by
Sarah Polley
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Recently, when I described this moment in the play to my therapist and the scenes of Dodgson’s rejection by Alice in Dreamchild, I tried hard to talk about my anger at being made to feel sad for the grown man instead of for the child, but all that came out of me was the sadness itself, a sadness so fierce I couldn’t speak for my sobbing. My therapist said, quietly, “There is something tremendously sad about being a pedophile. To love a creature you can’t have. To know that that love is bad. To know that you are bad for having these feelings, even if you don’t act on them. It’s tremendously sad.”
In my stocking was a mechanical claw, placed there by Mark, so I could reach things from my lying-down position on the couch, which I remained in for most of the holiday. At the bottom of my stocking I found, wrapped in tissue paper, three miniature figures of Alice, the White Knight, and Humpty Dumpty. I thanked my dad without looking at him and placed them on the mantelpiece, where they remained, collecting dust, for years. My dad also gave me a short black dress. He said, awkwardly, as I held it up, “I thought . . . when you get better. It would look really sexy.” Everyone looked away.
oh my god
The plan was to go back to school when I got better. The plan was to try to get into Oxford. The plan was derailed by the Conservatives in Ontario winning the provincial election in 1995. When I could finally walk and resume a life, the one I walked into looked nothing like the one I had been heading towards before my surgery. One of the first places I went on my own after months of convalescence was a meeting of the International Socialists. I’d seen a poster on a lamppost. As everything in the outside world had taken on a new shine after I’d been cooped up in our dark apartment for months, I now noticed things like posters on lampposts. This led me through quite a few meetings with various Marxist organizations before I ended up at the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and found a community of activists who took me in, embraced me, and educated me. So many of the conversations in my life now revolved around justice, labour, and fighting the exploitation of the vulnerable, and my own difficult experiences as a young child began to seem small and inconsequential compared with the suffering I was learning about and now saw first-hand. After a year or so, at a dinner at John Clarke’s house (John is the charismatic, brilliant founder of OCAP), someone asked me about being an actor as a child, and I reluctantly recounted some of the early experiences that had haunted me from the productions The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Road to Avonlea. Where I thought I would find eye-rolls in the face of my undeniable privilege, I found empathy, understanding, a weaving of important political context, and a generous holding of my more troubling experiences.
I dove into a life of activism, helping to organize protests against cuts to welfare and healthcare and the attacks on the poor that the Conservatives presided over. Seeing first-hand the decimation of the already impossible lives of the most vulnerable people I had ever encountered made the idea of going off to university to think when there was so much to be done seem frivolous at best, and at worst offensive and selfish. My life became a series of meetings, protests, and conferences, imbued with the camaraderie of people who had dedicated their lives to justice. I had a community I was proud to be a part of, a place in the real world, and a purpose after many months of not even being able to move. This was so much more than my fantasy of being mobile and strong enough to go to the hardware store to buy the imagined nail for the unnamed project. In those activist years, full of conviction and purpose, I lost Corey, I lost school, and I gained a wild and practical education in direct activism.
ahhhh
Why do we write things about ourselves? To absolve ourselves of guilt? To confess? To right a wrong? To be heard? To apologize? To clarify things for ourselves or others? I’ve wondered all these things as I sit down to write this.
I’ve been writing and unwriting this essay for years now. It’s difficult, when you’ve resisted telling a story for so long, to know where to start. Especially when it has haunted you to not tell it. When it has knocked around inside your brain, loudly in the middle of the night, asking why it didn’t deserve to be told, asking you who you might have hurt by not telling it, who you might truly be, deep down, because of your decision not to.
It can seem perplexing from the outside, this pull that many women experience to make things better for those who have hurt us. The impulse to smooth things over to keep ourselves safe, as well as the constant messages many of us have received in our lives to “make things nice” no matter what harm has been done, can be so deeply rooted that it often results in behaviour that can later appear nonsensical to an outside eye. (The betrayal of oneself that results from this “making things nice” with an attacker can also make one bleed on a subterranean level.)
Dr. Lori Haskell, a renowned clinical psychologist who has written and presented extensively on the impact of trauma in sexual assault cases, writes: “Some sexual assault victims may continue to date their assaulters in an effort to neutralize the trauma or regain some control over an event that left them powerless. In fact, many reach out to their attacker again specifically to try to regain power in the relationship. While others explain that they believed he may acknowledge what he did and apologize.”
