Saturday Morning Workshop Thoughts

Today I went to a Saturday morning Writing Project workshop.  I usually leave those workshops with something important and interesting to think about. Today was no different. The presenter was a sociology professor who had written a memoir about her mother and her mother’s evolving sexuality and her mother’s end of life days.  Not your typical memoir. 

She talked about the sociological imagination and the importance of seeing the connection between biography and history.  She talked about how every story is a chance to connect the personal with the public, like a mother’s alcoholism or sexuality or co-dependence or cancer. It is stories that drive change, she said, but stories in the context of a larger social reality.  Once we identify where we have personal control over the structure, then we have optimism, she posited.

She read riveting excerpts from her memoir. There were parts about her mother’s sexuality that were brutally honest and shocking. Then we were asked to freewrite.  Here’s what I came up with:

            *************

Thinking about my own mother’s sexuality is not a place I want to go.  My mother was emotionally broken from being orphaned and in a new country at age 12. She never really recovered from her early trauma. I will leave the chapter of her sexuality untouched.

But recently, at a Chinese restaurant on 88^th Street in Manhattan, my younger daughter claimed that we never had the sex talk.  She said that I never told her about sex at all.  Well then, how did you learn everything you now know?  I questioned.

I remembered that my older daughter, who was also present at this conversation, had a boy in her 6^th grade class who acted out all the time and said bad things and used explicit sexual language.  This was 6^th grade.  Daily, my daughter would come home from school and ask me questions about sex. What is a cameltoe?  What does ‘69’ mean?

In thinking back, I believed in answering questions on certain challenging topics on a need to know basis.  I believe I tried my best to answer her questions honestly.  Was that how she learned about sex? Did we ever actually have “the talk?”  Did my younger daughter only learn about sex from her older sister?  Who remembers?

So much for memoir writing for me.