Magnum Opus, Bitch
April is letter writing month for NaBloPoMo and even though I’m not participating in the event I am taking the time to write some letters. It is such a cathartic practice and a lost art. When I was a little girl I had such a great letter-writing practice with my grandmother. She has curly pretty writing and would put stickers on the letter and enclose newspaper clippings she thought I’d be interested in and enclosed them lovingly in an envelope she would address to me. My mind never paused to consider that when she licked the envelope she did so with lips that would kiss me were she living closer, but then we might not have had the many exchanged letters.
Last night week I wrote a letter to Mallory and sent it via email to ask her permission to share a different kind of letter here in my April writing exercise.
Let me back up a bit to tell a story. It’s not a warm and fuzzy one, either. Rather, it is a painful time in my life as a parent and it brought to mind the several years I was a single parent to my daughter.
When Mallory contacted her father and arranged to begin a relationship with him I wasn’t at all pleased, but tried to be brave and understanding of it. It’s natural, I thought. This wanting to find out where you come from and what your other parent is like. But I didn’t like it at all. After phone calls and a visit from her sperm donor to us, she got to the point where she wanted to fly to Arizona to his home and spend some time prior to Christmas with him and his wife and their young toddler-age daughter.
This was a strained time for all of our family and there were awkward, tense conversations with Richard Cranium that usually ended in me berating him for not sticking to the plan or doing some monumentally asinine act AND DOING SO WITH MY KID IN HIS PHYSICAL POSSESSION. Obviously, sharing any parenting duty with him was foreign and I have never been accused of sharing toys during playtime. Not in pre-school. Not ever.
So I put my teenage daughter on an airplane and waited in agony until she got home that about a week later to celebrate Christmas and immediately upon her return I received a letter from Sperm Donor’s mother-in-law. A woman I’ve never met who typed me three pages, single-spaced and let me know that my child hadn’t ever said “thank you” for anything and seemed ungrateful during her visit and a lot of other unbelievably ridiculous things. Somehow, while I was scanning the letter, my senses came to me and I called my best friend over to stop me from committing an unspeakable act that would have surely resulted in hopping on a plane myself to crease someone’s skull with a blunt object. Meanwhile, my eldest son called his father at work and suggested that he come home as he described me as a “lion in a cage, pacing back and forth and growling“.
This woman, this NOBODY to me, this STRANGER wrote me a letter and assumed all kinds of things about me. She suggested that God approved of her sending the diatribe and even invited me to call her because, as she wrote: “I do well on the phone.”
To list the numerous mistakes in her wondering if I could call her on the phone and “talk” about these things would take an entire other posting, but I’m certain that my personality shines through enough of my writing to intimate that THAT WAS A HUGE MISCALCULATION ON HER PART.
Bring it on was my first and only thought at that moment. I picked up the phone to call her and my BFF offered some advice that I’ve lived and lived by ever since that moment: “Don’t forget that women, especially, have a terrible problem that prevents them from ever getting anywhere, Kelly. They are always running around trying to get other women to behave. She wants you to BEHAVE and keep your daughter out of her daughter’s life. Her daughter is married to this man and she doesn’t want the distraction. If you try to go line by line of her letter and answer everything and even try to set her straight, she will be winning because she will be making you behave. You don’t have to do this.”
It was too late. Lion in the cage had begun the act of readying herself to protect her cubs and the claws were out. While I didn’t go “line by line” in explanation, I did call and leave a message. When she called back she said, “Hi. This is Christy.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Christy. You know. I’m so-and-so’s mom.”
“Who are you?” I asked again.
“I’m the mother-in-law of Richard Cranium.”
“No. I heard you the first time. I want to know WHO THE HELL ARE YOU to write that letter? Who the hell are you to send such drivel to someone you don’t even know. WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TO ME?”
As expected, she tried to defend her actions and didn’t really understand where I was coming from, but my intention wasn’t to get her to change her mind about me. The most worthwhile part of the conversation was when I told her how much she offended me by criticizing my parenting.
“You don’t get it, do you? Mallory is my Magnum Opus and you’re nothing but an art critic who can’t even finger paint. You don’t GET to critique me. That’s not your job.”
It didn’t get much better from there, but it was a moment that I’ll never forget because I learned that I am stronger than I originally thought. I learned that when it’s important, I can make the hard choice to confront those who require it. I learned that I am not a pushover or the person who is willing to lie down and become the doormat for life for either the people who’ve wronged me or the people who support them.
When I asked Mallory if I could write about it as a cathartic exercise and wondered what her feelings were she admitted that she read it years ago and said that if it helped anyone else to read that I should do it. Tomorrow, I will publish the letter I wrote back and never sent.
