Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1

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Feeling My Way Through: Writing about a Childhood in Foster Care / David Bahr

Keywords: Memoir; Literature; Queer Studies

<1> I don‘t remember when I first began to write about my experience as a foster child; I do know that I had been “writing” it in my head for years. Waiting for a train, walking down the street, standing in an elevator, I would replay scenes, test phrases, and try to imagine the form and structure that my fragmented childhood might take.

<2> Here‘s what I do remember: sitting in the dining room of my then-partner Steve‘s home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I gaze at the blemished beige wood, the circular stain left by a can or cup. It‘s midday, diffuse gray light fills the room. My jaw is clenched, my fists tight; I am paralyzed. To work through it, I write a sentence, revise it, then return to an incapacitated state for, what seemed, hours. A friend of ours later tells Steve: “I see David sitting at that table . . . there is so much tension in his face and body. It‘s like he‘s going to explode.”

<3> Writing about my life as a former foster child with a mentally ill mother has been difficult for me, mostly because it doesn‘t seem to exist as a story but rather as a black hole situated somewhere in my body‘s core: it‘s dense and dark and traps every bit of light that enters. The fragments that I recollect come to me unexpected, often while listening to a song, seeing a photograph, film, painting, or piece of sculpture. Memories have also been jogged, or inspired, by other people‘s memoirs: Afterlife by Donald Antrim, concerning the author‘s troubled mother and his own psychological breakdown; The Mistress‘s Daughter by A.M Homes, about the writer‘s unsettling reunion with her biological parents decades after being given up for adoption; Stop-Time by Frank Conroy and This Boy‘s Life by Tobias Wolff, both coming of age stories about nomadic childhoods with emotionally difficult parents. Poetry and autobiographical fiction have been even more fruitful, in terms of unlocking embodied memories. “Kaddish” by Allen Ginsberg, the eulogy of a gay Jewish man to his mentally ill mother, continues to affect me viscerally. (“Death, stay thy phantoms!”) The Things They Carried, by Tim O‘Brien, a work of Vietnam War-related stories featuring a protagonist named “Tim O‘Brien,” is perhaps the most influential book I have read, in terms of my own writing. His conception of how embodied memories are dynamic and the “truth” ever-shifting, alive, and made “true” through a life-long process of composition, resonates with me.

<4> Inspiration and the summoning of embodied memories are distinct from the challenges involved in transforming such sensations into prose. But I can‘t put words to paper until I physically register what I‘m trying to convey. That afternoon in Provincetown, faced with such a challenge, I was stuck, choking on emotions that had no verbal counterpart, feeling like a person without a past. So I did what I often do when trying to conjure a scene: I closed my eyes and tried to invoke the phenomenology of an event. I searched for specific images, sounds, smells, and sensations. In his book, The Invention of Memory, Israel Rosenfield notes: “Recollection is a kind of perception . . . and every context will alter the nature of what is recalled” (89). For me, recollection is perception and writing is the shaping and communication of that perception. I could not tell you the exact scene I was attempting to relive that day in Massachusetts. (There were many such days in Massachusetts before I finally published the essay in August 2004.) I do know that I already had a few pages by that point, although I cannot say exactly when I first wrote them. I know that I had tried to start at the “beginning,” with my earliest memory, which has always involved my foster mother, June. This is what I wrote:

My earliest memory . . . is a good one. I‘m five and the air is warm and sweet beneath a roof of leaves. I am walking down the street, holding June‘s hand and looking up at the giant trees. Light peaks through in quivering gleams, igniting the shade with specks of fire. Excited birds leap from branch to branch. I say something about it to June and brush my fingers against a neighbor‘s hedge, smelling the cut grass. We are walking away from our house, which sits on the corner surrounded by a wide lawn and a red log fence, heading toward the bus stop. In my pocket, I have a quarter: we are going shopping and I am thinking of all the things I‘ll buy. (“No Matter What Happens” 69)

I like the passage. It conveys the images and rhythm of a specific memory fragment. The words came to me like a song that I had been singing in my head for a long time but never composed. I was emotionally vulnerable when I wrote it, and by vulnerable, I mean open and in tune with my body. When writing succeeds for me, words are like tangible, sensational objects that I can feel on my tongue and at the tips of my fingers. (Right now, I let my forefinger and thumb gently rub against each other, trying to feel what I‘m describing.) At my least successful, there seems to be an unbridgeable chasm between my body and language. Then, I must wait, searching for a connection. With the above passage, I can still hear the birds and touch the leaves as I walk, clasping my foster mother‘s hand. The scene is comforting and, I suspect, idealized. Nonetheless, it is the memory I live with. Now that the event has been given language, and subsequently published, it has become the “official” and “definitive” account of that moment in my life. I feel no need for another account. I am satisfied. It has been objectified and recorded.

