#8 -- My Books: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Starting with the obvious, it turns out that Lionel is not a guy, but a woman, born in North carolina as a Margaret Ann who in her teenage years decided to become Lionel. She’s in her fifties, married to a musician, no children and living in London. Lionel or Margaret Ann as I sometimes think of her is an exceptionally gifted writer.

And yet her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005) is not a delightful, blissful read. Oh, au contraire. It’s hard and painful as nails.

I decided to read this novel because I was so intrigued by the previews of the upcoming movie based on Shriver’s book featuring Tilda Swinton (Eva), John C. Reilly (Franklin) and Ezra Miller (Kevin), directed by Lynne Ramsay. Well, even Lionel liked the film (I have the preconceived notion that she is very hard to please).

The book is about our psyche and our heart, dealing with those feelings which most of the time we shy away from and rather not name or discuss: the ones that we don’t socially accept, those difficult-to-name visceral reactions that we should not ignore no matter how disagreeable.

Eva gets pregnant with Kevin and their relationship is anything but what we know or acknowledge as the norm: there is no gushing adoration, no emotional attachment between the two. It actually seems like there is a mutual rejection between infant and mother, in spite of Eva wanting to and working so hard to reach the image of being good at being a  “good mother.” When alone with his mom baby Kevin will not stop crying, rejects his mother’s breast and milk, and is just plain difficult to appease and please. Eva is sheer ambivalence not only as a human being, but most especially as a mother. She knows what society expects her to feel and she sees she cannot call forth that persona as it relates to her son. Her husband Franklin tries to pretend all is normal, after all they’re talking about a defenseless baby ,he thinks, so he plays down his wife’s concerns and ambivalence.

As the years pass Eva realizes that that first impression, her intuition of being disliked by her son from the very beginning is true; throughout his childhood and now adolescence, he goes out of his way to make his mom’s life as miserable as he can, while leaving his dad under the impression that he is just your typical teenage boy. Franklin continues feeding on the image of a them being a “normal family,” whatever that might be. Of course, I do not know how things will pan out in the movie, but from my reading of the book, I felt that Franklin was just in a long-term act of self-deception, a dad unwilling to admit that his son is an “evil” human being, a really “bad seed.” After all evil does exist, remember Manson, Bundy, etc.? We do give life to human beings capable of doing so much damage and hurt without us really understanding the why? It seems to me that Eva has a hard time and assimiliates the belief that somehow, some way, she is responsible and played a role in her son becoming a mass murderer. Was it because of her undeniable maternal ambivalence from the get-go, never able to be your lovey-dovey mommy, your baby-talk mommy and whatever one might think makes a woman a good mother?

In my mind the valuable learning from this novel is precisely the possibility of accepting ambivalence in our feelings toward our offspring. They are not necessarily likeable all the time (we know sometimes they don’t like us, but they’re innocent right?, we are not.) We must love them absolutely and instinctively all the time. I guess in the long run, love will beat indifference, but like in Eva and Kevin’s case, it painfully is not the case in every single instance.

As a mother I know I sometimes need to be alone to remember who I am and what I like, to recover the essence of Me. And sometimes, my husband and maybe even my daughter do not understand that. But they do respect it, something I deeply appreciate. They don’t frown upon that I need to go to the movies on my own, or that I hide in a Barnes and Noble to read my books. I think they've learned that after these brief parentheses of alone time I can be the more tolerant and loving wife and mother they expect and deserve.

Maybe that was what was amiss in the Kevin novel. Eva didn’t find the support and validation from neither Franklin or Kevin to share her burden and open up to maybe consider her husband's and son's. Maybe Kevin, astute as he is, was able to perceive his mother’s extreme ambivalence and decided to ultimately pay her with murder and hatred, and with no one talking about it or addressing it, it might have felt for him that his parents just plain sucked, when all is that they were all too human.

My botttom line: This book is definitely in line for a second read and Shriver is an author worth reading. She has several novels. Right now I'm reading The Post-Birthday World.

