For the rest of October, I will donate $2.00 of every book sale to a local shelter that provides for women and children. This is a cause for which I am deeply passionate. Let’s keep the world safe for our kids and their caregivers. Suede: A Collection of Poetry is available through Friesen Press, at amazon.com or you can email me for a signed copy at Cindy Hollenbeck.
Eight years ago, my husband Eric and I bought a house. He wanted the perfect place in the package, already put together. I wanted the old place with potential that we could create. Because he was too busy finishing college, I looked at homes with the Realtor. When I walked into the harvest gold living room with hard wood floors on 870 Orchard Ave, I attempted my best poker face. This would be our house. There was no garage, and it had an itty, bitty tiny kitchen, but we had off-street parking and a pantry in a great neighborhood.
Our son turned one in this house, and we had a huge party with family and friends. Eric and I painted the rooms the way we wanted, fixed up the basement room, put a compost barrel in the backyard, and even got TP’d one year. We took gorgeous photos of our three kids backdropped by trees, held Easter egg hunts and trick-or-treated in our neighborhood. I found a great job, and Eric started graduate school. We were well on our way to living what many call the American Dream.
Eric and I had been together nine years, and he had seen me through my bouts of depression stemming from childhood abuse: emotional, physical and sexual. Talk therapy was a huge part of my life. I believe Eric didn’t understand what I went through daily, but he listened and hugged me. After I had our son, my postpartum depression lasted more than a year, and I went on antidepressants, which helped enormously. A few years later, when I turned the big 4-0, I thought, I had never felt happier. But danger loomed on the horizon.
By our son’s fifth birthday, I confessed to Eric that I’d had a three-week affair with a coworker months earlier. It took me five months to confess. Some friends say it was a selfish choice to tell him, but I assure you, no marriage counselor would see me unless I did. I wanted to work things out, not split up. And I guessed the affair was a symptom of my past abuse rearing its ugliness into my wonderful present as it had done before. Never with Eric, but in other healthy relationships. Eric saw my explanation as an excuse for me to “have fun” with my coworker “Leif.”
Eric called Leif’s wife and told her about the affair. Then in a drunken rant, he told our daughters. And the next thing I knew, my life spiraled into complete pandemonium. A state of disarray that my therapists warned I was a master at creating. People who grow up in chaotic environments need to learn to like the quiet.
Within six months, I asked Eric to leave our house because he was drinking and being abusive. He filed for divorce on the grounds of infidelity. He destroyed me financially. I quit my job. I tried to seek comfort from Leif, but realized he was only interested in the forbidden wife. My elder daughter lost respect for me. My middle daughter, who was going through puberty, started cutting. And my son said he wished Mommy and Daddy would stop fighting.
My daughters are grown. I am living alone in this huge house, my son coming half time. Leif is a dirty word. I am so guilt ridden about the affair that I cannot have a normal conversation with Eric. He is still angry, and it’s been five years. Our divorce has been final for two and neither one of us can move on. Me, because no one holds a candle to my ex-husband, whom I am still in love with. And him, because he’s bitter. He has a new home, a job he likes. We live blocks from each other. Our son is nine and is well adjusted and tender-hearted.
Tonight, I am signing papers to put our house on the market. I cried for the first two weeks after I realized I had to sell it. I can’t look anywhere without seeing Eric and the kids. Eric playing X-box in the living room. The girls playing Rock Band. All of us having dinner in the sun room. Drinking coffee in the itty, bitty tiny little kitchen. Raking leaves in the back yard. Tearing down the toilet paper in the front yard.
Many of my friends ask, Why are you and Eric not back together? It all depends on how you look at it.
Salt dough
My daddy died, says the four-year-old girl—
squishing and smashing lilac salt dough
into sea stars and snowmen at the daycare
craft table. She licks her fingers. Don’t eat the dough,
the caregiver says. A boy in a blue and green
striped shirt stacks blocks. The girl eyes
other kids’ paintings of mommies, daddies,
kids and dogs. My daddy died, she repeats,
looking around. The boy turns his stringy-haired
head her way, eyes her from her wavy bangs
to her purple fingers. I don’t have a dad, he offers.
Never met him. The caregiver tilts her head,
half-smiles. The boy rests the last block on the stack,
watches the tower weave before it falls to the table
with a boom and clack. He runs to the boy’s room.
The girl lifts a rounded mound of salt dough,
makes sure no one is watching, takes a bite.
From ages four to nine I was sexually abused by my step-uncle “Reggie” who was seven years older. He paid me in quarters and record albums, including Cheech and Chong’s Big Bambu and Toys in the Attic by Aerosmith. I had no idea that the abuse was wrong and blocked the memory until I turned 18.
When I told my father and stepmother about the abuse, they said, “Why didn’t you tell us then?” I was four. And of course, my stepmother accused me of trying to get her brother Reggie in trouble and cause problems between her and my father.
(as if they didn’t have enough on their own) Now I know this response is typical of a family in denial.
