morethanenoughtruth

Blood, muscle, sinew, nerve and bone, quickened with apprehension of self, cries out, “Be! Become!” The story of self is universal, a babe born with infinite inheritance, due everything, owing nothing. A god-being, nascent free-wheeling self. A baby at the breast, I break suction drooling warm milk, to smile at my mother. My only memories are of comfort, a beating pulse, movement, limbs thrusting, asserting the priority of release. My beginning is pure. I am all. Then…”The Other”. She is Mother. She is warmth, palliation of senses. Her very act of being initiates my fall from totality, in that she herself is a self, a not-me. My universe is slashed, rent into Me and Thee. Paradise is lost.

It is only now with the clarity of age that I can see my mother, Mary Opal Martin in focus. She once traveled this same path. She once too was incarnate, and now in death is but the legend of her own quest. My own positioning in the flow of the eternal is a gift from her and informed by her separate reality. That I could so dissociate the animal of my incarnation from its spirit flows from witnessing my mother’s struggle to heal the various splinters of her own psyche. I knew from almost the inception that she was adrift, and rooted my burgeoning psychology in the certainty of my own observation and intuition, a firm “not -true” ascribed to her patently incredible “not real.” Whether this resulted in a precocious separation or merely an incomplete one, I cannot say. I know only that from the beginning I embraced the empirical logic of my own thought as rational, and celebrated that knowledge as my own, individual, inviolate integrity.

Maternal imperative and psychological separation kept me isolated from the relentless influence of peers. Mother often pointed out that she was better company than those “stupid girls” who stood in our yard singing “Do-ro-thee-ee”, a tuneful demand that I come out to play. During twelve years pre-high school diploma, I attended twenty-one different public and private schools, knowing only what it meant to be the new girl. Always I beat them at their own silly game, rejecting them before they could reject me. It was safer that way, safer but lonelier, especially in the skin of an adolescent. Having set myself apart from all things maternal, I had no skill in identifying myself as one of a set of female identities. I never once opened the pages of a movie magazine. Being different was a comfort, a shield, a challenge. Human children are cruel, a fact that precludes my gushing “I just adore children” when asked if I like kids. As a youngling, I myself was no less vituperative, only more passive-aggressive. Even now, I constantly remind myself to be, at the very least, true to what is real and good. The result is a slow veering toward a proximate humanity. One thing has always been unquestioned: I do, so very much, love my children. I am scribing these confessions of human frailty and redemption for them, so they will understand how precious, how worth the struggle, is the possibility of becoming human. It was a challenge met by my mother, Mary, and by my father, Kelsey, as they made their own difficult heroic journeys. Having eviscerated my own dragons, I can now appreciate the nobility of their struggles and forgive what in them I had so callously despised. I was their child, and they loved me, even as I love my own three beautiful and heroic sons and the lives they have brought forth to grace our future.