December 2021 prompt NOTE: No Session December 26. We meet December 12 and 17 only.

 Until I was ten, Christmas was celebrated with a tree and gifts.  I recall driving into Princeton to see the Christmas lights on all the houses.  Those were magical times.  I found a photo of what must have been the last Christmas we celebrated before my mother converted.  I’m sure she was exhausted, trying to keep three children happy in an unhappy house.  I wrote a pantoum about what I imagined her feeling:

The End of Santa

My mother looks disconsolate, 

like crumpled wrapping paper.

Not what she got, not what she wanted,

not what she was hoping for.

Like crumpled wrapping paper,

as if she knew what was coming,

not what she was hoping for.

Next year, she’d no longer celebrate.

As if she knew what was coming--

her final Christmas Day. No Santa

Next year, she’d no longer celebrate

with cookies, gifts, good cheer.

Her final Christmas Day. No Santa.

Converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

No cookies, gifts, good cheer--

she’d exchange them for The Truth.

Converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The coming war of Armageddon.

She’d exchange them for The Truth.

Convert her hapless children too.

The coming war of Armageddon.

Plaid-skirted on her chenille bedspread.

Convert her hapless children too,

looking woebegone and lost.

Plaid skirted on her chenille bedspread,

oblivious to the coming loss of hearth.

Looking woebegone and lost, the cookies

left for Santa on a small white plate

                                            

Connection to Recovery:

Today, I can feel compassion for my mother and understand her sadness of being married to an alcoholic and doubtless engineering Christmas all by herself (as I did when my children were young.)     I can also be gentle with myself when I find my expectations of trying to create a good time for others results in my abandoning myself and my needs.                                       

PROMPT:

1.Find a family photo from your childhood that stirs a memory of conflicted feelings.  Write down one of those feelings and circle around it in the form of a pantoum.

2.Write about any holiday you can recall.  See if you can capture the fun of a special day. Write about your parents or other caregivers and how hard they worked for you to have a nice holiday. 

3. Write about what you expected from any particular Christmas or other important holiday and what actually happened.  Find an image, like the cookies left for Santa, that fits the feeling of your piece.

note:  A pantoum is a repeating form in poetry in which the second and fourth lines of a 4-line stanza are repeated as the 1st and 3rd stanzas of the next stanza, continuing through the poem. The final stanza often repeats lines from the first stanza, although I did not do that here. If it’s fun, try it.  

Prompt for November 2021 The Manicure

 

A family with a secret often has more than one.  My grandfather had a girlfriend named Frances later in his life that I believed was a secret from my grandmother. I met Frances in his hospital room after he had a tragic car accident in which he struck and killed a child.  That brought on an attack of emphysema.

 I was summoned home from college because the doctors thought he was dying.  When I got to his room with my mother, there was Frances (my mother’s age) sitting on the side of his bed.  When he died a few years later, my mother gave me the job of calling Frances. 

The Manicure

A young Korean man bends over me.

A shock of black hair hides his face.

He takes my hand in his.

I am embarrassed by the age 

spots sprouting on my skin.

He clips my nails, oblivious. 

To him, I’m just a client.

Then I recall my grandfather, 

a lean, laconic farmer, gasping

through ravaged lungs in the hospital,

attended by the woman he had decided,

fearing death, he wanted me to meet.

Her name was Frances.

Frances from the feed mill.

She was my mother’s age.

Here, seemingly in secret 

from my grandmother,

Francis held his hands in hers

and gently clipped his nails 

as if seated at the feet of Christ.

This gesture, more shocking

than a kiss or exposed flesh,

silenced small talk.

The silence grew, divisive,

deadly, deft.

Connection to Recovery:

Alcoholics Anonymous has a saying: “You are as sick as your secrets.” Keeping secrets was part of the “don’t tell” rule of an ACA childhood.  We didn’t tell what life was like in our homes. I wasn’t the only one to keep my grandfather’s girlfriend a secret.  My mother was complicit too.  It was she who handed me Frances’ phone number when my grandfather died. Keeping secrets was generational in my family.

