True Life Stories: PERILOUS JOURNEY
by Joyce Maynard
Originally published as a "Hers" column in the New York Times, 1983, and reprinted in the book, "Domestic Affairs"
January 27, 1999
My daughter's car accident last week left me deeply shaken. Audrey escaped with a broken collarbone (the car itself was demolished), but for days after I couldn't get out of my head the thought of how easily I could have lost her. It is a hard truth of parenthood, that the more you love, the more you have to lose. The more a child grows, the less control you have over her life. You cannot hold their hands as they cross the street, or keep them from heading out on a highway because the rain might turn to ice, as it did that day last week, in New Hampshire, with my precious daughter behind the wheel.
Audrey has been telling me -- gently, firmly, and finally, with anger -- that I have got to stop trying to guide her to what I think she should be doing in her life, and of all the stages of motherhood I've gone through, this one -- the letting go -- is the hardest. Because she's the oldest, she is, as she herself reminds me, forging through deep, churning waters untraversed by anyone before her. Her brothers will have an easier time of it.
This essay is about recognizing the need to let a child venture out into the world, in spite of the dangers that could befall her. Sixteen years after I first wrote it, I'm still struggling with that one. In the end, what I know is, all you can do is love your children and raise them with every good thing you can to make them strong, and then you have to set them free. In the end, I know, the only thing any of us has any control over is our own self. I love my children more than anything in the world. I love my friends, my home, my dog, the voices I find here, the music I listen to, artwork on my walls, the woods down our road that lead to the mountain. But when day is done, what I have, that I own, is my own life and the work I create.
PERILOUS JOURNEY...
People we know in
the city, seeing the main street of this small town where we live or making
the five-mile drive beyond it, through woods and farmland, to our house,
say what a wonderful place this must be to raise children. And of course
in many ways it is. Summers we swim daily in a waterfall down the road.
This winter we built a snow fort covered with pine boughs, and we ski
out our back door. More than one fundamentalist-survivalist religious
group has settled in this particular valley of New Hampshire out of a
conviction that we're situated in such a way as to escape the worst of
a nuclear blast. There are -- I reassure Audrey, after watching a scary
movie on TV -- no bad guys around here.
So yesterday I let her, for the first time, walk off alone down our dirt
road for a quarter mile journey through what are mostly woods, to visit
neighbors, just moved in, who have a daughter her age. I bundled her up
warmly for the trip (hat, mittens, snow pants) and gave her a plastic
bag filled with popcorn to eat along the way. I stood at the window, watching
the pom-pom on her hat bob off down the driveway. Then she dropped the
popcorn and kernels scattered in all directions; she bent to pick them
up with her mittens on, which made the job difficult. Then a strong gust
of wind came. She gathered up what she could that the wind hadn't blown
away, set out again, dropped the bag again. She bent down a second time,
picking up kernels one by one. I thought of how impatient I'd been with
her, just before she left. How (with Charlie asleep, and wanting to savor
the time alone) I'd complained that she was taking too long putting on
her boots. The way I'd brushed her hair (not absolutely unintentionally)
just rough enough that she cried out once.
I wanted, then, to run out and put my arms around her, take her hand and
walk with her the rest of the way. It seemed suddenly as if the sky had
darkened and there was a wolf behind every tree. Of course, what I actually
did was just stand there.
Word came this morning that my friend Janet's seventeen-year-old son was killed late Friday night -- one of two passengers in a car going too fast down the wrong side of the highway. The three boys hit an old pickup truck whose occupants remain in intensive care. All three boys are dead.
I didn't know Janet's
son, except as a skinny figure leaning out the passenger side of another
friend's truck (he never did learn to drive), trying to bum a cigarette
from my husband. But I knew his story from his mother. There was no way
to ask Janet how she was, how things were going in her life, without getting
to "How's Sam?" And he was never fine, his life was never going
well, and as long as it wasn't, neither could hers. Inescapable fact of
parenthood: a person's destiny comes to be controlled no longer simply
by her own actions, but by the lives of however many satellites she has
sent into orbit.
