Writing Is My Drink (20 page)

already been a daughter for decades, a role that had for so many

years rendered me mute. Not wanting to hurt or offend, I’d kept

my real material out of my own reach, up in the highest cup-

board. Now it occurred to me that when I’d been fearful y decid-

ing about whether or not to sign up for motherhood, my focus

had always been on how motherhood would tie up my time and

1 4 9

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 149

6/7/13 8:19 AM

T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r

energy, but in fact there was much more than that at stake. Like

the role of daughter, I realized now, the role of mother could also tie up my tongue.

Maybe it was the sleep deprivation or the flawed marriage or

I don’t know what, but somehow I felt all this crunching down

on me. I felt the lifelong boulder of my family’s history of alco-

holism double in weight with the curiously similar task of keep-

ing silent for the sake of the children.

I was realizing that motherhood meant keeping the peace,

keeping things nice and good, keeping the focus on the children.

“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at al ” was

back and rearing its head in the hushed banalities exchanged be-

tween mothers on the playground. I wanted to have a real con-

versation about motherhood and couldn’t find one—blogs were

still a thing of the future—so I started writing what I wanted to

hear: how motherhood can break you in two and then slowly

build up a new version of yourself, casting aside some of the old

parts forever.

Kathryn Harrison was already a mother when she wrote
The

Kiss
, a surreal and stunningly beautiful memoir that depicts the incestuous relationship between her and her father when she

was a late teen. Among the slew of harsh criticism she received

upon the book’s publication, some reviewers took issue with the

fact that she would write about such things as a mother, the im-

plication clear that part of a mother’s job is to shield her chil-

dren from ugliness—even if it was ugliness she herself had lived

through, even if it was an ugliness that had been perpetrated

against her. In an interview with
Creative Nonfiction
magazine, Harrison justified her choice as a writer and a mother, saying, in

1 5 0

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 150

6/7/13 8:19 AM

W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

essence, that if she hadn’t come forward about her experience

with her father, her kids would have sensed something “cor-

doned off” within their mother and, being kids, might’ve blamed

themselves. I have to say I think she’s dead right: Whatever it is

we think we’re hiding, our children will be asked to carry. But a

subtler point here is that mothers who write are often expected

to justify their choices of topics and their approach to them, and

for some reason we accept this expectation, and I believe this

acceptance creates a self-censorship so integral to who were are

that its existence often goes undetected.

We have things to do in this life that have nothing to do

with the people we love and our relationships with them. We

general y accept this for men. For good and for il , women

often have a harder time not focusing on how their actions

could potential y impact those around them. If I write what

I real y feel, the thinking goes, then I will hurt the people I

love. And so, sometimes we write nothing at al . Maybe for

some that’s perfectly okay, but for others it isn’t. For many of us there’s a sort of festering in the spot where we carry the untold

story. We feel tied up in knots. We can talk for an hour about

how we wish we had more time. If only I didn’t have so much

to
do
. If anyone were to suggest that maybe we could do less, we might bite her head off, so invested are we in the sense that

all that we do—much of it for other people—is crucial to the

continuation of life on the planet. Life as we know it would

surely cease if we were to stop the endless activity and sit down

with our own thoughts and a pad of paper.

But maybe the end of life as we know it wouldn’t be such a

bad thing.

1 5 1

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 151

6/7/13 8:19 AM

T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r

Maybe life as we know it keeps those we love dependent on

us.

Maybe if we pulled back a bit, they’d step up. And maybe

we’d be happier. Less—shall I say it?—resentful?

It’s true that my mother often did what she wanted without too

much fretting over the consequences for others. It is also true

that I have often wished that she were different. When I was a

kid, I wanted her to be like the other mothers. When I was a new

mother, I wanted her to be like the other grandmothers. But for

all that my mother’s pursuit of her own pleasure cost me, that’s

the exact amount I’ve gained. She loved who she wanted to love.

She went where she wanted to go. She drank martinis dry and

enjoyed many a steak on the rare side of medium. She took a

failing business and single-handedly made it prosper. And on

top of that, she did all this in the early 1960s, in the construction industry, as a woman whose education had ended in the tenth

grade. She hired and fired men in a man’s world. She studied the

business pages with the laser intensity of a savant. She bought

low, sold high, bought low and sold high—rinse and repeat—

until she’d secured the sort of nest egg single mothers of any

background or any generation would be hard pressed to repli-

cate.

But her legacy to me isn’t so much her success with finance

as it is her passion for it. She loved the business world. It con-

sumed her—and she saw no problem with that. Sometimes I hear

women talking about how their mothers’ martyrdom was a pal-

1 5 2

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 152

6/7/13 8:19 AM

W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

pable energy in their homes: the sighing, the slammed door, the

constant low-level hostility that self-sacrifice often engenders.

There were times when I would have liked a bit of self-sacrifice,

believe me, but lately—why do we come to it so late?—I realize

that my mother modeled a way for me to be a person, a woman,

and
a mother, and that I never could’ve become the mother who could love her work as she loves her children (yes,
as
) without her example; that without her—who I’d once believed to be the

source of my silence—I never could have found my voice.

