Daria Doering

I had a hard time assembling my remarks, because I couldn’t quite decide which direction to go in with this.  So I decided to do what I always do, when possible, which is to go in both directions. Starting with the difficult one.  So here goes.

It’s often hard for me to talk about my life at all.  Because I feel like almost all of it has been tinged with pain.  And I don’t believe in suffering in silence either.  Though I have to say, like pretty much everything in my life, I got this belief from my mother.  Sometimes I forget that for a bit, but everything always comes back to her.  In this case her belief that through shining a light, the light of truth or transparency, on our pain, we can heal it.  I’ve been trying to take opportunities to heal my pain, all my life. This is another opportunity, and I feel that I’m surrounded by loving friends.  So I hope you will bear with me and bear witness to all of this.

While going through all these photographs, in preparing the slideshow, I was struck with what a nice little family we seemed to be.  And I thought – What happened?  Why did it end?  Why did they get divorced?  Then I remembered, of course – Nicki, the encounter groups – those two things just blew it all apart.

When I mentioned this thought to my daughter, she said – “I think something happened when you moved to California,” which is true – this crazy, wonderful state of California can cause all sorts of odd things to happen.  Nina also said, “Maybe your mother didn’t have enough to do,” and that’s also true.  If she’d had a career, things might have been very different.  She created her own career, completely made it up, and it was very radical.

Back to the subject of pain, I believe strongly that sharing our pain brings healing … and that’s a lot of what my mother was about … she had a lot of pain herself.  A lot of it you could call sexual pain or relationship pain, which was my mother’s specialty, I would say.  Her pain came from her upbringing and her parents’ divorce and so on.

So guess what, folks, I’m sharing my pain.  It’s in what I wrote in the bio, most of which I don’t normally talk about – everything from having an autistic sister who ruined my life, to be honest, to my parents’ “open marriage” and affairs, to a bunch of strangers living in our house when I was a child and teenager, to my father being arrested, to ten years of being “confronted” about my character flaws by my mother.

All l I ever wanted was to fit in, to be normal and live a normal life, and I sure as hell never got that chance.  It was not in the cards for me.  I had everything from a sister who didn’t talk, who everywhere we went emitted blood curdling screams and ate garbage off the ground … to these huge honesty encounters at our house.

Plus I really received no guidance.  We were never part of a religious community.  So many people feel they were abused by religion … my view is – give me a break, it also kind of tells you what to do in life, and I didn’t have that. Plus the main thing is that my parents, especially my mother, were these big laissez-fair parents.  My mother used to say, “Do whatever you want as long as you tell us.”  That was cool, in a way … I appreciated not being overly “controlled.” But it also wasn’t cool, because I always felt like I was wandering in the dark, ignorant, confused, that I didn’t know how to act or what was expected of me.  And that’s not my nature. I’m a perfectionist, or at least a conscientious person.  I like to do everything right.  And I didn’t know what was right.  So I’ve taken the rest of my life trying to figure that out!  Being in my mother’s group was part of that.

Of course my spiritual belief is that we all choose our parents and the main events of our lives before we are born.  So I am quite sure that this is what I signed up for.  But I think that the way life goes, we sign up for something challenging, and then once we are living it, we think – hey, I think I want to return this life! I can’t do this!  This is too hard!  But that’s not how it works.  It’s too late! We’re stuck!  And I’m sure that’s for the best.

So back to the bio … well, I thought I was writing a short obituary, but it turned into a six-page narrative.  For some reason, everything I write turns out to be six pages long, I have no idea why.  Anyway I ended up thinking the story needed to be told, and I don’t have an hour up here so I wrote it down, just the bare outline, really.

I wrote down the facts as I remember them.  I told the story straight, dark as it might be at times.  My main feeling was, by God, I had to live through this, so I don’t feel it’s fair to me and my experience or to anyone else involved and their experience to cover anything up.

However the painful aspects are not what I think about anymore … almost never at this point … my focus is on all the good that happened.  So that will be the focus from here on out.  I will try to switch gears completely and talk about the good things.

My husband Mike and I will do our crazy brand of presentation here.  While I am always overly serious, Mike tends to lightens things up. And I don’t even see this as a serious occasion.  My mom had a life well-lived, that’s for sure.  She always tried to be happy, with varying degrees of success.  And Nicki … I don’t know … I hope she gets some karmic credit for all she went through.  And all her caretakers as well.