I burst into a workshop room where twenty other crabby-looking pregnant women had just been informed they couldn’t eat whatever the hell they wanted during their pregnancies and needed to draw their own blood three times a day in lieu of scarfing cupcakes. I worried for the peppy young nutritionist. She sat in the middle of the ring of famished, irate, heavily pregnant women. She looked as though she was surrounded by a pack of bloated, hungry wolves. There wasn’t a single question that was asked in a non-confrontational way. One woman kept asking about twisters. “WHAT ABOUT A TWISTER?! ARE YOU TELLING ME I CAN’T EAT A TWISTER IN THE MORNING? COME ON! NOT EVEN A TWISTER!” The group of women, who were mostly Asian, WASPy, or Black, had no clue what a twister was. Though I knew what it was, I initially had the good sense to stay well back from the fray. A Southeast Asian woman dared to ask what many were likely wondering. “I’m sorry. What is a twister?” She was met with a shriek of “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT A TWISTER IS? FROM HAYMISHE’S! YOU KNOW! COME ON! WHAT IS THIS PLACE?!” The nutritionist, who clearly had not been on the job very long, acted politely curious about the exotic cuisine being discussed and asked someone to explain what a twister was. “It’s bagel-like,” I finally offered quietly, unable to stay out of any fray for very long. “Oh! You mean a bagel!” the relieved nutritionist exclaimed. “A TWISTER!! IT’S WAY BIGGER THAN A BAGEL!” was the response. “Oh, well,” the nutritionist said. “You can only get away with half a bagel in the morning, so I guess a quarter of a twister would be okay. But that would have to be it! And it’s probably better to spend your carbs on something more nutritious.” I decided she was suicidal. Twister Lady was in a state of total combustion. “Give me that sheet!” she said. She grabbed out of the nutritionist’s grasping claws the sheet of information about what could and couldn’t be eaten and in what portions. The nutritionist went red as she tried to ignore the physical aggression and suggested we all practise pricking our fingers. There were moans. One woman screamed.
lmao
She was adored. As an adult, I am still sometimes stopped on the street by people in their seventies or eighties who tell me how much they loved my mother, how much she made them laugh, how much she helped them and believed in them. One of her former colleagues told one of my siblings that they remembered her rushing into a meeting late one day, which was odd, as she was usually so organized and responsible at work. He noticed that her face was greasy-looking and sweating. He said, “Diane—were you just sunbathing?” She yelped. “Yes! I’m so sorry! It was just such a beautiful day!” She managed to pack these shards of joy into a life that was constantly overstuffed.
<3
I take a deep breath and I answer Soap-Opera-Hot Doctor’s mother’s question. I say that I didn’t know how much I missed my mother until I was pregnant. I say that I didn’t know how angry I was at her for dying. I say that now that I’ve lived two and a half years with my child, and felt the intensity of our subterranean, inexpressible, and indelible knowledge of each other, I’ve gone from feeling that eleven years with my mother was not very much, not nearly enough, to knowing that to feel adored and cherished by a mother who was full of warmth and joy is quite a lot, actually. More than most people get in a lifetime. And because, as I became a mother myself, I was nurtured, for a short time, by a team of wise and skilled people at Mount Sinai Hospital (an incubator that finished off the work that my mother left undone), I’ve been able to remember, clearly, what was best in her, and to discover what was, in fact, fully formed in me.
I felt deeply ashamed and told him so. He said, “If this film is everything we want it to be, maybe, if we are very lucky, it will affect two or three people for a little while. The only thing that is certain is that the experience of making it will be with all of us, it will become a part of us, forever. So we must try our best to make it a good experience. It’s the most important thing.” He put his arm around me, ushered me away from set, and found a new way to shoot the scene. As we walked away from the set, something in me that had been stuck came loose.
So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t. Why is it so hard for us to believe our own stories or begin to process them without corroborating witnesses appearing from the shadows of the past, or without people stepping forward with open arms when echoes of those stories present themselves again in the present?
A few years ago, I travelled back to Rome. I sat on the cobblestones at the far end of Largo dei Librari. The store where I used to buy my little chocolate ice cream balls had closed a long time ago. Now there were tables and chairs filling the small square, and tourists eating in the open air. I looked over their heads to the apartment we had lived in for those months in 1988. The air in the square had the same smell. Centuries old. Romantic and disgusting. As though something was rotting, beautifully. I wondered if the tourists could smell it too.
<3
A year or so later, a girl awaiting a lung transplant asked to meet me. I spent a couple of hours with her and found myself forgetting the strange premise of why I was there. I liked her. A lot. She was funny and kind and she had a wry sense of humour about her own terrifying predicament. I would have liked to be her friend. The year before my mother died, we had moved from a suburb of Toronto to Aurora, a town which was an hour and a half by bus and subway from the school I went to, and I was never at school long enough to really maintain friendships throughout the year. I was under the impression that this girl would live, that we would talk often, but maybe I just didn’t ever ask anyone what her prognosis was. One day I called her to check in, and she was gone. Her father sent me a T-shirt with her face on it. I sat alone in my room for a long time.