From: richh@netcom.com (richh)
Subject: "For"
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 92 06:12:28 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 

     My mother began life as a poet of some promise.  I've looked
through her college papers up in the attic.  There they are, poem
after poem, A after A.  Sonnets, sestinas, blank verse, free verse,
terza rima, odes, elegies, haiku--you name it--it's in there.  She
would work for a while in one form, conquer it, then move on to the
next.  And they're all good.  Quite good.    
     And so many!  If you arrange them all in order by date, you
can see a point where she really started to turn them out--three,
four a day.  One gets the feeling that she was afraid her gift
would run out, so she wanted to use it as quickly as she could.  It
reminds me of the end of "Flowers for Algernon", where Charly
realizes he is losing his genius, and will soon be back on the
swingset.
     There's the urgency.  It's the urgency of some of these last
poems that really astounds.  My mother wrote her last poems in a
'confessional free verse' style before they even was such a thing. 
And boy, what confessions!  Secret longings, lusts, desires;  how
she hated her hometown, her 'embarrassingly-ethnic' parents, her
small-minded classmates.  Such passion!  How the only times she
felt truly free were when she was making love, or reading the
greats.  Her favorites:  the Romantics.  She ached for that passion
in her own life and sometimes writes about how she feels like she
is dying.  My mother's one mistake in life was that she was born
too soon.  Or much too late.  You can see from the handwriting on
these last poems that she never rewrote anything, but turned them
in to her writing teacher as soon as she'd completed them.
     The breakdown came senior year.  She had been living 'on the
edge' that whole year:  dating lots and lots of boys, drinking,
going further than the other girls would.  She went for the
unbalanced-artist type, having a torrid two-month affair with a
concert pianist who had wild, unkempt hair and long slender
fingers.
     She was admitted to a mental hospital early in her second
semester.  The diagnosis:  depression, with a predisposition
towards schizophrenia.  The truth is, what she really had was
bipolar disorder--manic depression.  But as I said, she was born
too soon.  Or much too late.  She was like that great New Zealand
writer Janet Frame, who was hospitalized for eight years before
going on to worldwide acclaim.  Only my mom was not quite so lucky.
     Her admission to the state hospital came as a shock to nearly
everyone who knew her.  And my grandparents were at a loss when my
mother's friends asked "What is she in for?"  Madness was not a
proper topic for conversation in the small town where my mother was
born.
     Treatments were limited then.  My mother was put on a routine
of psychotherapy(strict Freudian, I believe) and shock treatments. 
The shocks were more disorienting than painful, she told me.  You
wake up in a room and have no idea how you got there, or why.
     The electro-convulsive treatments worked.  They snapped her
out of her depression and she was able to graduate a semester
later.  But she lost the pianist and her talent.  
     And her ambition.  For the next decade and some change she
coasted, working as a secretary, a junior high school teacher,
anything that wasn't too demanding.  Her once-astonishing sex
drive, her poetry's life-fuel, had waned also, and she seemed
resigned to more or less becoming a spinster, one of those women
that everyone smiles and nods to in the street, but who is never
invited to the exciting parties, or told the juicy gossip on which
towns like hers run.
     Until she met my father.  I think she was surprised that
anyone could love her as she now was--a person whom she could
hardly recognize herself.  
     One day, I was home from school on break.  My latest passion
was cooking:  omelettes and pies especially.  I went with her one
day into town--to Fante's, that cookware store that the Frugal
Gourmet plugs on his PBS show.
     I ended up buying an omelet pan and these expensive cookie
sheets from Finland.  The sheets are really two cookie sheets
connected with about half an inch or so of air between then.  They
work on much the same principle as a double broiler--because the
cookies are never exposed to the direct heat from below, they never
ever burn.
     As we were walking back to my car my mom looked at me carrying
these new toys.  She could tell how excited I was about them, ready
to fly home and cook up a storm.  She said, more to herself than
me--or maybe it was to God--she said, "I never went in much for
cooking.  I guess I don't know really *what* I went in for."
     To this day, that is the saddest thing I have ever heard. 

RICHH
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU