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Letter from Joyce Archives
January 20, 2000
Dear Friends,
I have been saying what I want is three days in a row, the same. Not that I'm looking to be bored, mind you. What I've been searching for is a rhythm to our life here, and for some time (make that, a couple of decades now) it has been eluding me. Funny thing is, I keep imagining I'm just about to experience a breakthrough. I still hold out that hope.
For
a long time, what was keeping me from anything resembling a regular routine
was all the speaking and travelling I was doing surrounding the publication
of my most recent book, At
Home in the World. In the last year alone I've been to Germany, Brazil,
New York, Denver, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan, Connecticut,
New York again.... Add to that my travels for magazine work and you've
got yourself a bunch of frequent flyer miles and the jet lag to match.
(My reporting assignments for Redbook Magazine in the last twelve months
took me to Louisiana, Maryland and Macedonia -- the only time those three
places were all mentioned in one group breath, I'm willing to bet.)
[ Image above: Sophie, Joyce & April in Gainesville, FL ]
Then there were my children. Nothing that has taken place in the last year has shaken my belief that they are the three absolute best ideas I ever came up with, or the pride and joy I feel in being the mother of Audrey, Willy and Charlie. But it must also be said, we are now waist-deep in what I consider to be the most nerve-rattling years of parenthood. I'm not one of those people who grumbles about teenagers. I actually think teenagers (mine in particular) are great. (Which may explain why, three months ago, I told Charlie it was OK for three of his friends from New Hampshire to bunk in with us for a few days. They finally left this week.)
As I was saying, I like teenagers. The ones I've been hanging out with lately, at least, are funny, loving, kind-hearted, interesting and great company. But if peace of mind is what you're looking for, you might do better giving your heart over to three senior citizens with a raft of miscellaneous health problems and an addiction to the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes, or place your life savings on a single trifecta race based on the color of a particular horse's tail, than you will do, loving three young people who do things like get their driver's license, execute snowboarding jumps, fall in and out of love, and generally wander the globe, still figuring out how life works and sometimes forgetting to leave at least two full car lengths between their vehicle and the one in front.
In
the last twelve months, we have lived through three major automobile accidents,
two additional traffic violations, and one citation for driving without
a license, issued to a fourteen year old in this family who shall remain
anonymous. Nobody was drunk or stoned when these events occurred. Nobody
was playing chicken or hot-rodding. Nobody was (as far as I can detect)
attempting to convey some sort of angry, hostile message to his or her mother.
Taken on an individual basis, any one of these mishaps (with the exception
of the one involving the unlicensed fourteen year old who decided to take
his brother's Toyota Corona out for a spin at one a.m. when he was home
alone) could have happened to virtually anyone reading this. The fact is,
though, they all happened to members of my family. Is bad driving some kind
of side-effect of life in a broken home? Do teenage boys need a man around
the house, to properly instill in them the fear of God and the DMV? Was
I too much of a softie, for not grounding my son for his first ticket, or
his second? Or is my own sketchy driving record somehow passed down through
my children's DNA? One friend of mine tells me (as I recite this list of
reasons why it's all my fault) that maybe, just maybe, this whole business
has nothing whatsoever to do with me. And that, of course, is the most inconceivable
notion of all.
This much is for sure: My son Charlie no longer has a driver's license. My daughter Audrey is mostly recovered from her broken collarbone. Willy has finally completed his community service. My insurance agent rues the day I walked into her office. And I -- the women who decided to use the insurance check from our totalled Jeep to buy a used two-seater convertible, on the theory that my days as Carpool Mom were done -- am back on driving duty, making twice a day trips to my sons' school, fifteen miles from home. And if you think I'm too tender and loving a mother to deliver guilt-inducing lectures to my son all the way to and from school, on rainy mornings when we're squeezed into the convertible, making our way up the highway in traffic to school...guess again.
I
swear, there must be something going on in my life other than conversations
with the DMV, the Highway Patrol, the auto body shop and my insurance agent.
And there has been. There were college applications, and financial aid applications,
and a highly aggressive malamute who lives up the street from us, who one
day -- when my son Willy was taking our Boston Terrier Opie for a walk --
shot out of his house, tore over to Opie, picked him up by the neck and
sank his teeth deep enough that Opie required general anesthetic and surgery.
The dog may just have been following his natural instincts. What was harder
to take was the dog owner -- who pronounced Opie (a dog whose one goal in
life is to make love to every moving thing that passes him by) to be a "vicious,
shitty little animal". "You and your son are in denial about the true nature
of your dog," said the owner of the sixty pound malamute who attacked our
eighteen pound terrier. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
On
the brighter side, in early December I hosted the most recent of my bi-annual
Fredelle Maynard Memorial Pie Parties at our house, attended by around twenty
wonderfully different and intriguing guests who arrived as (mostly) strangers
and left not only as pie bakers, but also friends. As usual, the pie-making
portion of the day was followed by a long and moving talk, among the group,
gathered in my living room. An unusual aspect of this most recent pie party
was the fact that five of us (including myself) were all 46 years old. We
decided that this is a challenging and significant moment in the life of
a woman. Children mostly grown and gone or nearly gone (though one of our
46 year old club had never had children, and commented : "You're finally
back! I've been waiting for all of you to finish raising your kids.") We
are looking around, asking ourselves what's next. Few of us know the answer
to that one yet. Though it is a new thing, just to be asking the question.
For a long time there, it was obvious. Now about the only thing most of
us know is that we no longer know a thing about the future.
It seemed appropriate, at that party in particular, that one guest -- Steve, from Los Angeles, who is a professional magician -- would have performed the trick he did for us all, in which he threw a bunch of playing cards up high over his head, causing one and only one (the card I had recently picked out from the deck, and then replaced there) to stick to the ceiling. That card, the two of hearts, is stuck to my ceiling to this day. Not a day goes by that I don't spot it, and find myself thinking of the group that gathered in my living room that day, and all we got from each other. Pie being the least of it.
The week before Christmas, my sons and I flew off to a wonderful little town in Jamaica, Treasure Beach, to meet up with my daughter Audrey, who has been living and working back east since the fall, and who all of us have missed pretty sorely. In Jamaica, we were also joined by two friends I originally met here on this discussion forum, Jaime and Steve, one of the three couples I married a year and a half ago. We swam, we kayaked, we ate papayas, made many friends, spotted crocodiles, listened to lots of reggae, rode bikes, and got accustomed to the gentle breezes full of tropical flowers and the wafting aromas of jerk chicken and ganja. Jamaica was sunny and restful, except for the unexpected drama, late into our stay, of seeing my daughter briefly transported down a dirt road heading in the opposite direction from our hotel, on the bicycle of a Rastafarian man who liked her a little more than she'd bargained for. "I thought we were just friends," my daughter commented, later. Wonder where she gets that from.
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