dead can’t fight back. The dead have no voice. They can’t say: But that isn’t how it was. You’re getting it wrong. They can’t say: But I loved you so. They can’t say: I had no idea.”

When I read that, I didn’t think it applied to me. Not that I’m waiting for family members to die to write my own stories, but the idea that some kind (any kind) of understanding could be reached by getting words on the page felt so foreign to me. I had little faith that my own perceptions could shift and realign themselves. I couldn’t see that perhaps the one who it would change would be me.

That’s the starting point, says Karr, when we can willingly, soberly look at the past and say, maybe it wasn’t exactly what I thought.

Searching for the earring, I want nothing more than to stand up. My knees ache from crawling, hunched over and hands outstretched. These earrings had been a surprise, something I thought I’d lost. Opal is my birthstone, a milky stone with a slightly iridescent play of color, and I had several pieces of jewelry which has been misplaced over the years. I had no idea my mom still had them. Why wasn’t I offered these back?

Maybe on a day not that long ago, bitterness would have shocked through me like a live wire. Maybe I would have said something mouthy and disrespectful, pleading for justice in all the wrong ways. Maybe I’d go home and cry and obsess over it for days, more evidence that I’m misunderstood.

A few minutes later, we find the rogue earring. I stand up and brush my knees, place the pair in a baggie for safekeeping. All I want is to feel like myself. I want a new way into these old stories, a way to sit with myself and my past and, as Raymond Carver puts it, “feel myself/beloved on the earth.”

We put the patio back together and sit the table to chat, the sun dipping over the neighbor’s roofs and out of view. These same stories, these same people—it’s all been the same for so long and yet, I can feel the shift. It’s barely perceptible but I have hope. And here it is: my daughter’s new earrings that have suddenly become an heirloom, and me, a daughter myself, finding a new way in.