by Elisa Sinnett
Dispatches from Utopia
I’m heading to Utopia and a place called “The Mutual Aid Society.” I’m a little fuzzy on details, but Google seems to know the way.
En route, I get to pick up my firstborn, in a feat of logistics that goes something like this: Bus A comes down to Albany from Montreal going 100 Kilometers an hour, and car B is driving 70 miles an hour from Windsor, Ontario via Ithaca, New York, the absolute seediest rest stop off the I-90 corridor. Bolt the door of your motel room and don’t venture past the Wendy’s across the street if you must go out in search of dinner. Phones do not function here, and the Erie Canal glubs murkily at the edge of the parking lot.
I don’t write about this beloved child very often, because of privacy and the labyrinthine task of navigating mother/child, extrovert/introvert, Gen X/Gen Z. They view social media with suspicion. When they tell you their thoughts and dreams, detailed as a medieval city, you wonder if you have given birth to a reincarnated monk, one of the original creators of the book of Kells. You know how it is.
As I drive down the last bit of highway, I sing along to my 2000s playlist, the tunes that were popular when my children were small. “Yo te quiero con la alma, yo te quiero cada hueso . . . I love you with my soul, with every bone . . . ” My love language is food, but not the mac and cheese with peas, animal crackers, and lime Jarritos of their childhood. I’m on to the fresh foods now. Vegetables. Fruit. Hot food, homemade style. I stop at a Whole Foods fifteen minutes from the bus stop and assemble a feast. It’s been six weeks since I’ve seen Nora, and there they are, resplendent in boots, backpack, flannel. I forget to hug her in my excitement, but we both exclaim over the sweet potatoes and cool coconut drinks. Later, after fifteen minutes of being lost among the hilly row houses of downtown Albany, Nora says “Mom, I think I’ve seen that sign for the “Norman’s Kill :0 three times.”
“Kill? Is coming to Albany a bad omen? Is the city trying to trap us?”
“You’re OK Mom,” Nora says, but their forehead creases. At last one of us thinks to take the GPS off “avoid highways,” and we’re pointing towards the Catskills, Utopia, and the Wayward Writer gang.
We meet Ariel, our teacher, and the other Waywards in the 1800s farmhouse, now living its best life as the Mutual Aid Society and home of Adrian Shirk, author of Heaven is a Place on Earth. We talk over each other.
“Where should we set our stuff?” Nora asks. And “Hi, hi.”
“Where’s the coffee?” I ask. And “Hi, hi!” in a dazed, post-travel voice.
We settled down to talk and write, a circle of women, nonbinary people, drag kings, squishy daddies, and
seekers. At this camp, we did not toast s’mores, do archery, or sell cookies. But we drank a lot of coffee and wine. We walked in the forest, we made quilts and comics. We watched live theater and danced, made friends with horses and chickens, and hiked our brains into a liminal space. Ariel said, Write about home, write about utopia, write about dystopia, write what you want, write it backwards and out of order. Write what really happened, don’t let them silence you.
I wrote some, but mostly I thought. “Have you read Dorothy Allison’s Trash? Her first collection of short stories?” It was so hard to read, too raw. I preferred her later works when she told the same story but the girl grows up and gets away, finds friends.
It took me fifteen years to write Detroit Fairy Tales. Ariel was the good witch–not leading me out of the forest, but in. I learned how to rewrite history. I found out what happened to one of the missing girls. She married that boy who was raised from the dead, they farm Detroit, not the hipsters. The prodigal daughter doesn’t steal shit and fuck with people. She gets away from her attackers, survives, comes home on a chariot (a Greyhound bus.) That Mama that strikes children? She’s disarmed. She waves a hairbrush around and expresses her feelings in words. The narrator plants trees, misses her children, but knows they are better off far away from ground zero.
“They would like to silence you,” Ariel says.
Can I say this? (Will I be putting her in danger? See how well I am trained?) Ariel says, “Don’t let them silence you.”
Tell the truth? I am supposed to cross myself, be grateful for my daily bread, forgive them their trespasses lest I be unforgiven. Telling the truth feels dangerous.
The Trauma Bond
I dreamt that my ex-husband was killed in a police shootout because he didn’t want to go back to jail. I saw him. He was restless, anxious, jiggling his leg, just like he did when I last saw him nineteen years ago. In the dream, I call my children, they come right away, we hold hands.
I tell them, “Your father was in a police shootout, I’m sorry, he didn’t make it.” They
were younger, smaller, their eyes fixed on me.
Anyone who knows the single mama trauma bond knows the feeling that came next. The depth of connection. The certainty of my life’s purpose to protect them always.
