Parenting: LOVE IS
THE BEST ART OF ALL
by Joyce Maynard
Told at The Moth in New York City, 2006
In the family where I grew up, no blood was ever shed, at least not the
kind that was visible. In all the years of living under my parents’
roof, I never broke a bone. My mother and father never one time had to
take me to the emergency room, and I strongly suspect that we never had
to buy a replacement for our untouched box of Band Aids. No need: my parents
hovered over me so closely that no pain or physical injury could occur.
We lived in the state of New Hampshire, but never set my feet into ski boots. I don’t think a piece of athletic equipment ever crossed our threshold. My mother made sure that I didn’t enter the water for swimming until a full hour after eating, and my father stood over me and brushed away the mosquitos before they landed.
But every night at 6:00, he climbed the stairs to our attic and took out the vodka. Through the night he drank and painted. And sometimes -- eleven o’clock, midnight, maybe -- he might summon me to his attic studio, to study his beautiful, lyrical landscapes of the British Columbia of his youth as a painter, and to remind me with poetically drunken eloquence of the sacrifice that he had made, giving up the life of an artist to be a father to my sister and me. In the morning, we all got up and acted as if nothing had happened.
The drinking happened year round, but holidays were a particularly stressful time in our family. More than one Christmas, my father threw the tree across the floor. Every December, in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, my mother took off for her big trip of the year, to Princeton, New Jersey, to mark college board essays -- a great treat that, for me, would mean the gift of a week’s worth of hotel soaps and little plastic shampoo bottles, when she returned. While she was gone, though, it was my job to hide the car keys.
As two hugely gifted people, hugely frustrated in their own artistic lives, my parents raised my sister and me to believe that creative expression was a requirement for our lives -- and that we would win, for ourselves, the success and acknowledgement which had so unfairly eluded them. That was not simply their promise, it was our obligation. But for me -- a girl who took for granted the notion of making art, and accomplishing big things -- it was another goal that seemed most elusive and wonderful: I dreamed that someday I might be part of a happy family. And I believed that my best shot at having happy relatives was to give birth to them.
So I married young, at 23. Over the years my husband and I would both come to realize we were a poor match for each other, but we shared a creative passion. He was a painter and I was a writer, and we burned to do work that mattered. Still -- unfashionably, for those times -- we both felt that there was no creative undertaking more thrilling and potentially fulfilling, than to make and raise children. We got right down to it.
One of the things that I loved about having babies was the sense you had, with a baby, that everything remained possible still. For a brief moment, at least, no damage had been done. Holding our newborn daughter in my arms, I saw a person who was still perfect, a person with a clean slate, and I so wanted to keep her that way.
I had none of my parents’ tendencies towards physical protection, for physical injury. Some peole might even have thought of me as lax, for the casual way I let very young children pick her up or my readiness to set her down on the ground and let her get dirty. I never worried much about germs. To me, the greatest dangers to me had to do with emotional pain, the terror of witnessing heartbreak, the disappointment of failed dreams.
Audrey was 18 months old when she got chicken pox. Since the day of her birth, she’d been the possessor of a full head of amazingly thick black hair, and of course I knew that if a person scratched the scabs on her scalp, no hair would grow back there. So now I stood over her to guard each precious follicle. I missed one, and when I realized that--realized that there was going to be this one hair that would not grow -- I wept.
I wanted so many things for my daughter. One -- that I had not had myself as a child -- was a sibling who would adore her, to be her playmate and sidekick. Providing her with that formed the basis for the first of the increasing number of great battles with my husband. For four years we fought about it -- my husband wanting to live the life of an artist, and I, to create this happy family -- if it killed us. And the battles nearly did.
It took four years, but our son Charlie was born, and two years later, our son Willy.
Then, as now, I worked as a writer, but I didn’t live anything close to the life of an artist. I was a breadwinner, and a mother, whose chief occupation, I would have told anyone who asked, was to make a happy home for my children.
It wasn’t enough that our children have a stable, secure childhood. What I wanted for them was a magical one. And so I lived in a state of virtually uninterrupted mania -- rising before dawn to make muffins, racing to pick them up after school for art projects and expeditions to interesting, stimulating spots, arranging their apple slices in the shape of a flower, and flowers into garlands, and refrigerator boxes into playhouses -- shooting off rockets and sewing doll clothes and launching paper boats in the stream and driving two hours to Boston (never mind if it was a blizzard outside) to see an exhibit on dinosaurs or pyramids, always with the idea that I had the power to make their lives wonderful, to protect them from disappointment and pain.
