Sometimes, a thing from childhood will bubble up, like gas in a swamp. It happened to me recently when I was talking to a trained lifeguard and joking about how my younger brother is a certified lifeguard and how, in contrast to him, I can’t swim. I think this family paradox is funny. I also think that it perfectly reflects the kind of contradictory mother I had. Telling people about this, turning it into a joke, is a kind of way of relieving aggrieved feelings - wasn’t I owed swimming lessons?
Writing about childhood is hard. John le Carré hinted at this in his memoir The Pigeon Tunnel, in the chapter about his father near the end of the book. He tried writing at length about it when he was young, but the efforts “dripped with self-pity”.
I recognize in my comments that compensatory ruefulness my dad also had when he talked about my mother. It’s unsatisfying, and more often than not, it’s unfair to the person listening. Rather than being an amusing anecdote, it’s an escaped journal entry, one of those as Mason Currey writes in a newsletter that “can be relentlessly inward-looking and personal-grievance-focused, which is always a pleasure for the writer (and almost never a pleasure for the reader).”
On an episode of Conversations, George Saunders describes how a character in a story has to have more than one dimension:
What you find yourself doing as a writer, is, you have a bad character; if he’s simply bad section after section, you’re gonna be boring. So you have to complicate him, which means you have to look closer at him, just as in real life, you know (…) the person who pushes you aside getting on to the subway, at first he’s a terrible person. If you could follow him home, you know, and ask him some questions, you’d see him assuming dimensionality. So that happens to me in stories all the time.
And so, since good writing demands it, and since I am still learning, allow me to edit my clumsy attempt at humour. You see, my mother was an aesthete, descended from a woman, my Grandmother, who praised good looks and fine clothes. It was out of aesthetic concern that my mother enrolled my brother for swim class after swim class so that he would cut a fine figure. For years and years I mistook this as a more practical concern for health and for the ability to not drown in water. How much did she pay, I wondered, for all those lessons and the swimming pool membership? And it was only when attempting to tally an amount (was it hundreds? did it stretch to thousands?) that I realized she had spent a similar sum on me… not so that I would cut a fine figure, but so that I could show all of my teeth when I smiled. While my brother swam laps, I sat through appointment after appointment in the orthodontist’s chair for braces. This, in my mother’s mind, was fair; I had straight teeth and my brother had a swimmer’s physique.