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November 1 - December 3, 2021
how do we learn to accept and forgive those who have both succeeded and failed in helping us become who we are?
To speak candidly, with neither justification nor humiliation, relieves the haunting of memory and mind and becomes one way to regain our dignity and our strength.
My mother spent all of her life seeking the metaphorical home she called “Mercy Street.”
It hurt to be so alone. It hurt to be forgotten.
At three I had learned the litany of despair and knew its truth with all my being: depend on no one.
No one will rescue you.
How much am I willing to endure in order to remember? Do I truly want to be empowered by memory or language?
“Mommy?” I plead. “Please?” “No,” she pouts. “I’m nine!” “Please,” I say and start to sob, my chest heaving its burden up and down. “I’m nine!” “Please be thirty-four!”
Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind, in the commonplaces of the asylum where the cracked mirror or my own selfish death outstared me ... I tapped my own head; it was glass, an inverted bowl. It’s a small thing to rage inside your own bowl. At first it was private. Then it was more than myself.
The speed with which Anne Sexton found acceptance within the cadre of the literary elite was indeed remarkable, but it belied the work required.
More often, a poem went through twenty or thirty drafts with amazing numbers of alterations.
“Maybe why I want Kayo to beat me up is to prove he’s a man and I’m a woman,” she mused to Dr. Orne. “I want him to be aggressive.”
writing is magic because it harnesses the energy generated by the chaos within.
I found I could pay little attention to the outside world. My vision was peculiarly limited, aimed inward in unhealthy ways.
I discovered a new emotion, bubbling up from underneath my fear: anger. I was getting very tired of it all. Very tired.
except that a fugue was marked by lassitude while a trance could sometimes be accompanied by activity, such as masturbating or talking.
A poem wasn’t really a poem, it seemed to her, unless it was full of metaphor; it took her a while to adjust to the prosody she heard in his work.
One afternoon Mother called to tell me she expected me to testify against my father: “I need you to say that you witnessed him beating me up, that I was afraid for my life.”
I did not want to be recognized as “Anne Sexton’s daughter,” and I was running from that label as hard as I could.
Every month I watched my father scrape to pay his bills, sending Mother a monthly child-support check from which neither Joy nor I ever saw a dime.
“Because I found out that a little love is better than no love at all.”
She had told Dr. Orne that Plath “took something that was mine—that death was mine!”
No daughter would ever want to know these intimate details about her mother’s life.
this single memory, coupled with the others of Mother masturbating on me early in the mornings, or in front of me when I was small, was ample.
I have discovered that love and empathy play side by side with anger, fear, and resentment.
Depression is boring, I think, and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave. —ANNE SEXTON, “THE FURY OF RAIN STORMS”
Why, in fact, is the word pain rarely used when describing depression? The dictionary uses synonyms such as melancholy, despondency, and sadness.