The cost of keeping the secret was shame—shame on behalf of my grandmother and shame that I was not being honest. I allowed myself to be overpowered by an authority figure—my grandfather. I participated in a family drama.  Today, I recognize the signs of drama and learn to step away.

                                

                                          PROMPT:

 1.Write about any secret that you have kept for someone else,

particularly if you were conflicted and wanted to tell the truth.

 2.Write about any situation in which you learned a secret that changed the way you felt about someone you looked up to.

3.  If you have kept a secret, write a letter to the person you want to tell the truth to, even if that person is no longer living.

October prompt

 Recovery Writers Prompt October 2021

from: Beneath the Steps: a Writing Guide for 12-step Recovery by Christine Beck

Break-up of the Family of Origin

My mother didn’t leave my alcoholic father until I was fourteen.  By then, her job could support us.   By that time, we had nothing to mourn about leaving the farm.  But it had been home for fourteen years and was imbued with a strong sense of history. As we painted furniture in our old house to take to our new one, I knew we were moving.  

But, like many Adult Children I have big gaps in my memory.  How did we move our furniture?  Where was my father when we left?  What did he say about our moving out?  Logic tells me it was a huge melodramatic scene, but in my memory, one day we lived on the farm and the next day we lived in town. I don’t recall approaching the move with hope or even relief, although I imagine those feelings must have been there.  

But it was change, big change, and I’m sure the dread of change inspired feelings like the dead moth that appears at the end of this poem (an example of the surprise that can happen). 

Starting Over

When my mother kicked my father out,

silence tumbled in.

Our farmhouse had been furnished

in old wood, mahogany and oak--

the dining table, desk, and bookshelves,

even bedsteads, all evoked the color

of brown dirt, dark and dank, as when

the plow clears last year’s stalks away.

We painted it all white. For weeks,

we made each piece as pure as baby’s breath.

With each stroke, I covered fourteen years.

They lay stuck in drying paint, like a moth,

when it surrenders to the trap, its wings

turned hard and gray.

Connection to Recovery:

Like the moth, I was trapped in an alcoholic home. The feeling of being trapped can be triggered in adulthood.  Today, I can recognize the feeling and remind my inner child she is not trapped today.  I can help metaphorically to build her a new home. 

  

                                       

                                           PROMPT:

1. Think about a piece of furniture, flooring or wallpaper from your childhood home.  Let it speak for you about the loss of your home, even if you didn’t think it was a loss. 

2. Write about any move you made in childhood, trying to capture the mixed emotions any move entails.

3. Write about any breakup in your family when you were young.

September post

 

                                            photo: Artur Aldyrkhanov on unsplash.com

September 2021 Prompt, from Beneath the Steps: A Writing Guide for 12-Step Recovery, by Christine Beck,p 125

The Bible is a treasure trove of stories that bubble up when I explore emotions of longing or disconnection.  The following poem speaks to the fear of abandonment. It also involves issues of class, which tormented me as a child.   It’s the story of Ruth and Naomi. Naomi is Ruth’s mother-in-law. Ruth, a foreigner, is married to the Jewish Naomi’s son, Boaz.  When Boaz dies, Naomi plans to send Ruth back to her homeland, which was the custom.  Ruth pleads to stay with Naomi. I’m exploring contemporary notions of meddling mothers-in-law before turning the poem in a loving direction.

Mother-in-law

Just when you think you’ve heard enough,

her suggested hostess gifts, secret signals

of how her people learned to recognize each other, 

the initialed cocktail napkins, pressed lightly to lips, 

never mauled into a ball, a wrinkled mess. 

Just when she starts in on the nursery

school, the kind where our kind

goes to get ahead, 

Your head goes to Naomi, the Israelite, 

mother-in-law to a heathen girl named Ruth.

Boaz, Naomi’s son, stone dead, and Ruth, his widow,

lonely as the wind on Mount Moriah, 

clings to Naomi’s skirts, begs not be repatriated.

Ruth wants any task, just to hold the hand

of someone who once held him.

Wherever you go, let me go there too.

