The Holy Hole

Was it weird that she wiped my ass? 

She—our neighbor, Helga Ryder. Mother of my first and best playmates, Stephanie and Shelley. 

Helga still had some German accent. People said she was an alcoholic, that her husband, Steve, beat her. 

I am in between gratitude and embarrassment. Neither Mrs. Ryder nor her daughters made me feel badly—

that I hadn’t yet learned to wipe my own butt, or that my mother wasn’t there to teach me. 

It’s a fundamental to human life. Everyone needs to learn to clean their own shit. 

There’s a hole in my bucket, 

Dear Liza,

Dear Liza.

For 19 years Mom had been on the booze bus with my father. Not your usual party bus, like the ones Dad charted years later—him, me and forty of his cronies Greyhounding the two hours from Portland to Boston for a Red Sox game.

He’d charge them for the ride and for the ticket to the game. They could bring their own beer. Big wins all around: no drunk driving (at least not ‘til they got back to Portland at one in the morning), they arrived at the game already drunk, so saved on the price of beer in the bleachers, Dad made some money. I got to drink as much soda as I wanted. 

But Mom didn’t drink. So, I wonder… who chartered the bus that was their marriage? Who ordained it—and for what holy lessons?

I got on just before it crashed. 

By then, Mom was taking her fight to another level. 

Could she really blame Dad for the trip? For their first anniversary she gave him a silver flask with his engraved initials: ECH. Edwin Charles. Everyone called him Ned. 

He wrote his dissertation on alcoholism, citing himself as an example of what early stages look like. 

“You hit what you head for. You get what you ask.”

There’s a hole in my bucket, 

Dear Liza, 

Dear Liza. 

It was the era of the Equal Rights Amendment—1970s feminist ferocity. Was Mom just looking for a new opponent?

Every hero’s journey includes trial by fire—within and without. She had finally defeated the little girl inside herself that clung to the fantasy of what could have been with Ned.

She was both surfing and steering the waves of that era. 

By the time I’d entered the liminal realm between diapers and sovereign, still in the ‘help with wiping’ stage, she’d won the war with my father. 

Sure, their battles burned on for some years yet—like countryside carnage that continues before boots on the ground learn a cease-fire’s been called—but part of her had already disembarked the brawling bus of their unholy matrimony, and Ned had no chance of getting her back aboard.

Did he even want to? 

Some say alcoholics are always alcoholics. 

My Mom, Dorothy Anne, had won a war, though like a chain smoker lighting the new cigarette from the last, she started waging the next before the divorce was even final. 

I didn’t yet know that my tiny two-year-old pecker was going to make me her adversary, maybe already had. 

There’s a hole in my bucket, 

Dear Liza, 

Dear Liza.

Once, she brought me to the home of one of her new university friends—a fellow woman warrior. They talked for hours while I was meant to play quietly, my Matchbox car bumping over the dark wood floor’s rough grain. 

I wished she’d left me at home, but I was far too young, and we couldn’t afford childcare. How much of their “men are pigs” rhetoric did I actually understand?

Was it just boyish boredom? Or was it the anger I didn’t yet know how to name—resentment for being cooped up in that stale living room?

Or did I know more? I’d already witnessed enough of her wrath to understand: expressing my displeasure directly was dangerous.

Mom didn’t find out until later. I wonder how her friend pieced it together.

By then, not only could I wipe my own ass, I’d honed enough pissing power to arc a yellow stream clean over that woman’s toilet—straight into her open case of curlers. The jet hit the plastic tines and exploded into pinball droplets, ricocheting off the spiked little grips she used to tame her hair.

Some of the liquid hit the wall behind. Most collected in the casing.

Mom didn’t yell or hit me as I’d expected. Even then, she must’ve known something in me had gone sideways. Not all acting out can be beat down.

Dad’s drug was simple. Dorothy Anne preferred a more cankerous cocktail—fantasy, fury, and self-blame. As gross as it was—me pissing on her friend’s curlers—Mom knew it wasn’t just me. She had a share in it too.

