The Truth?

According to eye witnesses, when I was born, my father was in two different places.

He was at the American Legion drinking when he got the call that I was on the way. By the time he arrived at the hospital, Mom had already squeezed me out. The whole ordeal was all over, and my dad missed it. BUT he says he caught a glimpse of my “monkey face” (his words) being rolled down the hallway in a cradle, as he had come racing in once he had realized his failure. Here was this adorable new baby all swaddled and wide awake, blinking up at him matter-of-factly and curious. He might’ve giggled (because Mom says he had surely been out drinking himself silly). Then he strolled his long legs into the hospital room to take the tongue-lashing my Mom was certainly entitled to give him. But, really, she was most likely already sleeping. Nonetheless, Dad insists that, in that moment, my monkey face touched him in a special way, and he will never forget it.

He was also actually IN the room AS I was being born, right there standing a few feet away from Mom’s distressed vagina but close enough to see all the blood when all Hell broke loose. And he wasn’t drunk, but he had probably smoked lots of cigarettes – right there in the hospital lounge because it was 1974 – and he (just as he had ended more than one long night at the bar) had to vomit up everything right there, right then. Mom says (with a little disdain) that a nurse left her side and rushed to assist him, and he sat and barfed his dinner into the trash can while I was thrust into existence, all soppy in goo and mucus, my blue chord hanging to a gob of placenta. Then someone surely stuck a syringe up my nose – because that’s what happens when the world first sees you – and Dad eventually pulled himself together. And because Mom laughs a little now when she tells me her side of the story, like she’s getting one over on him by telling her truth, I imagine her laughing at Dad’s green face in between her contractions. Laugh, push! Laugh, push! And when I imagine Mom laughing and pushing, I imagine some bald doctor, sitting between my mother’s spread-eagle legs, as he’s throwing Dad a raised eyebrow over a pair of itty bitty doctorly glasses. My dad = tough, ole’ beer-drinkin’ veteran or skinny, puking wimp? Why am I even asking? Being both is acceptable and quite easy.

My sister and I (born fives years apart) each get this story in reverse order. Mom says Dad puked when I was born, and it was Julie who had the little monkey face. Dad insists it was vice versa and so I was the cute little monkey face instead of a cause for vomit.

My sister and I have each claimed both stories at variant times in our lives. For a while, I’m certain, we both held on to the cute monkey face story, but it too had its dark side – in Dad’s lame absence. So what was “the truth?”  We have weighed the variables: Dad is a smart man, but he did drink a lot, still tends to. Mom WAS the one doing the actual birthing, but then wasn’t this, and potential obstetrical drugs she might have been given in the 70’s, cause for distraction? Was she really in her right mind? And we’ve often caught both parents, long since divorced, mixing up names and dates and reasons, as aging humans, who have led painful working-class lives, tend to do. Until I get them both in a room and of a proper mind to work it out, discuss details and perspective, we may never know any sort of “truth” in all of this.

And yet if life has revealed to me anything, it is that I will never get them both in a room and of a proper mind to work it out and come to a conclusion as to what really happened. After being divorced for well over three decades, neither are willing to stretch themselves toward communicating effectively. And, actually, after all of these years they’re tired and impatient with the world and hardly interested in expending any more of their energy fighting (and I must say, finally!). The solution is to, for the most part, ignore each other. Dad “functions”, a little less perhaps as he’s retired and has been recently left widowed after the death of his second wife, our beloved stepmother. And I’ve been ever more doubting Mom’s capability to remember anything, let alone make solid use of logic and reason. She’s lived alone for a long time, Alzheimer’s is in the family line, and “truth” for her as always been a bit bleary – based more so upon what her preacher of late tells her. But then she’s my mother and I’m her daughter, and I’ve believed this to be the case since I was age eight.

And even if I got them both into a room to discuss the moments surrounding their daughters’ births, they would still be sitting on different sides of a room, trapped in different lighting and cocking their heads at different angles, gripping their vast pasts. “What actually happened” or what we thought we saw with our own two eyes falls into question when we view an event from different angles and with different levels of attention. How could I ever expect Mom and Dad to come to a shared point on the horizon in such circumstances? They were never any good at agreeing upon anything anyway.

