Journeys Home: Stories from Grandmother's Lap by Nancy Burnett

Excerpt

Journeys Home

I think it all happened so fast, being an accident and all, that time to negotiate a great life purpose vanished with the thunder’s echo. Time for creating a thoughtful plan evaporated in the haste. It all happened so fast; I don’t remember a thing.
    
Some children seem to remember their immediately preceding lives. They continue to see and talk to the angels or guides who tenderly escorted them to earth. For some those guides continue to usher them through life in adventurous if not completely logical ways. Not me. I remember nothing, having slid onto earth on a wave of thunder. All my information begins post-birth. Every scrap of data I present about myself consists of documentable fact or pure conjecture, some of which might be close to truth, but mostly unverifiable.
    
Some people arrive with a desirable program, chewing thoughtfully on the silver spoon they’re born with. As soon as sufficiently educated and launched, they move forward confidently toward a life steeped in purpose. Not me. Every idea I’ve ever had about myself dripped with doubt and lacked important resources for actualization. I think my resources burned up in the fire of re-entry (or entry, if this is my first time around). I’ve had trouble finding the desirable program made just for me. So I resorted to copying someone else as an alternative solution—for a long time my momma, just to be safe. I couldn’t even color inside the lines. How could I fit into a box made for her but not for me?
    
Some people feel they fit from day one. They never question if they belong or why they exist. Not me. Because of my accidental nature, I’ve asked just about every possible question about the state of my personal being. I’ve worried over my location, my justification, my salvation, my rectification, my adaptation. I’ve pondered my “raison d’être” and my purpose in life—all to no avail. I keep coming up with the same answer: there is no answer. I exist because I am here.
    
Really now, I know I began as an ordinary infant— pinky-red, squalling mad, and hungry. I wasn’t an accident of nature. I didn’t arise spontaneously from an opened seashell or spring forcefully from my father’s brow. I wasn’t baked up in my grandmother’s floury kitchen. I came the ordinary way—head first, easy as first births go for a non-drugged, healthy woman barely out of her teens. I plunged into that long July afternoon near the end of wartime, what later became Daylight Savings Time. The extra hour of sun-time on that afternoon presaged my life-long need of more time—more time to warm up, more time to play, then more time to settle down. I burst forth like the harvest of a Victory Garden, a ripened seed from a fertile pod, but once here, late to blossom, late to bloom, late to reach my prime. My body grew quickly through the mid-century milestone while my soul took her own sweet time.
    
My birth early that Sunday afternoon in a small town hospital landed me into farm families on both sides of the parental divide. Both families, though in separate parts of the state, struggled against the challenges of rural Arkansas—drought, rocks, tornadoes, floods, and insects fought within the limitations of greedy landlords’ sharecropping schemes. A varying geography of rocky hills and sloping meadows versus sandy rolls and muddy flats evoked only slightly disparate social impacts: worrying over which farming disadvantages needed fighting against in which seasons (such as not enough hands to hoe in summer vs. not enough hands to pick in fall) or choosing which unaffordable farmlife advantages to dream about (such as a tractor vs. a wringer washer). My maternal grandparents (in the photo on the next page), Rosie and Ray Rider, farmed in the northwestern quadrant of Arkansas while my paternal grandparents, Willie and Amanda Cummings, pictured on the right worked central Arkansas land.
    A greater divide stemmed from the contrasting cultural and historical roots of my ancestors’ European stock. Notable contrasts differentiated my grandparents. On my maternal side, Grandpa Rider’s Germanic thrift and serious work ethic wed Grandma’s residual wariness from her ancestral French Huguenot oppression and diaspora.
    
Grandpa Rider refused all government help during the Great Depression, and Grandma Rider remained a homebody all of her life, seldom venturing socially beyond family and immediate neighbors. Although baptized Baptists during my momma’s childhood, in my memory churchgoing didn’t fit into their everyday life. And seldom did they play, unlike my paternal grandparents.
    
Grandma and Grandpa Cummings married their Scotch-Irish conviviality to emerging mid-century Bible-belt Protestant fundamentalism. They too were Baptists. On their very front porch they started the Brownsville Baptist Church that continues to this day. They had an organ in the front room to accompany singing (but not dancing!) just for the fun of it. Grandma crocheted doilies to decorate every tabletop and collected ceramic chickens to set on them while Grandpa fished as much as he could. Throughout their 36-year marriage, my parents struggled with these divisive ancestral traits that precipitated contrasting expectations. My momma never understood my daddy’s willingness to drop anything to go fishing with his poppa and brothers while she and my grandma washed clothes in a big pot in the backyard after dumping and heating the necessary hauled water. Similarly, my daddy’s greatest frustration lay in trying to figure out Momma’s demands like the urgency to get the minnows out of the car after a fishing trip on a hot summer day.
    
