Kelly Marie Carlin-McCall, B.A., M.A. is known for her work in comedy and writing. Here we discuss a wide range of issues in an extensive talk on comedy and life. Here is session 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In the United States, women got the right to vote in 1920. 1918 in the UK. 1919 in Canada, depending on the area. In the early part of the book, Alice, your mother’s mother, said, “Women don’t go to college,” to your mother, Brenda after she earned a full scholarship to go to Ohio Wesleyan to study piano.
Kelly Marie Carlin-McCall: Yes, yes.
Jacobsen: I don’t know if that is the perpetuation of limitations for people in society. Do you think that statement by Alice to Brenda was reflective of that?
Carlin-McCall: Yes, this was in Dayton, Ohio. In Alice’s family, no one went to college, especially a woman. Maybe, a few men went to college, but it was a working class family. Women could only be teachers, nurses, or wives. You were only a teacher or nurse until you got married, basically, and then you were an old maid. [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing]
Carlin-McCall: Those were your only choices, in the Midwest, certainly. When you’re not given a lot of choices, and people around you are not given a lot of choices, you can’t visibly see those choices, even with my mother earning this scholarship. It is limited thinking. My mother was someone hoping to break free from her small, Midwest life – very shackled and imprisoned by that.
Jacobsen: Ken, the good boy next door, impregnated her. They got married. She had a miscarriage of twins. They divorced. All by the age of 20. For those growing up in more recent generations, that is a drastic story.
Carlin-McCall: Yes, yes.
Jacobsen: Later on, your father asked Art, your grandfather, to marry your mom in the Spencer’s Steak House urinal in Dayton, Ohio. (Carlin, 2015, p. 9)
Carlin-McCall: Yes. [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing] These are dramatic experiences for families, especially because, in a way, family narratives can become their own mythology, where these are the stories families tell each other.
Carlin-McCall: Absolutely, 100%, 100%. Yes.
Jacobsen: Were these percolating in your mind when you were coming up?
Carlin-McCall: The reason I wrote the book was that I knew I had such great stories to tell. Everything we learn about our parents when we’re children we use to try to figure out how the world works. I only knew my mother’s experience of her childhood through her eyes.
I didn’t know it through her mother’s eyes, or her father’s eyes for that matter. Those apocryphal tales that your parents tell you when you’re first meeting them. It shapes your identity as a child, as a family member, and how you see the world, and what are the rules and who breaks them.
We’re trying to figure it all out. I know that my mom’s story about how her mom was so controlling of her did affect me. I didn’t understand the connection between that and my mother’s pain and alcoholism growing up. I was a kid, but I did feel the oppression.
The same oppression from her mother. Not necessarily from my mother, but through my mother because she hadn’t worked through it herself enough. She carried so much bitterness and rage about it all. The oppression acted through me too and affected how I comported myself in the world as a powerful woman. Or, at first, not a powerful woman.
Jacobsen: There are numerous little heartwarming stories from when you were young throughout the text. The ‘stink pot or baby doll’ game. Of course, you were never stinking pot.
I think about the time your parents got Hobo Kelly to send you Colorforms. You cherished watching your father pack, with OCD qualities, before leaving town, for 2-3 weeks.
But at the same time, my feeling that I get from that is a desperate sense of wanting to connect in any way possible. With respect to those moments, where there were genuine family time and connection, and then the other times when there wasn’t, but you made up your own connection through simple observation of your father packing and paying attention to the minute details such as the OCD nature of it, there was – I hate the cliché – a hole needing to be filled.
You were, as children are more creative, finding more ways to fill that.
Carlin-McCall: Yes, I think it’s always difficult to connect with fathers. Fathers may be different nowadays, but, certainly back then, fathers were the ones who left the house, didn’t do the parenting, and brought home the pay cheque. There are that natural hole and void that was around for kids to that time, besides my own personal history.
But having my dad on the road for so long, all of the time. He was gone 1/2 to 2/3 of the year. That is a long time without a dad. Add to this the complication of my mother’s alcoholism and mental health issues (anxiety and depression), it created times without true connection. We were in survival mode. Luckily, the first couple years of my life had deep bonding, which is essential for deep connection.
So, the deep connection was there on some deep level, but from age 3 onward, until my mom’s sobriety in some ways, into my adulthood there was a need for deep connection. There was a melancholy around it. From there, my dad’s ambition and creative genius, and the creative drive were focused on the work, not on the family. There was a deep longing for connection, for all three of us.
When those moments of coming together and ordinary family moments, or even the extraordinary ones too, those bonded us. Even with the bonding of the chaos, I think created this sense of this mythology around my life. Here we are bonding over the stories like Summerfest in Milwaukee and dad getting arrested, things like that. They became funny cocktail party stories later, but there’s a deep bonding when you survive with people through harrowing moments. So, we did have a deep connection in that way. A profound connection, also.
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Original publication (1, 2, 3, and 4) on www.in-sightjournal.com.
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Part 1 can be read here.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images