#7 -- Finding More Paths Home

Once in psychotherapy I remember telling my shrink that sometimes I feel like there is a congress or conference going on in my head where several voices argue and discuss any topic that might be worrying me in life. Quite innocently I asked him, “Do you think there is more than one Me inside me?” His quick response was, “Well, we know that there is at least one of you.” No, he didn’t mean I was crazy and that I had multiple personalities. I went with the idea that we has underlining the numerous contradictions that define the neurotic that I am.

I bring this up because last weekend I went to the movies on my own. I went to the Angelika Plano to see the beautiful A Separation. As I was walking from my car to the theater, there they were…my voices. We were all talking at the same time, quite happy actually. In order to keep up with all that I had to be said, I saw that I needed to talk to myself with my outside voice. And though one of us kept telling me to lower my voice because I would get caught by the “normal” foks around me, I just couldn’t. All of us were really happy to be out and about again!

We were in a celebratory mode because I had just realized that lately my weak leg is feeling much, much stronger, so much so that I don’t feel I’m going to fall with every step I take. Sometimes I have the audacity to walk without my cane for extremely short distances, say to the vending machine at work (in spite of having no business there); or from the bathroom at home to my recliner-cum-bed. I quite flippantly and childishly tell my husband when he insists I take my cane, “I don’t need it!”, something I wholeheartedly desire to believe and am convinced and will come to be.

So my voices and I were congratulating me on how strong and quick I walk now; of course the slowness and limp are still very noticeable, but the improvement is something none of us are willing to ignore or deny.

Another day I took my daughter to her soon to be high school. It was sort of an Open House to meet with the clubs and become familiar with extracurricular activities she will be able to choose from. Because of my own experiences in U.S. schools, I was a little nervous, but I have to say I did fantastically well. I got very tired, but I was thrilled with myself.

The resurgence of these voices that to me seem to come from distinct individualities made me also realize that they had but disappeared since I had my stroke in June 2008. I commented to my husband that perhaps the part of my brain that died that June night was where these voices resided and now they have found new neuronal pathways back home.

I do hope so, because that means my brain is probably furiously, desperately working to regain its power over my left limbs.

May it be so.

#6 -- Letter to My California Home

Dear 411 Woodbridge Ave:

I just learned you were built in 1929 and that you offer 1225 square feet to your inhabitants. You’re a pretty humble home. My parents’ mortgage when you held us tight was only $65 dollars per month.

Let me tell you what you were in the seventies, when you were my home.

Because of their work in the orchards, our parents couldn’t pick us up at the airport that summer. So they told Irma and I to take a cab from the Sacramento airport to what we knew was our new home and of which knew absolutely nothing except this magical address written on a piece of paper to which we held on for dear life: 411 Woodbridge Ave. The drive to our town was an hour south of Sacramento.

Before you, we had lived in rental properties, all poor and probably undesirable for the majority of people, but to us they were the safest place ever, with mami and papi anchoring us strong and firm.

When we got out of the taxi and we saw the number 411 on a house that to our eyes looked like a mansion, we automatically walked down a small dirt road on your side that led to a place that to us seemed more appropriate (poorer) for us.

Finally we had to accept that the pretty house we saw initially was you, our home. We walked around you unbelieving and in awe. You had a fenced back yard and a side porch. I don’t know what my sister was seeing or thinking, but I remember I was unable to grasp that behind those creamy yellow, almost sheer curtains that covered the salient windows that framed the front of the house, was going to be where we would live. It seemed like a fairy tale home to the sisters who were not yet fifteen, and very probably developmentally much younger and innocent.

411 Woodbridge, you hold so much of my family’s history. Do you remember all the people that you housed, so many uncles and cousins for whom my parents open your doors wide and welcoming so they could work with us in the fields and orchards so they could send some money to their families back south? Do you remember my mother getting up at two or three in the morning so she could make flour tortillas for all those men? Do you remember her whitened hands, her sweaty face, and her roll pin as she turned the dough into flat round disks that bloomed with hot air, yummy and light on the griddle? Do you remember her plants, how, almost like green hallucinations, adorned your communal living spaces? Do you remember our friends the ones with whom we played cards until the morning came and they stayed to breakfast with us the “menudo” made by my mother?