I’ve spent decades in therapy working through the after effects of the abuse, which includes mistrust of men and authority figures, fear of commitment, control issues, and a penchant for the melodramatic. I have left good relationships for terrible ones, including my last marriage. I don’t want to be alone but keep making that happen. The truth is, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
In a poetry class years ago, I had a teacher who was a victim of childhood sexual abuse and not afraid to talk about it. He really understood the damage it causes to the human psyche. Through discussion, he helped me get my writing to a place where I could articulate what I wanted with the following poem. He read The Coin Collector and said, “You killed ‘im off, eh?” I didn’t mean to, but the poem took me there. And so be it.
The Coin Collector
You look tranquil in nickel-plate, uncle,
shark skin suit, black tie, eyeglasses.
They’ve done great work with your makeup,
brushed your hair back as you would
have worn for a wedding or wake. Your mother
offers kind words, says that as a child
you saved every penny you found. Your sister
talks about your thumbs, how they bent nearly
flat from the indent of so many coins.
I remember the Lincoln Cent collection book
you gave me, your taking me to antique shops
when I was thirteen, our private talks
of my high school lovers, all of which
you were dying to hear. These days, I carry
grief in my pockets like the coins you collected,
handled so often they’ve lost their brilliance.
I think of the young girl from a family
where no hands reached, how she welcomed
your affection year after year, afternoons
in your bedroom, a quarter a trip, your arms
linked through her legs, her fingers
tugging your blond hair, the pleasant ache
she felt between her legs then—and now—
when she hears them say your name, runs
her finger along the ribbed edge of a quarter,
sees the coffin close over your face.
Nearly two years ago, my beloved father (and best friend) passed away from a severe lung infection. Had he not contracted TB from an employee in his early fifties, he might not be dead. This employee did not divulge her disease while she worked for him. He found out later. And my father’s TB stayed dormant for years. When it finally blew up, he almost died (but that’s another blog post). His entire life he’d battled asthma, and he used to joke, “These lungs are going to be the death of me.” It’s a shame that the careless act of an employee may have caused his death. Because of the scarring on his lungs caused by the TB, doctors said he could not survive the surgery needed to cure his lung infection. But I digress.
The book Suede: A Collection of Poetry is dedicated to my father because his death prompted me to dig out fifteen years’ worth of poems and finish the book. My older brother Tony, my father’s namesake, was killed in a motorcycle accident when I was eighteen. He is the subject of several poems. Loss has defined much of my life. And while many of the poems in Suede include loss, some talk about childhood, love, lust and sex, family, and some even discuss abuse. I write in simple, image-driven language, because that’s what I know. My father, with his high school education, read all my poetry and understood my poems. They are not lofty. I call myself a “blue-collar” poet. I published Suede for my father and my brother. Perhaps you or someone you know might like it. http://bit.ly/WE66YU
The Week My Father Was Dying
The week my father was dying, I fell in love with him—
again. When I was six, I’d proposed, scrawled
I love Daddy over the wood benches in the back
of his shoe repair shop, carved hearts into the
hard plastic of the sewing machine table.
But the week my father was dying, shrunken frame
slouched in the fort of pillows and sheets on the giant
hospital bed in his living room, oxygen tank in the corner,
his black hair was combed straight, almond-shaped
eyes wide as a child’s, toothy smile yellow and straight.
I stood in the kitchen scooping chocolate ice cream
into a bowl, covered the mound in crushed pineapple.
I felt him staring, so looked over and waved. Up
to his neck in blankets, it took him forever to lift
his big old hand from beneath the fort to wave back.
I have his hands, and feet. It’s enough to have his wiry
hair, scratchy voice, flat Italian nose, and stubborn streak—
but why the chimp-like hands and feet with every
toe the same size? I want to pluck them off with
the pincer pliers he used to rip the soles off shoes.
He once told me, “You couldn’t be more like me if you tried.”
I drink to excess, choose damaged lovers, live 3000 miles
away from family. But the week my father was dying, I sat
with him, said, Everything good about me came from you.
You’re my best friend, I said, and I love you.
Thank you, he said. Some kids don’t feel that way about their dads.
I laughed out loud, rested my arms around the declining
slopes of his shoulders. He felt so small.
Three years ago, I almost lost my son Vinny to his severe food allergy to tree nuts. He secretly ate a piece of toffee and lied about it. While his father and I sat in the E/R crying and watching Vinny sleep off his Benadryl/Epi-pen-induced coma, the doctor came out and said, “That boy needs to be under the care of an allergist.” Within the week, Vinny had an appointment.
We already knew Vinny was allergic to peanuts and tree nuts from an earlier blood test. But now we were requesting a food panel. They would only test for a couple foods, because of his potential for an anaphylaxic reaction. I agreed to be tested, too, to offer moral support. Turned out Vinny and I are both allergic to cats, dust, dust mites, and all the grasses, weeds, and trees that grow in Idaho. He’s also allergic to dairy and corn. I’m allergic to chicken, barley, malt, coconut, and corn.
At the time of the allergy test, I wore a size 10. I was still drinking beer, eating bread, fried foods, including chicken, you name it. I was running three miles a day several times a week and lifting weights. I looked pretty good and weighed about 160 for my five-foot-six frame. The allergist recommended a full elimination diet.
