MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT

Mentor Commentary:
Katie Strine

Recipient Reflection: 
Janet Marstine

The Ring

Creative Non-Fiction by Janet Marstine

In the ER, monitors beeped, privacy curtains snapped shut on their tracks, and medical voices conversed in clipped rhythms while patients moaned and their families tried to soothe them. My mother was unconscious. I sat uncomfortably in a hard plastic chair beside her, my head pounding, and caressed her left hand, touching her finger and the ring encircling it. 

Mom’s hand was stiff and shiny, telltale signs of scleroderma, the autoimmune disease she developed that caused her body to produce excess collagen, first thickening and hardening her skin, then attacking her internal organs. My 70-year-old mother was dying, and I wanted just one more chance to crawl into bed with her, even though I was almost 50. I longed for the warmth of her belly, the scent that had comforted me since birth. 

“Put her ring somewhere safe, just wear it,” my father murmured, preoccupied with his own grief. 
Mom once had it on at the local convenience store when a masked man with a gun rushed in. “All I could think of was getting rid of that ring or he might kill me for it, so I threw it into a box of Clark Bars,” she later recounted. After the robber took off, she retrieved it and put it back on her finger. 

Looking over at Dad for reassurance, I gingerly removed the ring. It had a hinged band, specially designed when Mom’s knuckles became too swollen to slide off the original Tiffany setting. I turned her hand over to release the hinge, whispering, “You’d want me to do this, I know.” But still, I felt like a thief. After momentarily wrestling to get it off her finger, I grasped the ring in my sweaty hand and slipped it on. Just temporarily, I thought. That diamond, a rare luxury in its class , was way too flamboyant. I’d keep it in the safe deposit box.

But from the moment I put it on my own ring finger, I felt grounded. That perfect circle, symbol of loyalty, protection, and heritage, connected me to Mom in that bodily way I so needed.

Though the ring has become integral to my sense of well-being, it’s a problematic legacy. New acquaintances glance at it and see me differently. I get flustered when people make a fuss. “That’s a five-table ring,” a restaurant server once joked. “You can spot it from five tables away.” Sometimes I get my nails manicured and polished so they complement the ring. But then I change my mind and keep my nails short and plain to avoid attracting attention to the stone. I regularly volunteer in economically marginalized communities, and I worry that wearing the ring makes me tone-deaf. In big cities, I turn the diamond around into my palm to hide it so I’m not a walking target and then feel the lurking guilt of my own biases.

How do my conflicting emotions about the ring convey a deeper story of ambivalent feelings about my wealth and class? If I sold the ring and donated the money, what good could I do for others? If I sold it and took a trip around the world, what could I learn? And if I pass the ring to my own daughter, Jeanie, will she also be burdened by its complexities?

Ultimately, the rootedness I feel to my mother by wearing the ring is so compelling, it trumps the moral maze  of issues it provokes. Wherever I go, whatever I do,  the ring is a talisman of Mom’s strength. When I’m anxious, I center myself by instinctively massaging the back of the band with my right thumb. When I’m hopeful, I envision the prism of colors the stone projects as a rainbow overhead. And when I’m unsure, I channel Mom’s guidance and compassion through the weight, the sheer physicality, of the ring. I’ve never taken it off.

Janet Marstine

Janet Marstine is a retired Associate Professor of Museum Studies, University of Leicester (UK). She’s writing a memoir, “The Trans-Adjacent Sister,” examining how her brother’s transgender identity, first manifested four generations ago, shaped the person Janet is today. Janet’s creative non-fiction has been published in the Ginosko Literary Journal. She lives in Maine, one of her two favorite places, and, each winter, visits the other, Jodhpur, India, where she leads trauma-informed journaling workshops with LGBTQIA+ young people at Sambhali Trust.