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Turning Memories Into Memoirs
In the Herstory program, women are remembering chapters of their lives, and turning them into books.
At the Herstory workshop at West Babylon’s Heart & Soul Community Counseling Center, Lonnie Mathis reads aloud from a memoir she is developing into a book. Mathis’ story is one of survival, but this reading recounts a scene from her childhood.
Night after night, when Lonnie Mathis went to bed in her grandparent’s house, she would pray, “Please, God, please, bring my mom here.”
Night after night, her mother didn’t come. And something scary would happen during the night, something she could never talk about.
Until now. Mathis is weaving the tattered events of her life into a book-length memoir. It’s a project she has undertaken after a 14-year struggle with drugs and, later, depression. And it has come about as a result of her involvement in a weekly workshop called Herstory.
She is one of nine women who gather Wednesday nights in the Heart & Soul Community Counseling Center in West Babylon to share their secret moments with one another, with the hope that they can turn their memories into memoirs. Each woman brings difficult episodes to the tablet: incest, abandonment, violence, sexual assault. But they bring the fond remembrances, too, the ones about finding love, giving birth, reaching fulfillment.
They share laughs as each reads aloud. A box of tissues is kept handy, for sobbing is inevitable.
Mathis, a 39-year-old who, at 5 foot 9 ½ inches, has the presence of a gentle giant, is reading from an account of her childhood, when she loved to sit, swinging her legs despite her grandmother’s rule that her legs be crossed at the ankles – the way a lady would sit. As she reads, the seems once again to be that little girl – the child who can’t keep her legs still, knowing all the while that she’ll be feeling her grand mother’s sharp rap.