<5> The need to objectify, shape, and record is my primary motive for writing autobiographically. It transforms my embodied memories into an aesthetic artefact. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes that “pain only becomes an intentional state once it is brought into relation with the objectifying power of the imagination; through that relation, pain will be transformed from a wholly passive and helpless occurrence into a self-modifying and, when most successful, self-eliminating one” (164). The scene with my foster mother and I walking to the bus stop transforms painful memories of childhood, and an estranged relationship with my foster mother, into something that I created and control.

<6> Still, I remain dissatisfied with that passage as the “beginning” of my story. I‘m distressed that I cannot remember anything earlier than that walk with my foster mother; specifically, I am frustrated that I cannot recall anything from the first years of my life with my mother Sadie. I only know what I‘ve been told, which I wrote down:

Sadie was single, and never married; she left me in a foundling hospital when I was 18 months old. At age two, I was placed in the foster home of June and her husband Hal, a tailor. Growing up, I couldn‘t say the exact reason Sadie gave me up. All a social worker ever said was that Sadie “couldn‘t care for me.” The social worker explained what a lucky young man I was: “It‘s like you have two mommies,” she said, her blanched lips suggesting a smile. She was as old as a grandmother; behind big round glasses, her eyes swollen from fatigue. “Twice the love.” (70)

I‘m not sure that the social worker actually said those words to me, but I embrace my account of that “memory” as I‘ve constructed it. With my entire story, there is no one to corroborate the events as I have come to know them. Sadie died when I was 15 and I am permanently estranged from my foster family. A few years ago, I called the Jewish Childcare Association about my records, but I was told that they were lost in a flood. The only information they had about me, aside from the fact that I was in foster care and a resident of The Pleasantville Cottage School, was my name and birth date, the last of which they had wrong. My memory is what I have. I am satisfied with the above scene between me and the social worker, as I have recorded it; I have constructed a narrative that reconciles an embodied memory with a salvageable identity. Still, I remain haunted by what actually happened during the first five years of my life. What transpired that led Sadie to that life-altering and, no doubt, difficult decision of giving me up when I was 18 months old? I imagine various scenarios, none of them pleasant: me lying in the crib as a baby, crying and left in dirty diapers; Sadie sobbing in her bed for days, unable to tend to me, cursing me, ruing the day she gave birth to a child she couldn‘t care for. Sadie may now be dead, yet I am alive and I was there. What does my body remember? How has it affected me, particularly in regards to my inability to get emotionally close to people? My mother reluctantly gave me up. That decision can only be born out of pain. And I continue to feel it, viscerally, without any narrative to anchor it. At some point, I‘ll need to create something.

<7> In the meantime, all I have is what I wrote. After I decided on my earliest memory, I composed the first lines of the essay:

My foster mother was a small woman, with a fierce white smile, and hair the beauty parlor called Natural Blonde. Her clothes were violet, rose, lavender, and honeysuckle. Everything about her suggested summer. Her name was June. (69)

I liked the contrast between “fierce white smile,” which is slightly frightening to me, and the soothing associated colors and season, which is amplified (or informed) by my foster mother‘s name, “June.” I followed that three-sentence opening paragraph with my first memory of her: our walk toward the bus stop. I then shifted my focus toward my biological mother, Sadie.

     My biological mother was tall, raven-haired, and wore a long black coat well past spring. Compared to my pastel-colored foster mother, Sadie was stark and towering, six feet in heels. My foster sister Joanne once called her a vampire, but I thought she looked more like a witch. A sad one.
     My first memory of Sadie is really more an impression: On a white sidewalk, beside manicured gardens and quiet homes, she approaches, dressed in black, her hair pulled into a tight bun. She holds a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The sun is everywhere, and on her forehead are beads of sweat. (69-70)

This is my earliest memory of Sadie. While writing it, I had not yet known that, by the end of the essay, I would emotionally align myself with my biological mother. Most of my memories of early childhood concern my aversion to this “sad” “witchy” woman in black. As a little boy, I aspired to be the son of the handsome tailor and his blonde pretty wife; I yearned to be the brother of their popular, charismatic son and energetic daughter. Yet I would realize, after writing the essay, that I have a significant amount of affection—and love—for the wounded and broken Sadie. Growing up, I worshiped my foster mother. By the time of my troubled adolescence, I came to hate her; by adulthood, I simply felt neither hate nor love, only disengagement. Or so I thought. With my description of her “fierce white smile,” I would discover that an antipathy remained. It‘s not as strong as hate. I wouldn‘t even call it dislike. But there is an aversion toward June, as I remember her, which I can‘t deny. (Over the years, the animus has lifted; compassion, sorrow, and loss color my perception of her.)

