7. The Plot Thickens
Twenty years after I reconciled with my mother, this collage, titled When She Got Her Wings, revealed the bitterness I’d suppressed for so along.
Y 1973, WHEN I SAT next to my mother on her couch in Cleveland, she’d finally left her troubled past behind. My mob-connected stepfather, who had forced her to return to him under threat of violence, was now dead, and she had found and married her third husband, the love of her life, Paul.
She was ready to move on.
I, on the other hand, was determined to pick up where we left off – in Dallas, in 1962 – so determined that I would spend the next twenty years trying to build a bridge back to the relationship we’d had in another life.
Maybe it was to be expected that she’d be unwilling to join me. That eleven-year-old boy she’d been forced to leave behind now sat beside her as a young man pushing her to go someplace she didn’t want to go. It was like we were acting out a scene from a science fiction movie with time machines: me the figure from the past wanting to transport her back, and she, the present-day protagonist who recognized the problems that might create. Either way, I think it triggered in her a kind of cognitive dissonance, and eventually, a wall rose between us.
Somehow my sister was able to let sleeping dogs lie, but I couldn’t, and it wasn’t until I was in my forties that I would finally begin processing my true feelings about our mother. My first efforts took the form of the collage above, titled “When She Got Her Wings.” I cut out an old snapshot of her as a teenager, glued on actual butterfly wings, and poured out in scribbling pencil exactly how I felt. It was self-absorbed and narcissistic, but I couldn’t help myself.
Other collages played out the same motif, and my preoccupation with what I perceived to be my mother’s
flightiness and escapism manifested in my art, in imagery of wings and birds, people flying and falling. Next, writing became my outlet. Essays, short stories, and even a screenplay poured onto the page, finally evolving into the early manuscripts of my novel series, The Butterfly Myths.
But somewhere along the way, I came face to face with the realization that it might only be my side of the story. Soon after there appeared in my life an unknown figure from an unknown past, one who brought a different perspective to the tale, and real healing began. Read about that here.
