Monthly Archives: January 2025

Poem by Rythea Lee: “I Blamed Myself for the Election”

As we approach the second inauguration of Tan Dumplord, I feel rather like the heroine tied to the tracks in an old melodrama, watching the slow inexorable approach of the train. I’m not alone in having a lot of PTSD reactions to the narcissist-in-chief. Trauma therapist and singer-songwriter Rythea Lee wrote this poem in her e-newsletter, which she’s kindly allowed me to reprint here.

I Blamed Myself for the Election

I blamed myself for the results of the election. I know that’s insane. But it’s true.
In the face of a tsunami of horror, my whole body blamed itself.
That’s what I also did when I couldn’t hold off the weight of my father’s violence.
I blamed myself for having been born into it,
I must have done something wrong.

I blamed myself for other children getting hurt, for how could I be so powerless?
I should have kept them safe. I could have. I wanted to.
I tried and failed.
I must have done something wrong.

And now every trigger is here. The man and the hurting souls.
It looks so similar to my past.
All I knew to do was blame myself. That was my best strategy,
I must have done something wrong.

I can see now that it’s not really gonna work.
Hating on myself, or everyone else, isn’t really efficient.
It was a good idea at the time because back then, at least I could hope to be better.
Hope to change something inside me that might make them stop,
I eviscerated every corner of my heart to be better for them.
And IT NEVER WORKED.
They abused me anyway.
I must have done something wrong.

The sun rises today like the sweet song of a mother.
Calling me into a new paradigm where fighting the system
no longer requires me to harm myself.
Lifeforce courses through my cells with a river of determination.
Love wants its way with me.

Love wants to remind me that I never broke
and I’m certainly not going to break now.
Love is showing me the song of sanity that connects me to others
who are singing the same song.
We don’t have to try to know the song, it has always been playing.
We don’t have to force this song, because even when we were utterly alone,
the song played inside our bodies.
We never forgot the song. We are the song.

And now, as the world cries in its deepest pain, it is the clarity of love, not
shame, that guides me forward, putting me to work to the beat of that song.
In knowing who I am right now, I can trust that within me, within so many of us,
something has gone incredibly right.

In Memory of My Mother

My estranged mother, Irene, died shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve/Day. She was 84 years old. I last had contact with her in January 2011. My husband, our son, and my mom-of-choice Roberta (her ex) attended her graveside funeral in New Jersey yesterday, along with her late brother’s widow and a good contingent of cousins from her side of the family.

The Orthodox rabbi hired by the funeral home was very kind and diplomatic about the rather unorthodox eulogy I wrote, which is reprinted below. He didn’t know any of us, but he made an educated guess that my mother, for all her narcissism, was someone who wanted to give to others. When she retired early from teaching elementary school after a nervous breakdown, she lost a creative outlet she might not have realized she needed. He suggested that we do mitzvahs (good deeds) to ease the repose of her soul. If you feel so inclined, give some tzedekah (charity) to a dance program that you value; Jacob’s Pillow was a family favorite.

Though quite a beauty before stress ravaged her health, Irene was never satisfied with photos of herself. So instead, here are some characters she resembled in looks, mannerisms, and/or personality.

A predominantly red illustration of an older woman's wrathful, enraged face looming large over a frightened younger couple; the title 'Sunset Boulevard' is displayed over a strip of celluloid film tied in a knot.

(L-R: Queen Elizabeth I; Glenn Close in “101 Dalmatians”; Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond; a favorite Mary Engelbreit Design)

Eulogy for Irene

My mother Irene was a lot like Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard. Charismatic, disappointed, desperate for love but unable to be satisfied by it. She was too big for the picture of her life. She was an abused child in the body of a femme fatale.

My mother was a lot like Queen Elizabeth I, the historical figure she most admired. Both had rage-filled fathers and early betrayals that taught them to carve out their own path without depending on men. “Queen Irene” was fashionable, intelligent, and a rule-breaker. When she willed something, it happened…but at a high price. Addicted to control, she couldn’t let the mask of command slip for long enough to maintain honest intimacy.

My mother was a lot like a hungry ghost, a Buddhist metaphor for a spirit who seeks what cannot fill her up, looking for something outside herself that was hidden within her all along. Today we hope that the best part of her is set free from the patterns of a personal history that led her to starve herself and others.

Irene was a lightning storm of contradictions. I remember her leading us in joyful improvised flamenco dances after watching a performance at Jacob’s Pillow, in one of the Berkshires cottages we rented during my childhood. And I remember her breaking a picture frame over her partner Roberta’s head in that same cottage, one of hundreds of incidents of violence I had to witness or mediate over their 34-year relationship.

