One night, I left the confines of Bobst Library on Washington Square Park at dusk. Inky night, full of stars, it was then that I would think of her: Joy. My head would lift on the corner to gaze upon the first dollops of stars in a midnight blue. I love that color, just before the night falls and all goes black. I’d wonder if she was thinking of me somewhere out there. Impregnated with dreamy sentiments, expansive, even, the Zen Master Sybil called it, me, my mother — very Neptune. I came from a fantastical creature, more elemental than human. Her blindingly bright persona in a dark sea was unreachable. Not a spot of black within her. Her otherworldly eyes took me to space. Always looking up never looking back, her psychic imagery was celestial.
“Not the mesmerizing blue,” the Zen Master met me one day in feeling in her small room of “Neptune…” but she evoked that state of mind, even spirit, as floating and vaguely poetic. Not to say I couldn’t write a poem about it, but directionally, every now and then, the thought of her would descend at this hour, and I’d find myself in an even theatrical state of mind. I could have even recited a touching monologue. I could make statements, my junior year, when I first started working with the Sybil, such as “my mother showed me that anything is possible.” She’d SLAM down her XXL iced coffee and grab onto her armrests and fire rage into my eyes.
“Bullshit.”
“What?” Even a bit hurt.
“That’s the biggest piece of bullshit I have ever heard,” and she meant it—angry.
Anything? Would I get upset? Snap back. No. “Well, she did…”
“Taught you anything is possible?” In an ethereal sense?
In a sense, the world expects these sorts of phrases, “and now, I learned that…” gazing out the window at the end… “what is normal…?” Even. That one. People said that to me. Well, child abuse, actually, it’s pretty common. There’s delusion in the world—that’s true — in reflecting on Dr. J. She was “unbelievable” and the story itself existed in an unreal space, even to me, I think, I had a problem with meaning. What meaning do I make out of that?
People’s responses to that story shocked me, too, really shocked me. Someone even said, a shaman, apparently, that “she was gifted, she just didn’t have the tools to navigate her experience,” which was utterly off. Gifted? The Zen Master Sybil would — explode. If Dr. J sent 17 coats to her house, she wouldn’t laugh, she wouldn’t get sentimental with me as my second surrogate mother did. She’d blow at that bitch. “Bitch, you don’t know her address?!”
“Where the fuck have you been?” She’d be enraged on the phone.
It’s just to say, we develop over time and in a world. Are we a reflection of that world, or is it a reflection of us?
I can’t get too caught up in the intricacies of what is meta-structural, meaning, ideas such as gender, judgments made based on looks, style, as I was pretty, I suppose. I seemed to develop a bit of a bright spritely persona in college, bubbly, but I don’t know who th
at was, exactly, anymore. But I do believe it true that I began to disappear at the point that most appear: college. I didn’t even make sense when I spoke about the sex scandal I was in when I was four or all the families that came into my life. It wasn’t cute. I was cute, strange. I wasn’t always perceived that way. My curly hair even took on a dimension. I didn’t really want to engage with meta-structure, because I never judged a book by its cover. It never happened. I’m not built that way. But it happens, I never stopped to think that people projected onto me. I didn’t understand why you would.
By this point, my junior year, my father had just taken a dive. I had found out that he had been diagnosed with dementia ten years in the past and he hadn’t told anyone. I was, uh, in another family, again, by then, which had begun to appear bizarre and scary. I couldn’t even process that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s first, and now, it was Alzheimer’s. His primary care physician was even upset — no! Parkinson’s! No one in my life, my family, clocked that. I came out of a sex scandal and ended up with a sick man who was denying his dementia, at least. And now, I was playing house.
To be honest, I can hardly access that person in present time, I consider most people made up of different facets. I’m not one person, either, so speaking about myself as one sounds slightly inaccurate and confusing.