Both my ancestral streams migrated across early America from Colonial times. Both stopped at the Arkansas frontier, laid claim to farmland later lost to bad judgment or the wrath of Mother Nature, and then tried again. Both somehow survived the Great Depression and then stood on the cusp myth, and education.
    
My parents’ personal and unconscious myths cooked up romantically on a college campus during a sweltering summer term made me their singular result. With my birth, within my being, two streams of genetic heritage converged; two histories coalesced into one, going forth from that day.
    Across two decades of development I wove the common and dissimilar threads of my being into a self who would, in turn, continue the human pattern by joining to another stream of genetic, cultural, and mythological humanity. My birth near the end of World War II paralleled the birth of the atomic age. My birth split the atoms of my own self. Like this modern age, I arrived by explosion, by internal combustion. My modernity mirrored bewildering conflicts of choice: this emerging technology or that traditional way; here, near home or there, somewhere far away; right this minute, sometime later, or whenever convenient; which path to choose, where to go from there, or when to start or stop. My birth propelled a lemniscate-shaped orbit around two dancing stars—my parents. My bursting rhythm harmonized to their discord. I frustrated my momma with willfulness and through my sheer presence alone forced my daddy from his introverted shelter. While not a child of the outer war—my daddy didn’t serve because of (according to Momma) his flat feet—I lived an inner war, a war between will and won’t, between want and don’t want. This war distressed my outer world while alienating my body and soul, dividing my soul and spirit, and splintering my spirit from my body.
    
At a few weeks old I already knew fear, as maybe everyone does from the sheer shock of birth itself. Even the most benignly gentle birthing may arouse the spark of fear—perhaps a necessary element of the human condition. Fear at its core reacts to loss—loss of the known, of peace, quiet, and comfort; loss of a sense of security, of a stable plane of existence; loss of surround, of container, of the ground that may be womb, bed, or arms.
    
In my first year of life I learned about loss, and, like all infants, I sought refuge from it. Every skill, innate and learned, and each attribute of body, appearance, and expression supported this effort by attempting to attract my caretakers’ attention, compassion, and solicitous response. My birth itself set this impulse in motion. The full formation of emotional attachment completes in the second half of the first year of life. Yet any infant’s success at getting her needs met depends on the accessibility and responsiveness of the available adults. Some adults just do a better job than others. Human beings amaze with incredible life potential, but some of the things that we do to one another defy logic and rationale.
    
I know my infant-self cried my share. Why do babies cry? Some say crying results from a primary reflexive response to hunger, cold, dampness, and other sensations. Others say crying exercises and strengthens the new cardiovascular system. Crying might even be an emotional response to flailing alone loose in the world, unswaddled, untethered. I accept all these, and I also think babies cry to communicate. I believe cries distinguish needs like hunger from, for example, a need to relieve sensory distress—like a “you pinned my diaper to my skin” cry. This latter example seldom happens now that disposables rule the diaper universe, but in my infancy, pins represented a real hazard.
    
Yes, there are many reasons babies cry, and hunger dominates. My momma didn’t like breastfeeding and made a fuss over it that perhaps hid a bigger issue: simply disliking having a baby, period. After three weeks of our feeding impasse I got really hungry. My grandmother, who’d successfully fed and weaned five and knew her way around a breast, tried to help, but even she gave up and called the doctor who recommended a sweet elixir of Pet milk and Karo syrup that satisfied my hunger.
    
Later in my life, when pregnant with my first child, I considered the ironical new fad of breastfeeding. My momma pronounced it awful and couldn’t recommend it. She reported that it felt like having a little animal attached at the breast. Of course at the time I missed the symbolic implications of her statement. My mother added that Momma, my grandmother, had nipples that stuck out to here, and she held her thumb and forefinger up and about an inch apart to illustrate. That length seemed to be the key to success, and hers had apparently been too short. I noticed mine were pretty short too, which I considered a blessing. I remembered girls in the dressing room after gym class and in the dorm showers who had sported impressive pronounced nipples. I had never really thought of bigger as better—more, maybe, but not usually bigger. So I made the no-brainer decision at that time—to bottlefeed my child.
    
