A Plea for Eros (11 page)

As a reader of books, I’m convinced that words have an almost magical power to generate, not only more words but fleeting images, emotions, and memories. Certain novels and poems have had a power to unearth raw and unknown pails of myself, have been like mirrors I never knew existed. In every book, the writer’s body is missing, and this absence turns the page into a place where we are truly free to listen to the man or woman who is speaking. When I write a book, I am also listening. I hear the characters talk as if they were outside me rather than inside me. In one book, I heard a young woman who played at being a man; in another, I heard a man. In my dreams, I find myself pulled between the two sexes, wondering which one I am. Not knowing bothers me, but when I write, that same ambivalence becomes my liberation, and I am free to inhabit both men and women and to tell their stories.

2003

IT WAS VISITOR’S WEEKEND AT CAMP, AND I HAD MY TWELVE-
year-old daughter, Sophie, in my arms as we sat on her bunk talking. From across the cabin I heard a girl moan, “I wish my mom would come. Where is she?” Another girl lying flat on her back in bed complained to the ceiling, “Yeah, I want to sit on
my
mom’s lap.” They were still waiting for their mothers to arrive. When the parents left that day, some children cried; some didn’t. Some clung desperately to their mothers and fathers. Others offered them only a quick, perfunctory hug. A veteran spectator of visiting weekend told me he could always spot the divorced parents, because when the mother or father said good-bye to the child, the boyfriend, girlfriend, or stepparent would stand apart—at a respectful distance of at least ten paces. Good-byes initiate separations, and it isn’t easy to part with one’s mother and father, even though we all do in the end. My husband likes to say that our job as parents is to raise children who are strong enough to go off and do well without us.

When I was seven and my sister Liv was five, we bid goodbye to our mother and father and took the train to Chicago with my great uncle David. He wasn’t our real uncle but my grandfathers cousin, and in 1962 he was already an old man, probably in his early eighties. Uncle David had always been a part of our lives, and Liv and I were very fond of him. He had left Norway when he was twenty-two to make his fortune in America and ended up outside Chicago, where he had worked as a carpenter. Uncle David was fun. He walked for miles every day, played strenuous games with us, and showed his affection by giving us sudden, fierce hugs, which despite the fact that they were enthusiastic were also decidedly uncomfortable.

I don’t remember feeling anything but excitement as my sister and I and Uncle David stepped onto the train, and I have no conscious memory of saying good-bye to my parents. Liv and I felt that the trip was to be the adventure of our lives, and we embraced it wholeheartedly. It began well. We were sitting in our big train seats across from Uncle David when suddenly two men, with red bandanas tied over their noses, came running through the car. In hot pursuit behind them came two policemen with guns. Amazed, Liv and I asked Uncle David who those men were. Unruffled, he said, “Probably baggage robbers.” My sister and I were delighted: real robbers.

Uncle David lived with his unmarried daughter, a schoolteacher, whom we called Aunt Harriet. Their house was dark as I remember it. Maybe the curtains were often pulled or maybe the windows didn’t get much light—I don’t know—but it was an umbral place and it smelled old. The first night of our visit, Aunt Harriet told us to “go upstairs and take your bath now.” Liv and I looked at each other, walked up the stairs, opened the bathroom door, entered the room, and stood staring at the bathtub. We had never taken a bath alone. We had never turned on the water in a bathtub. Our mother filled the bath. She washed our hair, and she warmed towels in the dryer to prevent us from catching a chill. In the winter, my father would often wrap us in those warm towels, lift us up into his arms, and place us in front of a fire. I remember clearly that Liv and I conferred about what we should do. We had been given an order. It never occurred to us to disobey it, nor did it occur to us to ask for help. We did take a bath—in cold, shallow water. It lasted about two minutes.

During the days that followed, we never left Highwood. When Aunt Harriet went off to work, Uncle David entertained us. A high point of the visit, which I remember with burning clarity, was the afternoon Uncle David beckoned us into his room. As my sister and I watched, he reclined on his bed in a luxurious manner, shoes on the bedspread, and with great ceremony extracted a bank note from his wallet. We leaned forward to look at it. It was a hundred-dollar bill. We had never seen so much money in one place before. “Whenever you need one of these,” he said, “you can come to me.” Liv and I were deeply impressed.

