I am in the process of writing a memoir For You There Are No Words. The memoir uses family history, letters, my poems, and other research to spin my story as a woman raised from childhood with the mystery of not knowing her father’s identity.
For You There Are No Words unfolds my pursuit of the story that had broken my mother’s heart and that she felt she must keep secret.
My dream was to help mend that brokenness for her, for myself, and to shine a light for so many others who live with longing to know their biological roots.
Here is an excerpt from the memoir.
BORN
I was born because he stayed alive in Korea through all the night duties, through the time he got lost in the mountains and was behind enemy lines before he found his way back by listening for American voices.
I was born because back in Minnesota, she didn’t move away to a bigger city, but worked at Brentwood Eggs keeping the accounts. She stayed living on the farm, dutiful youngest daughter, when her sister married and her brother was drafted.
I was born because she stayed and drove for her mom and helped with chores and didn’t go to college, because there wasn’t any money anyway, so why even think about it.
He wrote You are probably wondering a little about the way I acted while I was home— well Sunshine, I want you to know I love you, I guess I always have and probably always will. But going away as I was and not knowing when I would get back I couldn’t ask you to wait for me–I hope you understand. If you don’t mind I am still going to call you my girl and when I come back I am going to look for the light in your window.
In the name of kindness he didn’t ask her to wait and she was so mad. She’d been through this with him before I liked his dimples. I liked being with him, but half the time he didn’t even have a car to get over here and see me. He said we should date other people, so I dated other people.
She got serious about someone else. Someone else loved her and gave her a ring. She couldn’t bring herself to put it on her hand.
He wrote Of course there is so much to do back there that writing letters to someone may seem unimportant and even if people back there don’t get mail there is always something else to do, but over here if you don’t get mail all you can do is look at a tent wall and wonder why and then hope for tomorrow.
He wrote Although I love you dearly I have to admit it is time you consider “the other party” he has treated you a lot better than I have.
But in those years, a war could go on halfway across the world and it would be a long time before you knew if anyone was lost or scared, or bleeding or dying. He wrote I guess I can tell you that while we were “up there” we didn’t have any picnic, the company had 3 men killed, and about 15 wounded this platoon suffered the most casualties, however 2 killed and 6 or 7 wounded.
She said He didn’t ask me to wait for him and when he got home, there I was waiting.
She couldn’t have known what he had lived through, though she remembered that when they drove at night he could name the animals whose eyes he saw glitter in the fields. Cat, pheasant, dog, coon. The frost settled in, the cornstalks dried and held on, their roots like fingers in the earth.
He had learned to see in the dark during the hours she had spent dancing or working or sleeping in the same farmland she had always known. Could there be anything smaller than that waist of hers? Was there anything more innocent than anger that had never seen war?
How could they join the worlds they’d been living in into one single heart? There was no better way to gather up the complexity, the things they understood beyond words. No other way to say the unsayable.
And so, I was born.