Reality Was Kind of Falling Apart: A Conversation with Christine Kalafus
When I spoke to Christine Kalafus about her debut memoir, Flood, I noticed a vase in the shape of a woman’s head above her right shoulder. The vase, Christine said, was named “Our Lady of Perpetual Revision.” The flowers in the vase, the space around it, and Christine herself were all meticulously arranged and striking. Unsurprisingly, Christine is a visual artist as well as an author— she is a painter, seamstress, and designer. Flood is about getting cancer while pregnant with twins, marriage, medical misogyny, and more. Christine spoke with me about writing about her mother, creating propulsion, and healing fractures of the self. This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper: I think readers of Literary Mama will appreciate this scene: you made the eggs, you held the spoon to your four-year-old son’s lips, and then he blew them all over your face. You took him up to his room, slammed the door, and then realized you’d inadvertently locked him in alone. Why did you want to include it in the book?
Christine Kalafus: Because it’s real. It’s the time I felt afraid. My husband had an affair, and I was like, “We’re working through it.” I got pregnant with the twins, and I was like, “Okay.” With [the eggs], it felt like someone laughing in your face when you’re telling this really personal, deep, painful story. But with a four-year-old, it’s not like you can have a conversation. You can’t say, “You’re not listening to me and my story. I really need you to hear me right now!” That time when the door locked was the most scared I’ve ever been as a mother, knowing that I had the power to hurt him. Of course, we all do. A child is smaller and weaker than a full-grown woman, but it never occurred to me that I could. That destructive part, that’s what being a mother is too. There’s destruction, not just creation. [In that part of the book I was] recognizing it and saying, “Yeah, I’m capable of that. I don’t want to admit it, but I have to be honest.”
BAT: There’s a strong and compelling medical misogyny thread in Flood. You describe interacting with patronizing doctors both during pregnancy and afterward. Can you tell me about one such experience that isn’t in the book?
CK: I had just turned 40—almost 10 years after the cancer experiences in Flood. I had a regular checkup, a breast exam, and then this doctor was going to read the mammogram results. So I asked him, “As I’m entering my forties, what kind of screenings should I do as I age? I was 31 when I had triple negative breast cancer, I just want to know, should I do something else? Is there an ultrasound?” He put his hand on the doorknob and said, “The protocol for that kind of screening is inconclusive . . . Don’t forget to vote for me in the election coming up in town,” and he left.
BAT: Oh my God. That’s so enraging. That’s awful.
CK: Yeah. It’s like, ”Run for that office, but don’t tell me to do it! I just asked you for something about my medical care, and you are reminding me to do my voting duty!?”
BAT: Flood is a memoir that speaks directly to motherhood; you write about giving birth, discovering you are pregnant with twins, childcare decisions. But it is also the story of many other things from the perspective of a mother: buying and maintaining a house, fighting cancer, a marriage surviving infidelity. How did that maternal perspective influence the larger work?
CK: Every experience I’ve had—being a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a seamstress, even an insurance agent—these are the experiences, the lenses, through which I see life, and they can’t help but be in my writing. If I could pinpoint the “mother influence,” I would say it’s anticipating need. I’ve had the normal version of anticipating need, and I’ve had the extreme version. The normal version is preparing what is crucial and responding to a child’s need in the moment. The extreme version, which I developed when I had the twins, was attempting to anticipate every need in advance of any possible scenario. Catastrophizing. I ran myself ragged to avoid a child crying. That quality, trying to anticipate everything before it happens, is the enemy of a writer. If I’m trying to anticipate what’s coming in the next paragraph as I’m creating, then there’s no magic in that. There’s no revelation. It’s already done, and so then not interesting. I think there’s a time in any writing process when the writing takes over and any sort of control I thought I had gets busy doing something else, like cleaning out a closet, while the writing gets messy and is a child.
BAT: So there’s a tension between the anxious forward-looking that we often bring to mothering and the open presence that’s useful for making art. If you had written Flood with motherhood taken out completely, how do you think that would’ve changed the experience of reading it?
CK: That’s like imagining I have no arms!
BAT: You’ve talked about how your body and self are like spiderwebs. You have all of these different parts of your identity that are interconnected in interesting ways. That sounds like a kind of wholeness, which is in contrast to the part in the memoir when you write:
The first time I split was when Greg told me of his affair. The second time was when a single fertilized egg traveling my fallopian tube highway doubled itself. The third time is an ever-growing multiplicity . . . My cells keep splitting. I have two selves and four and then sixteen . . . I am currently 170,356 people.
That quote is a good example of the way your voice melds humor and depth, but I also bring it up because at that point in the memoir, it feels like the multiplicity is a rupture, rather than the cohesion invoked by the spiderweb.
CK: Oh, absolutely. Back then, that rupture, that fracturing, was very real, was . . . dissociative. I was doing the things, but I wasn’t feeling very much. There was a shutting down. When I think about it now, I can almost recall it in my body more easily than I can think about it as a construct, as something abstract. I can shut it down again, actually. I can feel myself doing it, talking to you. I can do what’s necessary and put my emotional self aside and survive. It’s protective. But yeah, the scars of that fracturing are still in that spiderweb.