While my momma again chose the bottle to feed her second daughter 11 years later, I changed my mind when I had a second chance. Breastfeeding had steadily gained popularity. My friends had happily fed their babies this way. All the magazines and leaflets at the obstetrician’s office agreed that baby clearly benefited. Though I earnestly hoped to succeed that time, a different problem ensued— a late miscarriage ended my second pregnancy. Fortunately, I got another chance. My mother-in-law came to help with my second baby. Unfortunately she hadn’t a clue about breastfeeding, and Momma proved right—it hurt. I genuinely tried, but another problem arose. This time an infection convinced my doctor that I should stop. Suffice it to say, why babies cry and why mommas cry differs. I cried my grief over failure to perform what I had come to identify as a woman’s natural skill.
    
I finally got it right the third time. Many reasons might explain a couple’s having their third child, but for me, to finally feed my baby naturally ranked high on my list. I read everything I could get my hands on and decided I could teach myself. After all, I thought, women had fed their babies since the beginning of time under greater hardships than I would ever know. I read a memoir about a pregnant woman who, because of several unfortunate circumstances including breaking her leg, had to spend a winter alone in a cabin somewhere far up north after setting her leg herself. In due time she delivered her baby herself, and she fed it! I decided the least I could do after safely delivering my child in a sterile modern hospital would be to feed the poor thing. And believing it, worked. In fact, he practically fed himself.
    
He took to my breast so well that he refused to take the carefully pumped milk I’d bottled so I could play a round of golf with my friend, Mary Lou. He screamed the entire hour at the drop-in sitter service, Mother’s Day Out, which recalls me to the topic: why babies cry. I believe he cried his dissatisfaction at having to suck an awful, simulated nipple handled by a strange-smelling, unfamiliar woman when he knew the real thing must be somewhere near by. After all, it was his regular milk. So, the crying had to be about the delivery method.
    
I know my baby-self cried a lot because my momma told me so many times. Maybe I cried because I didn’t like the mothering delivery method. Besides daily feedings new mothers must manage pesky daily baths. Babies do get messy, even stinky. A new mother must figure out how to keep her baby safe from drowning and how to control the water temperature so her baby isn’t burned. Temperature concerns apply to bottles of milk as well. I have heard a baby scream from milk too hot—a cry not easily forgotten, ranking high with the pin-in-the flesh one. My friend Darla stuck my daughter while practicing diapering for her son’s impending birth. She felt awful. Recommended checks when your baby wouldn’t stop crying in the old days included seeing if a pin had penetrated the skin. On the other hand, how hot does bathwater have to be to scald a baby? Should a new mother test it with the inside of her wrist or just look to see if steam rises? How could my mother put me into a bath hot enough to blister my infant skin? She told me about her shocking “accident” many years later just as I began taking a symbolic view of life.
    
At three weeks old, I already knew fear. Next came the kidnapping scheme. A few months after the very hot bath, Momma dreamed up the kidnapping scheme. Of course everyone knew about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Despite my family’s lack of wealth and fame, Momma imagined kidnapping could happen to any family. Any mother not looking might discover her baby snatched right out of her crib. Of course, nowadays baby stealing ranks among the notorious crimes. During the last mid-century it happened less. But, the idea of it provided a perfect ruse to take me somewhere safe.
    
Where could be safer than grandmother’s house? A perfect solution! Let those other hips haul me around for awhile, especially those skinny sister-aunt hips who, when they were little, she’d hauled around all those years of her impoverished childhood while her momma worked in the fields or fed chickens or boiled the dirty clothes in a big black pot in the backyard. Let them figure out the bathwater and feeding and all the other dreary tasks. Meanwhile, my mother could visit now and then bringing cute little pinafores and rompers that she sewed for me. In fact, when about eight months old, I became the center of attention at my grandparents’ house for a while, a cute little doll to dress up and feed, bathe, and play with.
    
My mother had four siblings: an older brother, Coy, off to the war before she married, and three younger sisters all still at home when I came to live with them. These aunts felt like sisters to me. At about age 12, I discovered, through a new best friend who had real older sisters, my confusion about my aunts’ relationships to me. Spending the night at Jane’s house, we lay in the bed sharing truths and secrets. I felt in my belly and bones that my aunts were my sisters, and an empty space inside opened and filled with sadness as I confronted my new realization.
    