How about my papi, 411 Woodbridge? Do you remember him, his laughter, his joking ways when he mopped your kitchen floor, his pepper and tomato plants in your back yard and that he watered in his silent peasant ways? Do you remember Sergio’s three children (Eva, Sergito and Adán) and how we cherished them?

Remember when finally one of your rooms became my bedroom? In that room I somehow had a desk and my room was uncluttered, everything in its place, beautified with the books I borrowed from the public library (I especially remember the poems written by a Hispanic New York cop turned poet).

You were filled to the brim, 411 Woodbridge, you were filled with the love that united us, the light that could not be contained by your yellow curtains; you were filled with our music, our laughter, our happiness, our birthdays, our language, our customs, our greenery, and my parents hunger to defeat the chronic and extreme poverty from whence they came. And through sheer hard work, dedication and devotion to their family they did. And, finally, you, 411 Woodbridge, made them homeowners in the United States.

Amidst the northern California scenery browned by hard working immigrants, like my mami and papi, oh 411 Woodbridge Ave, I’m so happy to know you’re still standing tall.

#5 - Let There Be Light!

 So on Tuesday our electricity was turned off by CoServ. It seems I skipped a couple of payments. I remember seeing the interruption notice, but I didn’t pay attention to my last date to pay 143 dollars. I felt so bad when I called Wednesday morning to figure out what was going out with my account since I pretty much thought I was up to date, and the employee told me that the power had already been turned off that morning. I almost cried. What does one do? One pays whatever they’re asking for because life without electricity is unthinkable? I had to tell my husband and I feared he would be mad. But he was not. Actually, he was very understanding with me and accepting especially when I told him our power would be back up the next day, Wednesday. Now I imagine many people have the routine of a nightly bath or shower, so they just get up, dress, have breakfast and go. Not us. Our family of three takes their shower as soon as we get out of bed. Otherwise the day seems a pretty dirty daunting task to face. Wednesday morning we woke to the news that we had no hot water. A big surprise for us. We figured since our gas bill was up to date, we could count on having hot water so we could shower and face the day. Somehow it’s not like that, something to do with the heater having electric ignition, as was explained to me by the ever nice folks at CoServ. That paralyzed us...to the point that my daughter and I stayed home from work and school, both of us having additional reasons as to why getting dressed and going out was not a realistic possibility. Raul and his boss are scheduled to put the newspaper to sleep on Wednesday so there was absolutely no way that he could not not go to work. And he feels much more strongly about the necessity of a morning shower for all human beings. He felt awful all day long. Now why did I decide to write my Trust Me about this? Because of the reactions we really don’t talk about that I can’t ignore. The idea of shame comes to the fore. My husband actually asked my daughter to not tell anyone at school why she missed school on Wednesday, that it was a family thing and private. At work, I just felt comfortable explaining to my boss why I felt I had to miss a day at work. I really think this reaction of shame has to do with the immigrant experience. In my country, at least in my immediate reality there, if someone had their power shut off, you would think that they were so poor that they couldn’t even pay for that most abasic of basic utilities. And you don’t want to ever be that poor. I argued with Raul, I said, “But we are poor.” Of course, not so poor that we couldn’t pay for this service. I can be embarrassed by my oversight but I know we could have paid this bill had I not been so careless and distracted with that notice from CoServ. In places like my immediate reality in the “old country” poverty is a culture, so not paying your power bill, puts you even lower than low middle class. And no one wants to admit the possibility of this reality. So I decided to talk about it, because I’m not in the “old country.” I’m here. I really don’t know what mainstream U.S. of A. would imply from knowing that my power was interrupted, but Some Thing tells me it wouldn’t be as shaming as it would be in the “old country.”