I was always what experts now might call "an overfunctioner", but holidays brought on the most extreme behavior. I created extraordinary three-day festivals for their birthdays, with home made cakes and a pin the tail on the donkey on the wall, painted by my husband, featuring a portrait of Audrey riding on his back. There were scavenger hunts in which every clue was a poem, and puppet shows and sparklers and a magician, and a man who made animals out of balloons, and a row of borrowed sewing machines lined up in our kitchen one year, with a pile of fabric and lace to choose from, so every little girl at the party could sew her own miniskirt.
Valentine’s Day was another opportunity for an extravaganza: The entire month of February, we cleared our dining room table and set out all the art supplies, filled with glitter and every conceivable kind of paint to make amazing Valentines. Raised to believe in making art as something close to a sacrament, I think what I brought to my parenting was the notion that if you tried hard enough, you could create happiness the way you could make paintings or write stories. Through a kind of wild creative explosion, an endless outpouring of art supplies and stories, plays and movies, dances and songs and poems. I might be spending my days ghost writing articles for a parenting magazine -- advice on toilet training or sibling rivalry -- but my sons and daughter would be spared that kind of frustration. My father’s tragedy -- that he had to make paintings in our attic, in the middle of the night -- would not be my children’s.
Of all the seasons of the year, though, there was none that consumed my manic parenting energy the way Christmas did. With my homemade cookies and gingerbread house projects, our annual trip into the woods to cut the tree, and the ornament making and caroling parties and trips to hear black gospel music, and deliver gifts, and decorate -- haunted by the memories of the Decembers of my own childhood -- the tilting tree, the lurching father -- I gave over the whole month of December to giving our children what I had missed: a happy holiday. Or the appearance of one, anyway.
I didn’t buy their gifts at Toys-R-Us. I wanted to provide for my children the kinds of objects, the kinds of gifts that might really have been made in Santa’s workshop. So I searched the entire East Coast for a ventriloquist’s puppet for my son Willy, and ended up driving 200 miles to find it. The year my father died, I inherited a sum total of $500. My husband had the money earmarked to buy snow tires. But I went out one day and bought a $500. dollhouse for Audrey -- a choice that precipitated another of our grand battles.
My husband was increasingly appalled and disgusted by the display of these Christmases, but his approach, more and more, was to ignore my excesses and disappear into his studio. Christmas Eve, though, watching me set out the array of extraordinary presents I’d spent the year acquiring and assembling (that year included a department store mannequin that I’d found in a going-out-of-business department store in northern New Hampshire) he insisted that half of the items be removed from the room. Later that day, I took the the home made buche de noel I’d just constructed (marzipan mushrooms, butter cream frosting) and smashed it down the garbage disposal. I don’t suppose our children had an entirely magical December 25th that year.
Of course, one of the problems of providing magical objects in your child’s life is that you then must protect that they not get lost. And I had recognized by this time that although blood could be dripping from my veins and I wouldn’t notice, when the pain was theirs, I sensed it on my nerve endings. And when that’s the case -- when another person’s pain is excruciating to your own self -- you do everything you can to protect against their experiencing it. My own disappointments and sorrows, I was accustomed to. My children’s were unbearable.
In particular -- as a woman who focused unduly on possessions -- I suffered over lost toys, or pieces to toys. Usually tiny ones. So every time a Barbie came into our lives, the first thing I thought was, "Guard those shoes." One year for Christmas, we presented our son Charlie with with the Playmobil Pirate Ship. And of all the elaborate rigging and pirates and little items in the treasure chests and little coins in the pirate ship, the one piece of this toy that Charlie loved best was this tiny gold sword, roughly the size of a thumbnail clipping.
I knew so well the heartbreak that could come, if he lost it, that I said to him very specifically, when we went out to the station wagon one night, "Please don’t take the sword with you." But he loved that sword so much, he liked to bring it everywhere with him.
For the first twenty minutes of the ride, I could hear him in the back, playing pirates with his brother. Then I heard this gasp from the back of the station wagon, and I knew at once what it signaled: that the sword had fallen out the window. For the next hour and a half, I circled a stretch of highway with my high beams on. I did find the sword, although I was almost struck by an 18-wheeler retrieving it.
Back when I was growing up, in a small town in New Hampshire, in a family where money was in short supply, I had longed to see the world and wished for a bigger life. (Maybe the truth was, I wanted to get out of that house. Away from the sorrow within. But I saw travel as the way of accomplishing that.) And so now, as a parent, myself, raising children with little money, in an even smaller New Hampshire town, I dreamed of showing them the world. One day I saw an ad for an amazing promotion: a weekend in London for the unbelievable price of $100.
I bought three tickets for them and one for me and we headed out to London. Once there, I told them I would buy them each one special object.
