Moore - Inside Out

I t may sound strange, but I remember the time I spent in the hospital in Merced, California, when I was five years old as almost magical. Sitting up in bed in my soft pink fleecy nightgown waiting for my daily round of visitorsdoctors, nurses, my parentsI felt completely comfortable. Id already been there for two weeks and was determined to be the best patient theyd ever seen. There in the clean, bright room, everything felt like it was under control: there were dependable routines at the hospital enforced by real grown-ups. (In those days, there was a sense of awe around the doctors and nurses: everyone revered them, and to be in their midst felt like a privilege.) Everything made sense: I liked that there was a way I could behave that would yield predictable responses.

I had been diagnosed with kidney nephrosis, a life-threatening condition about which very little was knownit had really been studied only in boys, to the extent that it was studied at all. Basically, its a retentive disease in which your filtering system isnt doing its job. I remember being terrified when my genitals swelled up and I showed my mom and saw her reaction: pure panic. She got me in the car and rushed me to the hospital, where I ended up staying for three months.

My aunt taught fourth grade, and shed had her entire class make get-well cards, on construction paper with crayons and markers, which my parents delivered that afternoon. I was excited by the attentionfrom older kids, kids I didnt know. But when I looked up from the brightly colored cards, I saw my parents faces. For the first time, I could feel their fear that I might not make it.

I reached over and touched my mothers hand and said, Everything will be okay, Mommy.

She was just a kid, too. She was only twenty-three years old.

My mother, Virginia King, was a teenager who weighed a hundred pounds when she got pregnant with me just out of high school in Roswell, New Mexico. Really, she was a little girl. She labored in pain for nine hours, only to be knocked unconscious at the last minute, right before I came into this world. Not the ideal first attachment experience for either of us.

There was a part of her that did not really ground in reality, which meant that she was able to think outside the box. She came from poverty, but she didnt have a poverty mind-setshe didnt think poor. She wanted us to have the best: she would never have allowed a generic brand anything in our housenot cereal, not peanut butter, not laundry detergent. She was generous, expansive, welcoming. There was always room for one more person at the table. And she was confident in an easygoing kind of waynot a stickler for rules.

Growing up, I was aware that Ginny was differentshe didnt seem like other moms. I can picture her in the car driving us to school, smoking a cigarette with one hand and putting her makeup onperfectlywith the other, without even looking in the mirror. She had a great figure; she was athletic and had worked as a lifeguard at Bottomless Lakes State Park near Roswell. She was also strikingly attractive, with bright blue eyes, pale skin, and dark hair. She was meticulous about her appearance no matter what the circumstances: on our yearly trip to my grandmothers, she would make my dad stop three quarters of the way there so she could put in her curlers and have her hair just right by the time we got into town. (My mom went to beauty school, though she never turned it into a career.) She wasnt a fashion queen, but she knew how to put a look together with natural flair. She was always reaching for whatever was glamorousshe got my name from a beauty product.

She and my father made a magnetic pair, and they knew how to have fun; other couples flocked to them. My dad, Danny Guynes, who was less than a year older than my mom, always had a mischievous twinkle in his eye that made it seem like he had a secret you wanted in on. He had a beautiful mouth with bright white teeth offset by olive skin: he looked like a Latin Tiger Woods. He was a charming gambler with a great sense of humor. Not boring. The kind of guy who is always riding the edgealways getting away with something. He was very macho, locked in competition with his twin brother, who was bigger and stronger and had joined the Marines, whereas my dad was rejected because he had a lazy eye, as I did. To me it was our special thing: I felt like it meant that we looked at the world the same way.