<8> In my above descriptions of these two women, particularly of Sadie, I wrote the words after sitting for a long time, eyes shut, or gazing off into space, struggling to translate sensations into language. I could feel the heat of the sun as I stood on the sidewalk, outside my foster parents‘ home. The empty streets were wide and the single-family houses far enough apart that I felt exposed and small. I remember how I squinted and searched for my mother as she grew from a tiny dark spot to a tall imposing woman all in black. I was six. I didn‘t know it right away, but her visits were a prelude to reclaiming me, which she did a month after my seventh birthday; she kept me for a disastrous three years, before leaving me at a children‘s psychiatric hospital when I was ten. I vividly remember her visits. I recall how, as she came up the street, she took a last drag on her cigarette and threw the lit butt on the sidewalk. I can see her caked red lips and pained smile. I am not sure if I ran up to her or waited cautiously, but I remember feeling both excited and anxious. I am anxious and excited right now, remembering her. To capture this dynamic, I wrote the following, born out of an indelible memory of us sitting in my foster family‘s backyard.

When I was six, Sadie began visiting every month. It was the beginning of the “reuniting process” with my mother, the social worker said. Sadie‘s black hair was usually pulled back, the roots at her temples pure white by age 40. She had green eyes and a pronounced, full chin. Her smiles were tight and distant. Usually, we sat at the backyard picnic table. She never said much. We played board games, and she let me win. When she did speak, it was usually to ask a question. Her voice was high and nervous. She lit cigarette after cigarette, blowing the smoke upward, leaving behind a dozen or so butts, each stained bright red. (71)

I remember weeping while writing this scene. My mother was such a lonely and socially awkward person. She dyed her hair and kept her lips as red as a fifties‘ film star. Yet she had a noticeable body odor and her clothes showed signs of wear. My identification with pained and lonely outsiders began with Sadie. Yet it was only after writing this essay that I understood the extent to which I identified with her, and the extent to which I eventually dissidentified with my foster mother.

<9> I composed the rest of the essay, over 6,000 words, within a year. I proceeded in the same way, trying to chronologically organize my recollections and drawing on my embodied memories to make them come alive for me. I wrote a series of scenes: Sadie reclaiming me and our unsuccessful return to Brooklyn; her leaving me in the psychiatric hospital; my problematic reunion with my foster parents; Sadie‘s death; my attending high school graduation alone before venturing off into the world on my own. Each of those events seem encoded into my DNA by now, but crystallizing them into the specificity that good writing demands was excruciating and fraught with self-condemnation and a sense of failure. Perhaps most difficult of all was trying to write down my last phone call to my mother, who was days away from dying of breast cancer, which had spread throughout her body. Back then, at 15 years old, I didn‘t know she had cancer. She told me that she was in the hospital because of a stomach problem. It wasn‘t until our last conversation that I realized that something was very wrong. While writing that scene, I agonized over two things: 1) how to convey the sensation of hearing her totally transformed voice and 2) my sudden fear/realization that she was going die and how I told her that, upsetting her. I wrote:

Then, one afternoon, I called, and didn't recognize her voice. It was as if someone had replaced it with one from some toy. The sounds coming from her throat were tinny and robotic.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

She told me she was fine.

“You don't sound like you,” I said. And then: “You're not going to die or something?” I heard her struggle to form some kind of response, but her mechanized voice faltered, and turned quiet. A nurse got on the line and explained that Sadie was tired and needed rest.

I ran to June in the kitchen, saying that Sadie didn't sound right.

“Sadie is very sick,” June said, mentioning Sadie‘s health to me for the first time. (84-85)

I can still hear Sadie during that call. But I don‘t think that “tinny” and “robotic,” like that of “a toy,” fully conveys my embodied memories of her voice that day. I had originally written how “it was as if someone had replaced her voice with one of those mechanized boxes in a child‘s toy” but I chose to use mechanized later, so I deleted the first mention, to avoid repetition. I think I tried out the words “hollow” and “thin” and “tenuous,” but I eventually settled on “robotic” and “mechanized” because those were the words that best communicate what I heard, and still hear. I also wrote that “her mechanized voice faltered, and turned quiet” but I remember this faltering as a sob, yet it wasn‘t a sob because her voice couldn‘t convey that sound. But it lives in me as a sob. The problem I have with writing about embodied memories is my tendency to overwrite, to throw in every possible association and word I can think of. But concision, I learned and continue to believe, is most effective because, when successful, it is sharper and leaner; it allows for a greater range of associative play, although I have no way of knowing how that sense of play will register with others. Still, the one thing about the above scene that is absolute and irreducible is my final statement, “You are not going to die or something.” (It wasn‘t a question but a revelation.) I remember the words so clearly, probably more than anything I ever said in my life, perhaps because of how guilty I would later feel about having said them. To this day, I wish I could have let her die with some sense of comfort and belief that I was ok and would be ok. (And, in fact, I am ok.) In the end, however, I upset her with an acknowledgment of a truth that neither of us could address at that moment: I was only a teenager and she was physically incapacitated. Because of my panicked outburst, I imagine her last days and hours with the same morbid speculation that I imagine my first 18 months.

<10> Still, in connecting all the scenes as I did, as I have mentioned, an emotional arc emerges: my realization of how much I loved Sadie and how much of her I continue to carry with me. Until I finished the essay, I had not quite acknowledged the extent of our similarities. It wasn‘t a happy realization. My mother lived and died alone, and, for my entire life, I have mostly been solitary, with no extant family or life partner. Would I too die alone? Although an avid reader, Sadie had never finished college. She was an executive secretary. But she always wanted me to go to college. Before she died, I promised her that I would, but I was 15, and no other adult seemed concerned with my education. When I began this essay, well into my thirties, I was a part-time word-processor (not unlike a secretary) at an investment banking institution. I worked at that firm for about ten years, putting myself through school, earning a B.A. and finishing the necessary course work toward a doctorate. While writing the essay, I had already dropped out of graduate school and been laid off as a word processor. I battled low-grade depression and struggled financially as a freelance writer and adjunct instructor. I knew that my mother had given me up due to mental illness and was intermittently on welfare. At the time, recognizing the similarities between Sadie and myself was painful. This is how I concluded the essay:

Years later I would finally attend college. I would become a writer and learn to love books, carrying them around as Sadie did, losing myself in novels the way I once lost myself in clouds. I‘d sit in my studio apartment, beside an overstuffed bookcase, thinking of my mother‘s sadness, her defiance, the comfort she found in solitude, and I‘d see myself as June saw me. As Sadie‘s son. (88)

I remember feeling elated after finishing the piece; I had captured what had been trapped within me for decades and put it down on paper. Something had been exorcised.

<11> In 2012, having returned to graduate school after the essay was published in GQ, as “Mothered,” and, later, in the anthology Boys To Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up, as “No Matter What Happens,” I completed my Ph.D.. I am currently an assistant professor at The Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. In many ways, I can see that I am not like my mother; I am the fulfillment of her dreams. Since the essay‘s publication, I have struggled to turn six thousand words into sixty thousand. Again, I can find no clear, honest narrative; I only have dynamic fragments. I know I simply must keep writing, some unifying theme or force will unexpectedly emerge. But even if it doesn‘t, I need to transform my memories into an aesthetic object. I need to sit quietly, eyes closed, and pay attention to my body—remembering to release the tensed jaw and tightened fists—as I search to find the words.    

Works Cited

Bahr, David. “No Matter What Happens,” Boys to Men: Gay Men Write about Growing

Up. Eds. Rob Williams and Ted Gideonse. New York: Caroll & Graf, 2006. Print.

—.  “Mothered.” GQ. 4 Aug. 2004: 180-93. Print.

Conroy, Frank. Stop-Time. New York: Viking Press, 1967. Print.

Ginsberg, Allen. Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958-1960. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961. Print.

Homes, A. M.. The Mistress's Daughter. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.

O‘Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.

Rosenfield, Israel. The Invention of Memory: A New View from the Brain. New York: Basic, 1988. Print.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. London: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

Wolff, Tobias. This Boy's Life: A Memoir. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. Print.

 

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