Tara Arlene Innmon

SQUASHED BABY PIGS:
Writing Childhood Memories"

In the depths of our hearts, we often feel tugs from the old and the young that make us appreciate the past and die present. The experiences of my life shaped me into who I am now. I want to go back into my childhood and bring back that little girl and write her stories in her voice. I also want to include die adult I am now who thinks she has learned some lessons.

I sit down to write this essay, but little Arlene, the child I was, tugs at my arm. Little Arlene intrudes into the writing whenever I, the adult, write about her. Even now she complains, saying, "Why do you have to write an essay? What the heck is that?"

I tell her, "I'll get back to you as soon as I'm done. It won't be long."

She wraps her arms around her chest and glares at me. "You'd better tell it right," she warns.

As a child I followed my mother into her garden, down to the basement, and in her kitchen. I told her about the things that interested me: what someone said in school, what happened on TV, or what one of my brothers just did. I knew she wasn't listening. I vowed that when I had my own children I would sit down, face them, and really listen to them.

I wasn't able to do that. Food had to be cooked and dishes had to be done. My son's chattering exhausted me. He persisted in telling me stories just as I had told my mother. That child's voice has to come out and eventually find a listener.

The child's voice is not especially reliable, but does it matter? As I followed my mother around the house telling her the stories of the things I did when I was out in the world and away from her, I embellished my stories to see if she would turn around and look at me and say, "Really?" with interest in her eyes rather than the bored, tired look I usually saw. Once I got caught.

I was leaning against the sink in the crowded kitchen, with its green linoleum, and my mother was stirring something in a pot on the stove. I really wasn't sup¬posed to be in there. Maybe she would like to hear about what happened during the week I'd been with Becky, the neighbor girl on her grandparent's farm in Montevideo? It was the only time I'd been on a farm, and I loved it. My career choice at the time was to marry a farmer and have many kids and play with them in the barn and up the trees in the woods. My mother had grown up on a farm and looked bored and distracted as usual, as I spoke. What could I say to make the story more interesting? She had told me before that sometimes a mother pig would roll over and crush her babies.

"A mother pig had babies."

"Yeah, and the mother was really huge and she turned to her other side and some of the cute pink babies got killt"

She turned and looked at me, "Really? That happened at our farm, too. How many were killed?"

My heart pounded. She actually listened to me. "She had a lotta babies, I don't know how many, but three of them were squashed flat!"

"That sounds terrible."

"Oh it was. I cried, but Becky didn't she said she's seen that before."

Later that day, Becky came over to see if I could play. My mother said, "Becky, I heard about the baby pigs that were killed when the mother rolled over them. That's too bad."

Becky told her, "That didn't happen." They both turned and looked at my red face.

When I told the story that way, I saw the squashed pigs, and I still can. The ten and under child experiences fantasy the same as the "real" event. The adult reliving memories sometimes slips into the fantasy she may have experienced as a child.

Once at a workshop on writing from movement, we did an exercise that involved lying still and then moving as the body directed. I wiggled my feet, but suddenly, Arlene was wiggling my feet. She said, "Memories come from wiggling feet, of bare feet in berries and dandelion stickers." We were in my grandmother's backyard. At the time, I was losing vision from glaucoma and couldn't see my handwriting, so I used a tape recorder to write. I turned on the recorder, but before I could get it all down, she ducked under the willow and said, "Willows cover, hiding, peeking out." I kept wiggling my feet to keep her going, and crawled under the willow branches to join her. She popped out again saying, "Next to ber¬ries, luscious berries, poisonous to birds!" She ducked in and bounced out again and again in delight.

With my cumbersome adult body and tape recorder buttons, I tried to keep up, her words screaming through the tangled yard. I shaped those words into a poem, but how much changed going through my adult vocal cords and vocabu¬lary? How much did I forget, she spoke so fast, and how much did I inadvertently direct with my knowledge about her future?

