Post #35 – Women’s Memoirs, ScrapMoir – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
By Bettyann Schmidt
“To Thine Own Self…”
Shakespeare’s quote about being true to your own self applies to writing, especially in scrapbooks and memoir. While scrapbooks largely house photos of family and friends and a few written descriptions of the people depicted, not a lot of these albums include much in-depth writing about the person who created them. There are usually the words to describe how cute and precious the children are, the funny things they say, how much fun the family has on vacations and with friends, but the brief descriptions of the photos rarely reveal the feelings of the book’s creator.
How do you feel when you look at the photos you’re working with? When you pick up a picture of your newborn baby, how exactly how do you feel? Not just how perfect and beautiful the infant is, how happy you are. What are your hopes and dreams for the child? How did you feel carrying life within you for nine months? Feelings are one of the hardest subjects to write, because they are unseen, intangible, but to reveal your genuine self in the stories, they must be described. Your stories need to leave this part of you for the people who will read them. Those are the words readers want to see.
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness; touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. –Frederick Buechner, Listenig to Your Life (New York; HarperCollins, 1993).
How do you listen to your life? The “key moments.” That’s where your photos help find your story behind the images.
Using the Five W’s And One H
Remember the old five W’s of writing, Who, What, Where, When, and Why? I learned in journalism class to add an H. How. The “how” sometimes takes you to the story’s open gate quicker than the W’s. For instance, asking “How did I feel when that event occurred?”
Important Who’s
When writing about people and working with our photos of them, I’ve found a good question to ask myself is, how did this person influence me. The influence could be good or bad, because in our lives we are impacted by people, even family, that re-route our paths in ways that hurt us. This is all part of our story. What are the influences in your life that have guided your decisionmaking, your goals or dreams.
There’s a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside. ~Pearl Bailey
One of the most influential persons in my life was my paternal grandmother. A large part of her influence involved our Catholic heritage. I look back on that Catholic upbringing and realize now that I wouldn’t be the person I am today without that influence. It played a major role in creating my authentic self. I created a layout titled “Who I Am” that uses bullet points instead of paragraph journaling. When writing about yourself, you may find this an easy way to get started.
Stories That Influence Us
Sometimes the people we are close to tell us stories that affect our sense of self, events that happened in their lives that help shape who we are. This happened with my mother. I was a grown woman before she shared some of the stories that were hard for her to tell. One of the saddest tales not only changed how I felt about my mother but actually formed an image in my mind that stayed with me until one day I found out just how much Mom’s story had inspired a quality in me I didn’t know I possessed.
I have no memories of my maternal grandmother because she died when I was a baby. All Mom ever told me when I was younger is that she died of breast cancer. But the day came when my mother decided to tell me the whole story.
Since the family was so poor, my grandmother stayed at home to die, and without the pain medicines they gave in hospitals. Mom moved into her parents’ home to take care of her mother, and she told me how hard it was to watch the woman she loved suffer as badly as she did, crying out in pain. As I wrote on my layout about this event, I was told that my grandmother’s breast was eaten away with the growing cancer, the decaying odor almost intolerable. Still, my mother gently cared for my grandmother. The way she told the story, my grandfather did very little to help and even found a new woman during the time his wife was dying.
I felt pain for my mother, having to go through something that horrible. My mother was a small, delicate woman, suffering several major mental breakdowns when I was growing up, and I’d always thought her weak in a lot of ways. Those thoughts changed with the story she told me. I doubted I could be strong enough to handle anything like she had.
As I write in the above layout about my grandmother’s illness and death, I ended up having the faith and the fortitude to do what my mother had done so long before when my younger sister, Phyllis, was dying of cancer. Up until that event, I’d never thought myself capable of doing anything that important or that hard. As it turned out, after my sister’s death, I would tell people that I wouldn’t trade that time I spent with my sister for any amount of money. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times, but it was also a miraculous time that I am so glad I was given the chance to share with my sister.
What Inspires Us?
“It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.” ~Lucille Ball
Look around and identify the “things” that influence your life or inspire you. This is the What W. In my family, we are computer junkies. I started using a computer when they first hit the streets, and in addition to teaching myself how to master one of those wonderful machines, my young son Eric learned along with me. We were seen loitering around shelves that held computer magazines in the grocery store, browsing aisles of PCs on display at computer shops. It’s what we talked about most all the time. I didn’t realize what I was creating at the time, but I should have seen the signs. And now, his own child is following in his footsteps, and she’s only eight years old, about the same age as her Daddy when he got his first Commodore.
The Where that Opens us to Self
This is the Where of the five W’s. Places. I’ve lived in a lot of homes in my life, in different geographical locations, and they all hold memories. Certain ages in a girl’s life, however, evoke stronger emotional ties than others, and for that reason also have a lot to do with the “When.” This is the case when my family moved from our home where I’d spent most of my elementary school years, grades one to halfway through eighth.
I left my best friend Joanie and all of my childhood memories on the old street and began a whole new life across town on a little street called Inwood Place. This is where I lived through high school graduation. This is where I really grew up.