Somehow I had known the difference, but my attachment to each of them individually and as a group belied that difference. I wanted them to be my real sisters. Because my aunts were older children and teens when I came along, their lives passed over mine. Before I grew old enough to understand, I lost my central place in their lives. They grew up, fell in love, married, and moved away while I grew from infant to toddler to preschooler. When Mildred and Ruth Ann’s early marriages failed, they returned to the farm for a while, and my position shifted even further from center. By then, Mildred had two small children, Sandy and Vicki, and I felt like their older sibling rather than their cousin. By then, I moved back and forth with my parents between temporary college homes and the farm. During those early years, my home and family had elusive relationships and unclear boundaries that muddled my identity. My grandparents’ consistent daily care for a critical period of my infancy rendered my real mother more sister-like, blurring our relationship forever.
    
Momma’s sisters appeared to pose a different challenge to her. She vocally resented her childhood caretaking responsibilities but enjoyed bossing her sisters around according to Reba who, being next oldest, wasn’t easily bossed. Momma probably resented sharing some scarce resources with them; however, she seemed to enjoy being a role model for how to improve their lot in life. To this end, she shared whatever she had. Although they seemed to look up to her, they generally failed to live up to her imagined possibilities. She held the lowest expectations for Mildred, the least intellectual and most outgoing of the bunch. She envisioned big things for Ruth Ann, her favorite. But Ruth Ann disappointed my mother by not valuing education. Reba almost finished college before she married.
    
Momma never understood Reba’s settling for incomplete, but she blew off this disappointment as another in a long line of Reba’s peculiarities. She seemed most rejecting of Reba—understandable as the sibling who replaced her in her momma’s lap. Any new baby displaced the current holder in my grandmother’s lap; this happened to me too when Sandy came along.
    
I think my mother’s failure to influence her sisters’ achievements partly explains her shifting of expectations onto me over whom she, of course, had much greater control, more than she outwardly acknowledged. Her “accidents” and mothering solutions impacted my early life and created my clingy and anxious quality of insecurity. To resolve my discomfort I tried to copy her life. I figured that whatever she did or aspired to must be acceptable to her, and so my emulation would insure her acceptance. The complex interweaving of my uncertain relationships with my aunts and this pattern of anxious attachment to my mother operated in the foreground of my life—my grandmother comforting me in the background through her more reliable presence.
    So my world turned. My grandmother, who preferred a baby to anyone else around, got to mother a baby again—me. She may have missed hauling her own babies around while working hard to keep her family clean and fed. She probably felt she had no choice but to enlist my mother’s help. In those days, family and farm life followed a generational structure with each child moving into a stratum of work, as growth permitted. When examined closely—without projection—the facts of my parents’ and grandparents’ lives reveal situations very different from mine that demanded skills I know nothing about. Because my mother knew firsthand the challenges of living hand-to-mouth, she likely wanted no part of that, if she could avoid it. Going to college had been her daddy’s dream for her, and she quickly recognized it as her way out of poverty. During my first year of life, she probably felt altogether too close to the barefoot-and-pregnant scenario that she saw her mother live. I can see why she’d take drastic action to prevent that. A kidnapping scheme contained all the right elements: a perceived “real” danger and a good mother response.
    
Momma’s version of my story reports I lived happily ever after, my feet hardly touching ground because someone, usually one of my sister-aunts, gleefully carried me around on a hip most of the time. This proved to be my downfall, literally! I had lived with my extended family about two and one half months when Reba tripped, fell, and dropped me in the front yard while rushing to get to the truck to go to town. Maybe she just stumped a toe, and I went flying and crashed onto a rock in the gravelly yard. However the accident happened, it broke my leg. I entered the hospital where my leg, wrapped in an ace bandage, could be suspended in traction for the next six weeks. My grandmother stayed with me night and day, as the story goes, refusing to leave me alone. My doctor knew that treating the break with a cast would result in a shortened leg, and so adapted orthopedic suspension paraphernalia to fit my leg. His crafty treatment a success, he discharged me just days before my first birthday—with legs of equal length.
    
