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I guess in a way it’s time for me to celebrate my ‘graduation’ from the job I assigned to myself to transcribe the complete and utter chaotic mess of my mother’s letters and papers that somehow found their way to me when my mother died in 2002. I am done. After working most of this past weekend on two more of her homesteading journals that I found at the very, very bottom of the papers piled here by my computer, I cannot find one more single scrap of paper left to do.
The surprises are over. Now I am working to fine-tune, tweak, correct spelling and edit format in completion of the process that will finally lead to some form of publication of my mother’s words. While this is still no simple task, it feels to me to be an entirely different step that could NOT happen until I finally finished sorting, organizing and transcribing her work.
I realized yesterday as I transcribed the last pages that never once in all these thousands and thousands of words does my mother ever write about ME in the same way that she does for her other ‘darling’ children. That left me knowing that the dichotomy that existed in my mother’s mind between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ let her make the distinction between her DARLINGS and her DEMON child, Me.
What exactly will happen with all this information next I do not know. Time will tell. But I look forward to experiencing an every-growing sense both of pride in the accomplishment of the goal I set for myself and a kind of relief in my freedom from this task during these next days ahead. The work I have to do now is something that ANYONE could do. It doesn’t even require that I be any more ‘present’ for the task than I would be if I were editing writing that I am completely remote from.
This is unlike what happened to me last night as I worked with the very last of my mother’s letters. She was describing where we were on the Jeep road of my childhood when we saw our first black bear. I was actually following that story as I mentally following the startled scared bear as it crashed away from us through the woods when my daughter called me. The ring of my telephone literally caused me to jump right off of my chair.
No more surprises. I am glad for that. I have worn out the plastic carpet protector under my computer chair until it has cracked and broken into little pieces under the wheels of my computer chair. I have worn the lettering off of many keys on my keyboard. But I still have work to do here if you should wonder where I am!
I am here working on my mother’s chronicle of living her Alaskan homesteading dream:
CHRONICLE
Etymology: Middle English cronicle, from Anglo-French, alteration of chronike, from Latin chronica, from Greek chronika, from neuter plural of chronikosDate: 14th century
1 : an historical account of events arranged in order of time usually without analysis or interpretation <a chronicle of the Civil War>
2 : narrative
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1 : an historical account of events arranged in order of time usually without analysis or interpretation <a chronicle of the Civil War
>
2 : narrative 1
Stop the Storm 
Linda, it is sad to look at the picture of you with a smile on your little face ready to plant your beans and know how your mother abused you. How could she hurt you so badly? You were so beautiful, so small and helpless and innocent. A great injustice was done to you by your own mother. It is so unfair!
It’s good, however, to hear that you will soon meet your little grandson. It will be at this meeting where you can witness the fact that the cycle of violence, started when your own mother was young, has been broken. You “stopped the storm” Linda, and that’s a really good thing! Enjoy your precious baby and shower him with all the love and caring you have in your heart that your mother could never take from you. No one ever cherishes a child like a grandma does. Your love will be very special to him, always. A Welsh proverb says: “Perfect love sometimes does not come until grandchildren are born” Your grandson will give you a chance to start building good memories. Enjoy!
Congratualtions for persevering! Do you feel you have learned anything about your mother that you did not know before the transcription process? Have you come away from this exercise feeling differently about your mother? Father? Siblings?
You have done great work that required much emotional and intellectual effort! Now it’s time for you to go on a little vacation. Have a blessed and peaceful summer. Hope you see your little grandson soon! 🙂
I am not certain at the moment what the answers to your questions are! For me, it IS a big picture, and I am still pondering small pieces of it at a time.
It was interesting that it was only last night as I wrote this post that the word ‘chronicle’ appearing suddenly in my thinking: “an historical account of events arranged in order of time usually without analysis or interpretation” IS exactly what this stage of this process actually is about — letting her words be just as she wrote them with very minor alterations such as changing her “&” to “and” and her “Mts.” to “mountains.”
I also realized just as that word appeared in my thinking that this piece of work is: “Mildred’s Mountain: The Chronicle of a City Woman as She Lived Her Alaskan Homesteading Dream.”
While her “darling children” did have a part to play in that process, I was not one of her “darling children” and was never an actual PART of her ‘dream living’ chronicle! I was speaking to my sister, Cindy about this last Saturday as I told her I feel like a ‘fair witness’ from Heinlein’s book, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Because I was not one of her batch of “darling children” I am not actually IN the chronicle!
As in this picture – me being physically THERE in a body, but not a part of ‘the ongoing darling story’
https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/what-pictures-tell/1959-photographs/1959-december/1959-july/1959-july-birthday-on-homestead/
As I finished her June 1959 writings about the first full month we ever lived on that land, and as I read in her JOURNAL entries — not letters to her mother — her descriptions of the ‘cute and wonderful’ things her ‘darling children’ were doing up there on the mountain of their new home — I am absent. I am, in some strange way I STILL do not fully comprehend, THE ‘fair witness’ of my portion of the 18 years of my mother’s life I shared with her.
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This current stage of work occupies itself with the ‘mundane’ formatting process that needs to be done for the entire collection of her writings. Once this stage is completed, I will duplicate ALL the files of her writings and work with them while letting this first original collection remain intact. As I work with the second files I will decide to remove duplications of information, irrelevancies and completely trivial information – if I want to publish a ‘shortened’ version of the chronicle. And HERE is where I will create yet another group of files that will NOT be a ‘chronicle’ because I will give myself full permission to include as much “analysis or interpretation” and commentary as I want to. This volume will be the “Unspeakable Madness” part of the story that is UNIQUELY mine to tell as the target and victim of all the violence and madness that is ONLY alluded to that ONE SINGLE time in all of my mother’s writing (to Grandmother in reference to her ‘interfering’ and to the ‘incident of the turquoise coat’.
I imagine at the point that THIS process is completed I will have the answers to your questions. I believe it is a part of my dissociative disorder and of my corresponding disorganized-disoriented attachment disorder that I cannot ‘stop what I am doing’ with one batch of thoughts and switch over to consider a different one. My ‘orderly’ process happens in chunks!
And, I am not emotionally, mentally, physically able to travel this summer — so I am VERY HAPPY to report that my daughter is flying down here July 21 – 28 with the baby to see me! Meeting my grandson will be a turning point in MY life!
And, I guess that’s what even these small ‘accomplishments’ feel like to me – turning points!