And my wonderful husband … I used to utterly upset him with all my crazy ideas, but now he just says, “There’s nothing I can’t do with a shot or two of tequila,” and carries on!

To begin with, and most importantly, my mother was the inspiration for everything I am, everything I have done in my life and everything I ever will do.  And I mean that 100%.  She was an amazing teacher.

Some of you may know a lot about the serious part of my mom, but I wanted to talk about some of the lighter parts, the ways we had fun together.  So I’m going to relate some memories, which are kind of random, which Mike will help me with, and I will comment on some of the items on the Alter of Life that I put together.

When I was a child in New York, what I ate every morning for breakfast was macaroni & cheese from a can … Franco America.  I couldn’t find that brand in the store, so I looked on the internet.  What I found was a Facebook group of “Fans of Franco-American macaroni & cheese,” with over 600 members!  So I joined it, and brought these cans of Chef Boy-R-Dee, which isn’t nearly as good.

Other foods she used to make for me – I was the oldest child, so they were just for me – were junket, a sort of curdled milk pudding that was popular 60 years ago – and you can still buy Junket rennet tablets to make it – and rice pudding, which is still around.  I was a carb-o-holic from a young age.

My mom was always a fantastic musician.  She had a beautiful singing voice.  She played piano from the time she was a child.  She said that she spent hours a day practicing piano as a teenager.  She was sort of down on herself over it, as she felt she had escaped from life with music and books, but I consider it time well spent.

Later she learned guitar and then accordion, which I love and feebly try to play myself.  On the Alter of Life, you can see a little guitar and accordion … not hers, but small ones we had.  Also a Stephen Foster song book … she loved Stephen Foster who wrote so many classics in the mid 1800s … everything from “Oh Susanna!,” “Old Folks at Home” (Way up and down the Swanee River) and “My Old Kentucky Home” to “Old Black Joe” and “Massa’s in the Cold Hard Ground.”  But our very favorite book was the Fireside Book of Folk Songs, written by Margaret Bradford Boni, who was one of Connie’s teachers at the City and Country School … she loved her and told stories about her occasionally.

Another strong memory I have was of my parents always reading to me before bed.  My dad read me all the Dr. Doolittle books, and my mom read me all the Mary Poppins books, there are three, and some of the Wizard of Oz books, both of which were her very favorites.  Kids today probably don’t even know that over 30 Wizard of Oz books were written.  One of my very favorite books was The Five Little Peppers … there were also 6-8 of those books, though my mom said the later ones, after the Peppers went to live with wealthy friends, were not as good as the first book, in which they were very poor. I still remember my mom saying that Mrs. Pepper did sometimes go on and on about things in the book, such as how “dear” candles were … there was no electricity in those days, and even candles were too expensive to use very much.  There were so many other books, but one of my all-time favorites, which we read much later at the Center was Pollyanna.  Don’t let anyone ever tell you that there is anything bad about Pollyanna … it’s one of the greatest books ever written.

In general my mom was an Anglophile … she loved anything English, although I don’t think she ever actually went to England … but that’s why I have the tea cup and saucer on the alter.

My mom was artsy in other ways.  When I was 8 or 10 she collected boxes to make pop art sculptures, which Andy Warhol was doing then.  She collected soap boxes, cereal boxes, any boxes, and glued them together.

She also, although the home I grew up in, in the elementary school years, was rented and very modest, kept a scrapbook of home decorating ideas, and that was really fun.  I still remember that there was a kitchen we both loved that was like a ‘50’s style diner, with red round bar stools, spiral striped pedestals, maybe red horses that you could sit on in there somewhere, maybe a black and white checkerboard floor … I just loved it.

My parents finally bought a house, when I was 12, in La Jolla Shores, a few blocks from the beach, for $55,000.  Those were the days!  They had looked at so many houses that their realtor finally said “to hell with it” and sold them his own house!  Then they actually got to do some minor remodeling … they put down some new flooring, which I think was vinyl, created two more bedrooms out of some spaces that had been something else, for our large live-in population, and they had some furniture made – couches for our living room with huge drawers beneath them that were actually day beds, with twin mattresses and lots of interesting pillows in the back … for our frequent visitors to sleep on.