What a first year of life! It began with a feeding crisis, followed by a bath crisis, then a move to my grandparents’ busy, full house where they became “Memaw” and “Pepaw,” and I instantly acquired three sisters. This move interrupted the development of my emotional bond to my parents. The constancy of their faces and arms vanished and new familiars took their place. Finally, tethered to a strange bed in a strange place my first year came to a close. I would have about three years of stability before my parents decided to take me back into their home—a new crisis to interrupt my developmental path, another attachment crisis: the everyday loss of my grandparents who had cared for me, washed, dressed, and fed me, as well as emotionally anchored me while my parents came and went. My surface adaptability covered, even buried, the resulting wounds to my body and soul. My body withdrew its natural openness to protect against more loss. It loosened attachment to my soul and began to live in fear. My psyche concocted thoughts to explain and justify my new experiences. My personal history changed and absorbed a deeply woven thread of grief that would become difficult to remove.
    
As an adult I tended to blame my mother for the deleterious outcomes I traced to these events. Anxiousness sometimes poured over me washing away my hopes for a happy time like when trying to learn to swim: my enthusiasm and interest drowned in a panic once I got my face into the water. Global anxiety can make even a familiar setting feel threatening. Shyness often engulfed my enjoyment of new people and situations. I would have readily joined into play with other children but for an unbidden reticence. Night terrors and bad dreams of sinking in light blue water with no escape or being chased by dark figures or forces, even the mask of the devil, woke me all too frequently. Sometimes I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t pay attention, couldn’t listen closely, couldn’t learn. I battled these disabilities throughout my childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood when my nature changed slightly, having developed some coping skills, but the intensity of my discomfort did not. I attributed every accident, each adverse decision to my mother. I focused on the push-pull pattern of enmeshed relating that we expressed over decades.
    
Lately, I’ve wondered what role my father played through all of this. Most likely he felt helpless about the feeding problem. Plus, men in his generation seldom gave infants baths. But, did my mother easily convince him to leave me at the farm near Paris? Did he reluctantly agree? Or, did he too believe that kidnapping threatened my life and feel relieved with their plan that she later described as her own? Maybe he actually generated the idea. Maybe he talked her into it. I took a long time to realize my father might have perpetrated some of my early life history, and that he might have concurred or even created the plan that contributed to my later distress.
    
A girl’s relationship with her father inherently differs from that with her mother, and the origins of this critical relationship precede conception, lying among his childhood experiences. He carried in his body and soul a matrix woven of experiences with his father and mother, among his siblings, especially sisters, and between himself and the world beyond. A father undoubtedly thinks and feels in a personally unique way about a coming baby—both consciously and unconsciously—but the baby who arrives may bear little resemblance to his expectation. Men, frequently and notoriously, expect a son. The laws and ways of Western society for millennia have placed boys and men above girls and women, and so fathers have carried both responsibility and freedom that has overshadowed mothers and daughters.     On the other hand, the intense, emotional societal projections onto mothers can nearly obliterate a father’s value and influence. Fatherhood has had to be strong indeed to remain upright against this powerful symbolic presence. Hence, compensatory efforts devoted to this end permeate society from simple mores to elaborate laws.
    
My father grew up in a large family, born the ninth of thirteen children, the seventh of ten boys. Before his birth, my grandmother lost four of her children in a seven-year period, including one of her three daughters. The third to die in infancy or early childhood, a two-year old, died 13 days before my father’s birth. A year before that, the family home and farm at Barney, Arkansas, blew away during a tornado. Later, a fire destroyed their house. After so many challenges, my grandfather never recovered his oomph. He moved his family a few counties away multiple times and sharecropped the remainder of his farming days. My grandmother pined the rest of her life for Mount Vernon, Arkansas, her hometown.
    
I think all of her loss attached to that hometown, to the time and place of her innocence. Longing to return there, she symbolically longed to return to wholeness—to the time before she, at age 18, lost her mother of 45 to appendicitis; to the time before her fifth child died at age one, then her third child, aged five, died a year later; to the time when her seventh and eighth children died one after the other at one and two years respectively, and finally to the time before losing her house and moving faraway—in her mind—from her childhood home.
    
When I first discovered the chronology of my grandparents’ losses I began to recognize the depth of my father’s emotional inheritance. I can barely imagine the challenge of nurturing a newborn through the grief of the loss of one child. That his arrival capped a string of losses seven years’ long exceeds what I personally know. With further reflection on my experience of my father and his relationships within his family, I realized his older sister—six years old at my father’s birth—became his emotional mother.
    
