Post #28 – Women’s Memoirs, ScrapMoir – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
By Bettyann Schmidt
Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain….I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained
I’m quoting from my current read: The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. When I read this on the page, I realized the profundity of the statement. Life on this earth is not happiness and sunshine every day, and must we to treat it as such? In my scrapbook stories, I’ve tried to tell the truth, included the bad as well as the good, but it didn’t come easy.
The Way it Wasn’t
One of my best friends, Barbara, when we were out clowning around, sitting in a restaurant laughing so hard we had tears running down our faces and people were staring at us, said, “Let’s cut the real stories out of our albums and scrapbook the way it wasn’t.” Both of us having survived and gotten out of bad first marriages, agreed that we would adhere photos of successful, beautiful men on pages where they would stand next to us, gracing our layouts with the dreams we never realized.
We had both sidestepped the real stories of those early years in our albums and instead showed the birthday parties and family cookouts, where things looked fairly normal. We wanted our scrapbooks to look like they were created by Beaver Cleaver’s mom, June. Wasn’t it better to continue through life ignoring those disappointing, hurtful memories? I thought so at the time.
Several years later I met a woman who scrapbooked everything in her albums, including the death of her husband, which she admitted was a terribly painful project but had to be done. “It’s part of my life experience,” she said. “I don’t want gaps in my memories.” Her albums were her memoirs for her children. I read her words and was amazed at the depth she’d reached in sharing her feelings.
I wondered then how I could incorporate the truth in my books without hurting innocent bystanders, like my children. I think all children want and need to feel a sense of pride about their roots. I didn’t just think this. I knew it for a fact. I’d grown up thinking my ancestors were all bad people because of my paternal grandfather. That one family member created my complete family history. When I considered this, it didn’t seem quite fair. My Grandfather Frank was the reason I hadn’t pursued my family’s genealogy. It was the reason I didn’t allow myself to wander back in history and award myself with accomplishments of both my ancestors and myself.
Grandfather Frank dictated how I felt about myself. I had to hide him from everybody. And that meant I had to hide my entire family. He might sneak out if he got a chance. What would people think of me then?
I’ve told people for the past 10 years that scrapbooking healed me. I would have never found the life I discovered hidden in the dark shadows. The excitement, the fun, the self-satisfaction, and, most important, the self-esteem.
Armed with the knowledge that all of life is worth telling, and even the dark side can be told in such a way as to be more enlightening and healing than offending, I began to do justice to the memories in my scrapbooks. These are my memories, after all. I’m entitled to them. Why should there be a taboo against telling the truth?
Opening Our Closets
Growing up in my house, the same as a lot of you growing up, we were encouraged to keep quiet about things that would make us appear less than perfect. I was a grown woman when I finally realized that a lot of people who came across as really stand-up people also had skeletons in their walk-in closets. This was a significant, liberating event in my life.
I didn’t want to tell “the way it wasn’t” anymore. It was time to be true to myself and my family. Yes, there is “horror on earth and it is every day” sometimes. Each of us individually isn’t visited by horror on a daily basis, but somewhere in this world another person is. My life story includes all the good in addition to the trials, tribulations, and horror.
Kodachrome Memories
The Lovely Bones testifies to another truth that jumped out at me while I was reading. The character talks about her penchant for taking pictures of her family.
I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture….I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from be because I owned it.
Someone else has expressed my own feeling about taking pictures. I too find a way to stop time and hold it. What a miraculous opportunity. I mentioned last time that I was taking a class, “Library of Memories,” on Big Picture Scrapbooking online, which has already impacted me in a big way. It’s about making “connections” with our memories.
Referring to photos, this means choosing from among your library of hundreds or more probably thousands of images from different time periods and different whereabouts just a few select prints to tell a story you’ve not told yet. You make the “connections” that need to be made, possibly spanning years or even decades.
To do this, it helps to be able to go deep in your thoughts, stretch your mind and your heart. If the story is based on a hurtful memory, it is all the more important to do the digging to make the right connections.