Joanie and I had shared hours and hours, days and days, playing with paper dolls and the magical, solid wood dollhouse her father had built, with the light switches in the rooms and the garage and dog house.
We wore Joanie’s mother’s clothes and high heels and pretended to be sophisticated adults. We had sleepovers where we’d stay awake until almost dawn telling funny stories and giggling under the blankets.
“Who are you? said the caterpillar.
Alice replied rather shyly, ‘I–I hardly know, Sir, just at present–at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.'” Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
After the move, I felt a loss of self. I wasn’t sure who I was anymore. I mourned the loss of my best friend. I sulked around the new house and sat in the porch swing wallowing in my depression. Until one day a pretty, overly physical matured, blonde girl stopped at our gate and said, “What’s your name? Mine’s Jackie.”
And so a new image of myself was formed that day. I followed Jackie around like a little puppy for the next four years, just enjoying being seen with her. She was so popular and I felt important that she wanted to be with me, skinny little me who was still in a training bra and the same color hair I was born with. My face had never known makeup. People thought I was half my real age because I was so small. And Jackie wanted me for her friend. And she taught me the ropes. How to spit on the cake mascara in the little red box and use the tiny brush to coat my lashes and then curl them with the contraption that pinched when I didn’t use it properly. Jackie made me over.
This was the blossoming part of my life where I got my first boyfriend. It was an exciting time of seeing myself evolve as a butterfly from the cocoon.
Jackie was an only child, and I was the oldest of six. Her mother was gorgeous, thin, trim, long black curly hair, and worked outside the home. Jackie’s dad drove a big Cadillac and had a high-security job that he couldn’t talk about, and he was intensely intellectual. He drilled Jackie and me on mathematics. I was part of the family and got taken along on outings.
Jackie had her own Shillitoe’s Department Store charge card, and we often went shopping. She bought me clothes to make me look older. Needless to say, my parents weren’t overjoyed by my new friendship. But most adults only saw how Jackie looked, dressed, wore her bleached hair. They couldn’t see the inside. It’s sad that people still do that today. Jackie was one of the most loving and caring persons I’d ever met.
One of my favorite stories about Jackie is the day we were sitting at the soda shop counter a few blocks from our street, sipping cherry Cokes, when a girl with her little sister came in. The older girl, who looked to be about 10 years, laid a quarter on the counter for a chocolate malt for her little sister. As the small child, maybe six years or so in age, was gulping down her malt, the older girl fainted.
Before the waitress could get around the counter, Jackie had jumped off the stool and kneeled next to the fallen girl. We discovered that the two children lived on the street behind us on Inwood Place, where the tenement housing lined the narrow, downhill street, one tall red-brick building lined up one after the other on both sides. It was a rough street, just behind our back yards. The types of people who lived there looked dangerous to us. There were gangs of boys who hung on the street corner under the lamp post.
We discovered that the older girl hadn’t eaten anything all day and only had a quarter to spend, so she took care of her little sister. This made us cry, including the waitress, who made another chocolate malt for the older girl, which Jackie wanted to pay for, but the waitress said there was no charge.
Jackie insisted on carrying the older girl home, fearing she would faint again and possibly be hit by a car. I took the little one’s hand, and we escorted them to an apartment that upon entering was like walking into a class B movie. There were dirty mattresses on bare wood floors, empty beer bottles scattered around, an empty pizza box on top of one of the stove burners. It was filthy. There were roaches. Jackie was outraged. Ee ran the two blocks to her house to get her father, who called the Social Services Department. He assured us that someone was going to investigate and would probably remove the children from the apartment, but we didn’t need to go back there. Of course, we snuck back later, but the children were gone. We never knew what happened to them.
We mourned for those two little girls. We both spoke about how lucky we were. The shock of that scene never wore off. Neither of us had ever come face to face before that day with true poverty and neglected children. I didn’t look at my own environment as harshly as I had, so many children in one small house, an exhausted mother trying to keep up. I realized my Mom was always home. She cooked and fed us. She tried her best, and I was fortunate to not be born into a place like what existed on the street behind us.
Jackie and I had a lot of fun times together too, and, oh, the memories of those years. They will always live in me, keeping me company on grey, dreary days. If I could go back in time for a day, it would be to that old neighborhood and my best friend.
Jackie is my where and when, but also my why, because her picking me to be her friend when I needed it most and guiding me during my growing-up years fostered a lot of independence and self-awareness.
How it Relates to You
So how do you put yourself in stories, the stories that are important to you? Go through your photos and get to know them. Before you adhere one to a page in your scrapbook or notebook, ask yourself the questions. “How” does this picture affect me? How does it relate to me? How do I put myself in the story this picture tells? How do I tell this story best?
This week’s blog gave me pause to reflect a lot on my own sense of self. It is ever changing with every new person who comes into my life, every new place I visit, every new story I write, every new memory that comes to my mind’s surface. I hope you will find some inspiration as well and will be able to grab a few pictures and make a story that involves your true self.
Bettyann Schmidt
memoir writing
memoir words
memoir scrapbooking
