Everyone has a story about how their mother ruined their life. This is mine.

[aintbroke]

"Ruminations: the beginnings of an experiment in creative nonfiction/stream of consciousness writing (or, How I learned to love poetry.)"

The more time passes, the more I think I have done myself a disservice by not knowing girls.

There's a horrible song by No Doubt about being "the kind of girl who hangs with the guys" and although I think the attempts at a Caribbean rhythm are pathetic, I do identify with that. I can count on one hand the girls I know and consider my friends. (Oh, alright, if we're including women, I'd probably have to use both hands.)

I grew up climbing trees in countries where girls are expected to do embroidery, so it's not a real surprise that my social group (the monkeys) was full of boys. And not just young people of the male gender, I hung with the "boys will be boys" crowd, playing hard and mean, and I was one of them, part of the ever-fluxuating contingent.

Some things do not need to be stated with this crowd. You do not enjoy school, but your parents ask it of you, so you brush your hair and put on your tie and go. You will never be at the top of your class, because that would imply that you were paying attention. Neither will you be at the bottom of any ladder, because you’re smart enough to know that your life will be easier if you stick to the middle ground. You give what is required, but not an inch more, because your life is up in the trees and in the fields on the edge of town.

I learned to love books by accident.

My father is one of the rough-and-ready-boys who somehow managed to make it to adulthood. He’s got rough edges in funny places, but at his Catholic boarding school, a professor handed him a copy of On the Road and he learned to love books. He reads. Because he loves books, and I thought (think) that he’s one of the five coolest people on the face of the Earth, I love books.

I didn’t tell anyone. Books were my dirty little secret. But we read my parents and I, we devoured books together.

We read Watership Down when I was four, and I remember puzzling over the respective ages of rabbits for weeks after we finished. (And I didn’t cry at the end. I wouldn’t have done such a thing… not over a book.) We finished The Count of Monte Christo when I was about eight, and I took fencing lesions for a year. Just to be prepared. You never know when you’ll be called on to fight your way out of the Rabat Catacombs.

Books were acceptable, as long as they were sanctioned by an approved source. Poetry I wasn’t so sure about. Flowery. Girl stuff. Mushy. Not my thing. I kind of liked Shel Silverstein, but you’d’ve had a hard time getting me to admit it. I flatly refused to memorize a poem for school. Instead I took a page from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and performed it as a spoken-word beat box. My teachers never really knew what to make of me.

My mother, in that charming way she has, made some obscure reference to King Lear at dinner one night. I told her she had it all wrong, and she politely informed me that I couldn’t contradict her until I’d read the play. Oh I showed her. I read each and every one of the Bards plays in two weeks. I had the sinking sensation that they were bordering on something very poetic, and thus highly uncool. But they were interesting, in a convoluted, weird translation sort of way.

What followed is still referred to in certain circles as “the Shakespeare fiasco,” and in my own petty way, I hold my mother responsible. Because of course, the contingent was in my room, and of course, Lear wasn’t hidden away in it’s normal spot. (Under the bed, against the wall, behind the legos, and milk crates of birds’ nests.) And of course someone picked it up and commented on it.

I could have just dismissed it. “Oh, my mom is making me read it,” I could have said, and it would have been mostly true; it would have been received with a hearty commiserating sigh, and never would have been mentioned again. But somehow, I couldn’t wave off poor old Lear and Touchstone like that. I had felt for them, and I got defensive.

These boys of mine, they think fast. Less than fifteen hours after the discovery of Lear, I was at my first audition. They figured I was becoming a theater geek/ophile, and this was good for three reasons. One, theaters need sets, and sets need building, and where there is building, there are power tools, and not a one of us could say no to that. Two; acting seems always to require me to wear a dress, which is (I’ll admit) more than a little incongruous. Three; secretly they all loved it too, but they only went along because the girl wanted it.

But I honestly never liked poetry. I didn’t get it. Didn’t people understand that English was difficult enough without writing horrible sentence fragments?

The contingent grew up, and to a man, became nice, sensitive guys. Tov cried when he proposed to his girlfriend. (Or rather, he cried more than she did.) Mac still sends his ex flowers on her birthday. Jordan and Jose call their mothers on Tuesday nights to say I love you.

And then there’s me. I am none of these things. I don’t mind, really, because I figure they have enough “nice sensitive” to make up for compulsively blunt, awkward, forgetful me. I do not like sentimentalism, and somehow, I’d gotten the impression that this was what poetry was. All love and flowers, or overly dramatic, glorified deaths.

So I pretended it didn’t exist, tolerated it when that failed me, and was outright rude to anyone who pushed it on me. And then, sneakily, I found myself liking some oddly poetic things.

It snuck up on me, this liking of poetry, and once it was close enough to see, it smacked me in the face with a haddock. I think I like poetry now. Not all of it, but the abstract idea of it, is something I have finally grown into. I blame Posture Boy for knowing me better than I know myself, and Ko for encouraging me.

I had great plans for tying this into what we did today, but my hands hurt. So no more of that.