Some other things I appreciate about my mom were:

She always encouraged me to take lessons … when I was a child I took roller skating lesson and horseback riding lessons, which she had suggested, even though she was afraid of horses herself.

She taught me how to choose the right husband and be married – even though her own marriage had fallen apart, she taught me what I needed to know.  Her belief was that husbands and wives should go their separate ways, as long as they were faithful and came together at night.

She and my dad loved food … they also loved being thin and fit, so she never fried anything in her entire life.  But she was an excellent cook, and I learned so many dishes and recipes from her.  Some had a French twist.  One of her favorites to cook was cheese soufflé.

We also had a dream when I was little called “food day,” or the day we were finally going to get to eat whatever we wanted!  I was finally going to get to have more than one taco from Taco Bell, and that just seemed like heaven!  We made a list of all the foods we were going to eat … Sadly it never came to pass, or maybe that was just as well!

So we had our dreams: food and interior design, and what we actually did, which was horses, books and music!  Not bad!

Incidentally, I grew up in what I call the cradle of civilization of the fast food industry – the SDSU college area.  I grew up going to one of the first Jack-in-the-Boxes, the very first Taco Bell, the very first Der Weinerschnitzel, and much later, the very first Rubio’s, in Pacific Beach.  I get a kick out of that.

And I need to mention clothes!  We both had an absolute passion for Lanz clothes.  You may know the famous nightgowns, often with Tyrolean stripes, flowers and hearts.  Back in the day, Lanz also made a line of dresses, and had stores.  We would take these monster shopping trips to Lanz when they had a sale.  They must have blanched when they saw us coming, because we would try on half the clothes in the store … just stacks and stacks of clothes … and buy a few items. Then they would be left with all these clothes to put away.  We did get some awesome clothes.  And I still have “the hat”!  We were both obsessed with this hat, which one of us bought at Lanz, and would trade it back and forth.

Moving on to the group years, probably my most outstanding memory that maybe encapsulates it all was when the APA, the American Psychological Association, was going to have its convention in San Diego, and my mother decided we should go and do guerilla theater there.  So we trooped down to the community concourse, or wherever it was, set up a booth with my mother’s writings, and our props, and acted out something or other. I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember the daring it took to do this.

My parents both displayed such raw courage that it’s mind-boggling.  It blew my mind.  Not physical courage, but emotional courage.  Both my parents took risks, bucked the trend, and were fighters. They were seekers for truth, personal healing, and a better world.

My mother was nothing if not experimental … she experimented with how to help people, honesty, relationships.  She made plenty of mistakes, but she put herself out there and tried.  Studies show that people’s greatest regrets are not from what they do, whether it succeeds or fails, but from what they don’t do. Connie did something, and gave it her all.

My parents were both amazing people, and it has taken me my whole life to come to terms with being their child.  I’m still trying to live up to their legacy, or complete it.

I never needed to go far afield for inspiration … my parents were just it!  Also my grandparents, my mother’s father was a prolific author and my father’s mother was a best-selling author as well.  They spanned the globe, so to say, from the social sciences to psychology to finance to Hollywood.  So whatever bad things I said about any of them, forget it, unimportant, I just feel very grateful and blessed …

So hail to the truth! Hail Constance and Nicole!  Both one-of-a-kind type individuals.  Adelante!  Or as my mother would say, Onward and Upward!  Or if that seemed like too much, she would say, “Put one foot in front of the other.”  Or as my grandmother said, “the key to writing is to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

So there you have it. If you want my mother’s view of how her parents and the New Yorker magazine ruined her life, you can read her article, which is the only one of her writings that I have.  I also noticed, after reading it for the first time in over 40 years, that it is six pages long.

If you want my view of how my parents and sister ruined my life, you just heard it and perhaps read it.

And some day my children may comment on the same.  I hope not, as I sure tried to break that cycle, but I’m not sure if I succeeded. I don’t even know if it’s possible. My mother once told me that no matter what I did, my children would still be neurotic and need to see therapists. Which really pissed me off, but what else is new.

And if you think I’m terrible for saying all this, all I can tell you is that it’s what my mother would have wanted.  I am my parents’ child.

I haven’t said much about Nicki, maybe for obvious reasons.  I will say one thing.  That since her passing, I keep dreaming about her.  In these dreams, I am being nice to her, hugging her, something I have to admit did not happen in real life.  We are reconciling in the spirit world of dreams.