Sonya Fehér: In My Wrong Mind

The latest guest post in my Writing After Kids series is by Diane Fleming who has been my close friend for over a decade. We met at the Austin Poetry Slam and have written, edited, rehearsed, and performed together and gone to a lot of movies since then. She manages to combine honesty with humor in pieces that simultaneously resonate and make one feel wildly uncomfortable. I feel lucky to have her as a friend and a writing buddy. Diane is a poet and a short writer. She won the Tenth Annual Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest. She recently completed an MFA in creative writing at UBC Vancouver, and is the author of Trip to Normal, a book of poetry. By day, she’s a technical writer at a software company in Austin.

Have I Said Too Much?

Every other Tuesday night, three or four women sit in my living room and free-write. Tonight, the prompt is, “My lover’s penis.” When we finish writing, I start to read what I’ve written: I picture L.’s dick, shrunken and nestled inside his man-fro, protected like a freshly laid egg in a nest.

As I hear the words come out of my mouth, I stop.

“Is he gone?” I ask. “He went running, right?” My 25-year-old son recently moved back home from Chicago after finding himself still unemployed one year after his college graduation. Is he within earshot of what I’m reading about the man I just divorced? My writing makes him cringe.

“I think he left,” says Annette, “I heard the front door slam.”

I charge down the hallway to make sure he’s gone. His bedroom is empty, the computer room is dark. I continue reading: I can’t write about my lover’s penis. I couldn’t rightfully call him my lover if the word “lover” implies sex. I’ll write about his belly – a shelf on which he placed Frito pies covered with handfuls of grated cheese.

As long as my son is out running, I can “go for the jugular,” as Natalie Goldberg instructs. I can write, and read aloud, whatever I want. Over the weeks, I write about the demise of my second marriage, about how I visited my son in Chicago when he was in school to help him climb out of crippling depressions. I write about how he would stop taking the medication that kept him functional, certain that all he needed to get well was to understand his father’s violence and my emotional absence. During our weekly phone conversations while he was in school, he’d demand to know, over and over again through tears, why I’d been a cold and neglectful mother, why I’d stayed married so long to his father, and why I’d married L. But most of all, he wanted to know why I’d written about him.

When he was a young teenager, I’d divorced his father and started taking creative writing classes. My writing was about my life, our lives – my son’s depression, his father’s rage, my depression, sex after years in a sexless marriage. I published a book of poetry and performed in poetry slams. My son didn’t care that I’d changed the names. My writing made him feel exposed, angry. He didn’t speak to me for two years.

For a while, in an effort to regain his trust, I’d vacillate between not writing at all and writing fiction. I won a short story contest. At the public reading, I looked up in the audience and saw my other son weeping. I thought I was reading about a nameless woman who was trying to leave her marriage to a man who punched holes in walls. My son knew I was reading about his father.

My writing, which gave me a sense of accomplishment, closure, and connection, hurt my sons.

I started attending classes in Vancouver to complete a Masters degree. I had to keep writing, but I wanted to do it in a way that didn’t traumatize my sons. I’d stopped performing and submitting for publication. In this cocoon, I started to feel safe enough to write poems about my life again. After all, my sons were far away at college.

In one poem, I projected my worst fears about my loved ones. I wrote: My twenty-three-year-old jumps in front of train 324, Red Line, Chicago Transit Authority. The driver requires years of therapy. In that same poem, I also exposed my then-husband’s alcoholism. I remember telling my classmates who workshopped the poem that they must never tell my husband, who was in Vancouver with me, that I’d written about his drinking. “He’d divorce me if he knew,” I said. I changed the lines to make him a knitter rather than a drinker. And though my son was far away at school, the thought of him reading this poem made me worry about hurting him again. I altered the line about the suicide to make it about my brother. But then, certain my words could influence the future, I took the line out altogether.

As I hacked at the poem until it bore no resemblance to its original truth – that my son struggles with mental illness and that my husband was a drunk – I realized that my writing hadn’t driven my son away. The truth behind my writing had.

I still want to tell the truth as I know it. And I want to protect the feelings of my sons. I thought if I waited long enough, I could find that sweet spot where I could write honestly without hurting or embarrassing my sons. It doesn’t exist. Knowing that this piece will be posted online, I consider using a pseudonym to staunch the damage. Instead, I don’t mention my sons’ names and I refer to my ex as “L” – all very cryptic but probably pointless.

Writing is risky.

I could stop. But that silence constitutes a different sort of risk – the denial of self, the illusion that if I just don’t speak about it, the grit of my life and my sons’ lives never happened. That risk is one that I must also consider in this equation that doesn’t solve.

So what now? Each time I write, I weigh the risks. Some days I feel braver than others. Today I nervously choose to post this piece under my real name. But on other days, like free-write Tuesdays, I wait for the front door to slam, until my son has vanished down the street and around the corner to the trail next to the railroad tracks, off for his three-mile run. That’s just enough time for me to write a thousand words or so about him. But for now, when I read aloud, I read about my ex-husband: His biological mother abandoned him. His adoptive mother beat him. His penis hid, shyer than a crocus in early spring. It’s as if by reading aloud only about L., I’ve successfully bargained with the devil of writing.