Confiscating Others’ Experiences

By Sharon May

During last year’s Halloween frenzy, Peggy repeated her story about being required to collect money for UNICEF while politely refusing her neighbors’ sugary treats as commanded by her parents and teachers. Not the Halloween her seven-year-old mind had envisioned, particularly given that she had received candy in previous years.

I’ve heard the story often in our 17 years together, but this time I felt her resentment and connected it to mother-daughter stories she had also told me over the years. When I say Peggy is resentful about being robbed of her Halloween fun, I don’t mean that she remembers being resentful, but that she experiences the same deep emotion she did at seven. With that realization, I began envisioning a short story about deprivation.

I began working on my it, and realized I had drafted a similar plot some 30 years ago that was now languishing in a file drawer after meeting an early death due to my inexperience with life and a lack of craft. I dusted off a draft and read it. The basic premise is that a college professor takes her fiancé home to meet the family she had willingly learned to live without. Her conflict with her mother and their confrontation over old resentments drive the story. Sounds a lot like what I had in mind with Peggy’s story.

So, maybe I didn’t have a new idea, but a resurfacing of an idea I was too young to write about. I guess the idea was being seasoned till the right moment, when I can understand how a 66-year-old slight can endure and shape a person. Had I tried to write it previously, I would have had a confrontation with a 30-year-old woman and 50-year-old mom. I envision the exchanges will be more complex if the women are older. There is something more humorous, as well as sad, if both mom and daughter have to hash out old memories that have been smoldering for years.

No matter how the story turns out, I will always think of it as Peggy’s story as it will have bits and pieces of Peggy in it. The daughter in the story she is a college-educated woman who taught at a small rural, liberal arts college as Peggy did. They are also both from small towns they desperately wanted to, and did happily, escape to make a better life for themselves. Both had troubled relationships with their mothers, though for different reasons and outcomes. Peggy never had a chance to discuss with her mother her experiences or feelings about them, as her mother died young when Peggy was in graduate school.

But there will be lots in the story not based on Peggy because characters come to life on the page and tend to do and say what they want, surprising the author as much as the audience.