Beginnings Pt. 1

By Michelle Wruck

I was born in a town called Mishawaka. The town was named after a Shawnee princess, who was stabbed by a man who claimed to be in love with her. She had refused to marry him and he hunted her down along with her lover and stabbed her. She lived and died at the ripe old age of 32. My house was right on the edge of Mishawaka and everytime we left the house, we’d stop at a light to turn onto the main road and wait near a roadside drawing of the proud princess looking off into the distance. There were rays of sunlight shooting out from behind her back and the sign said, “Welcome to Mishawaka.” I remember vividly sitting in the backseat of our station wagon, feeling the soft cushion of the dark blue seats underneath my knees and shins, trying to feel some kind of kinship with Mishawaka. She was my first role model.

It didn’t take long for me to learn that no one cares much about Indiana. As it turned out, most things happened in New York and California. Parks and Rec was set in Indiana, Michael Jackson came from here, and we grow a lot of corn. Other than that no one ever thinks about us. We’re not exotic enough to be “the West” and we’re don’t have any major cities, just a road that gets you through to somewhere else quickly and efficiently. Our state motto is “Crossroads of America.” I remember being about 8 years old, sitting on the steps with my sister, pulling out thick red strands where the carpetting had come loose and talking about all the places we were going to go when we got older. I remember a soft light pouring in through the window and a feeling that I later came to recognize as the feeling of an open road and an unknown destination. From then on, I was really just bidding my time.

My dad had a good job; he worked at the university. He worked a lot, slept late, and sometimes didn't make it home for dinner. He was always happy, my dad. I never saw him angry, I never saw him sad, but then again, I never much saw him. I remember one time we were driving home from Knollwood, the country club where he played golf. We were in his blue Buick, riding on the small roads between the club and our house when the car ran out of gas. I felt panicked, what were we going to do? But dad acted almost like he had planned this all along. "Well, there it is," he said, stepping out of the car. He pulled a notebook out of his front pocked and spoke outloud while he wrote, "408.6 miles." Then he turned and started walking home. "You should always know how far your car can go before it runs out of gas," he said, looking straight ahead, "remember that when you have a car, okay?” I walked behind him, trying to imagine what my life would be like if I spent more time with this man. I never knew what was going to happen when I was with him, but whatever came, he just plowed forward with an unquestioned determination that I didn't see anywhere else in my world.

The Buick was a trusty friend to my dad. He believed that a car should last ten years and even if it seemed to everyone else in the world that the car was not “lasting,” my dad would not give it up. Keeping the car was easier than changing the structure of his universe by admitting that sometimes cars don't last for ten years. The Buick was actually an ok car, but there were certainly reasons to let it go. For one, the glue that held the ceiling fabric on the ceiling was starting to give out so the ceiling sort of sagged in little bubbles in certain spots. My sister and I would try to restick it to the spongey material on the other side while we rode to church by pushing the fabric back up right in the middle of the bubbles, but the fabric had stretched out from sagging and there was no way to fit it all back up in the way it was before. Dad said that our help just made it worse, anyway, and it irritated my mom so we tried to stop.

It should probably be noted that my mom had good reason to be irritated. For my sister and me it was no big deal to have the saggey ceiling above our heads because we were still short, but for mom, who had spent a good half hour doing her hair for church, it was annoying to get out and have her hair sticking out in a million directions because of the static electricity that was caused by her hair rubbing against the drooping ceiling all the way to church. This was the 80’s, after all, and hair was tall. I guess mom finally got mad enough because dad decided to try to fix things. He spent hours out in the garage every day for weeks cutting the fabric, pulling it tawt and stapling it up to the spongey ceiling. It was a good idea, I thought, but it didn't work. The fabric would just sag again and he ended up just keeping the staple gun in the car at all times.

Life with mom was a different story. It’s easier to describe my dad because he wasn’t around much. It’s easier to see something that comes and goes. It’s easy to see the aberrant. Someone once told me that if you were born wearing red glasses you wouldn't describe the world as red because that color would be so common as to go unnoticed. Actually, it turns out that if you wear colored glasses for long enough your eyes adjust and you see everything the way you would anyway, but I think the point is still valid. My mom was like colored glass, I couldn’t always see her because she was everywhere. Dad was like an orbiting planet, coming into view sometimes and dropping something off. Mom was the earth itself, steady, stable, reliable, constant.

I remember once standing in the kitchen with my sister next to the pantry that led into the front foyer. We used to keep after-school snacks there, and mom was dishing out the fruit roll ups. For some reason we were talking about what would happen if my mom died. I remember a lot of those kinds of conversations from my childhood, which seemed really normal at the time and seems really weird to me now. Mom was saying that we would probably go live with the Siade's if she died because they didn't have any other young kids and could probably handle us. Thinking about my mom dying was awful and thinking about living with the Siade's was terrifying, but talking about my mom's death with her right there was something else all together, it was just awkward. Just as I was noticing this awkwardness, my sister, always one step ahead, said something that I think she hoped would break through that awkwardness. Mom, it would be so awful if you died, she said. Yeah! I jumped in, catching on to the game plan, who would do our laundry and make our lunches?! My sister looked at me aghast and yelled, Michelle! She’s more than that! My mom just laughed, but I felt really confused. Once I had said it I realized what it sounded like, like all she was to me was a maid. I wanted to take the words back, but more than that I wanted to be able to communicate what I head meant, that my mom was everything to me. As far as I was concerned, without her there would be no food, no clean clothes, no baths,

She took care of everything in my life. As far as I was She drove me to school, she fed me, she bought me food, she cleaned my clothes, she talked to me when I was sad or scared, she gave the best hugs in the world, and I mean it, the best best best hugs in the world. If she had died who would have done those things. The Siade's couldn't have done it. No one could have done it. But I didn't know how to say all that, so i said what I said and it went misunderstood. It took me a long time to find the words to say what I meant and by then, it didn’t matter anymore. We were all grown up.

When I was 37 years old, I moved back home and spent a year living at my mom’s and a couple years living at my dad’s. Both were tough because I was sick but I came to know them more deeply than I had as a child. We try to understand our parents in an attempt to understand ourselves. I came to see how much different I am than either of them.