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Letter from Joyce Archives
July 15, 2000
Dear Friends,
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.
So
I send her packages -- chocolates and books, warm slippers, nice smelling
soaps, but really, what I want to give her won't fit in the box. I call
up women friends in New Hampshire, where she is living at her father's
house -- no car, no transportation, deep in the woods -- hoping they will
look out for her for me, and they do, but they are not her mother. I know
her father loves her, but he and I can barely speak. I call her, wanting
not so much words, as to somehow, from three thousand miles, put my arms
around her. And instead, we fight. I am loving her so hard, I am angry
at her, for allowing herself to be out on that road, in that tin can of
a car, where she could have gotten herself killed. She is angry at me
back, for not having enough faith in her ability to take care of herself.
Days go by I try to work and can't, I worry so much about her.
Yesterday we fought so bitterly we were both weeping into the telephone, and crying out so loud--no, I will say it, screaming at each other -- that we lost our voices. At 2:30 in the morning the telephone rang. My daughter -- quiet now -- telling me she fell in the shower and re-broke her collarbone. She doesn't say it, but I know what she thinks, and she may be right. It is my fierce, clutching love that's hurting her. I have to let her go.
I'm
going away for ten days. I don't know where: I'll put the computer in
the back seat of my son Charlie's 1980 Toyota (leaving my sons our Jeep,
because it's the safest car, and I cannot bear the thought of one more
accident). I'm driving north. When I see a motel that looks quiet and
cheap, with the right sort of semi-desolate landscape out the window,
I'll pull over and check in. Plug my computer in and get to work. Except
for calling my children at night, I'll be mostly out of touch for a while,
and not checking in here as I usually do, every day. I thought I'd leave
you with an essay I wrote, about the terror a parent feels over the possibility
of harm to her children. First published in the New York Times Hers
column, back in 1982, it's called Perilous
Journey.
That 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. So, off I go. Wish me luck.
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