Throughout her life my Aunt Ruth held a special place in my father’s heart. He touched in with her like I touched in with my Grandma Rider. I suspect, being the only other female then in the home, she reached into the space of her mother’s grief and tended her newborn brother. I believe they forged a bond that led to attachment as he grew and developed. I also recall that my father, while sentimental toward his mother, actually paid her little attention. Her hands were full. After my father she bore four more children. Nine children in all reached adulthood. My grandmother birthed a child on average every other year for 26 years. The laundry and cooking by themselves would have challenged any woman alone in a house with eight men and boys and two girls of assorted sizes. Fortunately because of their age differences, they all didn’t live at home at any one time.
    
I suspect my father often disappeared into the crowd. He wasn’t named until nearly two years old. One family story reports him at around age 10 or 12 deciding on his own to quit school. A couple of years later he decided he’d had enough of hanging around the farm and went back. Of course that put him grades behind his age-mates. Once he made his mind up, he stayed in school for the duration, eventually—inspired by a teacher’s encouragement— completing college.
    
My father—a quiet introvert, a studious sort who could often be found reading the dictionary in search of words for his songs, and a self-taught musician—enjoyed his solitude, sought older men as friends to fish with, and generally did what my mother wanted, albeit through some passive resistance. My mother once told how only he could quiet my terrible infant tears. She attributed this ability to his firm grip. I guess he had a lot of practice hanging on. I am glad he wanted to hang onto me while I cried furiously perhaps with a stomachache or other infant malady. I just wish he hadn’t let me go when he did—let me go to live away from him at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.
    
A baby needs a father to balance the mother. The current social experiment with single-parenthood by choice may work out okay, or may not. We humans tend to be hungry for what we need. Children and adults will, for example, sometimes eat surprising things trying to get a missing nutrient, seemingly driven by the body’s secret knowledge. A baby needs fathering to balance the family diet of mothering otherwise she may starve for missing masculine nourishment. Here I dangle suspended between the men in my infant life: Daddy on my right, Grandpa Rider on my left. I dance in the grass, my little left leg lifted in delight. My daddy’s guitar hangs around his neck. He’s no doubt already sung Little Red Wagon to me, the song I’ll ask for again and again throughout my childhood years. I can still see his body moving rhythmically behind the guitar as he formed the chords and plucked the strings. I remember his bright-eyed grinning face as he sang and the happy laughter that followed a performance. He made me feel that the song and his singing belonged to me alone. That feeling became like a transitional object—in place of a Teddy Bear or doll—intangibly connecting me directly to him. But the experience remained out of my control. I could ask for the song, but I might not get it when I asked. He also sang it for every other child in the family so it was never exclusively mine. A father is not like a stuffed toy that a child can carry around by an ear.
    
A baby easily curls into the cradle of a woman’s soft-bellied lap. A man’s lap differs by virtue of anatomy if nothing else. His body supports like a perch from which to look over the world of possibilities. Men carrying very young infants often do so in imitation of women, tenderly cradling the tiny child in the muscular crook of an arm held close to the body. One larger hand clutches two egg sized feet while the other arm does whatever needs doing often in the unmistakable way of a man with a firm grasp and a strong yank from a longer reach. Or they hug thighs together making a firm bed for the babe over which they sometimes curl awkwardly. Not many months later the baby may become like a sturdy stuffed toy held high on his shoulder for maximum viewing rotation—a perch some babies like while others curl back over the man’s head trying to retreat to belly level, the position I might have preferred.
    
I believe a baby loses out on knowing the differences between a woman’s body and the wider, harder, flatter chest; the larger, stronger hands, or the stiffer, bonier legs of a father or grandfather or uncle when one is not around. I believe a baby needs this sensory difference to develop the full spectrum of self. The cells of each new child carry the recognition of such differences borne by genes curlicued into a double helix and carried forever in his or her body. The mythologies of our world are replete with creation stories of males and females, with tales of birth and living and of death and dying, and with stories of heroic quests demonstrating the different strengths and resources of men and women that echo the body-based experiences of being human and the intuitive, imaginal grounds of the soul. I used to crawl into my daddy’s lap while he was driving and press belly to belly just to be close to him. His arms stretched over me as he grasped the steering wheel, driving us home. My ears absorbed his heartbeat.
    
