To this day, when I sit in writing workshops, I feel the anxiety cranking under my sternum. As we discuss other writers’ pieces -- their characters and plot lines and epiphanies and listen to them explain the complex details of the rest of the story: intricately woven events and reversals and awe-inspiring denouements, I think, “Jeez, I wish that I knew what was going to happen next.” All I have are broad sketches of incomplete characters who have compulsions they can’t articulate. They aren’t really sure why they have been rendered in the first place let alone what they are supposed to be doing. Most times, I don’t have anything past what is on the page and a belief that over time more will be revealed – both to me and any readers who stick around long enough to find out. So, I keep bringing my poor characters – faint, disoriented and reluctant as bats – into the workshop sunlight to be dissected, so that I can see them better, so that they can tell me what they want to do next. The closest thing I have to a plot line is a hunch.
Not having a child dawned similarly for me. There were times in my life when I was sure that I would have children. It was expected, anticipated even. Many of my friends from college got married right after graduation and started their families right away. My mother said what most mothers say, “When you have your kids…,” and I went along with the daydream.
I can’t point to a day or a discussion when my husband and I made the choice not to be parents. We didn’t debate over-population or our sketchy gene pools – something that probably could be used as a very effective means of birth control for a host of people – or even the more mundance concerns about our limited resources or the clamp children would put our freedom. It might sound lame, but having children just never made its way to the top of our list. Other things kept getting bumped up in priority – both of us working on degrees, paying off debt…then acquiring new debt, spending lots of hours building careers, even a health concern – but any of that could have been negotiated with having children, but none of it was.
In ruminating on this topic, I found myself getting increasingly uncomfortable like I do in writing workshops. One of my many hopes as a writer and editor is to make room for the voices of child free women in our cultural conversations, but I certainly don’t want to stand as the representative or champion. I understand more viscerally now the struggle that some of my colleagues have had finding a way to talk about their race or their sexual identity without sounding like a token informant. One of my good friends, Diane Lindsey, a wonderful writer, actually gave me a look of disdain when I brought this subject up to her. “I don’t feel any obligation to address that question,” she said. And, she’s right. She doesn’t have to. I know how many times I’ve been asked, “Why not,” and how invasive that has felt, and I don’t particularly want to give an answer either.
So instead of cutting into my psychic flesh to find the deeper reasons – if there even are any – for why I don’t have children, I’ve decided to focus on the topic of legacy. What do you do with all your stuff when you don’t have the default of children obliged to deal with it when all is said and done? Both my husband and I are collectors. I asked him not long ago, “Who the hell are we going to give all this stuff to?” The thought of my Sex Pistols action figures and Ramones bears – even the pocket-sized Lucky Cat that I bought in Chinatown last weekend on a lovely day with my friend Richard – ending up on eBay or in a random garage sale – none of our stuff would justify the word “estate” – makes me sad every time I think about it. The things I’m thinking about have stories – lessons even. They are as much a marker of who I am in this world as any of my poor little bat characters squinting at the light in workshop. In fact, they’re probably more revealing. These are the things that I live with. These are the things that every time that I’ve moved I haven’t felt at home until I’ve found them a place.
I used to work for a visual arts organization that was in Chicago’s River North gallery district. Down the hall from us was Sotheby’s auction house. I was there the afternoon that people crammed the hallway as Jacqueline Kennedy Oassis’s belongings were auctioned. The Kennedy children said that they’d kept her most personal items but wanted to get rid of the non-essentials. Some lots like the one with sofa pillows were anticlimatic. Some like President Kennedy’s golf clubs were surprising. But it was a strand of pearls with an accompanying photograph showing them draped around Mrs. Kennedy’s slim neck that hit me. (And, she was Mrs. Kennedy at the time of the photo.) The catalogue clearly labelled them faux. I imagined Jackie Kennedy smiling every time that she put them on, every time they were noted by a fashion editor, every time that they were photographed. They were her secret. A hand shot up with a bid in Chicago. New York was on the phone with a counter. It was all very civilized and clean, but it was no different than two men haggling over a plastic fort in somebody’s garage sale driveway wanting it because it was cheap and not that scuffed up.
So, I want to post a few items from my archive – the things that I don’t want to end up in the garage sale. And, I’d urge even people who have children to consider how they would like to curate the legacy of their mementoes. Just because you have children doesn’t mean they’ll keep what was important to you…as evidenced by --
Lot #1: The Unknown Mother photographs. I found these in a vintage store in Union Pier, Michigan, on Labor Day weekend 2008 with my best friend, Esther. I was rummaging through an old box of photographs looking for pictures of working women – secretaries, telephone operators, nurses – I told you, I’m a collector – and I wasn’t particularly taken with this woman’s portrait, until I came upon the next one, and then the next one. Here she is with her husband. She’s heaviest in this photo. They’re holding hands. They’re both standing very straight. Here, she’s had a studio portrait taken. She looks to be in her forties or maybe her fifties now. Her eyes show that something has happened. (There was a photograph of her husband in a casket that I just couldn’t bring myself to buy.) Here, she is again back in the photographer’s studio, probably in her sixties. She is peaceful now. She’s wearing glasses. How did these photos end up in a box in a vintage store? Who didn’t want them? Who knew her name? She’s the one that brought me to this puzzle of what we leave behind and to whom.
