Living with ladybugs

Write about your childhood….Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion....So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work.  Write straight into the emotional center of things.  Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, pages 225-226.

I read this at the end of last week, and it has stuck with me over the weekend.  It’s something every writing teacher has told me, in one way or another.  It’s hard to dig into your emotional center, though.  I remember when I first started writing I chose to write about things that I could name, things that I understood about my childhood.  I wrote about growing up in a Volkswagon bus and the summers I spent at the lake cabin.  One day, I read over the things that I had written, and I realized I was writing about my father; he was always at the center and I hadn’t even been aware of it.  I still don’t know why I always write about my father.  We have a good relationship.  But I feel like he is the key to my emotional center. 

Sometimes writing about my family feels like betrayal.  Actually, writing about my family always feels like betrayal, even when I write about the good things.  This never stops me, though.  Apparently, this is not a unique feeling.  Lamott refers to this feeling, and she included Sharon Old’s poem “I Go Back to May 1937” in her book, and I can’t help but post it here.  It is a wonderful poem.

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, 
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the 
red tiles glinting like bent 
plates of blood behind his head, I 
see my mother with a few light books at her hip 
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the 
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its 
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, 
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop, 
don't do it--she's the wrong woman, 
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things 
you cannot imagine you would ever do, 
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, 
you are going to want to die. I want to go 
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body, 
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I 
take them up like the male and female 
paper dolls and bang them together 
at the hips like chips of flint as if to 
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Often, the memories I write about seem to come out of nowhere, and I’m not even sure if they ever even happened.  This happened this morning when I set out to write about how my father used to catch lizards, rub their bellies until they fell asleep, and then would clamp them onto my ears as if they were earrings.  I didn’t even get to the lizards, though.  Instead, I found myself writing about the ladybugs that would infest our house every fall.

Childhood memory

My sister and I spent our childhood outside.  Growing up, we had a big yard with a fig tree and a plum tree and some apple trees that produced inedible apples.  The fig tree was a nice fort in the summer.  We were the kind of kids who ate sand and acorns and made necklaces out of grass and flowers.  We had pet turtles and pet lizards, and we dug up rolly pollies and kept them in gallon buckets.  We were, and still are, at the age when we were scared of bumblebees but didn’t want to admit it to each other.  I don’t know where a child’s fear of insects comes from.  We lived in a house full of spiders and roaches and ladybugs.  The house was old and creaky and drafty.  Our mother had Buddhist tendencies, so we didn’t kill bugs or snakes.  We didn’t even kill the rabid raccoon that lurked around our road one summer.  We set up a trap out by the woods and prayed the dog didn’t get bit.  If we absolutely couldn’t stand the company of a particular spider that made itself at home in the corner of the ceiling above our bed, we would catch it in a jar and throw it out the window.  In the fall, our house would fill with ladybugs.  You could see them flying toward the windows in swarms at any hour of the day.  Any other family would probably call it a problem, but my mother welcomed them.  Ladybugs were the one critter that I didn’t mind crawling in my hair.  I didn’t scream when I found one lost in my bed sheets.  They were cute, I suppose, and harmless.  They were pets for our Barbie dolls. 

I remember one time watching a ladybug crawl over my father’s face while he was sleeping on the couch in his office.  I had gone in there looking for the dog or my sister or a piece of paper.  I felt like I always needed an excuse to go in there.  When I found him sleeping I suddenly needed him for something, anything.  It’s like that when you’re a kid, and maybe even more so when you’re an adult.  I was tiptoeing over to wake him, to tell him I was hungry and wanted a snack, when I saw the ladybug come out from behind his ear.  I knelt down beside the couch, careful not to breathe too hard on my father’s face.  The ladybug crawled along his hairline and down around his eyebrow.  I imagined I was the ladybug, exploring the terrain of my father’s face.  Back then, my father was a forester, so I knew what a topographic map looked like.  I imagined his face as lines and circles.  I moved into the valley of his closed eye, and up the mountain of his nose.  I followed the trail of the ladybug took across my father’s with my finger across my own face.  I wondered what parts of me came from my father.  The ladybug moved across his mouth, and I remember being scared it would disappear into the cave of his parted lips.  It was scared, too; I could tell by the way it kept turning back every time it almost slipped into the darkness.  It occurred to me that my father might lick is lips and swallow the ladybug by accident, so I reached to brush it away without thinking.  My father woke, and I told him I was hungry.  The ladybug vanished into the couch.

Come winter, our windowsills were mass ladybug graves.  We were never disturbed by the sudden deaths of our buggy friends.  Their deaths were just as much a part of our lives as their constant and mindless fluttering against the lamp shades.  Mother would come around with a vacuum and suck up all the dried out carcasses.  My sister and I would follow her into each room.  It was always a time to sigh and shrug at the inevitable cycle of life.  We’d find the dead bugs in corners and behind the furniture for the rest of the year.  I guess it was like finding a sock you thought the dryer had eaten.  We would sweep them up into a dustpan and sprinkle them across the yard, waiting for the fall.