Connection to Recovery:

We all have stories or myths that take root in our subconscious. This story of possible abandonment had a happy ending. Naomi let Ruth stay. This one reminds me of the power of women in recovery. I need to keep them close and ask for help, just as Ruth asked Naomi.

                                          PROMPT:

1.Think of any story from the Bible, Shakespeare or any well-known piece of literature in which the characters display your longings or fear of abandonment.  Transport those characters

 to a scene from your life and see what happens.

2.Write about any current conflict in your life and then “flashback” to a conflict in some myth or fairytale that relates.

Response to July Prompt by Anna

 

If I go away.........

Snap snap goes the belt

daddy can't see me under the bed

I'm invisible.

light streaming from the hallway

i look around my room

there's my record player on a small table

will daddy break that?

He knows how much love my records

45s smashing across my bedroom wall

there are my worn out, stained dolls in the corner

i continue to look around my little room

a room that was once cozy and safe

i see the pink and white striped wall paper i love so

under a tear in the wallpaper is a message I wrote with a crayon

if I go away will mommy stop drinking?

if I go away will daddy stop scaring me?

if i go away will daddy stop touching me?

I float up to the sky

snap snap goes the belt

daddy can't see me under the bed

I'm invisible.

July 2021 Prompt based on fear of violence

 Violence and Feeling Unsafe

                                            photo credit: Dan Blackburn on unsplash.com

We who grew up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional family knew we were not safe. I wrote about walking home from school, fearing that I would find my father drunk and rageful.  He rarely hit us, but he swore, red-faced with anger and contempt.  His anger was inexplicable.  What had set him off? Would he be funny and want to play softball or would he be passed out on the living room rug? That uncertainty was worse than predictability. It created chaos, a roller coaster ride of emotions.

In this poem what is in a newspaper—words—can be more damaging to a child than being hit.  His words imprinted a belief that we were worthless and a problem.  We were shamed and felt abandoned emotionally.  This is true even if we witnessed these words being directed at others.  When I first came into recovery, I said my dad picked on everyone except me.  Today, I believe that was not true, but even if it were, I now know that if I was in the room, I didn’t need to be the one being derided and cursed at to register the blow.

Walking Home

It’s four o’clock. The school bus chugs off,

leaving me at the end of the lane to our farm. 

It’s called Princessville Road.

It’s lined with dirt, brambles, scent of wild things:

ink berries, bittersweet – their poison packed 

in blood-red berries bursting from their jackets,

cornflowers, huckleberries, honeysuckle,  

tiny drops of nectar shimmering on the stem.

Pull them through a slender shaft and suck it dry.

My mother isn’t home. 

She’s gone to work, and left me

to return to an empty house.

At least, I hope it’s empty. I hope my father

won’t be there, his rage rolled up like newspaper,

a weapon that’s supposed to leave no mark.                                           

                                                PROMPT:

1. Write about where you were when you realized you weren’t safe.

2.  Try to find an image, such as the newspaper in the poem above, to stand as a symbol for a weapon.

3. Try to put “contrary” impulses in your poem.  They create energy. Notice that the seemingly peaceful scene of walking down the lane with the berries and flowers becomes for the narrator a scene of danger when she imagines that the berries are “poison.” So the berries are simultaneously attractive and dangerous. This is one way to reveal what keeps us returning to dangerous or unsafe emotional or physical places.  We make choices that recreate our past, even if the past was painful.

Kevin's poem for the June 2021 prompt "In the Outside"

 In the ‘Outside’

by Kevin Cooper

 

 

Outside.

Outside was freedom

Opportunity waited outside

Adventure awaits

 

Almost always alone…

What games can I play

With no one else?

 

Climb a tree: it becomes 

a rocket to the stars,

a pirate ship…

Ride my bike, I’m flying

or in a road race

 

Outside, the wide world

is mine

No walls, no doors

no silence, no chores

 

Even when it rains:

outdoors is puddles

and drowning worms

My same world transformed

 

The street of our block

was a connection to another,

bigger world

It pulls me away with promise

of destination

But here I remain 

secure in the familiar;

the places to hide

right outside my front door