I have very few artifacts from my grandmother, fewer from generations beyond that: some photographs, an old fashioned record player, the steamer trunk that came with my great grandmother to this country. I have their stories told over kitchen tables and pinockle games. But what happened to all their things?
Lot #2: My second grade Twiggy lunch box (1967.) I will confess that this is a replacement lunch box because I wore my own out. The name inside isn’t mine but Arlene Mittag. The thermos, however, was dug out from deep in my mother’s pantry. It’s in great condition because my mom didn’t subscribe to including soup or juice in lunches – a pickle loaf sandwich with mayo on white bread, shoe string potatoes and a couple cookies were plenty. The school gave us milk. When I first saw the lunch box, I thought it was kinda cool. I had no idea who Twiggy was but I liked her big Bambi-eyed logo, the cryptic expression on her floating head, and I was tall and gangly like her. I don’t think my mother knew who Twiggy was either. I’m sure she chose the lunch box because it was purple – she was an art teacher and went for the non-mainstream colors – and it was probably on sale at the Korvettes a few blocks from our house. (At about this same time, my mother sewed us matching mother-daughter Nehru jackets in olive green for Easter.)
As we all know now, the choice of lunch boxes, shoes, back packs and folders are critical factors in establishing your place in the grammar school pecking order. Twiggy – though quaintly retro now – did me no favors back then. My lunchbox was soft sided. Everyone else went with metal or the plain brown bag. No one else knew who Twiggy was either. All the other kids had lunch boxes with Samantha from Bewitched, or the Monkees, or the ubiquitous Smiley Face. My guess is that Arlene Mittag’s Twiggy lunch box is in such good shape because she wasn’t going to be seen with this loser lunch box and made her mother switch to a brown paper bag or maybe a Beverly Hillbillies model. So for me, this lunch box represents my first understanding that I was going to be odd and vulnerable in this world.
Lot #3: My Danny O’Day ventroloquist’s doll circa 1970 testifies to my nerddom. He came with an instructional album and booklet by Jimmy Nelson, a professional ventroloquist who was mentored by the ventroloquist master Paul Winchell, so that I could learn how to be a ventroloquist too. (I love that Danny is wearing a smoking jacket and an ascot – like he’s the James Bond of ventroloquist dummies who’s gonna get lucky later on tonight.) My parents gave him to me for Christmas along with a dressing table chair covered in white fake fur, new pajamas and a robe, probably a Barbie with dazzling Barbie outfits and accessories, books and candy. I remember that Christmas because it was the most extravagant one we ever had. My father had landed a great new job earlier that year, and my parents splurged. We all went to Marshall Field’s and helped my mother pick out a fur coat. By the next Christmas, my dad had gotten laid off.
Now to be a good ventroloquist, you have to learn how to replace letters that make your lips move with letters that don’t make your lips move. For example, you replace the letter b with the letter d. I played my record over and over trying to follow Jimmy Nelson’s instructions. Even though I couldn’t see him, I knew that he wasn’t moving his lips and neither should I. The doy dought a dasketdall. The doy dought a dasketdall. Over and over, but it never sounded right. My Danny O’Day taught me that some times even with hard work things don’t always end up well.
So other than a trip down my memory lane and, perhaps, making you think through where your personal touchstones will eventually end up, how does this relate to not being a mother? Simply, I realize that I have to find homes for these things that have made me feel at home. With these entries, I begin the catalogue of my touchstones. At some point, I’ll make a website or something. If you think that you would be a good candidate for one of these items, or maybe something else from the Ellen Wadey collection – get in contact with me. (My information is at the end of this essay.)
Please understand what this means, though. You will have to spend time with me, get to know me. You’ll have to go to the movies with me or send me postcards or letters (I’m not much of a phone person) or sit on my porch and drink bourbon with me while the bats swoop from St. Nicholas’s steeple behind my apartment. Over time, if we have a meeting of the minds, I will put your name with the item in my will. This isn’t a gimmick like the guy who auctioned off all his belongings on eBay just to see what he was worth. I don’t want any money. And, everything isn’t up for grabs. (So if you come over, don’t case my stuff.) There will be heirlooms and juicy items that I will direct to my nephews and godchildren and other extended family members because that’s where they belong.
Each piece has a story. I’ll want you to know that story, maybe you will write one in return for me. I’ll leave it to you to figure out how to make your connection to my artifact and me. And once you have the item – which I will give to you when I’m ready and for a certain chunk of them that will include waiting until my death – I will only ask you to promise to keep it with you for one year. Then you may do with it as you please.
So if you’re a Twiggy-lovin’, dasketdall owning doy or girl trying to figure out how to leave your mark on the world, get in touch with me. My best hope is that this turns into some kind of Ellen Wadey chain letter more than an obsessive listing of my quirks. The same way that I work with my stories, I’m following a hunch here. I don’t know where it’s going to lead. But I think that over time, this practice will bring me some deeper understanding of what it means to curate a legacy with no children involved.
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