Finding the Words (With the Help of Joan Didion)

There are a hundred things off the top of my head that I could write about right now. There is absolutely everything going on in my mind and heart, but what to choose. So I will begin with today.

Christmas Lights on the Way to Maine, November 2023

We are in Maine. Which is to say we were going to drive one car to Maine but I’m here to tell you that one car no longer contains my family. And it’s not because our cars don’t fit six people. Each of our cars can fit six unique persons. One in fact, fits seven. And I know this because when they were smaller children I could fit all my kids in carseats plus one kid in the back and then they’d all throw their backpacks in the passenger seat in front. They’d listen to me (for the most part). They’d keep their hands to themselves. They’d never ever curse or say I hate you or call e a bitch under their breath.

Eventually my oldest was finally old enough to ride as a passenger in the front seat–well after every single other kid his age across the country, possibly across the land masses of the world, had been allowed in the front seat because heaven forbid I listen to my sister, the pediatrician, or our actual pediatrician and follow the state law before allowing my kid to ride up front–and then we could fit all my kids plus two friends in my minivan. The minivan was the place I would impart wisdom. It was the place they’d all sit contained and they’d listen to my music or we’d drive along, all in rapt attention as a beautiful book unfurled from the speakers like Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy or Jefferson’s Sons; A Founding Father’s Secret Children. Or Peter Pan. Or all the Penderwicks books. I may be misremembering this, but I don’t think so.

On the Journey, November 2023

But now my children (because they are all still under eighteen, despite the hormones and the body hair and the cursing and the actualization of self, ohmigod, they are still children) can’t all fit together in a single car. They can’t fit at a table. They can’t fit in a living room or today, apparently, in a small gift store in Maine that we have been frequenting since they were literally toddlers.

My “children” wrestled and fought and argued. They nudged into each other, they flat-tired each other’s shoes, they said insulting things to one another over and over and over, they bumped into me. The one who doesn’t have a phone yet stood just in front of me and to the right so that every time I moved I bumped her. She said she was afraid she’d lose me and that I’d leave without her. From a store slightly larger than the average living room where you could see everyone over 4’ 6” from the front door. And trust me, they’re all over 4’ 6”. They’re all average-size, adult-looking people with feet my size or larger whose full bodies are all my size or larger. And that goes for their personalities and their voices and their wants and needs and everything. Everything is my size. Or really, everything about them is larger than me in what is beginning to feel like every way. 

Once, years ago, when I had three of them along with me and two were infants and one was a toddler, an exasperated parent of teenagers at my husband’s school saw me with my double stroller and a baby strapped to my front, and she looked me in the eye and said, “It only gets harder.” 

Back then I wanted to say, “Fuck you,” if I’m being honest. I mean, I was still breastfeeding. Twins. Who both had countless therapies and doctors. Who was she to drop that on me?

I still sort of want to say to her, “Fuck you,” but in part, because a little bit she’s right.

It’s not that this is harder to do. It’s that nothing is in my control now, and teenagers are cruel, and now I’m old, and when one of my children at dinner says that I have saggy, tired eyes, he’s being both mean and accurate. It’s harder in my soul somehow. It’s maybe more demoralizing. It doesn’t look harder. It just is. 

Today in the gift store in Maine my husband took the boys out because we were obviously a yard sale, what with the pushing and shoving, the broad shoulders blocking aisles, shirts nudged from hangers, and bric-a-brac about to be knocked off shelves.

The woman who has been watching me walk through her store every summer since my children were toddlers, who remembers how they would stand seriously with their hands behind their backs looking around with wide eyes, she said how beautiful they’ve all become. 