I never stopped to consider my mother as part of me, it was impossible to relate to her, impossible to imagine. Not to say that I didn’t recognize certain traits, but it’s a no, she put alcohol in my burger, she wrapped me up in a sex scandal when I was four, we’re not talking about an argument. It was a bit of an odd tense angle, since I ended up back in the Zen Master Sybil’s office six years later, (after clown school), not knowing why I was experiencing emotions —purely — that I didn’t understand.
I had experienced a waking up moment on a train, I told her, on my way to London from Paris. Out my window, the countryside was foggy, disappearing. I was the only one in the car, the only one left…and like raindrops, the questions that people had asked me over the years began to fall. “Why are you in all these different families? Why did you start living with this Brazilian family?”
I told people why, “she lied that he was a child molester,” that was the lightest accusation my mother brought against my father. But I hadn’t really thought about it, not in my adult years. I had a notebook on me, and I began writing down everything I could remember, basic facts. Why did I keep on getting new families? Why did they all blow up? And soon, I saw my mother’s face as the orchestrator of the situation on Miracle Mile, where she told this woman that my father was abusive. I gasped, on this train, not knowing how I got there, where I had been, crying. The car blurred.
Back in New York, I was waiting for my paperwork to go through. I had to stop while I was going for a run along the Hudson, because anger swelled inside my body almost as if I were about to purge, cry, but it was red. Red red red.
I thought I had dealt with this… I said to her.
The Zen Master Sybil said, “I’m saying you didn’t.”
She wasn’t surprised to see me.
I told Sybil that I called Dr. J and left a message because I was beginning to realize that all that wasn’t normal, I wanted to talk to her. That was so gross. Just saying that took a long long time. I wasn’t there yet. I’m speaking from present time. After our initial phone call, when I said that I wanted to see her that year, and then she disappeared.
“What do you say… in this message?”
“Oh, you know, it’s me, Maria, just wondering how you are, so call me back.”
“NO!” She slammed down her XXL iced coffee, grabbed the armrests.
Enraged, she said, “where the FUCK you BEEN?!”
“Yeah fuck, where the fuck have you been?”
“You’re my mother,” and she paused before delivering the next line, probably wondering if I would remember our exchanges later. “I care…”
“No, no,” I said, quickly.
“Why?”
“Because…” rapid fire Sybil.
“Why?”
“Why?” She repeated it. “Why?”
“She’s not really my mother…”
“Excuse me?”
“Just because she gave birth to me doesn’t make her my mother…”
“Um…that’s exactly what that means.”
She nodded, as I began to hear what I had just said.
“Delusion.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“Do not tell me that I am facing my own delusion!”
“You are facing your own delusion.”
“Delusion,” she’d say very clearly to me. “Delusion,” as Neptune, we had a whole ethereal conversation about it, is the planet of dreams, but also delusion. “There is imagination there,” she nodded emphatically, not to negate it, but “you gotta be careful.”
“That’s your mother.”
My primary problem was rage to her. That was first. I remarked that she was so clear, so here. She’d nod, yes, nod in my face. She was very here, very clear. She attributed it to rage. I didn’t like that word, so she suggested I call it “red energy.” It’s creation. To her, rage was care. “You don’t invest,” she said, “because you don’t care.”
“This is a problem of investment and it’s a rage issue.” It has a larger scope than just blowing up at someone. “Vital, necessary: rage.” It’s boundaries. It’s clarifying. It’s active.
I interviewed Danai Gurira later— actress, playwright, activist. She said that rage drove her to the page, so, in a way, I thought about it as an act of love, actually. That was her point too.
Positivity in my case, as I was always “so positive,” didn’t turn out to be positive—a bit tricky in the world out there. It’s a directional question. Rage is positive. It can be. So my desire to be positive, see the good in everything — she’s ready.
“Bullshit.” Fire. It’s not that it’s not true, it’s just, it makes no sense. And it would… bite me in the arse. To get British about it.
-
In the next scene, you’ll read what happened, as I stopped seeing her at the top of my thirties, and I ended up going through a terrible decade, just terrible. I’ll begin to dig into the problem of rage, and why communicating my family story was — hell. And also, funny. To Naples—