Post #59 – Women’s Memoir Writing, ScrapMoir – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnettby Bettyann Schmidt
“But what minutes! Count them by sensation and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.” ~~ Benjamin Disraeli
Searching for Gold
Going back over my life, I tried to capture the meaningful moments, skipping around the events and ages and milestones, looking for the true sensations—those crucial minutes where life stood still for possibly only a second as a realization took hold.
This is what it’s all about in writing my memories. Mundane times of day-to-day living are not what anybody wants to read, including my family. It’s like a novel, where you hurriedly turn the pages to satisfy your need to know what happens to the heroine. It’s the thriller, where you want to skip to the end to see if the protagonist you’ve come to know intimately survives.
I wondered, could a life like mine with all its menial detail be told in such a fashion? What minutes taken from years of living were so golden that they could shine like favorite stories I devour in book after book.
“I was thinking about how disjointedly time seemed to flow, passing in a blur at times, with single images standing out more clearly than others. And then at other times, every second was significant, etched in my mind.” ~~ Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, 2005
Memoir Moments
The first memory I excavated from my mental compost pile was around 1948, when I was six years old, and a rush of significant images took form. I saw a skinny, dark-haired girl with big eyes, dressed in old bib overalls and a tattered white shirt, on her grandfather’s farm, being subjected to the abuse of a big girl four times her size. That was my step-Aunt Kay, who was only a couple of years my senior.
Kay’s mother, Elva, had married my maternal grandfather after my real grandmother died of breast cancer. Elva was about the same age as my mother and was a sweet and hard-working woman. Her daughter, however, was mean as one of the rattlesnakes that slithered up the block foundation of Grandpa’s house.
My mind’s eye sees Kay in a light pastel-printed dress, thin and several sizes too small for her robust frame. Kay was not a pretty girl. She had washed-out, light brown curly-frizzy hair, while mine was almost black and straight as a poker, and her eyes were small slits of anger versus my large blue transparencies of innocence.
Me and Little Sister Phyllis on the old Tricycle on Grandpa's Farm
When no one was arround, Kay subjected me to cruelties such as forcing me to retrieve her shoes when she kicked them into the “gulley,” which on our farm was the same thing as a “dump,” our own private landfill. All sorts of garbage lived there along with snakes.
I see myself climb up out of the gulley carrying Kay’s shoes, while one of my own shoes is filled with blood. I never knew whether a snake or some animal sunk his teeth into the top of my left foot, but I still have a straight, thin sliver of scar tissue, less visible with age but still a reminder of my worst enemy on Grandpa’s farm.
Watching Your Life Flow
The scenes then swish by like a speeding train to the city, my Grandma’s second-floor apartment, where three of her children still live at home, Aunt Dot, Aunt Clara, and Uncle Frank. No one does not love me here. I am the princess in this inner-city abode in Cincinnati known as Over-the-Rhine.
Grandma tells me she prays constantly that the Blessed Virgin will protect me when I’m not in her care because I’ve told her about the enemy at Grandpa’s. Grandma says rosaries for Kay, but I learn over the years that not even Mother Mary can change Kay.
Grandma’s prayers did however produce one blessing: We moved to the downstairs apartment of her building.
Amidst the love and comfort of our new home, and the addition of two baby sisters, I find I have now more than one enemy, this one of nonhuman form: Rats. I am terrified of the rats that live in our basement and at night in our tiny yard where garbage cans rattle.
One evening my Aunt Dot carries me into the yard as we exit the city bus, and when she opens the house-mounted mailbox, a large rat jumps out toward us, and I think he’s going to eat me. I don’t remember what finally calmed my fanatic screaming, but in my mind now it seems to have lasted all night upstairs at Grandma’s apartment with comfort from everyone who loved me.
After that I hated falling asleep because that nightmare visited over and over. I became a night person early in life. Only daylight was safe.
The old red brick apartment building on CliftonAvenue and Murphy’s Pub, which used to be Dad’shangout, the “Prosit” bar. Not much else haschanged.
Thieves of Time
“Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death.” ~~ Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, A Woman of Independent Means
The speeding filmstrip stops suddenly at a time years later after we’ve moved to a different house, which in my childhood mind seemed far away but in revisiting the place was only several blocks up the hill in Over-the-Rhine.
The scene here is a light green-shingled, tall, narrow house with a long side porch where a group of girls pose. I am now one of many little girls and I am not important anymore. My father is crabby most of the time, always when he is not drunk, and my mother is sick nearly every day, most seriously after she gives birth to the fourth daughter.
I am in charge of watching not only my three younger sisters but also my three cousins who live upstairs from us with my Uncle Norbert and Aunt Vera. My cousin Terry is the only male at this point, and he is several years younger than me. Uncle Norb has a tattoo of a coiled snake on his upper left arm. He is either teasing me or insulting me constantly, and Aunt Vera bosses me around like I am her Cinderella.
When Mom gets bedridden, Dad says I have to stay home from school and watch her, emptying the bucket beside her bed when she vomits, while the younger kids go to relatives’ houses. I hate my life.
When things are not so bad, Dad takes me with him to the card games in the back room of the saloon behind our house, on Jefferson Street, where I get to stack the quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Dad shows me his cards and explains how the game of poker is played. I get all the potato chips and “pop” I want.
No other child in the neighborhood is allowed in this special room in the back of Baden’s Café. It becomes my only specialness now. There is nothing else.
Sander Street. I’m the tallest.
I fade into the ever-growing family and stumble down alleys of wrong decision, avenues of low self-worth, and pretend boulevards of acting like I’m somebody else.
The Circle of Life
“If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves.” ~ Maria Edgeworth, O Magazine, April 2004
My trip back into my life has turned up many, many defining moments and sensations, and I am continuing to log these into my memoir, but I will skip to a recent, present-day realization that seems to tie my story together and bring it full circle.
I am finally special again.
For a long time, over fifty years, I struggled to find that innocent child who’d lived inside me, who was special for a brief period, before life’s enemies stole her innocence.
And she was there the whole time hiding deep inside my soul, waiting for someone to find her.
“Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.” ~~ Faith Baldwin
When I attended my Aunt Dot’s funeral last February, my cousins and I connected after a long number of years, and we ended up talking about some of the old stories. Being the eldest, I knew details of events the others didn’t, and the youngest cousin surprised me by saying he’d been searching the family history. He was elated that I had particulars in the “story” department.
I told him a few funny incidents I witnessed, and the realization dawned on me I had the special gift of “family.” Good times, bad times, there were all there in my memory bank.
I count that reunion with my cousins and other family as a turning point for me. It became my identity. I was reminded how much my Aunt Dot loved me and how she helped raise me during critical times in my life. She always made me feel good about myself.
Now her children are grown, like me. They and their father, Uncle Bill, call me by the same name Aunt Dot and Grandma called me, “Bettyann.” I was never called just “Betty” by my father’s family. To this day I am Bettyann. That’s why I chose that as my writing name. To honor my heritage, the people who made me feel the most special.
I’m happy about who I am, and I have a story to tell.
Try digging into your own compost heap of memories and get the filmstrip of your life started. Then try to snag a few that give you a sensation you can still feel and write about it. Let us know if this has helped you in any way. We love hearing your stories.
Bettyann Schmidt
Be sure to join me on my blog:
Journey2f.blogspot.com
memoir writing
memoir
writing
scrapbooking
