There's No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things

By Valley Haggard

There's No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things is a memoir written in the aftermath of a father's death, exploring how his love, absence, deliriums, and ultimately, his mortality inform the trajectory of his daughter's life. Follow Valley Haggard through her childhood with artists and alcoholics onto a dude ranch in Colorado, a farm in Arkansas, a cruise ship in Alaska, and finally back to her childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. In the course of her vibrant and ever-evolving life, Valley navigates unhealthy relationships, addiction and recovery, child loss and birth, marriage, and the process of healing old wounds in order to create a family of her own. Written in the style of flash non-fiction, the narrative arcs towards connection and meaning in a world torn apart and then stitched back together, even though, sometimes there is still no accounting for the strangeness of things.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life in 10 Minutes Press
• Release date: Dec 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781949246223

Book preview

My Dad told me that before I was born he quit his job and set out for California in a VW bus with a few jugs of wine and a couple of friends, and that he has always had a thing for drugs and women.

He told me this was his own literary copy of the great metaphor.

I was conceived in a tent in the Shenandoah Valley on my mother’s birthday, October 19, 1974. The Valley of my Birth. The Shadow of the Valley of Death. The Valley of the Dolls.

One more cup of coffee before I go / to the valley below

Val-Pak

Valleydale Wieners, Valleydale Sausage.

Back Alley Valley.

Valley.

When I’m born my Dad sees himself shoot into outer space, far past the moon. He watches as a meteor soars to the earth and as it crashes he hears me cry, my head shooting through my mother’s legs, hooked into the stirrups. He can’t sleep for days so he stays up drawing my birth announcement and getting high with the neighbors.

My mother paints a giant mural of Adam and Eve and all of their animals on the wall above my crib. I love the lion most. My dreams are full of lions roaming our neighborhood, dangerous, beautiful, looking for me.

We have a small army of cats and my parents nurse an injured seagull they call HeShe back to life in our shed. HeShe and I hop around together until HeShe is healed and soars off without me into the big blue sky.

My mother sets up a two-foot tall clothesline in our backyard because I want to hang my own clothes and a dishpan of hot soapy water on the floor in the kitchen because I want to do my own dishes. Don’t wish your life away, my mother says when I tell her I want to be grown.

We don’t have a television but we dig red clay out of the backyard with our hands, firing cups and figurines on a baking sheet in the oven. We make Shrinky Dinks and I strap a doll to my hands and feet, so she can dance around the house with me, the sister I don’t have. My drawings of princesses and cats and little girls cover the walls.

The photographer at my parents’ wedding leaves the lens cap on so the only snapshots of the bride and groom are taken by a 7-year-old, like he’s staring up at the stars. At 22 my mother is beautiful with her cat-shaped eyes, updo, and cupid bow lips. My dad is tall and swashbuckling and only 19 years old.

A few years after their wedding, they both start dating other people. My Dad moves in with a woman and a man moves in with my mom. One night though, my mom knows she wants to have a baby, so she calls my dad and tells him to come home and after that they make me.

My mother is a beauty but she hates herself because she thinks she’s fat. Strangers say she is exotic and ask if she is Mexican, Chinese, Gypsy. She has tiny hands and tiny feet and is a foot shorter than my Dad who towers above her, a flower and a tree.

I am big and fat and healthy with many rolls of chin and thigh. My mom’s friends call us the Little Lady With the Big Baby and she molds clay sculptures of me lying across her naked belly, a nipple in my mouth. My mom smokes so I grab the ends of her long black hair with my fists. I sleep between my mom and dad with all of my dollies piled around me. When they wake up hungover, they breathe in my sunshine milk sweet breath and marvel at my happiness between them.

I eat a Camel and know the difference between a joint and a cigarette. Jennifer! my father yells. Valley put a peanut in her vagina! I still don’t know the difference between my mother and me.

I roam around the house trying to find my Dad after he moves out. Daze? I call. Daze? My mother hangs photos of him on the walls but photos are not what I want to see. When my mother is diagnosed with thyroid cancer and is admitted to the hospital, my Dad stays at our house with me. I am so angry at my mother for leaving, I take all of my drawings off the walls. She comes home with a scar across her neck like a noose, or a smile.

Sometimes my mother flies into rages. She has terrible menstrual cramps and I need too much of her body, her breasts, her time. Her mother has died after having her toes and then leg amputated from diabetes, and my Dad is gone. She scares me when she screams, so I scream back. We are lightning bolts striking across the same sky.

My mother tells me to go into my room, lock the door, and call 911 if she hits me. That scares her so bad she calls family services and tells them she is afraid of what might happen. Family services get her counseling and she is never violent, but her mood is my thermometer. When she is hot, my insides catch fire.

When I’m 2, my mom starts going to Al-Anon and then AA. I’m the kid on the floor beneath the haze of cigarette smoke, playing with baby dolls and coloring books. My mom wants to go back to school to study art education but she doesn’t have any money or know what to do with me. The ladies in AA tell her to pray about it.

How do I do that? she asks.

"Get quiet and imagine a higher power," they tell her.

That night my mother imagines a hot young guy she names Judah holding her tight. In the morning, I sit up next to her in bed and say, Mommy! My angels were with me last night!

My mother is awarded two scholarships, enrolls me at the university children’s co-op, and goes to art school.

For Christmas, Santa brings me a gingerbread house. I sneak into the living room before the sun comes up and cannot believe the miracle before me, a palace slathered in brilliant white icing, enticing rainbows of candied jewels dancing around the outside.

We don’t have a lot of money. My mom and I are on food stamps and my clothes are from the thrift store and sometimes the lights are shut off. My mom never lets me eat sugar but the gingerbread house is proof that dreams can come true.

I love it too much to eat it. I preserve it in my room like a shrine.

Over time the cats use it as a litter box as it slowly rots away.

My mother lies in bed crying because we are broke and the toilet has overflowed into the living room. I tell her a magic fish has come to make everything OK. The magic fish walks her through the house pointing out all of the miracles, the sun through the open window, the meowing cats, the beautiful art, Adam and Eve before they had children, and their lion on my wall.

One day after school, my Dad picks me up and says "Surprise! We’ve moved!" He leads me down the hall past our old apartment on Grace Street to a new apartment in the same building, farther down.

My Dad moves every year, and sometimes I sleep in a sleeping bag next to his bed, sometimes in a loft he’s built, sometimes I have a room of my own. But no matter where we are, he puts me to sleep with Uncle Wiggly stories, and in the morning wakes me up with the Pachelbel Canon on the record player, and a hot mug of Children’s Coffee he brings me in bed. Coffee with warm milk and honey. His coffee is breast milk, lifeblood to me.

Sometimes I miss the apartments or townhouses or rentals we leave behind, but in memory, they’re just a blur of rooftops and fences and walls and shafts of light and shadow falling through windows onto the floor.

In my Dad’s dream, I tell him I’m from Atlantis and he is so shocked he falls backward out of his chair. I’m from a lost civilization, a home I can’t return to. Part of me believes my Dad and I first met each other there.

In the grocery store, my mother steals walnuts from the produce rack, smashes them on the floor with the heel of her boot, and digs the meat out with her fingers. I’m a little girl, hiding one aisle over, pretending I’m at the store alone.

Our cat sleeps in the drying rack while dishes pile up in the sink. We eat dinner on a picnic blanket on the floor when the dining room table is piled too high with things. We don’t buy many things new, but she always scrapes together enough money when we need it.

My mother doesn’t want to ruin my creativity and she hates noise because her father always played the news loud at dinner, so we don’t have a television. We go to festivals and art shows and one time she asks a