I pointed out how outrageously obnoxious they’d been in her darling store, how quiet the place was now that they’d left (and they’d scared off all the customers so also, that). But she laughed and said they’d seemed fine and that parents always see it for so much worse than it was. Then she showed me pictures of her three gorgeous girls who look about the ages of my kids, and I vaguely recalled watching her sitting on a stool wearing her youngest in a front carrier behind the counter when it was still just a table in a store that was basically an old gas station filled with handmade things she’d picked up at flea markets or from local artisans. I remember wondering how she could possibly juggle it all. We’ve all grown up.

I’m reading Blue Nights by Joan Didion now. I pulled it out right when we arrived in Maine last night and started reading it because my kids were all sprawled around the downstairs, which is pretty close quarters, staring at their screens just scrolling and scrolling and making weird faces as they snapped photos and jerking their shoulders around as they played shoot em’ up games on their computers. 

I started reading because I wanted them to see that books were good. That smart people read books. That they should read books. That I was a better person than they are but they too could become a better person. By reading a book. So sure, a little bit I was virtue signaling literacy. 

But also, I wanted to feel less like running through the house grabbing screens and throwing them into the street to be run over by a truck. I wanted to stop saying, “Shut up,” either in my mind or (shamefully) aloud every time one particularly incessant and annoying (practically grown up) child made a mouth sound with their mouth hole. Books make me feel better. They generally make me civil. They give me perspective.

I should have remembered that the last time I picked up a Joan Didion book was seventeen years ago, about a year before my oldest was born. We lived in Philadelphia. I was trying to get pregnant. And every manner of bad thing that can happen when you’re trying to get pregnant had happened to us and to me. 

So I read the new Joan Didion back then in 2005, The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, Joan Didion attempts, in the most searingly brutal and gorgeous prose, to unpack the tragic unraveling of her own life and everything she ever accepted to be truth when her husband dies and her only daughter nearly dies. (Later, in 2011, she wrote Blue Nights, about the actual death of her daughter shortly thereafter.) The Year of Magical Thinking was not a pick-me-up. Catharsis is what they call it. I remember laying in our tiny bedroom, looking out the window and feeling all the things.  It was all so very visceral and beautiful and sad.

I’m not close enough to all the things right now or maybe there aren’t all the things in the same clear and heavy way. I have a list on my phone of some of the things waiting to be written about: menopause, vertigo, aging in general, the recent and tragic loss of my brother-in-law, deferred dreams, my mother. Because I have found that words do always help somehow. Whether the writing or the reading of them, they help me understand what I’m feeling or why or how or maybe how to not feel quite as much. 

My kids will read what I’ve written tonight. (And wouldn’t that be a small victory? My teenagers reading?) They will try to unpack what I’ve written. I don’t know what sense they’ll make of it. I’m not quite certain what sense I’ve made of it. I’m preparing myself for sarcasm. I am ready for eye rolls. Maybe they won’t even read it. But maybe they will get it, too. Hard to say. It’s all a crapshoot right now. With teenagers literally anything can happen and you can’t control a goddamn minute of it. 

After dinner, after I’d sent someone outside to stand in the freezing cold for being mean and disrespectful again, and then I’d finally let him in and people had sort of cleared their dishes and begrudgingly helped clean up,  I heard my girls laughing. They were playing Monopoly. Or basically Maine-opoly or a similarly local version. My sons were sprawled belly down, side by side on the Yogibos, watching a Mr. Beast video on one of their computers. I went over and kissed between their shoulder blades. Along with the tops of their heads, it’s one of the few places that still feels like a toddler version of themselves.

If Joan Didion has taught me nothing else, she’s taught me that wandering through the word hallways in our heads helps. She taught me in 1989 when I read a badly photocopied version of “Goodbye to All That” in a college dorm in New Haven, that I had the words inside me even if I couldn’t always get them out. And then she taught me something about grieving–oh how I cried over that book–and catharsis in the week I read The Year of Magical Thinking seventeen years ago. There is a lesson to be learned again, I’m sure. There is always a lesson. 

But for now, I write down the parts that belong to me with whatever words I can find.

The View Through Her Eyes, November 2023