I’m not sure how this particular piece came to be opened on my desktop tonight, how my finger happened to stumble across it on the desktop, opening it on the screen. It’s something I recall writing in the spring, prompted by an exercise from Southeast Review’s Writer’s Regimen. But here it was, sitting here, like I was supposed to read it again, and it was appropriate, actually, to continued wrestling I have with my dad’s response to my writing. Just when I think it’s gone, it resurrects, this time in a phone conversation with my mother in response to a newspaper article that came out about me yesterday. She read the article, she said, aloud and to my father, and his only response was an expletive at the reference to him and my uncle as partial subjects of my autism memoir. And I don’t suppose I’m surprised, exactly. The saying, “This doesn’t leave this house,” was a big one growing up. What happens here stays here–we don’t talk about ourselves, don’t talk about our difficulties, don’t give anybody reason to look down on us. In fact, we pretty much just hide who we are. Well, I’m not living by that rule anymore. In fact, I’m trying very hard to write my life honestly, without pretension, without exaggeration, without malice so that I can better understand. So I’ve decided to post here what I wrote in that exercise. It’s a reflection on a photograph taken the day I graduated from Notre Dame, but it’s also more than that. Much more. Here it is:
“Picture Perfect”
Pride in another comes easily when you don’t know the whole person. That’s how it was for us on that day, squinting into the sunshine of early June, me robed in black robes I’d butchered with scissors, not quite grasping that somewhere there really were armholes in the robe, not just these long empty things. Even on that day of accomplishment I felt like an idiot, careful not to raise my arms to reveal my butchery of fabric. I laughed about it then and I can laugh about it now. But I still feel stupid about it, even as I sit here wearing my checkered red pajamas, mens pajamas, one size too large which I never exchanged for a smaller size, feeling stupid about that mistake too.
But there we stand in the photograph, my father and me, his arm around my shoulder, his face a slight smile while my smile seems broad enough to split the universe, split myself into two. And I know that he is proud to be present at my graduation from Notre Dame, proud that I have an MFA. He is proud in the way that one can be on such a day, in the way that he can be when he doesn’t have to read what I write and therefore acknowledge who I really am, whatever that may be. This is a photo to show and say, “See my daughter? She graduated from Notre Dame,” just as he will say in the year following, “my daughter is a college professor,” and just as he will say several years later, “my daughter has two children and stays at home with them.” He will never to my knowledge admit, “My daughter is a writer” as the last story of mine he ever saw, not even read, garnered the response, “I would be ashamed for anybody to know my daughter had written that.”
“Hide it,” I tell my mom, handing my master’s thesis to my mother as we stood one night in her kitchen, one night when it is late and my father is asleep in the living room chair and my husband is off reading a novel in the spare bedroom. “Don’t let Dad read it.” And my mother doesn’t argue with this, doesn’t say, “but he’d love to know what you’ve written.” Instead she says, “maybe I should give it back to you when I’ve finished, get it out of the house.” She’s right, of course, and that is what she does, giving it to my sister who cannot really understand my stories any more than my mother can.
Do I sound bitter? I’m not bitter exactly. For I look at the pictures and I remember feeling my father’s pride in that moment even if he lacked full understanding or even a desire to understand. He was proud and I was happy to make him proud. Simple as that. What a shame I’ve since become such a disappointment to him, so much so that he used that very word—disappointment—to describe me on finding out my 2008 presidential pick. A bit more of his pride in me chipped away that day. Actually, pretty much all of it was. And yet what a little thing that seemed to me. Not like giving him my stories to read. Not like revealing to him my deep inner struggles of identity and acceptance.
“Hide it,” I hear my mother’s voice in my head. “Hide it from Dad. Hide it even from me.”
And so I smile wide to bursting, wanting to split out of my skin and let everything come spilling forth.