BAT: Can you say how you healed?
CK: How did I do that? I quit my job. For two years, I didn’t work. Our house had skyrocketed in value, so I refinanced the house to pay off credit cards and stayed home. And then I was sewing. I’ve sewn since I was four years old. My grandmother taught me how to do a simple straight stitch when my grandfather died, and I’ve never stopped. [At that time] I became an apprentice and learned how to do couture sewing—it’s the classical-ballet version of sewing. You lay out your tools, your needles, your thread, prepare your bobbin, and make sure there’s no oil on the surface. You have to prepare as if you’re going in for surgery and you’re a surgeon, and your job is to manipulate this fabric and whip something into being that doesn’t exist. By doing that, I came home in my body.
BAT: In Flood you’ve included a conversation you imagined with a mother and cancer survivor who told you that you had to cry and let yourself feel.
CK: Oh, no, that wasn’t imagined. That was real.
BAT: Oh! But then the person who connected you disappeared?
CK: That was a real conversation, but when I went back to the hospital to thank the woman who gave me [the mother/survivor’s] number, her desk was gone. And I thought, Was it like this last time? Where did I see her? So I was having gaps in memory. The reason why [that scene of confusion] is in the book is because it illustrates the fact that reality was kind of falling apart.
BAT: You’ve said that you struggle with allowing yourself to be mothered, but your mother comes up a lot in the book.
CK: As they do.
BAT: Yes! It feels impossible to write about your life without writing about your mother. I love the nuance and tenderness with which you wrote yours. When in the process did she come into the work, and what was important to you about including her?
CK: I can’t imagine writing a book without my mother in it, really. Everybody says, “I’m afraid of being my mother.” I would like to be my mother. She’s a product of the fifties, so she has some trouble with asserting herself, but she is so stubborn and so determined. She’s only 22 years older than me, so I kind of grew up with her. She’s extremely shy, and yet she forced herself to be a Mary Kay consultant and walk up to strangers in a mall and ask them if they wanted a facial. I watched her do it even though she was terrified. It makes me cry thinking about it. It’s very affecting to see someone grow right in front of you.
It is also true that when I was six, [my mother’s] father died, and she went from this buoyant, young, happy person to a very depressed person. I would come home from school to a dark house, [and] all the blinds were down. She was crying, sad, and mourning. I found myself outside on my own. I’ve had a little therapy, and what has been revealed to me is that it’s hard to trust being mothered if it gets taken away. It doesn’t mean my needs weren’t being met. Of course they were. I was fed. I was clothed. There was just this time in her life when she couldn’t help but be sad. I am not mad about it. It’s just a fact. And it formed me a little differently. The metal was still soft. You can figure out how to mother yourself emotionally if you need something. And I did. I had imaginary friends. I created whole worlds on the rug in my bedroom. That quality showed up when I went through the nightmare that is in Flood. My mother’s there and wanting to do things for me, and I don’t want that, because I can’t trust it. I couldn’t relax into it, even though I didn’t know that at the time.
BAT: I thought Flood was impressively propulsive, especially given that you captured a sense of dissociation, jumped around in time often, wove in moments of magical realism, and included such a wide-ranging combination of topics. When you put the pieces of Flood together, how did you think about sequencing the various parts?
CK: My brain works with association. A little kid will say to you, ”Mommy, that car is like Grandpa’s car.” It’s an association of familiarity, looking for some kind of continuity. When everything is chaotic, we think, ”That’s like the other thing that I know.” That is what I did intentionally with the book because that’s how I think. If I’m driving through the tunnel on the Merritt Parkway, I can’t help but think that the tunnel is like the MRI tube.
BAT: It sounds like you are most drawn to visual associations—the way one physical form might be like another physical form—and you’re using that preference to connect pieces of the memoir.
CK: Well, interior design is my undergrad. Really, it’s an art degree. These are my paintings on the wall behind me.
BAT: Oh, wow! You’re a visual artist in many different forms.
CK: It’s all the same thing to me. Whether it’s writing or painting or whatever.
BAT: Can you name any other choices you made that contributed to the admirable pace of Flood?
CK: Yes. I put it in the present tense, except for the flashbacks of childhood or teenage stuff when I met my husband. There’s an immediacy to present tense. There’s no time when you’re writing to contemplate what’s going on. I wanted that present-tense medical part to be as immediate as possible to closely represent the actual feeling of being in it. That was the tool, and everyone said not to do it. But I wanted to use that wrench. I didn’t want to sacrifice it at the altar of ”everything has to be this way.”
BAT: Do you think workshopping our writing in groups creates a pressure to prostrate yourself at the altar of ”the right way to write”?
CK: I think the workshop model can be very helpful, especially if you have an excellent, inclusive teacher who’s very kind. But it can also be limiting at a certain point. You have to take ownership of what you’re doing and say, ”Thank you for all your advice. I’m going to do it my way anyway.”