I have determined context to be important when it comes to creating truths. Oh, and brain function too. “Pure truth” will surely always disintegrate as long as there remain multiple perspectives. And who wouldn’t want multiple perspectives? And what happens after the shouting match is over, and they leave the room? Wasn’t fighting a valid reason for circling around each other every now and again? Doesn’t it make a sliver of sense to say a secret part of them loved it?

There was never a third party to tell my mother and father the “actuality” of what was what on the days when my sister and I were born. My parents never cared enough to ask a third party like the doctor, assuming he would have taken note and remembered. Mom and Dad each knew what was true, as they best recalled it. They divorced when I was two – so conversation surrounding the fact was severely stunted. Besides, that doctor might’ve coerced twenty babies into the world on either day. Who could blame him if the faces all ran together, all in a day’s work? And who’s to say Mom or Dad would want to listen to him in the first place? And maybe a confirmation could be easily passed over? Maybe that doctor had ulterior motives? It’s not hard to see how some third party witness could be shrugged off easily when it comes to expelling doubts and deep-rooted belief systems or even the slight details that barely matter for anything.

We are indeed creatures who have always manipulated “the truth,” seeing as we must come into contact with it in order to interpret it. I guess I like this idea of “truths” or “nonfiction” and “facts” because I want to believe I know something. It seems to me to be a romantic notion really and so I don’t hate it – If we arrive at what was “true” not only do my parents come to agree on something for once, but they embark some shred of actual wisdom upon me, which I am guessing would feel really nice.

Is all of this a request for just the facts, please? I would be curious to know how my (and the world’s) desire for “truth” has ebbed in and out of priority. Because I know there were times when I lived and breathed a steady stream of lies, and it felt fine. I assume it all has moved in waves and cycles brought on by an unstable setting.

I guess I have always believed art has some limitations and standards . . . but they exist because I put them there (because I have been taught I can put them there if I want to). Beauty is definitive of mere societal choices, often as they have flowed together throughout history, one individual manipulating the truth of another if even ever-so subtly. But ask my mom about art, and she will refer to her five foot tall black velvet painting of Elvis that hangs in her bedroom. Ask my dad, and he will either show you his Audubon book or play you one of his many George Jones’ LPs. And, in my opinion, they’ll both be spot on.

The truth, according to Col. Jessup?

I suppose I do come to journalism and encyclopedias and the like in search of these things called “truths” and when I don’t get them (as I feel I should), I let it surprise me, if not piss me off. But perhaps it shouldn’t. Such manipulations of shared/public information is not new. It is in fact a shouting match of perspectives and the winner takes everything. Perhaps this notion that I “deserve the truth” (when I have never had it given to me completely) is a delusion, either a delusion of privilege (as I have been sheltered) or a delusion of naiveté (as I have been duped).

Actually, I’m only being clever. Well, I’m trying. Sort of. I have accepted that I don’t come to my parents – or anyone else for that matter – when I have questions and need a bit of insight, without expecting farce, flips, or an outright stretch. For, always, all they have to offer me are their stories (their perspective, their angle, their interpretations, their past, their neurological firings).

We do like to think we know something. We don’t like to think we have been manipulated. I think John D’Agata – in The Lifespan of a Fact (big question: “How negotiable is a fact in nonfiction?”) – was trying to be clever too, and he could have perhaps gotten around the uproar he created. But he didn't. The uproar was what he was going for, just what he wanted to make people question this exaggerated notion of “truth” and “facts.” As though some divine superior creates such things and not the fantastic brains of we simple humans. As though journalists are not storytellers influenced by something as seemingly pointless as their angle in the room . . .

But I see Dinty Moore's point on Brevity’s Blog that “we have a labeling problem” and that stepping away from acknowledging the persistence of “truths” and definitive lines could bring the entire genre and even the field of writing (and all the other Humanities?) into question. Where do we stand then?

We stand beside a weird word and concept: truth. Maybe we stand beside our faulty senses. Or maybe we don't stand anywhere; maybe we kind of sit, unsteadily, in the middle of a tangled web. Social issues like class and race and gender seem to determine which stories gain the most attention, what details we make note of. We are creatures of manipulation and interpretation. ALL we have ever had to offer to each other are our stories. And all we have ever been offered are the stories of others. I’m not sure of anything. Neither are you. And that is the truth.  But none of this spawns some need to stop listening, to stop considering all the stories we have . . . oh, the possibilities . . .