Like most people, I was terrified of public speaking. All those eyes on you, giving you their full attention, judging you, and waiting for you to humiliate yourself. The opportunity for disaster was too great to ever risk it. As a result, I used to help my husband write speeches and toasts and sit by […]
-
-
Our Histories Live On
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Essays
I could have felt hurt or offended. A very close friend admitted to me that he couldn’t bring himself to finish my recently published book, a seriocomic memoir called, “Don’t Say a Word!: A Daughter’s Two Cents”. The book is about my parents’ bizarre unraveling at the end of their lives and their refusal to […]
-
Grandmother Surveilled
// Elizabeth Marcus // Decoding Our Parents, Essays
Suddenly finding myself the full-time nanny of my two-year-old grandson Aiden was an experience in swinging from the horrifying to the hilarious by the moment. What landed me in the job was a family emergency—my daughter was hospitalized with frightening symptoms—and here was a way I could help. On the one hand, I got to be […]
-
A Shocking Story
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Essays
The photo suggests a peaceful day in the country, but the accompanying story relates anything but. This is Hix Bridge, in Westport, MA, where Joseph Grinnell, a 16 year-old apprentice, encountered three enslaved fugitives attempting to reach a Quaker safe house in 1790s New Bedford. The grim and shocking account was excerpted in the […]
-
Know Thyself: Through Photos
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays
It is generally held that the road to mastering internal conflict winds through our past and back to the conflict’s source. As children, we do our best to make sense of what feels wrong, with whatever limited understanding we have at that moment. And so we often come to false conclusions–most commonly that we were […]
-
Infant Care: Us vs. Them
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Essays, Reverse Parenting
When my daughter Zoe came to visit with 5 month-old Zach, my first grandchild, we looked together through the photo album I’d made of her first year. In it we found a picture of me feeding her in the very same rocker in which she liked to sit feeding her baby. Nothing had changed. And […]
-
Love At First Sight: My Side
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Essays, Travel Lessons
My husband Michael and I fell in love at first sight, and for fifty years I’ve always told the story about that afternoon the same way. We met by chance. He’d been asked to give a lift to a college friend of mine who had been invited to the same out of town wedding. On […]
-
Roz to the Rescue
// Elizabeth Marcus // Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Memoir Writing
It’s not surprising that when you have spent your life worrying that your words will be pounced on and held up for scrutiny by nitpicking judges, writing what you want can take more courage than you have. Particularly if it is the nitpicking judges that you want to write about. You will need a mentor […]
-
Early Trauma That Won’t Let Go
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays
We tend to take our strong aversions as a given, but behind them there surely lies an explanation and a story full of feeling. Recently, I had reason to recall my having once been so allergic to French as to have become entirely deaf-mute in the language, a condition I’d never questioned. So, when I […]
-
First Love, Revisited
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Essays
I’d been happily married for 46 years, and yet my heart still raced whenever my college boyfriend crossed my mind. We hadn’t been in touch since the affair ended without grief, when Ernst graduated and returned to Germany. But when my husband Michael and I decided to visit Berlin, the thought of seeing Ernst again, […]