To a small child the whole world exists in one room or one front yard. My matrix of mothering interfaced with the arms of the men in my life. I lived for a time at the center of two worlds—one permanent, one transitional—a situation later difficult to reconcile. I took a long time coming to see my early-life events in a positive cast, as colorful, unique, and endlessly engaging among the spectrum of life stories. The first year of life, the infant life, sets the stage for all to come. The first-year trajectory determines and impacts critical later passages in ways too numerous and complex to fully identify, though social scientists keep trying. Birth from womb to world mirrors a journey from sea to land. Not every child screams at birth, but every child born into outer life must initiate lungs to air, sense frightening new sensations, and lose the wet and tethered known world of umbilicus in amniotic fluid. The door of life opens to unfathomable possibilities like a rainbow arcing from one horizon point to another contains every color of light, the sum of all hues, and the product of all blending.
    
Any given life can go in any possible direction. The generative impulses lie within incomprehensible mystery. The knowable genetic potential of DNA may be altered by unassessable environmental contributions. The trajectory of a child’s development may thus change in any fraction of a second, on any day of life. And that omits accounting for the metaphysics of a baby’s birth, the resulting astrological signs and portents. Every one of us bumps against each other. Individual metaphysics, personal behaviors, and singular thoughts may clash with the predestined givens of self as well as with the paths of others.
    
I am a Leo; my father is a Cancer; my mother a Libra. Does that make us compatible or not? We all had dark hair. Did that cause us to have the same thoughts? Where did one of us end and the others begin once we all came together in the same space and time? What implosion brought us together? What explosion later parted us into three different directions? I ask these questions from the vantage point of time and distance. When a child, especially an infant, I couldn’t see beyond my parent’s arms and legs. I named the ones that reached for me and accepted my outstretched arms, the ones who bathed me and picked me up when I fell—those I named Momma and Daddy.
    
A small collection of photographs spanning my infancy and childhood partially documents the trajectory of my life. A cache of pictures followed my childhood from house to house, state to state. They lived inside an old album that slowly came apart, pages dispersing to uncertain places, mirroring the fragmentation of our family life. At the end of my parent’s marriage I rescued others and made them mine. Here and there among these captured images I glimpse a higher order of meaning. I see within these little pictures’ fading backgrounds and partial skies and fuzzy foregrounds an explanation of who I was, who I became, even who I might be tomorrow. I look closely at the pictured scenes for explanatory details of my life. I see eyes opened or closed, heads cocked or turned, arms tight or reaching, attention focused or distracted, contents centered or skewed, and expressions withheld or beseeching. I see life coursing through space and time. I weave the in-betweens with story, tether the parts with ribbons of memory and imagination, and color the monochromes with vivid swaths of patchwork while writing the fragments of my life into clarity, coherence, and continuity.
    
This little picture enlarged well beyond its actual size shows me open-mouthed, closed-eyed, and carefully held by my childaunt, Ruth Ann, who gazes at me with the rapt delight of a pubescent girl. This tiny record of my infant-self almost misses me as the photographer’s hands veer the camera toward the open field. Still I am there, captured forever on paper that can live longer than my body, now digitized for even greater permanence. I can live forever because someone snapped this image of me.
    
Am I crying or yawning? Am I sleepy or afraid? Does cause for fear exist? Or have I no ground for concern, yet? Who shot this photo? One of my parents? But, what about the photo of the new parents cherishing their tiny child? Wouldn’t that be the one saved photo if it existed? Its absence from my small cache saddens me. No such photo exists—as far as I now know.

As I reflect and write today, the earliest complete family photo in my small collection shows me in hard-soled shoes, of uncertain age but no longer an infant, probably after my broken leg had healed. I orient to my father perhaps responding to his touch, to words spoken but uncaptured by film, or to an unseen pat or squeeze. He leans in close, reaches all the way around, fingers loose beside my right knee, a hand over my left ankle. My mother’s closed eyes seem protective of her gaze, perhaps against the sun’s glare or my father’s cuddle of me, or something the photographer said that evoked self-consciousness. What she touches with her left hand remains hidden—perhaps my back, her husband’s arm, the car hood? And her right hand? Maybe she grasped her skirt to pull it toward her knees, to smooth it for the picture, a familiar gesture seen innumerable times in my life.
    
I sit in the middle, perched high on the old fashioned ’40s car hood, eye-level with my parents. First children sometimes divide a couple rather than unite them and seldom save a faltering marriage. I came well before their marriage faltered but before they were ready, before they really wanted me. I think I came when I did because I wanted my life, and I wanted it now! Still this picture suggests uncertainty. We focus in different directions—attention as divided as our living arrangement around this time. I believe an undercurrent of mixed feelings undoubtedly churned among us over that fact. What thoughts accompanied these two—she in white pearls and shiny belt and he in tie and dress pants? Could they remember, if asked? What would they remember of this day, the honeymoon of my infancy long gone?
    
