JOURNAL, Wednesday, Nov.28th

Slow dancing, swaying to the musi
Slow dancing, just me and my girl.
(Johnny Rivers)


I remember I once heard that the process of writing is part gift and part puzzle. I understand the gift part in how therapeutic it can be, but it’s the puzzle that interests me now. In writing about my childhood I’m creating a puzzle, examining each piece and linking it to its neighbour, trying to understand the picture that’s emerging.

I read parts of Claire’s letter during my session with Jean yesterday – it was like taking her on a voyage through a world that I’d built myself. Like any tourist would, Jean points out things that interest her along the way, things that amuse her, that intrigue her and confuse her. She notices details in my landscape, some I’ve placed there with great care and precision, some I barely knew were there at all – she brings them to my attention.

Jean notes my powers of observation and says that I have a good memory for detail. She says that she envies me for this, that memory is a precious commodity after you hit 40. We both laugh – she laughs at herself and how she can never find her glasses; I laugh at Bill who was never able to remember things – things that were unimportant to him anyway. Now that he’s in his fifties, he must be completely lost.

Jean says that I describe scenes and events with much detail and precision, but when it comes to writing about how I felt at the time, I’m more “economic” with my words. She has a point. Danny is always trying to get me to talk more about how I’m feeling, but I have trouble expressing these things. I’ve always been quiet; it takes time for me to formulate what I want to say about how I feel, and when I’m ready, often it doesn’t matter anymore.

I guess that I’ve fallen into a habit of focusing on outside details in my writing, but I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad thing. It’s in the details of my story that I deposit my feelings. When I write, I put myself in Chinatown, for instance, holding my embroidered slippers. I can see every stitch and remember how cherished I felt that someone would think to give me such a delicate gift. But then I feel all of the shock, the confusion and fear that was also there during Claire’s first tantrum just a few minutes later. The emotions come back to me and are invested in describing how we sat there on the bench – a lifeboat really – waiting to be rescued. Each detail that I write is born of an intricate set of emotions that are just too complex to put down on paper. Sometimes I acknowledge them as I write; I don’t like to dwell on them.

To write about my pity for Bill as he holds out a dictionary for me to pack would be too simple – it would lessen the anxiety, the excitement, the guilt, the confusion and the glorious relief that I was also feeling at the thought of leaving him, of going with Sophie. If I wrote of each emotion in a particular situation, I could spend an entire letter just describing how I felt – how I didn’t want to feel – as I watched mom lashing out at Bill like a wild animal who knows nothing but how to defend herself. I don’t want to do that.

For now telling the story is what’s become most important to me. Maybe I’ll come to a point where I want to focus on my feelings – I’m not there yet.

Jean also pointed out that when I described how Sophie saw each of us, I didn’t mention how I thought that she saw me. This wasn’t deliberate. Perhaps I never did know how Sophie saw me then – I hope that she saw a little girl trying to be so grown up, trying to hold it all together and so grateful for her presence, her attention, her guidance. Sophie has done so much for me over the years that it’s hard for me to imagine how she would have felt about me when we first met.

Now that I’ve started writing the story, I don’t want to break its rhythm. I’m spinning a thread that’s connecting so many of the scattered bits of my life. Most of my childhood was like a series of scenes into which I felt that I’d been deposited, never knowing with any certainty how I got from one to the other. I remember when we were first with Sophie in Scarborough, I’d wake up each morning startled, looking for Claire in the bed that we shared when we were in Vancouver. Every day I had to relive how we came to be there. It didn’t come naturally to me to believe that we were safe and comfortable in the twin beds in Sophie’s guest room. Writing the story of how it all happened has helped me connect these two different scenes: life with Bill and mom, life with Sophie.

In my relationship with Danny I sometimes feel that same abrupt shift in gears that I did as a kid. One day he’s here and we’re a couple, warm and loving and comfortable together. Then the next day he’s gone and we go back to leading our separate lives in our separate worlds. We’ve been living this come-and-go existence for so long that I’ve gotten used to it. I’m comfortable with it and I’m afraid that changes might destroy what we have. I suppose that our arrangement has been harder on Danny because his life didn’t prepare him for such constant flux. His experience would lead him to expect a life of scenes that flow naturally into each other, day after day.

This idea of my life having more of a rhythm to it, moving more logically and naturally from one scene to the next, reminds me of an image that I had of Claire and me. Last spring, Danny and I went to his brother’s wedding. At the reception after dinner they rearranged the tables to the side of the hall to allow room for dancing. The bride and groom danced the first dance, slow and graceful, effortless. The second song was to be for the bride to dance with her father. This beaming middle-aged gentleman stood up, tall and distinguished in his rented tuxedo. He rested his cane against the table (he had lost his leg to cancer the year before) and limped onto the dance floor. He took his daughter in his arms as the music started and they danced together, holding onto each other with such devotion. Through the song, Sandy was crying all over her father’s stiff white collar; you just knew she was thinking what a gift it was that he was there at all, that it was only his leg and not his life that he had lost to the cancer.

So there they were, Sandy and her father with 150 people looking on, watching as they made their slow, awkward, hesitant steps in time to the music. It was an odd looking dance from our perspective but for them, it was perfect in how they adapted to each other – she offering him balance, he offering her comfort.

The image of their dance has stayed with me; it reminds me a lot of how Claire and I were. When she was a baby, we were dancing the dance of sisters in the normal rhythm of our lives, as they were then. But after Claire came home from the hospital so transformed, we learned to adapt our dance to suit her new place in the world, her new way of dealing with life. We danced our awkward, stilted dance, clinging to each other, needing each other, yet happy and grateful when Sophie came to change the music.

Copyright 2003