Guest Blogger Laura Zinn Fromm writes:
A few days ago, one of my students emailed. She had read an essay I’d just published about my father—dead now 19 years but still giving me plenty of juice to write about.
The essay was about how volatile my Dad had been, and how loving—a love I rediscovered in letters he’d written to my mother at the end of their marriage. My mother had given me the letters during the pandemic, while she was cleaning out her house. I knew my parents had once loved each other fiercely and unambiguously, but the memory was an ancient one that predated my birth, and by the time I started to pay attention to how they treated each other, it was clear that love had been undone by disappointment and grief. They’d had a stressful marriage, and eventually moved on to other people—my father remarried, adopted a baby, divorced, became engaged to two other women and raised my half-sister alone; my mother moved in with another man for ten years, then left him and married someone else. Scads of boyfriends, girlfriends, semi-siblings and step siblings came and went; the only one I still talk to is my delightful half-sister.
But my father’s letters to my mother, written in the middle of their marriage and then at the end, showed that there had been layers to their relationship. My father had been bipolar, suicidal and often cruel to my mother, but the letters gave me insight into his loneliness, confusion and remorse over what had happened between them.
My student wrote:
I loved your piece about your father. I wish I could get to the point where I can balance my mother’s flaws and good points in a balanced, detached way. Did you achieve your clarity and equanimity mostly through therapy? Any suggestions? When you get a chance.
This was an excellent question. Had I actually achieved clarity and equanimity? And if so, how?
Of course, therapy helped—I’m 59 and had started seeing my therapist when I was 31; we had spoken about my parents at length. But it wasn’t just therapy that allowed me to consider my father from different angles. In addition to the letters, my mother also gave me journal entries my father had left behind, and home movies she had transferred to a thumb drive.
The movies showed my parents when they were young and carefree, chic on safari in Africa, cavorting on beaches in Tahiti and the Jersey Shore. There was my father in swim trunks, sticking out his tongue and doing handstands on the beach, there was my mother looking like Audrey Hepburn, gorgeous in a red bikini and sunglasses. Long after their divorce, these props allowed me to imagine what they felt as they reveled in each other and the countries they explored together. I could hear my father teasing my mother, and my mother laughing and saying, “Oh, Steve!”
The letters and movies allowed me to piece together what they had savored and surrendered.
Some of the journal entries were hard to read (my father had some choice things to say about their sex life) and it took me three-plus years to write the essay I recently published. I would read a journal entry, squirm, then put it away, sometimes for months. When I finally returned to the letters and journal entries, I set a timer and wrote for 15 minutes, just enough time to reread and maybe write a few challenging sentences. Eventually, I was able to write for longer stretches and finish the story. Telling my parents’ story allowed me to exert some control over it, unlike the powerlessness I had felt as a teenager, watching their marriage implode at the dinner table.
There was something else too that allowed me to write about the difficulties of love: meditation.
I meditate 30 minutes every morning, sometimes outside. All the volatility I experienced as a kid melts away as I close my eyes, repeat my mantra, and reset my central nervous system. Meditation allows ideas to bubble up to the surface and is the most effective way I know to self soothe. Plus, it’s free. You don’t even need an app. I just set a timer on my phone and silently repeat my mantra (ima, Hebrew for “mother”), while thoughts ricochet around my brain and finally dissolve into something resembling clarity.
I wrote back to my student:
Yes, of course, therapy helps, but I think meditation and writing about my parents in a focused way helped even more. Just the process of thinking about them in a calm way (through meditation) allowed me to detach from how I felt about them and let me “observe” them from a safe distance. And then writing about them, and wrestling with their challenges but also forcing myself to find a way to deliver some message of hope and insight for the reader, also helped. So, I guess the short answer is yes, therapy helped, but meditation and focused writing helped even more.
My student wrote back: “Thank you for sharing what helped you with your parents. Writing is definitely therapeutic. I still have to try meditation.”
If you are tackling difficult subjects, I recommend it all.
Originally posted on August 26, 2024 Brevity as “Writing About My Father.”
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Laura Zinn Fromm is the author of Sweet Survival: Tales of Cooking & Coping (Greenpoint Press, 2014). She has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction workshops through her company, Sweet Lab Writing Workshops.
She has also taught at Columbia, Montclair State, the New York Public Library and through Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.
A former editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, she is a winner of the Clarion Award and the Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award for Labor Reporting. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Forward, the Girlfriend, the Opiate, and elsewhere.
