I Got Here Because...Part II

More Cause and Effect

The Cat in the Hat Explains Cause and Effect

Last week, I opined about how the chronological timelines that many Substackers like to post — i.e., when I was Three I did this, and when I was Thirty-Three I did that — merely skim the surface.

Instead, I described how blown away I was when I did my version of an exercise that Demi Moore described in her book Inside Out, where she asked the question How did I get here? and then proceeded to answer by beginning with the phrase “I got here because…”

I posted my first three responses in last week’s post. Now — deep breath — here’s my complete list.

• I got here because of the actions, both smart and stupid, thought-out and impulsive, of relatives I never knew, probably most often as a reaction to living in a country that has been fought over for centuries.

• I got here because my grandfather escaped from a prison work crew in Poland, stowed away in a ship to America, jumped into New York Harbor and swam to New Jersey, and ate out of trash cans until he found a job and a place to live.

• I got here because in 1920 my grandmother had the balls to escape an abusive marriage.

• I got here because my mother and father grew up during the Depression.

• I got here because my father had lost half his teeth as a kid, and lied about his age to enlist in the Navy after Pearl Harbor because they’d give him teeth.

• I got here because my father was a medic during World War II.

  

  Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

• I got here because a sniper’s bullet found him during the invasion of the Marshall Islands in February, 1944.

• I got here because he drank to blot out the horrors of war firsthand and never really stopped.

• I got here because my father decided to become a dentist.

• I got here because after growing up dirt poor my mother wanted a better life so she married a dentist-to-be, and at the age of 19 in 1946 she was considered an old maid so she couldn’t afford to be picky.

• I got here because my father wanted kids but my mother didn’t.

• I got here because after fifteen childless years, my father took my mother into Manhattan and came back with my sister, since a wife’s signature wasn’t necessary to adopt a child in 1961.

• I got here because my sister was emotionally uncontrollable, and my mother tried to return my sister to the adoption agency and my father wouldn’t let her.

• I got here because my mother had ovarian tumors and wanted both ovaries removed so she wouldn’t be saddled with a second child she didn’t want. Her male doctor didn’t listen to her and left a half ovary behind.

• I got here despite because of that ½ ovary.

• I got here because I learned to read when I was two and started piano at the age of five and picked it up really quickly, and my mother brought me to the local school so kids could watch me read books upside down at the age of three and sightread Chopin at the age of five, and it made my mother feel slightly better about her life — but it made my sister feel worse — so I accepted the mantle of savior of the family and learned to stay out of my sister’s way.

• I got here because one day when I was six years old, I was outside digging in the dirt and my mother came out to tell me she was divorcing my father, and then went back inside leaving me with a shovel and a pottery shard in my hand.

  

• I got here because my mother moved into the den so she wouldn’t have to deal with any of us.

• I got here because I was already good at raising myself.

• I got here because I learned to tune out the silent discord in my house, but I couldn’t stop staring at friends’ parents who actually talked to each other.

• I got here because when the divorce came through five years later, I saw my parents talk scream at each other for the first time ever as he was moving out, and my mother said my father was a drunk and my father said my mother took drugs when she was pregnant with me and my sister turned to me and said Maybe that’s why you walk funny.

• I got here because my nickname was Lurch in junior high.

• I got here because eight months after he moved out, my father killed himself [?] died because he could no longer prop himself up with the illusion of a happy family, and also because he was probably tired of failing to bury the trauma of what he had experienced during the war.

• I got here because the message after that was to bury everything because the past was the past and nothing could be changed so it was over and done with.

• I got here because I was already good at burying everything.

• I got here because my mother kicked my sister out six months after my father’s death – she finally got to return her – on Mother’s Day, no less.

• I got here because I continued to be the savior of the family when I went to conservatory for piano and then became a published writer right out of the gate.

• I got here because it was always easier to tell other people’s stories than telling my own.

• I got here because despite not knowing anything about marriage and having two husbands that I pushed away before they could push me away, I finally have a great marriage and I have no idea how I got here because no one ever taught me.

• I got here because the buried stuff couldn’t stay buried.

Whew. Enough.

Understandably, one could argue that by mostly focusing on the actions of other people in this exercise I'm still shying away from my own stuff. But the only way I can understand who I am today is by creating a connection back to other people.

Besides, baby steps.

The Takeaway, Part Two: When it comes to telling a story, whether a memoir or a family history, there is no such thing as a vacuum. Demi Moore’s I got here exercise serves two purposes: One, so you can see how one person’s actions — or inaction, as the case may be — has morphed you into the complex person you are today. Second, so you can see what shaped the people who came before, to maybe spark a bit more tolerance for their faults and shortcomings, even just a smidge. After all, if you’re writing memoir or family history, if you write little more than He/I/She did this then He/I/She did that, you’ll just be recounting events, not flesh and blood people. And you’ll quickly lose your reader.