Most of what I share here grows out of the ongoing, sometimes messy work of healing from CPTSD. But all of it, in some way, traces back to a larger story I’ve been trying to tell.

Panhandler Books interviewed me about my memoir I’m working on and ran an excerpt along with an interview. I thought some of you might want to read the origin story behind much of what I write here on Substack.

Here’s the link: A Memoir Excert and Interview with Charlotte Pence

I’d love to know what lands for you, what questions it raises, or what it stirs up. Drop a note in the comments!

Would he have suspected the truth: I’m trying to create for my child something I did not have as a child? That this urge to have a beautiful home is because my own childhood home was a yard-sale, sticky mess?

I remember my own mother’s attempt. This year as I was putting up my grandmother’s little tree—the only decoration she used, which could be an essay in and of itself on capitalism’s hooks, I thought of the odd relationship I had with my grandmother.

My grandmother wanted little to do with us, even though she lived in our back yard—or rather a trailer in our back yard. We needed, my mother thought, to spend more time together to create a deeper bond. So, Mom suggested a matinee and said she’d drop us off. (Gram had never mastered the art of steering--or rather, braking—so Mom had to drive her everywhere.)

Gram arrived outfitted in a huge straw hat and equally large straw bag as if we were picnicking. Soon as we sat down in the dark cool hum, that wonderful celestial feeling that theaters give, I heard the crack of pull tab and the soft roosh of liquid. “Damn,” Gram said as she rushed to slurp the foam, the rabbit-piss odor of beer reaching my nose.

Just when I was about to say “I don’t think you can do that,” she nudged me in the side: “Chicken leg?”

“Um, sure,” I said.

As the show wore on, Cinderella’s blue dress seemed to glow, her perfect blonde conch-shell of hair, mesmerizing. Gram began to start commenting on the show, a little too loudly. The comments were at first simple observations: “Clean apron,” she snorted. But then they turned a bit more sailor-like with each beer: “Bitch of a step-mom.” “Ooh boy, those titties popping out of that dress. Need to keep those girls under control.”

Again, I was about to tell her to hush when she said: “Want some candy?”

To my surprise, she didn’t reach down into her bag from where the beer and chicken had come from, but up. Yes, up. She started pulling out the hat pins, one by one, and miraculously, there under that hat, enmeshed with her strawberry-blonde hair, was a huge bag of marshmallow circus peanuts.

“They never check the hat,” she said. “Remember that.”

Suddenly, I had a whole new affection for this woman and then Gram belched right when the prince arrived. “She’s a whore!” she called out.

We were escorted out around that time.

I’m not sure what the moral is here—other than don’t slut-shame Cinderella, who for the record seems perfectly chaste.

Maybe it’s this: we parent against our own childhoods, don’t we? We string lights to chase away tired ghosts. We create traditions to fill the spaces where traditions should have been. And sometimes, in trying so hard to give our children what we didn’t have, we forget that what we did have—messy, imperfect, occasionally escorted out of movie theaters—also counts as something.

The lights are beautiful either way.

When I was nine and my brother fifteen, my mother became bed-ridden for three years due to a rare neurological disease. To complicate the situation, my dad suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. As soon as we brought Mom home from the hospital, my dad split, leaving my brother and me to run the house, grow vegetables for income, and take care of Mom.

But that is not what this essay is about. It’s about Cap’n Crunch cereal.

I don’t remember waking up in our ranch-style house with my mother’s uncooperative body beside me and feeling dread about the day’s tasks: feed her, feed me, feed dog, clean up, garden, repeat. Instead, I remember mornings like this…. Waking to the chatter of birds through the open window as they began their own routine for survival. My first thought? To get that cereal bowl (as we all know there is only one good cereal bowl) and see how much I could put in it without the milk swashing out. The goal was to do this before my brother would wake up and take it all.

With equal parts excitement, hunger, and competitiveness, I glanced over to make sure Mom was still breathing, and then I zinged out of bed in my Strawberry Shortcake nightgown with its ruffled sleeves. The cotton loosened its cling to my body as I scampered down the carpeted hall and soon felt the kitchen tile under my feet. That first jolt would tell me how hot or cold it was outside, and I would take stock of the tile’s temperature and the sunlight’s brightness, and assess the day before me. If warm and sunny, I knew I’d need to work the garden soon. If cool and dim, I could watch cartoons until ten. But first, I had more important business.

I poured my cereal and the milk that denoted ownership, and sat down, swinging my legs in triumph.

Lee, my brother, came in soon and asked in greeting: “Did you take all the cereal? Again?”

“Maybe.”

He arched his back and let out a quiet howl as he yanked the box off the counter. Then, his body softened as he knew immediately upon holding the box how many bowls were left. If poets are those who pay attention to minute details, children are the laureates of the world. Just one shake told my brother all he needed to know about how much cereal was left.

Lee soon joined me, arms forming a barricade around his bowl, and the crunching became our morning news. I stared at the cereal, wondering what those puffy rectangles with the three stripes were supposed to be anyway. Whiskey barrels? Treasure chests? Gun powder kegs?

So, I asked my brother, “What is Captain Crunch a captain of? Do you think he has a fleet or something?”

“That’s a stupid question. Look—there are only three stripes on his sleeve. He’s not even a captain. He’s just a commander. Of cereal.”

