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Letter from Joyce Archives
October 23, 1999
Dear Friends,
The other day an e mail showed up from a friend in Michigan. He was telling me about Sunday dinner at his parents' house with his wife and sons. His mother had called him up that morning to tell him his dad was making gnocci. The whole family headed over.
The story he told was such a simple one. "First thing, when we come in the door, everybody baci and abrazzi," he wrote. I could just picture the scene.
Then there were the gnocci, much loud conversation. His older son telling his dad about scoring a goal in his soccer game the day before. His dad taking out his wallet and handing out five dollar bills to both grandchildren. Watching the Vikings/Lions game afterward, with his wife beside him on the floor, yelling at the announcers for not pronouncing the name of the one Italian player correctly. Seeing his father sitting very calmly on the couch during the crucial play, with one hand resting on the top of his grandson's newly- shorn head.
Reading all of this, I started to cry.
It's about family, of course. The big dream so many of us have, and few attain. At least not the way we pictured it.
I grew up in a climate of great love and concealed trouble. Looking back on my own childhood, I recognize and treasure so much about my parents, but I also know--so much more clearly than I understood at the time--how the whole world is transformed for a child who grows up in a household where she doesn't feel safe, and how long-standing the scars. That experience--surviving one's family--is really the subject of my most recent book. In many ways it's the theme of my life. And it is surely the reason why I have devoted myself as I have to the endlessly demanding, frustrating, inspiring and thrilling challenge of raising my own three children. From as early as I can remember, I wanted to be part of a happy family, and I believed (not without reason) that the only way that would happen would be to give birth to one.
Joyce with friend, Ruth, in Germany last Spring
For years I tried to make this family of mine into something that matched those television images of happy family life--the ones I grew up watching on television, and longed to be part of. Some of you who have been reading my work from as far back as the days of my old Domestic Affairs column know that part of my story: the perfect birthday parties, the hours spent making a buche de noel with children pulling at my feet, the homemade spaghetti sauce and Barbie clothes...I was crazy enough back then to feel compelled to work like a maniac at making a happy family (if it killed us), though at least honest enough, in that column, to acknowledge how much the effort wore me down. That buche de noel I made ended up stuffed down our garbage disposal, in a rage over my husband's inattentiveness to the children's cries, during a football game. The homemade spaghetti sauce was improperly canned in the pressure cooker one year, so that all fifty quarts suddenly began exploding right there on the pantry shelves, leaving one spectacular, bloody-looking mess that probably conveyed a more accurate picture of how things really were in our family, that winter, than the neatly-lined-up mason jars ever had.
My marriage ended. The myth of our perfect family exploded too.
Over the ten years since then, as we have struggled with our homemade solutions to recasting our reconfigured family life, I have probably come a lot closer to genuine happiness than I used to back in the days when I was sending out those smiling family Christmas cards of the five of us, lined up in front of the tree.
Still, it's nothing like the picture my friend describes, with the Italian parents, and the gnocci, and the baci and abrazzi every Sunday afternooon... My sister, my one remaining relative from my family of origin, hasn't spoken to me for a long time now. She loves me, but I know I remind her of every sad piece of family history she would rather forget about. I love her, but she is not the cozy, effusive kind of sister I always wanted, who would want to hear all about my children and gossip with me on the phone, the way some of my women friends do, with their sisters, or ask me questions about what's going on in my life, or want to tell me about hers. No fault of either of us, our family history set the stage for a lifetime of uneasy distance and separation. My own children will know a very different story with each other in adult life, I believe.
Still, sometimes days go by around here when my sons and I don't manage more than five minutes a day, sitting around the same table sharing a meal, their lives are so busy. My daughter's three thousand miles away, living at our old house, with her dad, painting houses. Before you know it (in less than two years) there will be no children left at all in this house, except for the rare holiday, and even those are shared with my ex-husband. And, even more significantly, they will be shared with my children's friends, and with their own passions, their need to see the world, venture forth, create their own families. It may not even make sense for me to own a house (not one this size, anyway) in a while. For a person like me, who has been making a home for a family for over twenty years now, this is a staggering thought, and the reason why my friend's story of a simple Italian family dinner made me weep.
I am the woman who once, when our daughter was no more than five years old, expressed to my former husband the fear "wouldn't it be terrible if it rained on Audrey's wedding day". No big surprise, yesterday found me thinking about my own future grandchildren, who may be a decade or more away from showing up, if they ever do, and worrying "Where will they spend Christmas? Will they only go to their grandfather's house, because that'sthe one our children grew up in, and it's in the country, with our old skating pond, and our children's toys in the attic....?" Give me the least opportunity to find a potential family issue to worry about, and odds are good I'll manage.
