Remembering | Andie's writing journey

Dear Once Upon A Time,

You believed the fairytales of a woman’s ability to be like a god changing the attitudes of another, bringing to life your fairytale perfect home. You believed that you could change enough, be enough to satisfy the desires of those who were the forces of power in the world you had been taught to believe. For you, the Stepford Wife existence would have been a mercy. You would not have had to deal with me.

When among the hoped for fairytales, the nightmare took root you fought with virtual tooth and claw to keep me trapped within the prescriptions of your schedules and I tried to comply, tried to find the line between your ridged expectations and the fluidity of my visions of a world of creative possibility waiting to be explored. It was never enough. He had called me frivolous, an escape. And you did not have the talent set that would have made it all better, that would have finally brought the acceptance you so longed for. The anger and despair in you built, an anger you could not accept. You broke when finally you came to realize things would not change.

Someone saw me in you then. She called me an eagle locked in a cage. Her vision gave you hope that perhaps I was not a chain that held you down but wings waiting inside and tentatively you began to seek me again.

For many more years you would struggle to find a way for both of us to be accepted without breaking the code they had set you in throughout your life. It was an uneasy alliance for your world had become one that had little room for me. As before, when despair robbed you of the energy to hold me down you let me emerge to write words of hope that you could read or to record a memory you would someday need. In those years, you let me create at times as well, practical crafts, nothing too frivolous.

You even tried to kill me when you realized my presence would never allow your world to have the stability of acceptance in a fairytale romance you had fought for so long. It was easier to blame and discard me then to face your humanness which kept you from being a god with power to effect the choices of another.

Ironically, when you finally accepted the reality of your life and began to heal in the aloneness of distance, you still could not accept my presence in your life. You still blamed me for being. They called it anxiety and depression. I knew that it was your raging grief at not being god enough to meet the expectations of the world of thought you had been raised in. The day you finally came face to face with your freedom not to be responsible for the choices of another, you began to heal.

I had learned to wait, that even within myself I could not impose a vision on the part of me still in the pain of disillusioned dreams. It would be years before I would meet the images of the hurt woman in a way that you could begin to see the painfulness of a life without me. Our uneasy alliance would find more compatibility in our house of disappointing or distant relationships.

You still held a separate face within the mirror. My face aged yet yours remained trapped in the age your dreams stood still. Mine was a face you did not recognize as the lines slowly changed from the rigid prison of your lost dreams. There was an uncomfortableness when you looked in the mirror. You could not accept seeing me so clearly etched into the surface of your life.

A few days ago I looked in the mirror and only saw this face. The specter of your trapped image was gone. It has not returned. I can not feel you anymore. I can feel the legacy you left of finding order to build my life within, but your anxiety and discomfort are gone. There is a quietness within of just being.

Like other trapped pieces met through the years of healing you have faded into memory. I only hope you found that inner island of healing that was hidden from us years ago when time came to put so much of the past to rest. I hope you are finally happy there feeling the acceptance you longed for.

But I go on, inwardly whole and healthy, living fully in this life that was always mine to live. I can only hope I am wiser now and aware enough to see the changes in direction that are needed when anxiety sends signals of danger ahead.

I have learned from you. Thank you for all you added in my life in the years you did not recognize your worth.

Peace to you,

Myself

“Everything that’s happened in the strip
has happened to me,” he once said.
“That’s why I have all this white hair.”
Bil Keane, Family Circus

Let’s see what today’s writing prompt is . Write about a memory….

O, I have the perfect one! I’ve told people about it several times. Now’s my chance. Surely someone has it on the net……No? Then there is my chest of memories downstairs. After all the years I had it taped to my kitchen cabinet, surely, I would have kept it?…..No? A photo album then …. Where could I have kept it?

It was one of those Bil Keane Family Circle cartoons. That strip really seemed to capture moments as a parent. Billy and his sister and brothers got into so much mischief and said the cutest things. But that strip, that one captured it all.

Hmm… where else can I look. I hope it wasn’t in one of those boxes that got tossed. Could it be in the basement of the old house. Surely I didn’t lose it?

There were two panels. The first was a coloured picture of the mom and dad — pulling at their hair, I think. Around the image were small images of the kids and some of their many antics. “When will they ever grow up!” I think the parents were saying.

I remember turning to the picture for empathy remembering the fire in the bathroom garbage can lit by Not Me’s cousin I Didn’t Do It. Or the times they were settled on each end of the couch until they could talk instead of fighting….. Yes, I understood that image.

But the strip didn’t end there. There was the other panel. The mom and dad are sitting in a quiet house. He is reading a newspaper and she is knitting. On the neat as a pin end table between them is a new history. The kids are grown, graduated, married. Around the mom and dad are line drawings of the images so full of colour in the first of the panels. They did grow up.

I remember touching that image and sending up a prayer to remember that no matter what happened these moments when they were young were fleeting. Yes, there would be trouble but there would also be joy — the last first day of school coffee with the girls, and then with the youngest as one by one they entered school, a child’s delight in the new flowers of spring, songs and stories, hearing myself in the embarrassing mimic of their play acting at being grown up.

Now they are grown and their images fill frames on my walls. It is my grandchildren on their visits that fill my space with songs and stories.

In my mind I reach out and touch that worn frayed comic strip one more time where it hangs so I can see it in the business of being home with three small children.

Wait! I do still have it after all these years. I didn’t lose it after all. The worn comic strip is right here in my memory.