Nancy Slonim Aronie
All the years of my marriage when
things have gotten tough, my husband has always said at least no one is chasing us with machetes. Really? has always been my inward eye-rolling response.
When I was first dating him I asked him all those beginning-of-a-relationship questions, like what’s the meanest thing your father ever said and what food did your mom make you eat and were you rich or were you poor? He said his father never said a mean thing and his mother never made him eat anything he didn’t want. And without hesitation he answered yes to rich.
I have always been a talker. My parents said even when I was little when they would come home late from an evening out they would rush into my room outraged that I was still awake . . . only to find me sitting up in bed talking in my sleep. To no one.
I come from a family of talkers. We talk over each other thinking the louder we yell the bigger the possibility that someone will listen. But since there are no listeners in this crowd no one really hears anything.
When my mother and father met they were working at the same department store in our town; she on the fourth floor in girdles and bras and he in the mezzanine in sports equipment. She bought a baseball glove for her brother from him and was shocked when on the same bus going home that night there was the tall handsome salesman.
I teach a writing workshop here on the Vineyard and often I begin the class by saying: “We are alchemists. We can turn garbage into gold. We can take what happened to us, the trauma, the hurts, the tiny murders, and we can transform them into something beautiful. But the most important thing we have to do first is, we have to feel them. You can’t skip the pain part.”
I grew up in a household where no one got better at anything. No one practiced anything. No one started a project, no one finished a project. No one took an instrument, no one played a sport. My father made it clear that we were never to look foolish, which to me translated to don’t try anything new. When I took ballet at seven and came home and complained to my mother that my toes hurt, she said well honey if it hurts, quit. So I quit everything.
In the home of my childhood we had no scissors, no flashlight and no scotch tape. Well, that’s not exactly true. We had them all but when they were needed we had no idea where they were. Everyone has one of the drawers that has three thumbtacks, two double A batteries rolling loose, a refrigerator light bulb still in its package and the baster that kept the drawer from closing the first nine times you tried to shove it shut. Well, our house, our entire house was that drawer.
When I first got married my mother in law was standing in my kitchen while I was making our spaghetti dinner.