The knowledge that I would, I could. At the cost of my own life. The knowledge of my inability to protect them, the self-delusion of my “sacrifice” and the harm done to them came later. The trust, love and loyalty of children to the cause of our mutual survival fuels the parent, but harms the child. Now, my children can’t come right over if I call. They live far away, and have made new connections, with people who don’t put them in harm’s way.
I sing them into the trees and flowers I plant every spring, grateful that they got away, even though I’m still dreaming that they are here and nothing has changed.
The Best Two Weeks
As soon as I get home from Wayward Writer’s Camp, my younger daughter comes home to Ontario for an impromptu visit. We’re upstairs and just like with her sibling, I’m thrown into a time-traveling nostalgic whirl. This is the one who keeps making me coupons for free hugs. Maybe I should go back to Al-Anon just for the hugs when she goes back home to Texas, but I like Temple Grandin cow squeezing type of hugs and that freaks some people out. I spend a lot of time in the pool, water hugs me and
doesn’t look at me crazy. Anyway, I hugged D, she squeezed me back, hard. “I love you, Mom.”
She steps back, runs her hand over my sternum bone which is tilted crazy sideways because it has no muscle to attach to. She’s studying anatomy and physiology. She raises her eyebrows, curious, asking me questions about my childhood, my mother, rifling through my journals. She says, “Well you don’t have to hate Grandma.” She’s silent. I don’t want this kid to feel like she has to be this loyal and I didn’t mean to start crying. I remembered something.
“Wait,” I said, “I just remembered the best two weeks of my life.” I said. “I mean, when I was in junior high. My mom was really nice when I got sick.”
I was the kid that got “most improved” award at every sports banquet. I wasn’t bad at softball, because we were all pretty terrible. This was 1978, Title IX hadn’t arrived at our school and it was painful to play ball on the asphalt playground. The softballs bounced like superballs and anyone who even tapped the ball got a single, at least. Our softball scores were always in the double digits. There was no mercy rule, and games usually ended after two hours in the third inning, with scores like 55-40, and the outfielders
giving up and laying down on the pavement. The boys? Their games had normal scores. They got to play on grass across Six Mile at the Jesuit school. A real baseball diamond. Still, in the recesses of my brain, my desire was to be a major league baseball player. My experience of sucking at everything was the same for every girl. It sucked for all of us, and for once I didn’t stick out. Being left-handed because I was missing half of the muscles in my chest was an advantage, and the catcher’s gear covered up the deformity and the sticking-out bones.
So back to my happiest two weeks. They started off with a pretty good day. I was being my tomboy self as catcher for our softball team.
My sister had snuck away again, but this time we weren’t wondering if she was safe or in the hospital or dead. It was one of the times when we knew where she was, but she wasn’t home yet starting fights.
My Mom even got to come to my softball game instead of searching for my sister.
As the only girl who volunteered to play catcher, I got to play every inning, instead of rotating out. I could hit, too. My left (and only) pectoralis was as developed as a gorilla’s. I could hit the ball. Ooh. I could hit the ball. I was getting hits and it pissed off the right-fielder on the St. Benedictine team. When it was her turn to bat she swung straight at my head and laid me out. I think I went unconscious for a second, even though I had on a helmet and all the gear. My Mom said, “That’s it, EL, GAME OVER.”
My Mom must have been terrified because we got Dairy Queen on the way home. I felt a lot better the next day, but then my leg started to itch. A line of blisters snaked around my leg and onto my back. Mom said the blow to my head was a shock to my nervous system and gave me old people shingles as a 13 year old. Mom was great. She loved it when I was sick. I got to stay home from school for two weeks and lay in her bed.
My luck had run out recently at school. Being the kid with a sternum poking out like a scene from Alien combined with a big-mouthed mean girl with access to her Dad’s, the doctor’s, confidential medical files had the whole junior high knowing more about my deformities and my medical condition than I did. School was a gauntlet and had been since big-mouth Julie opened her mouth and the kids would stare and poke at me and mutter insults.
Maybe I could stay in bed until graduation from the 8th grade.
“Here’s some soup sweetie. And some chocolate milk. Do you need help standing up?” Mom would say.
The spring breeze smelled like lilacs. The blisters were so bad I couldn’t stand up, but it was such a happy time.
I stared at the shingles, fascinated by the path they took. Along a nerve line, Mom said. The chicken pox virus had been waiting in my bones for a smack to the head. Snaking along. The blisters, the constellations, the clear ooze. I also had pet hermit crabs and I watched their spindly legs trying constantly to escape, crawling along the screen cover of their cage. Scratch scratch scratch. I stared at the ceiling. I stared at my hermit crabs and I stared at my leg, never knowing that I would miss my pet hermit crabs, my shingles and my mom so much.
