Kelly Corrigan’s biography hooks the reader from the get
go. Things have changed dramatically in
her life, and you want to know why, how.
She had had a cool relationship with her mother while growing up. Now her mother was the one person she wanted
to have nearby. She had thought that all
the important stuff happened when you got away from home. Now she was settled with a home and family of
her own. What happened in her life to
make the change? Was it just growing up?
Glitter and Glue is how her mother describes Corrigan’s father and herself. He was the good
cop. She was the bad cop. He was the exuberant, encouraging support for
anything Corrigan chose to do. The
mother was the practical one, the structured one, the one who couldn’t ignore
the negatives.
Corrigan and a buddy decide to travel the world. They save their pennies, buy their tickets
and head off into their great adventure.
Her dad is supportive. Her mom
thinks it’s a dangerous waste of time.
All does go well until the girls find themselves in Australia with their
funds depleted. They want to work for a
few months to raise some cash, but can’t find any jobs. Finally, Corrigan gets hired as a nanny,
living in another family’s home, experiencing the new “family’s” drama. Suddenly,
with no chance to grow into the role, Corrigan finds herself in the position of
surrogate mother.
The drama seems to involve only a dad and his two
children. The mother had died not too
long before, after a long illness. The
dad is still shell-shocked, the little boy has not quite grasped what death
means, and the slightly older sister is bitter and suspicious of her new
nanny. Gradually, though, more
characters emerge from side apartment and back room. There is the college-age stepson who isn’t in
college. There is also the elderly father-in-law who does the family’s
laundry. Neither of these two materializes
until the father has left for the day. He hardly acknowledges their existence, but in
some sense each individual in the family is helping to hold the family
together. Corrigan finds her assumptions
challenged when it comes to people and their roles in other people’s
lives. She feels the gaping abyss left
by the loss of someone who was at once a person/wife/mother/daughter.
Fast forward and Corrigan has her own family. But cancer enters the picture. In stark horror, she sees her new life
merging with the experience of the Australian family. She wants, she needs her own mother. And her mother understands and drops
everything to be there for her.
Sometimes bad relationships can become better. Sometimes
it doesn’t take a whole lot of change. People
can still be who they are, but when you see them in a different light, you see
them as different people. I would keep
the name of this book somewhere in my files.
This is not a “how to fix relationships” book. But it might be a good one to recommend to a
resident’s family struggling with closure when relationships have been
strained.
© Donna Stuart, ADPC September 15, 2014
Corrigan, Kelly. Glitter and Glue. New York:
Ballantine Books, 2014.