What did I feel in my place in our triangle, too young to understand yet alive with learning and growing? A new baby overwhelms even really good parents at times. Confidence gets lost in the shuffle of feeding, changing, and the thousand other necessary care-giving tasks. A baby overwhelms because everything else still needs doing. The dailiness of life continues despite a new baby in the house. Even with grandparents present to guide and help, a new mother and father set the tone and boundary of the new family life.
    
I can imagine the chaos in my grandparent’s farmhouse in early August 1945. According to my grandfather, one day my father just left and no one knew where he went or if or when he’d be back. I don’t know when this happened, where he went, or how long he stayed away though I believe at least one night passed. I’m glad he returned, but I understand the impulse to just get up and go. I suspect that he didn’t know himself why he left and only discovered where he’d headed after he arrived. I only heard this story mentioned once, and my mother didn’t recall it when I asked. I have learned through the years of my reflection that much can never be known.
    Nowadays, in his 90s, my father remembers relatively little and my asking about very old times in my life seems to pain him. He’d rather remember his childhood and chuckle over a detail long forgotten but delightful to his remembering. So I’ve stopped asking about mine. Understanding those things that happened and shaped a life often requires many stories, told many ways, many times. A single story reveals little when told through only one set of eyes and ears and elaborated through just one imagination. I alone tell my story through images of salvaged photos taken by someone else, through words told to, over, and around me, remembered across decades through the mists of my mind. I’ve gathered as much as possible through those who were there during my early life. I alone bear responsibility for observations reported here, for interpretations recorded here, for conclusions drawn against comparisons with other stories, other remembrances.
    
I cannot truly know my father and my mother, only what I know of them through familiarity with their way of being and relating to me, through the stories I heard others tell, and through my experience of their touch, breath, body, and mind. I alone know my self through these same kinds of experiences, through my own eyes, ears, mind, and heart. But, I know fear when I feel it.
    
Why do I have these photos? Why did my parents leave some behind while taking others? Why did I collect these stories and place them into an order? How do I know I already knew fear in my early infancy? I know from the stories told and the evidence in photos that accompany them. I know from a long stream of reflection over my injured body and soul. I know from the anxieties born in my bones and muscles for as long as I can remember. I know from the pictures in my dreams, the themes of my imaginings, and the stringency of my early beliefs that reveal fractures between body and soul.
    
I believe a divine impulse propelled me into this world and guides the details of my life toward a meaningful whole. My task, I believe, includes uncovering and sorting such details to more than simply document my life story but to also discover its meaningful whole. My lifetime is the timeline for my effort that continually unfolds new petals, refracts new facets and hues, and harmonizes new tones and melodies of meaning. I cannot wait, expecting the complete meaning to arrive on a silver tray or wash in on a ship. If I wait, the opportunity will pass into my death. I must tell my story as I go, as I create my life from day to day.

  I rescued from careless loss some photos that illustrate my childhood. I saved them in an effort to heal the splits in my being, to reweave the integrity of my soul, to smooth the jagged edges of my shocked spirit, and to comfort pains long carried in my body. When I tucked these photos into my purse to bring them home from the house my mother abandoned at the end of her long marital war, I didn’t know I began that effort. Across the years following, image by image, thought by thought, I rescued my self—restored me, regenerated me, re-enlivened me. Simultaneously, these little pictures saved me through a mutual pact of love. Over twenty years I strung the photos like pearls and hung them around my neck. I worshiped them on my altar of hope. I sang them into being with my voice like words made flesh. I looked into them and saw me. I laid claim to myself by exploring them and owning my story. They became not just pieces of bent or rough-edged photo paper. They became me.
    
As I imagine my infant-self squirming on a blanket, smiling, rolling over, sitting up, grasping my bottle, and babbling in coos and jabbers, I love myself. I delight in my specialness and my ordinariness. As I imagine my infant-self growing up in Arkansas around mid-century I know two important things: I know I received good-enough parenting on the one hand while enduring some exceptional challenges on the other. I accept my living in the universe in my time and space and among my people whether, in the end, I will have learned its significance or not. I am because I am, and that truth alone justifies my being and belonging to myself, to my family, and to my world.