T A B L E++T A L K

Is there hope for the cleaning impaired? Self-described messy moms convene in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Drama Queen Candidates
Mommy dearest -- not!
(06/10/98)

How to ruin your kids' summer vacation
By Kate Moses
Instead of schlepping your kids off to camp, let them do nothing
(06/09/98)

Someone to watch over me
By Janis Cooke Newman
Babyhood in a Russian orphanage
(06/08/98)

Living under the knife
By Fiona Morgan
Steven Levenkron's book "Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation" casts an eye on the emotional pains behind a dark adolescent practice
(06/05/98)

A kinder, gentler cowboy
By Polly Shulman
Reviving the latest endangered species: cowboys
(06/04/98)

BROWSE THE SECOND THOUGHTS ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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BY SALLIE TISDALE | I haven't been arrested since I was caught skinny-dipping at the age of 15. Easy enough to read the newspaper with both alarm and a certain complacency. Crime is something done by others -- perhaps to me, but not by me. It's easy to presume the gulf that separates me from you, us from them, is wide and deep, but I know better. I'm a criminal, and so are we all, and the difference between the crimes that send us to prison and the headlines and the other kind is only one of degree. Like all criminals, I think we carry our crimes with us until we are done with them and they are done with us -- until they are confessed, and we are punished; and sometimes even after that.

When I teach writing to adults, I sometimes give them a phrase and start a clock, asking only that they keep writing until the clock stops, never taking the pen from the paper. I want them to stop editing in their heads, to put everything, anything down, and especially the unexpected, petty, surprising thoughts floating through their heads, which they never think to call writing. I like to use short, ambiguous words to get them started -- words like "fired" or "dark" -- and phrases with emotional gravity, like "doctor visit" or "lost object."

A few years ago, I happened upon a particularly useful phrase: "the crime I committed." I expected these beginning writers to take it literally. They were summer workshop students ranging in age from 20-something to 73, college students, a housewife, a lawyer, a retired reporter and a real estate agent. I was prepared for a series of anecdotes about teenage shoplifting and vandalism, perhaps a few confessions of drunk driving. My hope was to get the beginnings of storytelling, and speaking from one's own experience.

I sure had that wrong.

It was a beginning of a different kind, the beginning of real writing -- these raw, artless stories about the crimes that really mattered, the crimes they still carried hidden away, undeclared. One woman, crying, read about her failure to visit a dying friend. Another wrote about a cowardly escape from difficult circumstances. They wrote about yelling at their children. About broken promises. Faithlessness. Cruelty.

We're all bearers of a double standard, and not a simple one. This one has two sides to its doubleness: We forgive ourselves for acts we despise in others, despise ourselves for what we forgive in others, in a continual dance of separation. Hurting, we lash out; hurt by others, we retreat; and rarely do we just explain.

I've been thinking about this because I've had so many conversations in the last weeks about how things are falling apart around us, how the center seems like it cannot hold, perhaps has never held at all. I know a lot of people who feel innocently embattled in their daily lives, locked in a house, a job, a city, a relationship -- locked in by fear. We're afraid of losing money, health, love, genuinely afraid of being shot, run over, stolen from, victimized, picked out. Picked out by those others, the ones who lose control, who get mad, and get even.

We visited my grandmother several times a year when I was a child. I committed one of my greatest crimes against her. I was about 8 years old, and she'd been widowed only a short time. Nothing in her tidy house had changed -- it was still a sunny, well-kept house with clearly delineated territories. She had a large yard, steadily tended, full of the lush, continual growth of a fertile, warm valley. She had a number of prize plants; one of them, a split-leaf philodendron several feet tall and the deep green of jungle shadow, stood beside the back door.

I have no idea what angered me; I was simply angry, with the kind of anger that fills every space and controls every muscle, every word. The leash was off the beast, and I stood outside the back door by my grandmother's kitchen -- my reserved and silent grandmother, her perfectly clean, white kitchen -- and I tore her philodendron to shreds.

Not a second thought. No more thought than a pack of wolves spotting a weak caribou -- ferocious, that anger. Cruel, ferocious, but carefully directed: I didn't tear up a neighbor's plant, after all, or pull up dandelions. Anger, and something weaker than me, something that couldn't fight back -- something to kill -- was all I needed. So I killed it -- bit by bit, leaf by leaf, until there was nothing in the cool shadows of the brick patio but green confetti, me in the midst of it like a leprechaun after a night's debauch.

And then I realized what I'd done, and it wasn't killing a plant. My grandmother stood in the doorway, her face a stone mask. But behind her -- my mother. That was the crime hidden inside the crime, that terrible act -- exposing my mother to her mother like that, proving my mother inadequate, her child a terror. And her face -- that was punishment.

There my memory ends, fades into the lost time of childhood. I'm sure I was disciplined, but I've confessed it many times because the hidden crime remains, without restitution. I'm still trying to figure out what proper restitution might be.

A friend tells me one of his childish exploits -- a chemistry-set experiment ending with a big hole in the bathroom linoleum. He covered it with the clothes hamper and was on the phone, trying to arrange a repairman's visit, when his mother returned. But when I ask if this is his biggest crime, he says no. That was shooting a squirrel with a BB gun -- wounding it and leaving it to die. He can outrun the sneaky attempt to cover up an accident, but he can't outrun the fact that he was a coward.

I think we all tend to presume that cowardice and destructive tantrums are childish things, something we outgrow, suppress, control. But the beast is always there. It isn't always angry, either; sometimes the beast is scared, sometimes the beast is sad, or just selfish, hungry for something it sees and wants. I've felt that leash slip many times as an adult, and I don't think I deserve much in the way of congratulations because I haven't done a lot of visible damage at those times. I've done lots of damage, wielded many weapons.

So many broken promises, large and small: "I'll call." "I'll be there." "I won't forget." So many lies: "It's nothing personal." "I had a wonderful time." "I'm fine." We're like gardens, all flowers and weeds, not always sure which is which. Crimes of commission, mostly, and sometimes omission, crimes of intent, and lack of. Faithlessness, of so many kinds -- petty dislikes and thoughts of disdain, dust motes of bad opinion and harsh judgment clouding the air. Little weeds, with long roots.

Little outlaw acts. An undercharged item at the grocery store. Too much change. A too-small tip. A little cheating here and there, just a little padding, a little undercutting, just a little. Misplaced blame. Exaggeration. They're all forms of stealing -- robbing from others, taking what we want and have no title to, just because we want it. Because we want.

Intimate crimes, private ones: irritability, sarcasm, the short temper. Glib jokes at someone else's expense -- someone else, paying for you. Cheap shots, ba-da-boom, take a bow. Abrupt ends to conversations, unanswered letters, unreturned calls and wavering attention. The thank-you notes never sent, the presents never given, the niece's volleyball games never attended, the son's award dinner missed. Complaints, mostly small -- whining, mostly old. All forms of assault, killing small parts of other people, killing hope and kindness and self-esteem, little knife wounds of neglect and prickling self-defense.

The list is as long as our lives. These are simply the symptoms of being human, after all. What we so easily forget is how close to each other we are. The gap between an angry shout and a slap is very small -- I know, I've slapped. Weapons are always at hand, some deadlier than others, and the thoughts we use to make it all right to pick one up are in each of us, always. I keep reading the paper and listening to people talk about the criminals in the news, listening to the fear and anger and violent wishes for revenge. I try to remember that this fear, anger, this sense of powerlessness, these wishes are precisely the emotions that drive the acts we dread. Only humans can commit crimes against humanity, and no one is innocent of that.
SALON | June 11, 1998