We leaned in toward the cherry-red box, studying the captain with his wide mouth, an odd trapezoidal shape in which a sword-like spoon was getting ready to dump in sweetened goodness. Another argument ensued about whether he were simply a pirate who ate a lot of cereal or if pirates ate cereal at all. We ended our breakfast by washing the bowls (cold water, fingertips) and imagined the grossest cereal flavors: Cat Piss Corn Flakes, Seaweed Sugar Smacks, Rotten Tomato Rice Krispies.

When I look back on this scene, I wish I had better words to describe the feelings. I need a word for that devilish joy in needling a sibling—that skill, learned through trial and error, of knowing exactly how long you can tease before it tips into tears. But I also think of another word—a word perhaps that resembles resilience.

We get much wrong in this country regarding resiliency, too often forsaking the abused, the sick, the poor and then complimenting their grit if they manage to survive. But we also mistake the many forms resilience can take, especially among different age groups. Finding joy where there is little, delighting in details, stoking curiosity: this is resilience at its core. Resiliency among children might look like wasting time or teenagers bent over laughing when they should be studying. And this: two kids, half dressed, arguing over cereal, the box dented and half-full.

Some of you have asked about the memoir I’m working on that tells the story of when my brother (age 15) and I (age 9) secretly ran the house for three years and cared for our incapacitated mother. I’ll include in this post the draft of the opening pages. (Very drafty indeed.) Who knows what will remain of them? A book’s beginning and ending are often what’s revised the most, so these pages might shift to the middle, be revised beyond recognition—or cut altogether. For now, take a peek and let me know your thoughts.

First Three Pages from Chapter One

Dad had remained behind the bedroom door with Mom all afternoon. I could hear his heavy footsteps treading and retreading the space between closet and bed. Bursts of whispered diatribes. Clang of metal hangars zinging off the rod. Then, the distinctive slide of metal teeth grooving into metal teeth. Decisions made. Tasks complete.

“Kids, come in here,” Dad called out. When we walked in their bedroom, Dad’s duffel bag sat smugly by Mom, where she lay as I had left her that morning, still dressed in her cotton nightgown printed with blue forget-me-not flowers. Flat on her back, propped on three pillows, her ashen-moon face aimed at the ceiling. The empty bowl of yoghurt that I’d fed her crowded the nightstand along with a vast terrain of tall and short prescription bottles.

“I need to find a treatment to help your mom. Talk to some doctors who really know what’s happening. In Florida, they’re doing blood transfusions for people like her, so I need to go investigate. I’ll be back. Soon as I can get some answers.”

The air in the room zipped to a close.

“Yes, sir,” my fifteen-year-old brother said, jaw tight like I’d see before a critical move in a football game.

“This is what I need from you two: take care of your mother. Do whatever she wants done in the house. And the garden. Okay? Promise?”

“Understood,” Lee said.

Dad arched his eyebrows at me, and I repeated after Lee, trying to keep my tone even like his, too. I was only nine years old.

“You two have this under control. She’s doing much better.” And then he turned to Mom. “You can get to the bathroom on your own now. Right, Rita? I showed you how to brace yourself this morning.”

She did not answer. Or rather, she could not, her tongue as affected as every other muscle in her body.

He continued to give instructions as if Mom were simply some woman who needed to be treated with respect. A typical be-good-while-I’m-gone speech. That’s how things work in a house with a parent like my father. Everyone was desperate for him to be in “a good place.” So, even when things are off, we would pretend otherwise. Console ourselves that there were more good patches than bad.

I kept nodding while Dad talked about this potential blood transfusion, wondering if Mom thought siphoning her blood and replacing it with someone else’s was a good idea, especially with this new disease, AIDS, spreading around? To be honest, a part of my child-brain still suspected that what she had was AIDS. Is that what dad had meant by “people like her?” The doctors had seemed so baffled by her condition. I glanced at her to get a sense of what she was feeling about his departure. Her eyes were closed, as usual. Her mouth trim and straight. Maybe her eyelashes looked darker. Was she crying behind those closed eyes? Was she terrified at being left? Was she in agreement about him leaving? I had no idea.

A box fan propped on a kitchen chair whirred over the rumpled sheets of Mom’s bed, agitating the air more than cooling it. Dad stood in front of Mom, near the center of the room, arms punctuating his points as if he were on a stage and needed to be heard in the back row. My father was an imposing figure, not only because of his size, but because of what one instantly sensed he could do with it. Whenever I walked up to him, I felt as if I were interrupting an argument. Sometimes I would even glance around the room to see if there were someone else, but there would only be his pugnacious air and his vein-pounding neck. His six-foot-frame, which he felt was an insult compared to his own father’s six-foot-six, was eerily controlled, like a panther before the pounce. Mom said once a Doberman rushed out to attack them when they were on a walk. Dad simply bent his knees, caught the dog in mid-leap, and broke its neck in one fluid, tie-a-knot motion. By the time Dad dropped the dog to the ground, Mom said she hadn’t even had a chance to scream.

Dad continued with his rant of instructions while I scanned the room for more bags. He was coming to the end of his speech; longer pauses clung between his sentences like a mountain climber struggling to the precipice, pausing to find the next centimeter to grip.

“All right, Rita. I gotta go now,” he said and smacked a wet kiss onto her unmoving lips. “Love you.” Then he went to the closet and hoisted out a suitcase. Followed by yet another. And another….

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