Janet's son was known as a town bad boy. There were drugs and school suspensions.
Juvenile officers were involved, and later the police. Sam's father --
divorced from Janet and living in another state -- had broken off communication
with his son a few years back. There had been counselors and therapists
and, for Janet a parents' support group called Tough Love. A while back
Janet had found a residential drug treatment program in another city --
the kind of place a kid goes to when he has reached the end of the line.
He agreed to try it, the town agreed to pay part of the enormous cost.
I'd never seen Janet look so hopeful as she did in September, just after
Sam had left for Odyssey House. Two days after Christmas he was home for
good. Kicked out (and nobody has to get himself kicked out of a program
like that -- you can leave anytime) for plotting to break into the center's
office, steal the operating cash, and go on a spree.
My friend Janet is a wise, funny, loving but unsentimental woman. She's an artist, a lover of birds, which is how we came to meet her, a couple of Septembers back, watching for hawks on top of Pitcher Mountain. She was just nineteen when her son was born; he was five or six when she and her husband separated. I've heard her speak, full of regret, about not having handled carefully enough that hard time in her children's lives. I've heard her voice regrets over mistakes she felt she made, things she'd do differently if she had another chance. It's hard to find yourself living under the same roof with a person you'd have nothing to do with (I've heard her say) if you hadn't happened to give birth to him.
Usually my children were around us -- all over us -- as we talked. We'd be in my living room, surrounded by the tangible chaos children the ages of mine make of their parents' lives. Cars and blocks and Fisher Price people flung in all directions, Audrey begging for another cookie or the chance to stay up a half hour later, and Charlie, naked, having successfully eluded my attempts to put on his pajamas, dancing his wild dervish dance to The Big Chill soundtrack, with a plastic fire chief's hat on his head and an uncapped magic marker in his fist. They are still children of an age to be picked up and put in another place when they're heading in the wrong direction. Children to whom one can still hold out the threat of no dessert, and for whom the lyric "You better watch out, better not pout, 'cause Santa Claus is coming to town" still carries a lot of power. My daughter (though of course she can also get very angry at me) will still sometimes say, "You're the best mommy in the entire universe." My son wakes in the night with my name on his lips. I try unsuccessfully to imagine my round-faced offspring being teenagers who will someday stop smiling, stop speaking to me. Go up to their rooms and close the door, blasting me out of the house with their music. And worse.
Janet was, I know, a loving mother who did everything she could to save her son, and still he didn't make it. New Year's Eve, the week before the crash, I saw Janet and the man who -- if she were freer, and not bound up by attempts to make things okay for her children -- she might happily have been living with. "Something terrible is going to happen," she said, powerless to change anything.
If another friend's
seventeen year old had been killed in a crash I'd be thinking about the
senseless way car accidents have of altering a seemingly cloudless horizon.
With Sam's death there is a different sort of grief -- of having seen
this coming as clearly as if the vehicles had been toys that were wound
up and set on a track and we were all watching in slow motion. Sam's feeling
of emptiness -- the inability of everyone who tried to give him excitement
or hope or even interest in living -- appeared bottomless. He seemed so
bent on self-destruction that the shock at his death lay most strongly
in the fact that he was a passenger in the car and not its driver.
Parents of older children, nodding in the direction of my small ones,
shake their heads and tell me, "Wait until they're teenagers. They'll
break your heart." Well, I don't feel the grip of terror. I have
to believe that a person has some control over the way things turn out,
and beyond that I have to trust my children. But I don't feel even close
to immune to Janet's kind of disaster, the chaos that an unhappy teenager
can bring on a household, on himself. I can't believe that I control my
children's universe and that I have the power to ensure their survival.
And there is no such thing as a safe place to bring up children, no matter
what the water tastes like, or however much the landscape resembles a
scene printed on a calendar. It's always a perilous journey through the
woods. Not only for the child, but for the mother, back at home, who stands
watching through the glass.
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