Dirty Laundry — A Memoir Unfolds
Memoirs have been begging to leave my bones for decades. In the summer of 2021, after conversations with my loved ones, after I’d let the oldest memories begin to simmer and stew and bubble up, I began reading memoir again. And, on a summer day, in 2021, I continued my story with new depth.
I tried to help my ten-year-old daughter clean her room yesterday, She struggles with an artistic temperament and style conjuring beauty from chaos.
As a kid, I also found myself amidst creativity and chaos. Anger and sadness started to move through me. Only I didn’t even realize it at the time. That’s the way art gets me. She finds me in life and then bubbles up my throatstory into a story for us, a story of us.
One story divided, multiplied, subtracted, added into the story. This story. Our story. The story of artists. The story of us.
My daughter and I share a story. The story of mothers and daughters. She busts me open like a river geode, hammering into my insecurities — those childhood things I don’t even realize made me me.
Her room was a mess — candy wrappers, empty paint bottles, dirty dishes, and clothes strewn about. I could barely see her bed or floor. My demeanor went from calm to mother rage in about six seconds. Without warning for my change of mood, I stood tall, shaking my head in disdain at her room as I lorded over her, “I’m setting the timer for an hour. No, you can’t talk with your friend. Give me your phone. You’re cleaning with your door open. I don’t trust you to clean.”
The truth was stinging my motherheart and my daughterheart with my daughter’s heart stinging deeply.
The thing is, the thing is though, I could see in her eyes she was considering respecting me. She heard the no-nonsense tone. The I am your mother tone that I rarely use because it’d be cool to be her friend, but I know better. She is funny and cool and artsy. We’re more alike than I realized as I looked around her room which I’d ignored for months, pretending it wasn’t an issue. Candy wrappers, Zevia cans, half-eaten chocolate, popsicle sticks, a mannequin head covered in demon-style makeup, makeup brushes, makeup everywhere. Tiny bits of paper. Art, art, art in every corner.
Our creative spirit. Our force to reckon with. We will not squelch her art. I will not squelch my art. We will have the freedom to express ourselves.
This is more about me than I care to admit. I let our daughter dye her hair black in first grade. She looked like Janis Joplin to me — confident and fierce. The kind of grownup spirit I’d be smitten with. She scared her little Christian friend who thought black hair meant Goth and Goth meant demons and hellcreatures. I mean, really? I was so annoyed by this mom and child. How dare you judge us? And, also, still stuffing down the shame and rage to avoid a confrontation. Freedom of expression is a core value in our home.
Do your art, Daughter. Whirlwind the world with your black hair and demon makeup and silly dance moves and athletic form. Be of the world and in the world and don’t let them stomp on your spirit.
My room wasn’t dissimilar to our daughter’s. At Mom’s house, she laid down this rule, “As long as you can close your door when company comes over, I don’t care about the state of your room.” It was the 1990s: I had moldy dishes, fashion and teen magazines, CDs, papers, books, incense, candles, clothes, and who knows what else, because what even accumulates in a life? How do we amass all this stuff we think we can’t live without? In looking at old photo albums, I see the cutouts from magazines. Teenagers in prom dresses taped above my bed, cassette tapes, and knick-knacks. I craved my own creative sanctuary.
After we’d cleared the empty chip bags, candy wrappers, bowls, and cups growing mold, I glanced at my daughter’s dirty laundry basket. It held about three loads worth of laundry and was overflowing. I crammed it all deep down in her light aqua laundry basket and told her I’d come back with it empty. Our daughter stood on her head and said, “I think that’s too big for one load, Mom.” Yes, definitely. In the garage, filled with the grownups’ clutter, I dumped her laundry into the family’s overflowing laundry station. The pile crawled up the brick wall. Little shirts and socks and whatnot, bits of paper, art experiments jumped out at me and begged for my attention.
Yellow stands out. Butter yellow. A favorite color. I remembered screaming at my husband, as we fought the day before, “You despise me!” We’d gone on a date to the bar and tried to talk about home improvements which turned to home organizing which turned to clutter and cleanliness and my lack. My lack. My lack. My lack. When I screamed, “You despise me!” I meant “I despise me!” I’m worthless. I’m hopeless. I’m a lost cause who can’t even keep up with the dirty laundry.
I went back to our daughter’s room and she wasn’t standing on her head this time. She was picking up trash, throwing it in a paper grocery bag. Her treasures to organize later were in another paper grocery bag. Makeup, a mirror, artwork, soft pillows. Her things. Her expressions of self. Her. She seemed calm. I felt calmer. We sat together picking up trash until the timer rang and we felt free again.
Midway through drafting my first book-sized memoir, I got stuck on where to take you next. My logical mind said, “Be linear.” Then, I read Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water, a poetic-prose miracle that cracked further into this geode that is me, that is us. Thank you, Lidia: you’re a fierce, scarred, and beautiful beast.
While I was considering where to go next, I was sure that I’d need to take you back to when I was 13 living in Oakland with my dad and my new stepmom. We had a laundry chute and we’d throw our laundry into the scary unfinished basement that my parents couldn’t climb down to due to their disabilities. So, it was my duty to do the laundry, and one day they found out I’d royally fucked up by not doing it at all, and there was a big scene and I was scared, so scared. That’s when I knew I had to leave to go back to my mother. That’s for another layer, a later word-painting. While I was trying to force out my own memoir, I read Lidia’s book, and my heart swole, and the scars hurt and glistened and said find me, soothe me, and sing me into your story.
Bravely, here we go.
Aimée Brown Gramblin is the founder of Age of Empathy. She became a memoirist in her younger years and is writing them out now in middle age. A regular contributor to The Memoirist, Aimée is a late-blooming pop-culture enthusiast; she’s a contributor to FanFare and The Riff. With a minor in art history, she occasionally publishes art-centric nonfiction.
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