Seeking Authentic Voice

My mother and biological father, circa 1955  My mother, born seventy-seven years ago today, was a story teller. I remember how restless I could be as I tried to sit through her telling me something. Especially as a teenager and young adult, I often thought, "Just get to the point!" She loved to weave in every detail she could remember, or rather every detail she wanted to remember. Her version of reality was usually not the same version that other people experienced. Although she only had a high school education she was very smart and spent the last years of her life learning about quantum physics.  My mother was never a healthy person, she had polio as a child and rheumatic fever. She use to tell stories of being five years old and confined to bed for a year, hooked up to machines. Her grandmother was her only joy in those days, visiting her and comforting her. She never found much solace, at least not that she chose to remember, in the care and love of her pare...

I've been reading Terry Tempest Williams' latest book, "When Women Were Birds" - a memoir of her mother. This is one reason memories of my mother surface within. Also. Friday, September 21, 2012 was the eighth anniversary of my mother's death. My memories of her are fading. Jergen's lotion reminds me of her hands. Someone will laugh, and I think of the tone of my mother’s laugh, tossing her natural red hair, green eyes shining bright. She claimed an Irish heritage but in reality she was of Scottish descent. Arscot is the family name on her mother’s side.   Holding only a high school diploma, she had a brilliant mind and a lifelong fascination with science and space. She might have been a novelist - gifted with an penchant for detail and a natural talent for storytelling. Her ability to spin reality into her own particular version, one she could live with , was convincing albeit confusing to me. Sadly her reality change, known in psychologi...

(The view from my mother's final resting place, along with my grandparents and an aunt, Salt Lake City, Utah) On September 21, 2004 I received a phone call about 11am. I was in the office at small church. The caller was my mother's roommate, a long time friend. My mother had a massive heart attack in the middle of the night and died. I left work and drove to her home, spending time with her body before she was taken away. My relationship with my mother was complicated. She was a lovely, charming, delightful, funny, woman. She was also profoundly damaged. She was 65. In her memory, a Mary Oliver poem. Complicated with a mix of delight, joy, and sorrow, including a child who has worked to find her own voice. Mary Oliver - Flare 1. Welcome to the silly, comforting poem. It is not the sunrise, which is a red rinse, which is flaring all over the eastern sky; it is not the rain falling out of the purse of God; it is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward, ...