Compliance and Resistance
People refer to their “group of friends” so unconsciously as if it’s not a miracle. How does one get “a group of friends” without an endless and impossible task of playacting? No matter how hard you try people know you’re faking and a weirdo and start looking the other way when you come around. I go on walks by myself. I stare at people at the big tables at the Cantina, hanging out at the Kildare, getting ready for Karaoke at the Vic. But me? I only have friends that have the same exact interests as me. It provides a cover, but these friends live far away. I have feelings. When I look at the mirror, there are eyes attached to a human animal staring back. I’m human, ok? I’ve learned but I still have to study if I’m going somewhere new as if I’m mapping my way across a swamp. When my Dad was alive we’d spend hours watching those cop shows with the subtitles and say to each other “Why doesn’t life have subtitles?”
Ariel says, “What is compliance? Who has authority?” I resist. Ariel, you should know this is down to you. I resist. Resisting takes decades.
I resist the psychiatrist. There are no meds for my brain wiring. I was born this way and nothing can help, or should help. Not the pills they gave me when I hit puberty, not the tranquilizers Mom stole from the dead patients to settle me down with. It was better when she started using the healing power of her hands. She would scream at the teachers for saying I was re#$%@ed and needed to see the psychiatrist, but she never stopped trying to fix me. They required her to take me to see one psychiatrist. He said:
“You’ll never be a beauty queen.”
Mom stopped trying to cure me and started talking to me like she liked me three days before she died.
“You’re a lot nicer than your sister,” she said.
“Mom, you talk like an abused wife.” Did she want to come home with me?
My other sister swore she’d been telling Mom that for years, “so don’t feel guilty you
didn’t save her.”
Then, two days later, Mom fell. And three days later her caregiver found her and five days later she died. The last real full sentence she said to me was. “You’re a lot nicer than your sister.” Not a whole relationship, but surely a start. For a minute there I saw the flutter of the bedroom curtains and smelled the lilacs through the window, and heard my hermit crab scritch scritching across its cage. I reach down to pick at my leg.
Now Write About Utopia
I’m trying to make this story happier for you. I like to make people smile. Ariel says, “write about Utopia.” Maybe Utopia is a Rom-Com. I think happy stories start with a phone call, a break-up, a misplaced item that ends in a meet-cute, maybe even a murder.
Is this the past or future? If it were the past it would be only a daydream. My past walks over crushed things. A rainy wedding day with no dress, no witnesses, no family. An armoire, a garage sale treasure now broken, drawers pulled out and smashed, my clothes strewn out in revenge. I’m crouched on the hotel bed holding my children, watching the red LED clock, the hours inching by. I carry my little one, hold my older with one hand as her little legs pump quickly to keep up, climbing in the back seat, crouching down until we could get a few blocks away to pull over and do seat belts. The c-section scar was still healing, the staples holding in by some miracle. I’ve taught my children that it’s dangerous to be female bodied in this world. Wear good shoes. Be ready to run.
Why do I keep circling back? It was a dark and stormy night when I left the second to last time. I know to not start a story with that line, even though it was dark and sleeting and N was shivering in the back seat, her little sister glassy eyed. I called my Al-Anon sponsor from a phone booth. I told her J had punched me in the face but he was so drunk when he got home he mostly missed.
I told her, “I’m at the gas station, I have the kids, I don’t know what to do next.”
She said, “The difference between you and me is that you hang around with bad people who do bad things, and I do not.”
The past says there will be no Utopia for me, but my children are grown and their partners don’t hit. They are writing new endings. I hope they will tell me one day, what it’s like for them. At least, I can see mercy, love in their eyes, maybe even forgiveness.
I did leave, one last time. We did get away. Life is so simple when you’re the prey and everyone else is a predator. We were the mice, looking for a nest away from all the cats. Sometimes Utopia is a car with a full tank of gas, Ritz crackers with peanut butter, and a parking spot under a tree.
This morning smells like dew, an open window, like Detroit in the 70s. It’s the sense of a possible future. We all lived off the grid, compared to today. There is no noise even in this Detroit summer. Not now. The uprising is over and we are living in a time where most of the upwardly mobile have moved along and left us in peace. I can hear the humming of cicadas out the window and no one is fighting. I think that’s my mom on the stairs with my lunch tray. We have one AM radio tuned to the weather. We get the paper once a day on the front porch, the black newsprint staining our hands as we pour over the baseball scores, the horoscopes. We recycle them at the paper drive, wrap bones, line the drawers, stuff our wet boots. There is no news, only weather. We make one phone call for the weather, WEA-THER, or walk outside and look at the sky. We call 472-1212 for the exact time. “At the tone the time will be 1978” and all is well.