I remember her encouraging me to be a maverick artist, to devote my life to writing even when we had very little money, so that I wouldn’t live with regrets the way she did. Misogyny and family pressure pushed her into the more “respectable” profession of elementary school teacher when she really wanted to be an actress or a ballerina. She channeled that artistic passion into filling my childhood with books, museum visits, and season tickets to Lincoln Center and Tanglewood. (Sadly she was also a pop music snob who made me return my Cyndi Lauper cassette to Tower Records. Assigned-female-at-birth people just wanna have fun, Mom!)

And I remember her trying to sabotage my wedding and telling the adoption social workers that I would be an unfit parent, so that no other relationship would compete with her for my devotion. She wanted me to be the girliest little girl but not to grow up to be a woman. Well…I guess she got that part right.

Irene would have described herself as a child of the Sixties, with all of that generation’s iconoclasm and self-focus. Spiritual but not religious, she took deep interest in Native American cultures, Jewish folklore, and New Age self-help. She raised me to take it for granted that no opportunities would be foreclosed to me because of gender, yet she struggled to apply feminist ideals to herself and other people when her personal shame around social class and body image was triggered. Her longest relationship by far was with her lesbian partner, but she would never have identified as queer. I think she just liked being in a class by herself.

When she retired from teaching, her world became much smaller and unhealthier, caged by her OCD compulsions. She wasn’t able to learn how to transmute her intergenerational trauma into creative energy, so she offloaded that unbearable anger and anxiety onto the people closest to her.

Roberta and I literally had to save our own lives by ceasing direct contact with her in 2011, after ensuring that she had good nursing care in her apartment and then in her assisted living facility. We’re grateful to our late friends Anne and Sid Emerman, my late Uncle Phil, and my Aunt Susan for buffering us by handling Irene’s medical and legal affairs.

I learned from my mother to speak my mind, question authority, believe in magic, buy the best chocolate, and never run up credit card debt.

May she have a peaceful rest and a fortunate rebirth.

January Links Roundup: Fiction and Poetry from Gemini Magazine, Missouri Review, and More

Happy (?) 2025, readers. We will resume our regularly scheduled signs of the apocalypse next month, unless I get arrested for peeing in a red state. Let’s start the year off with some reading for pleasure, rather than the news.

First, I was really moved by Stan Duncan’s story “Hodgens” in Gemini Magazine. The narrator, a young preacher in small-town Oklahoma, reminded me of characters from Marilynne Robinson or Walter Wangerin Jr. Perhaps the holiest thing he does is stay present with his sense of inadequacy and not run away from the man he can’t help, a tough-looking but emotionally vulnerable inhabitant of a prison camp. Stan is looking for a publisher for his collection of linked stories; contact me if you can help.

Also in Gemini, Wess Mongo Jolley’s slice-of-life tale “A Candle in the Sun” shows a moment of tenderness between two strangers on a bench in New York’s Union Square Park. Being homeless, the narrator is someone that people often overlook, which allows him, in turn, to be an astute observer of their interactions. “What magic is in this city! How sheer the curtain between Fifth Avenue and Alphabet City. How intertwined the strands of rich and poor, like gray hair and black, braided together in a rope that supports the weight of this city’s soul.”

Gabriel Fine’s “Days of Awe” was The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week on Dec. 2. Observing the Rosh Hashanah traditions with his family, against the backdrop of the Hamas attacks and Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the speaker is chilled by the legend that God decides whom to re-inscribe in the Book of Life during the High Holidays.

…Stone and coiled steel
of the maps and tomes. Signs obscuring the way
to the other country. When did I first learn the terror
of inscription? I loved our songs, feared the book
of names: who shall live and who shall die a cruelty
I failed to understand…

Abby E. Murray, author of the fantastic poetry collection Hail and Farewell, has a poignant parenting poem in One Art called “How (Not) to Die” about “children on playgrounds, processing/what it is to exist in a world built/only by hands that cannot survive/or save it”.

Published in Necessary Fiction in 2023, Robbie Herbst’s flash fiction “The Harvard Whisperer” is part horror, part satire of the precarious society that young people enter and the pieces of themselves (literally!) that they lose to get ahead.

Over at Bending Genres, Shannon Frost Greenstein’s hermit crab essay “Quiz: Are You Perpetuating Intergenerational Trauma and Using the Wrong Skincare Line?” reveals that this humorous non sequitur is not so random after all. There are lots of possible connections to be drawn; I was reminded how mothers try to protect their daughters from cultural misogyny by oppressively micromanaging their appearance.

2. What is your nightly skincare routine?

A. I cleanse, towel dry, and threaten my children with bodily harm if they get out of bed.
B. I fall right asleep because I’m not that invested in modeling positive behaviors.
C. I do a laser light therapy facial mask and pit my children against one another.
D. I cry into my pillow because I’m making the same mistakes as my parents.

Tighe Flatley’s essay in the new issue of The Plentitudes, “How I Learned Victoria’s Secret”, is a young gay man’s coming-of-age story about working in retail at the ubiquitous mall store. By turns melancholy and hilarious, the essay describes the slow process of first assembling a false self and then letting it go.