My daughter called last night. It was our Free Friday of phone calling, so we talked for hours, about many things. This is the year when my children are due to spend Christmas here with me, but she was breaking it to me that she probably wouldnt' be able to do that. She'll be on that other distant coast. Not unkindly, she told me that though she misses me, misses her brothers, this place in California doesn't feel like her home. I knew that already, actually. And sometimes, knowing that feels like reason enough to pack my bags and run to wherever it is my daughter wants to be. Only what if that place isn't the same one my sons land in. And then there will be all those other characters I haven't even met with--the ones they love, maybe marry, have children with....the families of those people. What happened to that happy family gathered around the table eating a homemade meal, that I spent the last quarter century trying (way too hard) to create, by sheer will and obsession.
"I need to find my own home now," my daughter said to me. Same thing I have been trying to do all this time.
For me, I said, home is wherever my children are. It sounded right at the time, but she stopped me. "Home should be within your own self, Mom," she said, not unkindly, but firmly. "I can't make home for you any more." She was right of course. She went on to tell me that we'll have times--as I know we will--when all of us are together here. They just may not fall on the prescribed family occasions. They'll happen when they happen, where they happen. Not to worry about it.
This morning came another e mail, also from an Italian friend, oddly enough--this one, a member of our discussion group here, telling me he and his wife hope to come hear me speak when I visit Yale in a few weeks. Then, so I'd be able to pick him out in the crowd of undergraduates, he gave me a description of himself and his wife, with a run down on their many children: his four, her three, the many grandchildren. Not the traditional family, two parents, and the children born to the two of them. And still, I am willing to bet they manage a bowl or two of gnocci.
Italian friend number one e mailed back this morning too. "Stop sniffling," he wrote. "You have more family than you know." Sometimes we are born into a family. Sometimes we have to make one.
Before moving on from this perfect-family theme, I want to share with you one more story: A friend of mine, around my age, was telling me recently about how, as a child, he had always loved watching those Andy Williams Christmas specials. "But it was also bittersweet," he told me. He had grown up in an alcoholic family, an only child. His parents divorced when he was still very young. No big crowd round the tree,harmonizing on carols while the snow piled up outside the window.
My friend became a television producer. A few years back he found himself producing a Christmas show in which Andy Williams put in an appearance. Andy Williams is now in his seventies, divorced from the mother of his children, who, as some of you may remember, ended up murdering her glamorous Olympic skier lover, many years ago.
Sitting off to one side of the Christmas tree, on a couple of fake bales of hay in a fake manger, my friend told Andy Williams how he used to feel about those Christmas specials. "I always wanted an Andy Williams Christmas," he said.
"I know," said Andy Williams. "I always wanted an Andy Williams Christmas too."
On a different note, I want to remind you that the paperback of At Home in the World is now in stores, with a new afterword by me, along with a reprint of my article, from 1972, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life." The book was written in many ways for my daughter, and for other people's daughters--as a cautionary tale of sorts about the dangers of a young girl's giving herself over, as so many young girls do, to some powerful older figure who tells her who she should be and whose voice, whispering in her ear, may drown out her own. The book is also about reclaiming that voice. It is my hope that now, with its more affordable paperback price, and with this new material, mothers and fathers may want to pass the book on to their daughters--and that young people, young men as well as young women, may find it on their own. That's the reason why I'm making a point of visiting college campuses this fall, and hope to do more of it in the future. I also want to encourage those of you who read and enjoyed the book in hardcover to think about picking up a copy of the paperback and sending it to a young person you care about.
I also want to extend a particular invitation to young people who may visit here, who have read the book, to share your impressions, and tell me what, of my story, echoes aspects of your own, and how things are different for you. If we hear from a few of you, I'd like to establish a link here, featuring the comments and observations of young people to At Home in the World.
And as always, I love to hear from all of you, about whatever is on your minds--not simply my work, of course. This space was established, over two years and many millions of hits ago, to give people a place to share their stories, as I've been able to. So have at it.
(Incidentally, we've just gotten in a big new shipment of the wonderful Where Love Goes CD, featuring 19 great songs by Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Townes Van Zandt, Aimee Mann and many others. It's not available anyplace but here, and all proceeds of sales go to support the invaluable work Myrna does to keep this site going. You might want to pick up a few.)
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