I am in the process of finding an agent for my memoir manuscript. It is hard. It is filled with a rejection – a lot of rejection. However, I’m going to keep on keepin’ on until my dream becomes a reality. Thank you for being part of the process.
Here is an excerpt from the manuscript.
It had been six months since I had seen or spoken to my mom. It was she who had surprised me at our annual Memorial Day family reunion.
The morning of the reunion was cool for late May, but I still stood out on my great-aunt’s expansive porch, a cup of too-strong Folgers steaming in my hand, watching the rolling Appalachian mountains lazily shake out of their foggy coats.
I had spent decades trying to get over those mountains, hating them for trapping me where all my hurt lived. But, as I got older I looked at them differently. They had morphed into my protectors. I felt a kinship with the Appalachians; they too had been abused, poked fun, abandoned, but there they were – weathered and patched, but strong and resilient, nonetheless.
When I stepped back inside, the house was buzzing as the laughter, cursing, love and cutting insults that my grandmother, her six sisters and a couple of tolerated sisters-in-law always brought to our family gatherings floated through the house on a cloud of carcinogenic smoke thick enough to drop a moose where it stood.
“Oh, Sosh, I’ve been looking for you,” my gran said. “Something has leaked all over the downstairs fridge. Get some bleach and a rag and go clean it out.”
I started to protest, started to suggest that maybe one of my cousins who hadn’t gotten a full-ride to college nor been named an Assistant Vice President of Marketing at a large commercial real estate firm before they turned 30 would be better suited for the task. But, I didn’t. It would have been completely and utterly pointless and had I made these petulant suggestions, she would have undoubtedly found additional and more vile chores for me to complete. My family was certainly proud of me for my college degree, my fancy job, my husband who adored me, but they damn sure weren’t going to let me get “above my up-bringin’”.
Therefore, I simply replied, “Yes ma’am.” And, trudged off downstairs with my cleaning supplies.
After I finished cleaning the leaked chicken juice that had pooled in the bottom of the spare fridge, I bee-lined to the bathroom to scrub the salmonella from my hands. The sound of a sickly muffler filled sent anxious vibrations down my spine. Before I secretly watched her swing the dented, creaking passenger door of whatever friend she had promised God knows what to drive her the 20 miles to the reunion open – I knew it was her. My mouth dried out and my cheeks flushed as my body quickly ping-ponged from fight to flight and back again the moment that car rounded the curve to my aunt’s house.
I had spent nine months getting to know my mama from the inside and thirty years studying her, tracing my fingers over pictures of her, trying to make sense of the many different personas that dwelled within the woman I called mom. Despite my life-long dedication to her, I almost didn’t recognize the woman that emerged from that car. She steadied herself on the door of the filthy Cutlass Supreme and let loose a wet cough that buckled her over.
I was transfixed with my sniper’s view of her. Once she righted herself from her coughing fit, she looked slightly unsure as to what to do next. She was allowed at the reunion, but being allowed is not the same as being welcomed.
She had lied, deceived and hurt so many of our relatives. In a family that had more than its fair share of alcoholics, high school dropouts, petty criminals and even a killer, mama still managed to be the outcast. She wasn’t to be trusted. And, she knew it. She knew that her arrival meant that her family, including her mother and her daughter, would lock up their purses, leave their valuable jewelry on their person and secure their medicine bottles. The weight of this seemed to settle in on her as she stood in the driveway getting her nerve up to go inside.
As I stood there watching her, I wanted to run to her and run far away from her simultaneously. I blinked back tears when I saw how skinny she was. She pushed her sunglasses up on her thin, dishwater brown, grey-streaked hair and her eyes were sunken way back into her skull. The rattling cough returned and I feared that the force of it was going to shimmy her too-big Levi’s right off of her hips. And, when she took the hand that she had used to cover her drawn mouth away I could see that she was missing more teeth than she had. The woman who could once make the very walls of a room smile now looked shrunken and hollowed out like a November Jack o’ Lantern.
She fished out a pack of Native Spirit cigarettes from the large cheap purse that was flung over her shoulder. I had witnessed her snort lines off of one of my Alvin and the Chipmunk albums and seen her take a shoestring from my basketball shoes to tie her arm off, but the sight of her smoking still shocked me. She had actually only started smoking cigarettes a couple years before. One of her go-to lines had always been, I don’t have an addictive personality, I’ve never drank a cup of coffee and I’ve never smoked a cigarette. She held the cigarette wrong, the V of her first and middle finger way too far apart, the filter nestled all the way down in it. Inhaled it wrong. It was just wrong. Everything about her was wrong.
This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