Later, I discovered that if I ate any type of food with corn in it, i.e., restaurant french fries (deep fried in vegetable oil that had corn oil) or enchiladas with corn starch, Heinz ketchup, gravy, within two days, tiny blisters formed on my fingers that opened up into full-blown eczema. And since I’ve taken corn out of my diet, I’m incredibly sensitive to its effects.
Corn is everywhere: dextrose, fructose, modified food starch, Xanthan gum, vegetable oil. I can’t eat at any fast food restaurants or fried foods at sit down places.
Vinny’s ten. He eats popcorn, which makes his skin itchy. He says he doesn’t care. The allergy will become worse with age. He cannot eat dairy. It gives him horrible flatulence and the runs. And as one teacher described his behavior after he dairy: he wilts like a flower.
The benefits of my food allergies are that I have been turned on to clean eating, and my body has shrunk four pants sizes. I’ve lost 30 pounds because of healthy eating! I have to watch every bite I put into my mouth, not because I want to lose weight, but because these foods I’m allergic to quite literally poison my system. The effects of chicken on me aren’t even worth discussion. Once you stop eating poison, your body loses inflammation. It’s that simple.
When I go to barbecues, restaurants and gatherings with friends, some say, “Wow. I’m lucky. I’m not allergic to anything.” I’m like, “Really? Have you ever had a food panel done? How do you know?” Plus, I didn’t ask for this. A little sensitivity goes a long way, folks.
About three years ago, I started researching good family dogs. Again and again, labs showed as the number one choice. They didn’t howl, they could be trained easily, and if you worked eight hours a day (as I did) they could be crate trained. At the time, my son was six, and it was very important to me to choose a dog that would not harm my child.
I’d never owned a dog before. My father and brother are allergic to almost every animal you can name, so our family pets were a rooster named Sam (another blog post, perhaps) and a few rabbits. After I finished researching and decided on a lab, I visited our local pound. As luck would have it, they had two black lab/Newfie pups, 13 weeks old, and as cute as could be. I chose the feisty one who bit my finger.
Gus is an alpha male and stubborn. He’s been to obedience class. He’s learned sit, shake, lie down, stay, and leave it. He still pulls when I walk him. He barks when he meets other dogs, because he’s a big chicken and tries to establish dominance. He nips the dog’s ears and has been nipped himself. When people see all 5’4″ and 97 pounds of him, they freak out. I have been screamed at more than once by terrified folks at the dog park, dog swim, and off-leash parks. One man said Gus bit his son’s leg. It was a pencil-tip nip with no blood, and it was after the boy and the man screamed because Gus came running over to them.
Alas, as Gus moves into his third year, he still acts like a puppy. I’ve spent at least 500 dollars on gimmicks to make him behave. And I research constantly (which is what I wish everyone would do). When I say, “Walk,” Gus leaps like Rudolph the Red-nosed reindeer or humps our other dog Ginger. I’ve been acting more assertive with him lately, taking him on more walks–trying to burn out his puppy-like aggression. He is not a mean dog. I love Gus, and people who know him think he’s wonderful. He’s a lab and a newfie, for Pete’s sake. I chose him for his attitude. Maybe in my next life, I’ll choose a slug.
This is wonderful.
I don’t have much to say about Robin Williams’ death. A lot has been said already and all I can add is that I’m saddened, depression is real, and if you need help don’t be ashamed to seek it.
His movies have shaped much of my worldview and I have a lot to say about them. I realize 1) That these films were written by other people and 2) He embodied these characters and improved half of his lines. I couldn’t see anyone else playing these parts. I will watch all of these movies with my kids one day and hope they learn these same lessons:
5. DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO BE AROUND YOUR KIDS
Fathers can be whacky, irresponsible, and unreliable. Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams) was that kind of father and it drove his wife (Sally Field) to get a divorce. The judge finds Daniel unstable. His wife gets custody…
View original post 760 more words
My stepmother used clear plastic runners to protect the carpets in our house. My older brother Tony invented a game called “Torture,” employing said runners.
In order to make the runners stay on the carpet, the underside was affixed with sharp points. These had another purpose. After my father and stepmother left for the evening, Tony pulled up the runner and flipped it upside down. He cradled my little brother Jack and swung him back and forth over the runner. Tony chanted, “torture. . . torture.” Jack giggled with delight. The older kids version of Torture involved Tony and me, wrestling to see who could knock whom to the “mat” first.
Tony also invented the Food Contest. The first sucker, usually me, had to close her eyes and plug her nose and guess which food Tony shoved in her mouth. A giant hot pepper. Him: a salt-coated cucumber slice. Me: a spoonful of baking soda. Him: peanut butter on popcorn. Me: an old match. And we’re done.
The games always ended once the ‘rents came home. I love that Tony gave the games a name. He was structured that way. Maybe it’s because our real mother was born in Germany, right after WWII. I wonder what games she played with her brother. I’ll have to ask.
The Cobbler's Daughter 