Just When You Think You Know Someone

“High School Senior,” “Those Winter Sundays,” and Meeting the People Who Raised Us

Jun 23, 2023

I was in my mid 20s when I met my mother for a serious talk at Kitty’s Italian family restaurant, where the salad dressing (and only the salad dressing) is so good it tangs you in the jaw like sour candy. We’d been not speaking for months. I don’t remember the precipitant, but the fight itself was quiet, passive, and vaporous rather than the easier, high-volume kind. Loud is the way my family always fought, so six months of no-contact with my mother was crushing and bewildering. It felt weirdly formal, like I was in another family’s fight.

Growing up, we used to go to Kitty’s on birthdays and Christmas Eves. My father would flirt with the waitresses. He knew them by name and they knew him by drink. (Manhattan.) Suburban children of the 70s and 80s know a Kitty’s: baskets of stale bread, paper placemats, big bar, red rug, dark wood booths, smoky slants of afternoon light with Frank Sinatra playing, or Toto.

Walking in to meet my mom for lunch that day, I was nervous like you’d get meeting a blind date or an ex. Between that and the smell of old marinara and grilled meats, I had to remind my busy stomach that it was my mother I was meeting. Not some stranger.

It’s a significant thing when you begin to understand that your parent is just a person navigating their own confusion, joy, and regret–a whole life and lifetime apart from you. As kids, we get some previews of a parent’s provenance and otherness. Witnessing a parent grieve their own parent is such a moment, and it’s one that the teenagers I’ve worked with over the years describe as destabilizing, whether or not they were close to their grandparent. Many say it’s the first and only time they’ve seen their parent cry. And sadly, you have the kids who’ve had plenty of examples too early and often of a parent who’s in their own orbit—detached, inconsistent, and unreliable.

One student in Watertown–I’ll call him John–used to pass his own estranged mother (he called her his ex-mother) on the street, where she’d either ignore him or cuss him out. John’s troubled brother once threw a desk at me. (I ducked. For my first teaching job at the residential school, the only question I remember being asked during the interview was “What do you do if a student throws a desk at you?”...My answer: “Duck.” I started the following day.) I taught John early in my career, and he’s stayed in my head and heart as a miracle kid, showing up at school every day and reading every story I assigned (in a class where most of the kids did not do that.) And then he’d use the literature like a lifeline. He had loyal friends and was so loved, with that one brutal exception.

My mother really came into a newly sharpened focus for me over the course of that single Kitty’s lunch. I don’t remember anything specific about the conversation except that we hugged afterward. On the drive home, I felt foolish for the grudge (mine) that had made me ask for the lunch meeting. I don’t remember my exact complaint or the particular offense, but I’m sure it had something to do with an unmotherly thing I thought she’d said or done, or way she’d been. But somewhere within that hour at my childhood’s restaurant, I learned that her assignment to be mother only and mother first needed to be renegotiated. She found some gentle way to set me straight. When I got home to Somerville, I loved my mother in a different way. It was a good first date.

Over time, and especially after I had kids of my own, I started re-acquainting myself with her, and consequently with myself. I reconsidered certain long-settled facts and decreed conditions about my childhood and adolescence. My understanding of the love between parent and child would need retooling and renovation. This is true of the speakers in both of this week’s poems.

My mother worked the third shift as a maternity nurse in a hospital an hour away, and never really made up the sleep. When I was growing up, she was tired a lot, and sometimes irritable, and I’d taken her sleep deprivation and grumpiness personally. But like the speaker in the Hayden poem, I developed a wider and more three-dimensional read on the moods of our house in rear view. And with this re-cognition, a layer or two of my distress molted over time.

Growing up, my parents called me too sensitive and impulsive, and I hated it. But even my well-established resentment at this refrain softened once I had kids. I’m still not a fan of “too sensitive,” but I see now that my parents wanted me to armor up because they were afraid, and weary of the world’s harshness. Even the love where they came from was tough. And as it happens, I’ve said ridiculous things to my own kids out of the same concern and impulse. My daughter and I laugh now about the one time I told her to get some balls.

