Benefits of teaching memoir: it’s some kind of therapy thing

Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s home is now part of a Florida State Park.

When I assigned “Traits I Share with my Mother” as a Mother’s Day writing prompt, Bill opted to write about his stepmother. His essay starts decades ago, when he first came up with the expression “Good Betty/Bad Betty” to describe her behavior. Betty is 102 years old now, and Bill says the moniker still fits.
“My stepbrothers and I have used it ever since in our post-mortems on Betty visits,” he wrote. ”As in, ‘Which Betty was it this time?’” He conceded that the bad/good moniker could be applied to most of us. “But Betty’s ‘badness’ has always seemed particularly infuriating,” he wrote, following that statement up with this example:

A few years ago, she and I made a pilgrimage to the woodsy home/museum of Marjorie Rawlings, author of the wonderful book The Yearling. The museum is a few hours north of Orlando, the journey up was uneventful. We both loved the house and grounds, but the return trip was a different story. Betty questioned my driving, claimed I’d made one wrong turn after another, argued we were going in the wrong direction.

I finally snapped at her, and that’s when I noticed the problem. “Betty,” I said. “You have the map UPSIDE DOWN!”

An apology of some kind? No way. “Ok, Bill, you’re on your own. I’m taking a nap. Wake me up when we’re back. And good luck.”

Another Bad Betty example in that essay comes from a conversation Bill had with her recently about the atomic bomb. When Bill mentioned the first target was Hiroshima, Betty insisted the first target was Nagasaki. “No, Betty,” Bill corrected her. “I am pretty sure it was Hiroshima.”

That unleashed what Bill describes as a classic Bad Betty Barrage: “Bill, how would you know? You weren’t born then! I was a war bride, and my husband flew B-29s over Japan. This was OUR war!”

Bill surrendered.

The rest of Bill’s 500-word GoodBetty/Bad Betty essay describes Good Betty. “Happily, there is a Good Betty, too, who is intelligent, curious, adventurous, willing to listen and fun to talk with (okay, as long as you agree with her).”

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A week or two ago Bill sent me an email from a visit to Cleveland to see Betty. “I took a lot of my essays with me, figuring I would read some of them to my stepbrother and his wife.” Bill reported that his writing got a positive response. The only part of the “Bad Betty/Good Betty” piece his stepbrother took issue with was the very last line: At 102 she is mellowing a bit.

”No she is not!” he insisted.

Bill hadn’t anticipated reading many of his essays to Betty, but said she did listen to four or five of them with interest. “It’s possible I will not see her again, or that if I do, she won’t be very attentive or with-it,” he said, letting me know how glad he was to be able to share these memories with her now — especially the stories about his father and the trips they all went on together.

“At some point she interrupted me to ask,’ Is this some kind of therapy thing?’” he said. “I told her no. But of course, in a way, it is.”