Volcanoes

"'We are volcanoes,' Ursula K. Le Guin once remarked.  "When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change.  There are new mountains.'"

-Rebecca Solnit, "A Short History of Silence", p. 18

"Stories save your life.  And stories are your life... Liberation is always in part a storytelling process...  A free person tells her own story.  A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place."

-Ibid, p. 19

I wasn't going to write this blog today.  I had started feeling that terrible sadness that comes from thinking too much about a problem.  Communicating about it from the inside out.  Jason and I spoke for an hour last night, hashed out every detail as I brought him up to speed.  But in the end, I felt mainly hollow, and my sleep was disturbed.  I woke up at three AM and stayed awake until the alarm at five, tossing and turning, filled with guilt and sadness.  The rest of the day was more of the same.  I teetered on the precipice of a looming depression, only snapping out of it when I heard about the possibility of a new teaching job and after hours sitting in the hot, bright Austin sun.

I wasn't going to write, but then I began reading this essay by Rebecca Solnit about silence, particularly women's silence.  The key to liberation, it says, is speaking up and making ourselves heard.  She recounts so many victims and crimes, abuses perpetrated and concealed, until this present #MeToo moment, when women have begun - again - speaking up.  She says that only when we speak can we cause things to change.  So here I am, "speaking" up.  Taking myself seriously one more time.

I tried tonight to reach out to my mother.  The moment I sat down in front of my Gohonzon, I knew I couldn't continue this aggressive attitude, this anger.  I wanted to reach out in a kinder, more communicative way, while still maintaining this boundary of demanding that she move.  It immediately made me feel better, but of course things then began to get fuzzy.  I couldn't remember why I needed her to move, why I had insisted.  I looked around me at my large, brand new home and I felt so guilty to not make space for her here. I also was reminded of the pointlessness of having purchased such a grand and expensive place, if I was only going to live here with my child and her father.  There is literally one setting that makes me feel good and lifts my depression, and that is to give my mother everything, in the way that my grandmother always did.

Of course, she did not text me back, instead maintaining her own silence.  Jason said to me last night, "Can't you just tell yourself she's not capable?" I instantly raged.  This is a familiar narrative, passed down by my grandmother.  She would always say to me, "Your mother's not like other people.  Just let whatever she says go in one ear and out the other."  My benevolent grandmother.  I don't think I'm as benevolent as she always was.

Jason said this about my mother because we have an autistic daughter who doesn't understand much of the world.  So many times we have to explain to her in slow, patient detail the ins and outs of things, what is expected, and how to respond.  Jason was suggesting we view my mother - just a little bit - in this same way, not expecting her to be able to comprehend and respond appropriately.  The rage erupted inside me because my mother is not disabled, like my daughter.  She's not technically incapable of change.  (Neither is my daughter for that matter.)  I didn't want to make yet another set of excuses for her.  What good that rage did, I don't know.  All day long I felt so sad, and so frightened of sinking into yet another depression from which I couldn't get out.

A song I heard while working out at the gym this morning.  "You made me feel high, 'Cause you had me so low/You only seemed tall, cause you stunted my growth.  That wasn't love, that was just hope."

That was never love; it was just my hope.