It turns out that I was, in fact, a bit much as a child. During Covid, we got a chance to watch the bunch of home movies from the 60s and 70s that we’d had transferred to DVD. From the opening scene involving a new baby sister and a guinea pig, it was clear that this small version of me didn’t have a neutral setting. Just scene after scene of me crying, chasing, and pointing; or flipping out with a panicked joy over my cardboard kitchen in the basement. Even when I wasn’t the focus, you could see a figure moving and darting past, or even just my feet in the corner of the frame hopping in place. Sensitive and fast-moving, like my own kids. As my old Irish boyfriend used to say, they didn’t lick it off the street.

Last month for Mother’s Day, we got my mother a subscription to this memoir-writing platform called “Storyworth,” which sends her weekly prompts and then after a year, they send you a book of all the writing. She’s gone rogue, writing prolifically about things my siblings and I had never heard about. Big things like driving across the country in the early 50s with her mother and baby brother and all their belongings to start a new life. And smaller big moments like the time she got into my dad’s car, meeting him for the first time to go on a double date:

Eleanor got in the back with Charlie and I got in the front with Donnie. I immediately went to light a cigarette ( yes everyone smoked then). The cigarette lighter in the car wouldn’t work so he turned around to Charlie and said “Hey Charlie, hand her the hammer so she can break the radio too.” And off we went.

She’ll be 85 in a couple weeks. When she has insomnia, she tells me, she just gets up to write before going and golfing 18 holes, or 9 if she gets tired. Last year, she had ovarian cancer. I’m really looking forward to that book.

Adjusting your aperture to shed more light on the people you love can be bittersweet. Like the Christmas Eve my dad came in to my room dressed as Santa, and I learned two new things in one moment: that there was no Santa; and that my father had it in him to be the kind of dad who went around to the neighbors’ houses, even our friends the Rosenthals, to be their Santa.

This week’s poems “High School Senior” by Sharon Olds and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden ask a lot of teenage readers, including a stretch in their perspective that’s generous enough to include parents. Here are the poems in succession, followed by some student thoughts, and teacher resources.

High School Senior

by Sharon Olds

For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
–this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a bright tree-frog in the dark,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever–I try to see
this house without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak’s
wing, but I can’t. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young
for weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me–no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.

***

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

***

About “High School Senior” by Sharon Olds

When my daughter left for college, I felt her absence acutely, in my body, for the first few months (okay; longer than that) especially coming on the heels of so much time together during Covid. The Olds poem is so corporeal in this same way…birth, pushing, primal, moving, ending in relief…

Some of what we talked about when we talked about “High School Senior”

I think it’s corny, Greg starts, It kind of goes in and out sentimental, right?

There’s a pretty long pause, kids marking up their poems.

You mean the “feel as if?” Maja asks.

Yeah and the “no my love of her is in me, moving in my heart” responds Greg.

I had to look up eohippus…says Sam, (complains Sam.) What a cool idea/image, though, gotta give her that. Not sure it’s so fetus-like, but cool.

Nice of you to give her that, Sam I say. Never use sarcasm as a teacher, except for the times you feel you must.

I like “she had come out of history slowly”...says Ranna.

We talk about the physicality and the movement of the poem…all the hearkening of the natural world…the cumulus clouds, the tree frog, the creek-brown, the river, creatures…

We wonder about the different combinations of parent/child–mother/daughter, father/son, mother/son, father/daughter, and wonder about the qualities and capacities unique to each. One student, Uma, refers back to an Andre Dubus short story we’d read, “A Father’s Story,” that examines this particular “dyad” question, in this case about the ties that bind father and daughter. We wonder how the Olds poem would be if it had been about a son. It would be a different poem, so “why are we even talking about it?” asks James. Fair enough, James. Brusque, though, James. We go back and forth about the value of that kind of conjecture… And then we come back to the poem in front of us.

I say, I always show this to parents at parents’ night, especially parents of seniors.

And what do they say? they wonder.

Sometimes they cry.

Naw. In front of you?

Yeah. And sometimes the ones who’ve already had kids leave home reassure the parents who are about to have their kids leaving for the first time.

Are my parents really gonna miss me this much? I doubt it, says Claire. I can’t wait to go to college. Can’t wait to get out of the house. Silence as we sit with that.

Yeah- I don’t really wanna hear that my mom is gonna have this heart-wrenching experience, Jimmy responds.

I do, Matt says.

Me, too, says Tanisha.

What about you? they ask.

I don’t remember such acute missing, I say. But they always seemed happy to see us. I don’t tell them that I got desperately homesick for nearly my whole freshman year.