A True Horror Story
The story in my own life that recalls the worst horror of all is the night we took my youngest child, age 9, to the Vanderbilt ER with severe head pain. Our pediatrician thought he may have migraines and had him on liquid codeine. It had gotten to the point where I was holding the bottle up to his mouth and giving him a “shot,” and this was happening more and more frequently. It was a Saturday, and I laid on my bed with him, the drapes drawn. Everytime he awoke, the pain in his eyes was stark, raw. Before he could whimper again, I put the codeine bottle to his mouth. Finally I called the doctor and said I was taking him to the ER. She said she would call ahead and alert them and that she was worried.
We sat in a cold room and waited. We got a CT scan. We waited some more. Finally a doctor came in, drew up a chair close to my knees, looked me in the eyes, and said words that no parent wants to hear. “Your child has a huge mass on his brain.”
I remember my husband’s arms around me and the doctor taking my hands in his and telling me he was sorry. I remember thinking they had already made a diagnosis just on a scan, without going in and seeing it, without any biopsy lab findings. The young, sweet doctor with the soulful eyes answered my unspoken questions. “These types of masses on scan, especially this large, are usually always malignant, cancerous.”
The story gets much sadder after that, and it really was a horror I will never forget, I can’t forget, even if I wanted to. When I found out that my child surely had such pain, “excruciating” the surgeon said, the kind that an adult would have been hitting his head against a wall to get rid of, those words got indelibly emblazed in my memory. I still have days, 12 years later, when I remember the words and want to scream to heaven , “Why didn’t I know?” To think that I allowed my little boy to suffer for weeks with that kind of pain and didn’t know. Jeff has Down syndrome and is not as verbal as regular kids. His communication skills are severely limited.
But I remember those intense blue eyes staring at me as soon as they opened on my bed that Saturday, and I fall apart again.
A few people were surprised that I chronicled this journey in my scrapbook. How could I leave it out? What would that say? If I am indeed telling my life story, that’s an integral part. It’s an event that shaped who I am. It was an experience that brought out the deepest and rawest emotions I am capable of.
And so when Jeff, during chemo in the hospital, wasn’t in pain anymore, and on a particularly good day when I saw smiles and playfulness, I snapped the photos for remembering. I’d also done this when he had open heart surgery at three months, while he was in the ICU, when he was being kept warm around the clock with the lights that exposed the red scar running the entire length of his chest. I looked into those tiny eyes then too and read the story that little baby was trying to tell me.
Thinking back on these episodes of my life, I made a deep connection. I knew exactly where those pictures were. I had already scrapbooked them in albums and displayed them by year on my shelves. Now, years later, I’m hit by a stark revelation. I made a connection out of my deepest memories and created a new story that all the while lay at the bottom of my muggy lake of memories waiting to be told.
Taking it to the Limit
When I created my first scrapbook for my older children, I had a photo that was so appropriate for my story I could hardly believe it. I’d forgotten it. Several months before the split-up, we were traveling to Cincinnati and had stopped in Burnside, Kentucky. My soon-to-be-ex husband was a Burnside, ancestor of General Ambrose E. Burnside of the Civil War. He wanted to take my picture in front of the city limit sign. Little did I know then I would use that photo years later.
When I wanted to finally tell the story recently, because one of my children said something that prompted it, I gathered various photos that made the connection I wanted. After that the story flowed easily.
Go Fish
You can do this without photos, I know, by using hidden-away stories. By digging down deep into your subconscious and fishing them out on the little hooks you use threaded with the bait of taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch. These prompt the memories to bite. Once you’ve got them in your net safe and sound, you can see them and put them in order.
With pictures, however, it’s easier. The “catch” is knowing where they are. If your photos are retrievable in a few minutes, they will work for you. Visit my journey blog linked below under my name to learn more. I’m trying to blog my experience down this new road of the extraordinary “Library of Memories” class as it veers off the highway of my life. I also welcome your comments below.
Bettyann Schmidt
http://journey2f.blogspot.com
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