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I've never wanted to be one of those people who defined herself through her children. (Meet a woman, ask her what's new, and she tells you what her kids are doing. And of course, I've done that very thing.) Still, the defining fact of my life at this moment is the great and yawning, imminent absence of my children in this house. As I write this, my daughter Audrey is in the air, heading to Guatemala, where she will spend a month working on her Spanish in preparation for six months' field work in the Dominican Republic, volunteering for a social service organization there. My son Charlie is back in New York City -- performing poetry, spinning records, volunteering at an elementary school on the lower east side, playing drums, making films and fitting in college in his spare time. My youngest son Willy, age seventeen, graduated from high school last June and has been saving up his money, working as a waiter, in preparation for a backpacking trip he begins in ten days. He'll be making his way from Spain to Morocco and then -- totally overland -- to Nepal. If you think I rest easy about any of this, think again. But I also know the time is past where I can tell my son what to do. I can only hope he's been raised with sufficient wisdom and sense to get through what is sure to be a very challenging journey. And then let him go. So I am taking my youngest child's advice and venturing out on a quest of my own for a while. No land mines in the territory where I'm headed (not the physical kind, anyway). But that's not to say there won't be some challenges ahead for me too. In the interests of cutting my expenses and making it possible to do a different sort of work for a while -- and also, of simplifying -- I've rented out my home for five months. For the first six weeks of that time I'll be travelling, visiting some old friends, giving a speech at a college in Rhode Island that's marking the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my old essay "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life" by asking students to look back on their own. As I like to do every year at this time, I'll be travelling to Northern Michigan, to the writers' retreat at Walloon Lake where I join a wonderful group of writers and poets at the Walloon Lake Writers' Seminar. There's still space, if any of you reading this feel inspired to join us. It's always a fabulous weekend. So I won't be very present on this discussion forum for several months to come. I may visit the library in Pahoa, Hawaii, now and then and see what you all are talking about. I will certainly come back, eventually. And in the meantime, I count on all of you to keep the lights on and the conversation going as we have here for over four years now. It's an odd thing: When I was nineteen I thought I knew just where I was headed in life. When I was twenty-three I thought I knew where I'd live, and with whom, forever. What I'd be doing, where my garden grew. I was wrong on all counts. Now I know almost nothing. And oddly enough, that's alright. I'd be lying if I told you I don't approach this new phase of life with some anxiety and trepidation. But more so, with excitement and joy. I can't wait to see what happens. Meanwhile, I hope you'll support Myrna, the wonderful, generous webmistress who keeps this site going (purely through your donations, and the proceeds of sales from the Joyce Maynard Catalogue. If you like this forum, why not drop her a check now and then. The address is Myrna Uhlig, P.O. Box 636, Clatskanie, Oregon, 97016.)
If you think of it, you might check out an article of mine in the December issue of O, the Oprah Magazine, and another, about federal mandatory minimums, in the October issue of Mademoiselle. I should have profiles coming out in US Weekly (of Diane Keaton) and, in the new magazine, My Generation, a profile of Sally Field, sometime in the fall or early winter. But mostly, my hope is that you'll be hearing a little less from me for a while. And then, I hope, a little more. One more thing I will mention. And that is the great and heartening inspiration that comes to me, from the knowledge that you are there, and that you care to read what I'm writing. I count on that, and it is your words, even your faces, that come to me in that lonely place I go back to every morning, facing the blank screen. We are all of us writing our story, of course. (Some on a computer, some in a garden plot, or a canvas, or a classroom.) Luck to us all, and if you happen to be in Iran, Tunisia, Pakistan or Libya, and you bump into a six foot tall blonde boy with a great smile and a bandana on his head and a seventy pound pack on his back (twenty pounds of which will be books) by all means tell him his mother loves him madly, prays for his safety, even as she knows she had to let him go. Whoever the boy is, it is likely to be true. Now it's your turn.
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Back in June, Willy was asked to make a commencement address at his school.
He talked about how, as much as he and his contemporaries are venturing
out in the world, so too should the parents who have devoted themselves
for so long to the needs of their children. "Go find a man!" he said,
smiling in my direction. "Or better yet, find your own self. Write that
novel you keep talking about. Tell those thankless children of yours to
take out college loans, and look after yourself for a change. You all
used to be hippies, for god's sake, remember?"
From Michigan I fly to Guatemala to join Audrey for a couple of weeks
before she starts in with her field study project. And from Guatemala
I go straight to the Big Island of Hawaii, where I've rented a tiny little
one room cabin -- no phone, no electricity, but a generator to charge
up my laptop computer. I'll be doing some baking, probably, at a yoga
retreat near where I'm living, and maybe leading a writing group there
once a week. But mostly what I'm expecting to find there lies within myself.
My hope is that when the silence finally comes to me, and all is still,
the novel I've been trying so hard to work on will come.