There’s a hole in my bucket, 

Dear Liza, 

Dear Liza.

✦✦✦

Mom wanted to look good at my brother David’s wedding.

Finally, her motivation was strong enough to lose some weight.

She looked great in that sheer teal gown.

And even though it was one of the only two times I remember seeing her and Dad in the same room,

I have no idea if he looked at her twice.

There’s a hole in my bucket,

Dear Liza,

Dear Liza.

The last time Mom took me to the emergency room for the pain in my ears,

the doctor told her that if it happened again, they’d have to put tubes in.

Whether conscious or not,

we’ve all got our “do not cross this line” boundaries.

Hafiz said:

Because of Our Wisdom


In many parts of this world water is

Scarce and precious.

People sometimes have to walk

A great distance

Then carry heavy jugs upon their

Heads.

Because of our wisdom, we will travel

Far for love.

All movement is a sign of

Thirst.

Most speaking really says, 

"I am hungry to know you."

Every desire of your body is holy;

Every desire of your body is

Holy.

Dear one,

Why wait until you are dying

To discover that divine

Truth?

✦✦✦

If I stood gape-mouthed when my mother loosed the torrent of her rage at me—

or, on the rare occasion I cried—

she’d scold:

“Why can’t you be more like your brother? He lets it roll off his back.”

One definition of love:

Comfort with another’s body fluids.

There’s a hole in my bucket, 

Dear Liza, 

Dear Liza.

I would have given anything to patch the pail of my mother’s heart.

Lord knows I tried—

not just to escape the guilt trips.

So much flowed through her,

yet she always remained a thirsty woman, drowning.

✦✦✦

When I was fifteen and Dad was dying, she came with me.

That she didn’t want me alone at his house while he disintegrated in the hospital bed—

no surprise.

Even her beside me on the cold vinyl seat of the taxi,

slushing through the black-grey melt

as we climbed the hill to Maine Medical—

not shocking.

What got me was his ankles—

distended like mini basketballs.

The dam of his liver had burst,

dominoing to his kidneys.

What was worse:

seeing the tubes that gave him breath,

but took his voice.

Everybody’s gotta learn to take care of their own shit.

That wasn’t what undid me.

I’d lived through deeper muck.

What was too much—what gutted me—was watching Mom take his hand,

look into his eyes, speak to him.

And him—wasted, nearly gone, body failing—

but with consciousness still flickering in his pupils.

Inscrutable. At least to me.

Later, Mom told me that she knew he had appreciated her being there. Maybe. Probably. 

I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, how he felt. But maybe I would have known if the hate that had always been theirs had flared. 

But if that was a precious moment—

if the storms and struggles had drained just enough

to let a flicker of peace arise,

maybe there was something sweet in the end.

Maybe the conditions were just right

for a flamelet to form.

But wouldn’t that suggest the ember was always alive?

Then what weighs more—heart or feather?

A moment of peace, maybe love, after decades of torment?

Or the tragedy of a sacred bond buried so long,

just because neither of them knew how

to clean their own shit?

I’ll never know what was awake inside my father in those last moments. 

I do know that I am my parents’ child. 

Addicted, like they were, just in different directions.

Optimism can be a form of fantasy.

Some folks pit gratitude against realism.

They say Jesus and the Essenes—the mystic Jewish sect he may have belonged to—

practiced enemas.

Cleansing as prayer.

Purgation as practice.

There’s a hole in my bucket,

Dear Liza,

Dear Liza.

I picture Jesus’s cousin dipping the Messiah-in-training back into the river.

There’s no hole in a river.

It’s meant to flow.

And now—decades beyond the debacles, debauchery, and disaster of my parents—

I go back to my birth

and baptize them both.

There’s a hole in my bucket,

Dear Liza,

Dear Liza.

So I pour.

I cleanse.

I let go. Let flow.

I am baptism, baptizing—

Not once.

But again—

and again—

and again.

— Daniel Aaron