If the mother curbs herself for the sake of her family, she be-

comes less than she can be in the world. And then, what will her

daughters do when they have daughters of their own? Will they

put themselves on hold endlessly as well? Langston Hughes’s en-

during question chil s me: “What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”

When I begin with a new group of memoir writing students each

year, we go around the room and they introduce themselves and

talk about what they’d like to write about. Inevitably, at least one older woman will say, “I want to write stuff down for my grandchildren,” which makes my heart sink.

I know that sounds bad. Isn’t that what grandmothers do? If

that’s what she wants to do, why am I judging her? My thinking

goes like this: If you’re writing stories for your grandchildren,

you’re going to leave out the time you cheated on a test and lied

to your boss, the hot experimental sex you had with your college

roommate, how bored you sometimes felt in domestic life, the

1 5 3

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 153

6/7/13 8:19 AM

T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r

time you got too drunk at a wedding, the infidelity you consid-

ered but then veered away from. These omissions are for good

reason. After al , these readers are your
grandchildren
. However, when you take all the crack out of the Cracker Jack, what you’re

left with is . . . not much. You’re left with the literary equivalent of one of the more tepid episodes of
The Waltons
: a highly sani-tized version of your life.

More bad news: Ninety percent of the time, your grandchil-

dren won’t read what you wrote—even if you had put all that

juicy stuff in there, which you didn’t. They know the juicy stuff

isn’t in there. They actual y don’t think you even own any juicy

stuff because you’re their grandmother, and they still believe

that the young have the juice market cornered. They will thank

you when they receive the bound edition of
Grandma’s Life
on Christmas morning, maybe even skimming a page right there

in front of you, but then they’ll put it aside, always meaning to

get to it but never quite. Recently, one of my students had some

of her work published for the first time in a literary journal and

sent copies to family members. “Theo, I never heard anything

back,” she said to me, surprised and disappointed. “Do you think

they hate what I wrote?”

“No. They haven’t read it,” I said, adding: “People don’t read.”

Okay, that last part isn’t quite true. People
do
read, but they don’t necessarily read what we want them to read, even when

they are our own family and even when we are handing them

our own writing.
Especial y
our own writing when we hand it to them.

So let’s go back to this book you wrote for your grandchil-

1 5 4

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 154

6/7/13 8:19 AM

W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

dren, the book you spent hours creating—hundreds and hun-

dreds of hours, I exaggerate not; the book you created with a

specific audience in mind; the book that’s only a shadow of what

it could be because it was created
for family
; a document that was alternately pleasant and onerous to write, but was never liberating, never truly intoxicating. It was a story eternal y fettered to the ground like a falcon in a zoo exhibit.

But what if it could have flown?

What if you
had
written it for yourself
?

What if after all those Thanksgiving turkeys and elaborate

Christmas mornings you put your efforts into something
for

yourself
with no communal gain in mind? If your family ends up reading it and even liking it, all the better, but what if you started out on this adventure with only your own literary vision and

your own fulfillment in mind? The tribe might profit from your

work in the end—who knows?—but that would be an accidental

by-product of this writing, not its raison d’être
.

No. Its reason for being—your reason for picking up the pen

and showing up at the page—would be this: You want it. You

want
it. You want the paper under your hand, smooth and gliding like a bedsheet. You crave the pen in your hand, carving out

the meaning only you can create.

You are not bad, or selfish, for wanting this for yourself. In

fact, your writing’s one shot of coming into its own—of truly

offering something fabulous to the world—depends upon the

existence of this type of animal selfishness. For in the deep de-

sire to express what is truly our own, we have that one golden

opportunity to tell that which belongs to all of us: the universal

1 5 5

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 155

6/7/13 8:19 AM

T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r

story of love and loss, of despair and redemption, of our tres-

passes and our forgiveness.

We give most to others when we are ful y ourselves. “Don’t

ask what the world needs,” philosopher Howard Thurman once

said. “Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because

what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

So go on, pick up the pen. Come alive.

1 5 6

WritingIsMyDrink_i-xiv-1-258_1p.indd 156

6/7/13 8:19 AM

W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

Try This

1. Write on this question: How have you kept silent or limited

your writing because you feel that somehow you owe this si-

lence or limited articulation to another family member?

2. Has that same family member ever actual y been the impetus

in some way for your writing? How can you credit them for

their contribution to your eagerness to write?

3. Write on this question: What writers do you real y admire?

And what can you specifical y point to in their work that you

can imagine some family somewhere is not too happy about?

How different or less powerful would that writing be without

those elements? What would be lost?

4. Write on this question: How have those writings helped you?

How have you benefited from other writer’s willingness to tell

family secrets, to call out issues, to speak the unspeakable?

For many of us, the only place we’ve ever been able to see

our own experience reflected back to us is in books. As James

Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are

unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented