After Shocks

Angry and on the offense, shoulders back, a contrary, an ancient thunder being.

Thirty-one years since the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake hit Los Angeles in 1994, here in San Diego, we experienced an earthquake. A fault line 8.9 miles underground burst through the surface of the earth. At 10:08 in the morning. Here it came a 5.2 in magnitude and intensity, a force of nature shaking the building where we live, the city, the countryside. Disrupting what had been a quiet overcast morning, a good day for daydreaming and writing, for delving into worlds remembered or envisioned. Here it came a reminder from below shaking things up. Here it came, a strong, frightening jolt. As if out of nowhere. A shake up. In the same way the past intrudes on the present, the molten core of the earth we all live upon, always active, never complacent can erupt. Triggering. A sudden violent disruption which can take me back to the most dangerous place I’d ever experienced.

A normal-looking family of five: three kids and a Mama and a Daddy. I was five, Moody Sister, three, and Baby Brother, a toddler, the summer we moved in. Three years later a fight broke out in the night. Mama hit the road. Upheaval. Soon we were poor and vagrant. Living on the road in motels. Strangers’ spare rooms. Rent houses. And the backseat of the car.

The façade of family cracked wide open. Every home impermanent.

After the building stopped shaking I rushed outside to take our dog for a walk. Said hello, to neighbors who had also rushed outside. Quaking with fear and surprise. I surveyed the street then walked around the block glancing up at the sky, back straight, mind blooming with love for this our only world, our earthly home.

I’ve lived my life on the periphery of every family system: adopted by my stepfather, my name changed from Smith to Edwards. Married to my first husband my name changed to Embree. Married to my second and last husband my name changed to Rice.

SEER.

On the edge of vision. An observer. Surprised to belong anywhere.

The kind of person interested in the beautiful, yeah, sure, okay. But also, the sublime. As in the archaic meaning of the word: “to elevate to a degree of moral or spiritual purity or excellence.” Forcing us to recognize the gravity underlying every experience, even pleasure, especially joy. Tears fall from open eyes even in the midst of rejoicing.

Family ruptures are difficult to explain.

Let’s just go and park outside her house, my son suggested once in a late-night phone call. Just park outside and watch her.

I can’t, I told him. Still too afraid. Afraid of my own mother. Yes. I was. All those years later. I still felt her blasting heat on my neck. And in my chest a lit desire to not, not, not, be like her. Please god. Make me a new being.

That’s okay, my son said. I will be with you.

But it wasn’t okay. It’s not a child’s job to protect their parent. To flip our script. To roll around inside our Möbius Strip of childhood trauma.

No. No, I can’t I told him.

Once more I could not give him what he wanted. A glimpse of the grandmother he had never met. Would never meet. I didn’t realize when I made the decision how that decision would reverberate in my life. In my son’s life. Do we ever?

It was the last time he would ask me for anything.

I didn’t know how important it might have been to him to know her. Didn’t know he would never come back to me if I said no. I didn’t fight to keep him. Didn’t stake my claim on his very existence as every mother does. Didn’t speak with authority over him, take a certain tone, a stance. I didn’t use the parental voice I had made a promise to myself to stay away from. I simply said no. In my mind I was protecting him. And myself.

I did not want him to see how I was raised.

Like an animal, a contact sport, her display of dominance over us a daily occurrence.

I vowed to be the opposite of her. Shied away from taking a dominant stance, shoulders back, head high, voice deep and low. And in my not knowing how to advance myself so many chances were missed. For all my striving to overcome the past I often lost my way.

Decades spent sidestepping her legacy, a life of vagrancy, poverty and disappointment. Ironic how a lifetime of running away from her had kept me on the same road with her, just walking in the opposite direction.

Knowledge comes in the aftershock of upheaval.

Now I know what I didn’t know in my youth. We cannot run away from ourselves or our mothers. Or our sons. Or our past. Our shared history. Our only planet. Or even our ancestors. They are who we are. The known and the unknown. The living and the dead. The stupid ones and the cruel ones, the ugly ones and the beautiful ones too. They peek out of our eyes, breathe through our nostrils. They speak without voice.

Only in old age have I truly found my own voice. But I have not found myself. Yet. Where is she, who is she? I wonder. That girl I might have become. I might never know. And I don’t need to know. I have accepted myself. The entire mess of me.

An elegy without epiphany. Who mourns so many and so much: the death of culture, of country, of reading, of newspapers, of journalism, of empathy, public compassion, of shared hopes and dreams. Of unity, family and community.

What remains after the long march, the death vigil, the divorce, the decades of silence, the child absent from the table, the father rejecting, the sisters vexing, the friends who fell away.

What remains? The circle of love we have created.

At the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, elephants formed a circle around their young when the ground started shaking. Friends called. My younger sister texted me concerned about the earthquake. Asking if I was okay. And wondering about my next Substack post.

Was there food in the refrigerator when you lived with her?

What would you like me to write about? I asked her.

Your childhood, she texted back. Christmas holidays and how mom was pretty. Because I just remember the opposite.

Society gives attractive people a pass they haven’t earned that’s for sure, I texted her. Thinking how the surface reality is often so deceptive. She used her looks to manipulate people. And it worked, because so many people confuse charm with character; conflate a knowing smile with kindness.

To be honest, my baby sister texted back, I never really looked at her because I was scared. I remember the caked dark make up and eye shadow and the powder she used on her face all over the bathroom.

There was seldom food in the rentals, I responded. We mainly ate in fast food places.

I texted a response to my sister’s question about food in the refrigerator not knowing how to comment on our mother’s beauty rituals.

Did she ever cook for you? My sister asked.

She made spaghetti and a thing she called cowboy beans sometimes. A canned pinto beans and hamburger meal kind of like a fast chili. And once when she wanted to impress (some man) she made us stay outside all day while she made vegetable soup and baked homemade bread. It was a blazing hot day, and we didn’t want to eat it, so she got mad.

Do you remember her singing?

Big Rock Candy Mountain, I responded. A song her father loved. Made sense I thought. A song about a hobo’s idea of paradise. Romanticizing vagrancy and homelessness. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Where the cops have wooden legs. The hens lay soft-boiled eggs. The jails are made of tin, and you can walk right out again as soon as you are in.

As if.

I don’t remember that song, my baby sister responded. She did sing late at night when she thought everyone was asleep. But I wasn’t. She sang Glen Campbell songs. Old songs. And slapped her face to stay awake. Going down the road at 35 miles per hour.

I was her first child, so I watched the beginnings of this. I saw even as a child that something was really wrong, I texted back. My experience was similar yet different from the younger kids.

Trauma affects all children differently.

Trauma creates a disorganized story line.

Trauma is the ghost in every family.

All of my sisters came into the world after me. I am the oldest of my mother’s nine children and my father’s three children. I have two paternal half-sisters, and I had five maternal half-sisters. Two maternal sisters died young and three continue to carry our shared mitochondrial burden. We are half siblings and yet wholly connected. My two paternal sisters were never curious about me or my other sisters. I am the link the only link between all of them; the cord gathering up disparate beads.

Grown or gone, alive or dead I gather them together in my heart, cherish them, long for them, especially my maternal sisters. Their laughter is my laughter, a deep knowing cackle come from the depths. All of us fertile with life desire, openly harmed, almost cross eyed with grief, and generous to a fault. I still see them all as the children they were, defiant and resilient, sparkling with survival. Alive in the aftermath.

One day I made a spreadsheet of all my maternal sisters. Tabulated all the marriages between us, the divorces, the children, the college degrees, the GED’s, the diseases come from poverty in childhood. I don’t know my sisters well. Still, they are a part of me. Always and only together in my heart, or around my neck on the string which holds that old turquoise necklace together, the one our mother was wearing when she died.

I want to say to anyone suffering and confused right now, it’s okay to be angry at the upheaval. Enraged by the impossibility of dodging all the fault lines. It’s okay to push back at the greed and the grift and the cruelty. It’s okay to not be a productive person. To not be a financial success in this life. It’s okay to live with what you have. To love people. To love life in all of its stages. It’s okay to demand your rights and the rights of others. To take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Never apologize for needing help. For you and for others.

Never apologize for being human.

No living being is a mistake. As in an error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness.

Good stories are about mistakes, missed connections and unsolvable mysteries.

Write yours down. If only for your baby sister.

When I was a child, as we traveled back and forth between the Bible Belt and the Pacific Ocean, as our troubled mother took us who knew where, I read Nancy Drew mysteries in the backseat of the car. “Her golden red hair flying in the wind, Nancy Drew ran up the porch steps and opened the front door of her home.” A stray line from The Quest of the Missing Map, book 19, popped up in my daydreams after the earthquake last week, a line come from all those anonymously written books sold to curious young girls. Young girls trying to figure the world out, find our place within a culture which seems to hate us.

I read them all, all the mysteries, all the murderous stories. I still do.

Angry and on the offense, shoulders back, a contrary in the car, an ancient thunder being.

Searching for my own map.