For Charlie, the choice was a set of beautiful, brightly colored leather juggling balls. He was so entranced by the feel of those balls in his hands that shortly after their purchase, as we descended that afternoon into the London Tube, he began to juggle with them.
I said, "No, Charlie, don’t juggle in the Tube," but it was too late. One of the balls fell into the pit.
For just a moment, we stood there, looking at the beautiful juggling ball: green and purple leather, lying on the track. I looked at my son’s face: ashen with disappointment. Pain. I jumped in after it.
I got out before the train arrived, of course, or I couldn’t be telling this story. Though I didn’t escape the screams of my daughter, who pounded on me with such force that later I would see a bruise. "I hate you," she screamed. "You’re crazy."
Here was the moment, as my daughter stood on the edge of the subway platform pounding on my body, weeping and screaming, that I realized that I was becoming an insane mother.
That Mother’s Day -- I was 35 years old -- I got a call that my own mother had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, and I was going, of course, to be with her for what proved to be the last weeks of her life. In fact, my mother’s was not the only death that summer. My marriage also ended, and it was probably about time. It had been many years now, since things had been good between my children’s father and me.
As much grief as I felt over the death of my mother, and the end of my marriage, there was no moment harder, that year, than telling our children our marriage was over, no sorrow greater than having to inflict this pain on them. It was the last time, maybe, that my husband and I could truly share an experience: our shared sorrow over telling them that news. I can still see them very clearly -- Audrey, Charlie and Willy, ages 11, 7 and 5 -- as they came into the living room that night. They sat together on the couch, looking as if they expected news of another great adventure coming up, instead of what they heard us say.
Each of them responded in their very different ways, so like themselves. Audrey was the oldest, and had learned the lesson well by now that if you have a mother who feels your pain so acutely, the best thing is to conceal pain from her, when it strikes. So now she made a stiff little smile and said, "I think I’ll go watch Cosby."
Willy, the youngest, stood up and let out an animal moan, a wail, a sound I had never heard come out of him before or since, thank God. He flung himself against the wall with the force of a grown man, and said, "You mean you’ll be divorced for all my life?" He kicked so hard his shoe flew off.
Charlie, who was 7, got up silently, and went into the kitchen. The table was, as always, covered with art supplies. He took out the colored pencils and he began to draw. He didn’t say a word, just sat there, working on a picture.
Only later -- after they’d all gone to bed -- did I see what he had drawn. It was done in pencil: the image of a heart. Not like the Valentine hearts of our February festivals, but inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter, so painstakingly formed it was as if he ‘d been drawing in blood. After he’d drawn the outline of the heart, he’d shaded it with little sort of shadow marks behind it. Then he made a line like a piece of picture wire, as if this heart had been a picture, and then he made a little dot in the center as if the picture had been hanging on a wall.
And then my seven year old son had written, for his writer mother and his artist father, these words: "Love is the best art of all."
I think that was the moment that I knew the foolishness of ever supposing that I could protect my children from pain -- the folly of supposing it would be a good thing, even if you could.
That was eighteen years ago. Since then, all of us have known our share of grief and loss and sorrow. For many years, our children traveled back and forth between our two houses, with their belongings always in brown paper bags. They never seemed to get it together to get actual suitcases. They lived through the interview of the guardian ad litem, asking them which parent they wanted to live with. They lived through their mother standing in the kitchen one morning -- Christmas again -- pouring all the milk on the floor. And car accidents and losses on the tennis court and girlfriends breaking up with them, and boyfriends breaking up with them, and a case of malaria on a trip to Africa. Because they continued to be adventurers, they just went farther and farther away -- real trips now, not hundred dollar weekend junkets. And large sorrows somtetimes. Major life losses, that make me reflect back on the tears I shed over that one baby hair of hers that wouldn't grow back after the chicken pox, that lost Barbie shoe, and call myself a fool.
Of course I failed utterly at protecting my children from pain. I failed to make a marriage that worked. I failed at orchestrating perfect Christmases. I could no more spare my children the pain of loss, in those days, than I could find the shoe of Audrey’s Crystal Barbie -- misplaced at her eighth birthday party, though I tore up the house searching for it.
And still, here’s the ironic part: I am in fact related by blood to three amazingly happy and well-adjusted human beings. I did get a happy family in the end -- just not the one I envisioned.
My days of raising children are behind me now, but if I could go back to being the young mother I was, I know well what I’d tell her: That as impossible as it is to spare our children pain, the real task before a parent is to raise them so that they will be strong enough to survive it, and to know, through sorrow comes growth. Loss is a part of living. Love is the best art of all.
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