Talking about the family outside the family, part 1

Funny thing happened yesterday, a thing I knew was coming -- which is that I told a story that Someone didn't fully appreciate.  In short, I received an email from my mother which made it clear she'd read me and didn't entirely agree.  Leaving me with an instantaneous oh-shit, now-I've-done-it sinking feeling.  Damn it.  

It's my own fault really, since I've been using this here blog to tell the story of my sister Carla.  But it was bound to happen eventually.  That's the thing with writing every single day.  Eventually you're going to tell a story that somebody's not crazy about.  That's particularly the thing with writing about your own life and thoughts and experiences every day.  

My mother's email is excellent actually -- I won't reprint here verbatim although I would love to -- expressing so much with so few words placed just-so.  Truly, there is little wonder I is who I is.  I've written lots of pieces about how insanely amazing my parents are, like this piece about my mother that also ran on the More magazine website and this other one that shows off her movie star good looks.  Her words also open my latest love letter to my friends.  I give my parents tons of credit for the decisions they made in raising us, the education, the travel, the living-abroad experiences we received free as a bonus for being born to these two goofy love-birds.  That doesn't mean they did everything right, but honestly, who the hell does?

For the record: My mother, Sara Ofelia Ortiz-Argumedo Karg Trelaun, is a truly remarkable human being.  The thousands of public high school students she taught over the years, the gajillions of people lucky enough to be her friends, and her daughters all know it: she is amazing.  And she's very funny.  En bref, she's got it all.  And guess what?  Like the rest of us, even my sainted mother, as I was trained to say, even the authoress of my days, more training, is not perfect.  That's part of her charm.

For all my rule-flouting, I hate getting in troubs.  Chalk that up to a childhood of learning grammar in three languages and being raised by two teachers with extremely high standards. Ask the people who work for me or, better yet, ask The Kid, how far this acorn fell from that particular tree.  It took me a few iterations to learn not to say, "Why not the A?" when he'd bring home an A- in a class.  I try to reserve my perfectionism for myself, but sometimes, sometimes it bleeds over.  Even more, I hate disappointing my mother.  With everything that's happening with Carla, for all of that heartbreak, I am trying to be really good.

But I couldn't NOT tell the story I told yesterday.  Once I got started, it just had to come out.  And I don't regret it, not even a speck.  But that's the rub: being a grown-up or maybe it's more accurate to say telling the truth or maybe living with integrity is hard.  Sometimes what you say or do won't sit perfectly right with others, but as long as it sits right with you, and you haven't been deliberately unkind or hurtful in your choice of words, then everybody should be able to get through it and be better off in the end.  I've kind of been done trying to pretend to be someone I'm not for a long time.  So my words are my words, no matter who reads them.

Anyway, following that email, I wrote to two people I know who I thought might be able to guide me.  To my friend Frances who wrote the excellent To Have Not, I asked:

I'm wondering how you made the call when writing your memoir, if there were stories you left out because they might pain your family too much. Or ways that you finessed the telling of a story so as not to have another fight about who did whatever in the past. Or did you just say, Fuck It, I'm telling the story and you all can write your own damn book if you don't like it.

And to my friend Sarah who has the most popular morning talk radio show in the Bay Area, I wrote:

How you decide what you're going to talk about on-air and what you keep private.  Like, what stories do you or don't you tell about your own mother?  Naturally I don't fool myself that I have even a nano-particle of your audience, but do wonder how you make the call.

Stay tuned.  Tomorrow and beyond,  I'll share what they learned me as I continue to consider what it all means, how to be a truthful person and not be in fights with people, how to be a good daughter, good sister, and still tell the stories of how I was made.