As a writer in the first memoir draft, I let the child have her way, and I write what she says in my mind. Her world is small, she only partially understands things outside herself and she doesn't know the future. I know the troubles she will get herself into, and I squeal, "Aha!" as connections are made. I write down these nuggets of insight as they occur. They get stuck in between the child's words, jarring a reader and confusing him as to which narrator is speaking, the child or the adult. Weeding out the adult voice from the child's and deciding when to allow the adult to have her say, without interrupting the flow, becomes the baf¬fling job of revision.

My mother, the adult who couldn't listen well to me, is now a part of my adult self. Not only couldn't I listen to my children, but also I am unable to listen well to little Arlene every time she speaks.

When the child hunches over, looks down at her tightly fisted hands, and mumbles, "I don't want to remember this," the writing gets hard. Who is speak¬ing? Is it litde Arlene, my fantasy-writing assistant, or the grown-up Arlene who knows how it will all turn out?

And what about the reliability of the adult voice? What can I say about my making things up now as an adult? I sanction die adding of details of events and conversations I don't remember as a necessity for the sake of creating an interest¬ing story. I don't squash pigs anymore, but my mother is dead and I'm still looking for a reader to turn and look at me and say "Really?" with interest. Besides my living memories sometimes slips into the fantasy she may have experienced as a child.

Once at a workshop on writing from movement, we did an exercise that involved lying still and then moving as the body directed. I wiggled my feet, but suddenly, Arlene was wiggling my feet. She said, "Memories come from wiggling feet, of bare feet in berries and dandelion stickers." We were in my grandmother's backyard. At the time, I was losing vision from glaucoma and couldn't see my handwriting, so I used a tape recorder to write. I turned on the recorder, but before I could get it all down, she ducked under the willow and said, "Willows cover, hiding, peeking out." I kept wiggling my feet to keep her going, and crawled under the willow branches to join her. She popped out again saying, "Next to ber¬ries, luscious berries, poisonous to birds!" She ducked in and bounced out again and again in delight.

With my cumbersome adult body and tape recorder buttons, I tried to keep up, her words screaming through the tangled yard. I shaped those words into a poem, but how much changed going through my adult vocal cords and vocabu¬lary? How much did I forget, she spoke so fast, and how much did I inadvertently direct with my knowledge about her future?

As a writer in the first memoir draft, I let the child have her way, and I write what she says in my mind. Her world is small, she only partially understands things outside herself and she doesn't know the future. I know the troubles she will get herself into, and I squeal, "Aha!" as connections are made. I write down these nuggets of insight as they occur. They get stuck in between the child's words, jarring a reader and confusing him as to which narrator is speaking, the child or the adult. Weeding out the adult voice from the child's and deciding when to allow the adult to have her say, without interrupting the flow, becomes the baf¬fling job of revision.

My mother, the adult who couldn't listen well to me, is now a part of my adult self. Not only couldn't I listen to my children, but also I am unable to listen well to little Arlene every time she speaks.

When the child hunches over, looks down at her tightly fisted hands, and mumbles, "I don't want to remember this," the writing gets hard. Who is speak¬ing? Is it litde Arlene, my fantasy-writing assistant, or the grown-up Arlene who knows how it will all turn out?

And what about the reliability of the adult voice? What can I say about my making things up now as an adult? I sanction die adding of details of events and conversations I don't remember as a necessity for the sake of creating an interest¬ing story. I don't squash pigs anymore, but my mother is dead and I'm still looking for a reader to turn and look at me and say "Really?" with interest. Besides my reliving memories sometimes slips into the fantasy she may have experienced as a child.

Once at a workshop on writing from movement, we did an exercise that involved lying still and then moving as the body directed. I wiggled my feet, but suddenly, Arlene was wiggling my feet. She said, "Memories come from wiggling feet, of bare feet in berries and dandelion stickers." We were in my grandmother's backyard. At the time, I was losing vision from glaucoma and couldn't see my handwriting, so I used a tape recorder to write. I turned on the recorder, but before I could get it all down, she ducked under the willow and said, "Willows cover, hiding, peeking out." I kept wiggling my feet to keep her going, and crawled under the willow branches to join her. She popped out again saying, "Next to berries, luscious berries, poisonous to birds!" She ducked in and bounced out again and again in delight.