We discuss the changing chambers metaphor in the poem. How resonant it is, the pouring and re-pouring and weighing and re-weighing. How deliberative it is, and how representative of so much emotion-having and decision-making. A couple kids write their musings about the chambers of the heart and the movement of the poem itself being like an idea pouring from hand to hand…The way the speaker doubles back and corrects herself, seeking precision…

***

About “Those Winter Sundays:”

My father had a temper, and he also sacrificed and woke up early and was a country boy, and his father was the same. We had anger(s) in our house, too. And yet we also had some of the speaker’s clarity, appreciation, regret, and hindsight. Some. You may notice I didn’t write much about my father in the prelude essay to these poems. I will. I miss him. He died suddenly in 1999, and I don’t think I pried enough before he did. What would I say if I could use language the way Robert Hayden used language?

This poem is a favorite of mine. The opening moment Sundays too…does so much heavy lifting in the world-making of the poem. The father’s perpetual sacrifice…the speaker’s humility, and a perspective that is so wide-angle and deep-focus…

It’s like a letter of apology, says Ida. And the questioning at the end…

It’s beautiful…so sad and…Juana says.

... and not a moment or word you don’t need Hagop adds.

We talk about the use of short sentences, especially the effect when they are contained within or on their own line. What Shurron calls the physical and visual “boom” of the complete thought set down in the middle of lines and sentences of various design and length and weight. Especially No one ever thanked him. Boom.

Grey notes and wonders about the epiphany/realization being given away early. They reason in a (terrific) essay that No one ever thanked him kind of brings the house down. They wonder about the effects of placing it so early in the three-stanza poem.

Was he abusive? Is that what chronic angers of that house means? Izzy asks. We wonder.

This sounds so insensitive, but I don’t think that matters, says Dimitra. What you take away…what I take… is that the speaker regrets, is sorry, sees the father…regardless of the chronic angers, the loneliness.

We note that within the world of the poem, no one is assigned this anger…it’s in the woodwork, diffuse, in the house, all around…

I ask the students what kind of things they’d say in the future to a parent in a poem. What they’d regret not saying. What things they might notice later that they didn’t notice in real time. It’s an enormous stretch…a conjuring. Some know right away what they would want to say. Others just know they’ll have regrets…

Teaching and learning resources:

Here are some prompts and brainstorming for writing/response/close reading/project work. Tweak as you see fit; you know what your kids and students need:

•See the empathy project writing prompts (from Accident, Mass. Ave. Substack); Interview parents (your parents, other parents, single, young, old…) for exploratory or confirmatory research along a central line of inquiry– or use as inspiration for original work; Distribute the Olds poem to parents of graduating 8th graders or seniors or pre-schoolers, and have them do a response/questionnaire/ letter to self/letter to child/letter to high school self–anything to gain insight on the developmental arcs and trajectories of hellos and goodbyes–current, past, or anticipated.

•Go to the airport and do bare observation, taking in the whole/gestalt of this hub of human activity; Zero in, choose an interaction and write that backstory; Write a personal essay or piece of fiction whose locus is an airport or another scene of leave-taking or home-coming (college dorm; new school; entering a nursing home; baby coming home; adoption court; sleep-away camp; leaving foster care; entering foster care; hospital; new house/move; end of a beloved book series; start of a big project; end of a big project…Etc.)

•Write about the role of regret in the Hayden poem, and perhaps about the role of regret more generally.

•Read this short overview of attachment theory, especially the section on attachment styles. What new light does it shed on the poem/s?

•Read Stephen Cope’s Soul Friends/Deep Human Connection, especially as it pertains to the notion of “containers” in relationship. Experiment with his theory re: our two poems. How might it help us understand the yearning, regret, and healing in each? For more structure than this, see the questions at the end of each chapter. Here is a brief summation of the six types of relationships he outlines in his book.

Call to teachers for ideas and pairings:

For pairings this week, I’m asking teachers for thoughts/ideas about pairings. What would you use? What other works would enrich/pair/interrogate/complicate either or both of our poems for this week?

Please riff/write in the comments section (click on the thought bubble icon at the top of the email or post), and I will add your resources to the website version of this post (which I can edit; the subscribers’ email is time-bound.)

As always, any and all of you–share your thoughts, comments, pairings and anything else in the comments section.