With my cumbersome adult body and tape recorder buttons, I tried to keep up, her words screaming through the tangled yard. I shaped those words into a poem, but how much changed going through my adult vocal cords and vocabu¬lary? How much did I forget, she spoke so fast, and how much did I inadvertently direct with my knowledge about her future?

As a writer in the first memoir draft, I let the child have her way, and I write what she says in my mind. Her world is small, she only partially understands things outside herself and she doesn't know the future. I know the troubles she will get herself into, and I squeal, "Aha!" as connections are made. I write down these nuggets of insight as they occur. They get stuck in between the child's words, jarring a reader and confusing him as to which narrator is speaking, the child or the adult. Weeding out the adult voice from the child's and deciding when to allow the adult to have her say, without interrupting the flow, becomes the baf¬fling job of revision.

My mother, the adult who couldn't listen well to me, is now a part of my adult self. Not only couldn't I listen to my children, but also I am unable to listen well to little Arlene every time she speaks.

When the child hunches over, looks down at her tightly fisted hands, and mumbles, "I don't want to remember this," the writing gets hard. Who is speak¬ing? Is it litde Arlene, my fantasy-writing assistant, or the grown-up Arlene who knows how it will all turn out?

And what about the reliability of the adult voice? What can I say about my making things up now as an adult? I sanction die adding of details of events and conversations I don't remember as a necessity for the sake of creating an interest¬ing story. I don't squash pigs anymore, but my mother is dead and I'm still looking for a reader to turn and look at me and say "Really?" with interest. Besides myuncanny ability to be inventive, I also am trying to remember things that hap¬pened almost fifty years ago. Now I look at those vague memories through the filter of therapy and the experience of raising my own children, perhaps remem¬bering their childhood voice more than my own. Perhaps my own children are reflected in little Arlene's proddings.

And what about the squashed pigs? If I stretch the metaphor as I stretch the truth and drag it a bit I can talk about how my mother squashed little Arlene's voice and, yes, her spirit, flattened her so she could grow up, which means be less Annoying to other adults. My family did not set out to do this. It is our culture, and perhaps more so in the Midwest where I've grown up that does this flattening. Especially, possibly, my grandparents, who were the immigrants, those who ran from some misery in a Scandinavian country to come to Minnesota and be disappointed, and work too hard to ever do anything but to let their children, my parents, be squashed, silenced, and put to work.

The schools had even more to do with this squashing. I notice this especially with my abhorrence to writing an essay. I came out of public school and junior college with the belief I could not write a decent essay. Flattened, kilt, the writer's voice in me could only whimper out a poem or two for many years and silently scribble its complaints in diaries to never be shared.

What did this squashing do to the child's perception of self and stored memories? Is this adult trying to puff itself back up again by writing down its recalled perceptions of that childhood? If there is no voice that can be trusted to tell "the truth&, what's the point? After puffing this piglet back up to a semblance of something pink and round again, will I become Annoying again, full of hot air spewing out the "truths& I've learned from a distant past?

This sounds bitter and hopeless. I am not. That metaphor went down a path I don't want to take; so I want to turn around here and go back to the barn. I'm excited and hopeful about the writing. I admit that the more I write the more thinly I stretch the "creative& in "Creative Non-fiction&. I started out with the naïve belief I would only write what I truly remembered. That's not fun and not interesting to read. I want to let both the child's and the adult's voice fly like a hot air balloon set free. After all that has been said, I can pull those voices back in again, deciding what stays and what doesn't. I've learned my lesson about getting caught in the act of a clear lie. I want to try to tell what I believe is the truth. I want that small child to be finally understood.

"Previously published in a slightly different version in Behind Our Eyes."

Tara Arlene Innmon was working as an occupational therapist when she began losing vision. She turned to her first love, visual art, and exhibited across the United States. When totally blind, she started writing, publishing numerous pieces in literary journals. While earning her M. F.A. in creative non-fiction, she is writing her childhood memoir.