I’m not sure when I started missing home and longing for my parents, but I suspect it was after only a couple of days. The entire visit couldn’t have lasted more than two weeks. What is interesting to me now is that I didn’t articulate the feeling to myself. I didn’t say, “I want to go home,” or, “I’m homesick.” At the same time, I had a strong sense that Liv and I shared our feelings, whether we spoke of them or not. We stuck together, discussed how different Uncle David’s was from what we were used to, but we didn’t cry or ask that anything be changed. Then I wrote a letter home. I believe that it was a cheerful letter, that I gave a report to my mother and father about our doings in Highwood, but with the letter I sent a drawing of Jesus. The Bible stories I had learned in Sunday school had had a great effect on me, and at seven I was a pious child. God and angels and miracles and the terrible story of the crucifixion inhabited my inner world, and it came into my head to draw a picture of Jesus praying to God, his father, in the garden at Gethsemane before he is taken away and crucified. I worked on it very hard. I thought it was the best, most beautiful drawing I had ever made. Christ was kneeling in prayer, and I think he was wearing a blue robe. I folded it up and sent it off with my news.

My mother took one look at the drawing and decided to take a train to Chicago. For me, the message of the drawing was entirely unconscious, but my mother read it correctly. It said: “Take this cup from me.” 1 still remember the sight of my mother at the train station, the sound of her voice, the feeling of her body, and the smell of her perfume when Liv and I threw ourselves into her open arms.

That trip and my mother’s arrival have remained as vivid for me as any event in my childhood. Uncle David and Aunt Harriet didn’t tell us that my mother was coming. She later told me that she had been against this plan, but there was little she could do to dissuade them from the idea of a surprise. Because we were in the dark, her appearance struck us both as a magical event, like a wish granted in a fairy tale. This enchanted quality was furthered by the fact that I had called out to my mother, without knowing I had done it, and she, endowed with what I regarded as supernatural penetration into the recesses of my soul, answered the call and appeared.

Because our mothers are our first loves, because it is through them that we begin to find ourselves as separate beings in a new world, they have, for better or for worse, immense power. Liv and I were kindly treated by our relatives, and yet the visit remains in both of our minds as our first venture into a strange environment. I remember the alien bed-covers and the odd cereal bowls. I even remember the yellowing grass in the yard, as though it, too, had been touched by another reality. Through experience most adults lose that intense feeling of the unfamiliar—of being
not home.
Of course, had our mother been with us, Liv and I would not have felt the change so strongly. The truth is that the idea of home and the idea of our mother and father were inseparable.

At seven I was more than old enough to have a grip on the real, to feel certain that I would see my parents again, and yet I longed for them. My parents were like the ground under my feet. Without them, I felt suspended and unsure of my steps. Anyone who has ever had a baby knows that an eight-month-old, for example, is
not
sure you will return, that leaving the room is enough to set off a wild protest. I remember that when my daughter had just learned to walk and I talked on the phone, she would suddenly become demanding. You don’t have to leave the room to leave a child. My desire to talk to somebody else was enough to create anxiety and irritation in her. When I was off the phone and completely available to her, she would often wander off, suddenly very busy and seemingly unaware of my presence. There’s the rub. A child’s true independence is the product of a strong, reassuring parental presence, and it is that presence that we take with us when we walk out the door for good.

Although I work at home, I have left my daughter more often over the years than my mother left me. When Sophie was four, I went on a book tour in Germany for two and a half weeks. She stayed at home with her father and my mother, both of whom adore her, and they took very good care of her. When I returned, she clung to me but was decidedly cool to my mother. It doesn’t take a brilliant psychologist to know that it wasn’t my mother she was angry at but me for leaving her, and yet the replacement mother took the rap. Many stepparents have found themselves in the same position—as the targets of displaced anger. For two years after that, whenever I traveled, my daughter would look up at me and say, “You’re not going to Germany, are you, Mommy?”
Germany,
a country she would never have been able to find on a map, became the sign for her of missing me, and while I am glad I went away for my work, the unhappiness of my own child who was left in the care of people she loved and who loved her suggests that even what might be regarded as an ideal separation leaves a trace. When Sophie was nine, I traveled to Germany again for my second novel. By then the name of the country had lost its mournful connotations and she was only delighted to be with her grandmother during my absence and afterward. The nine-year-old was far better equipped emotionally to understand my departure than the four-year-old had been.

It is well known that small children often take a parental absence personally, that they feel somehow responsible for a beloved parent being gone. All little children love their parents and at the same time resent their omnipotence, and if the parent disappears, they can’t help assuming that their aggressive feelings might have had something to do with it. And if they are feeling vulnerable about their greatest love, they may take out their anger elsewhere—on a safer object. I knew a little boy who, while his father was away, repeatedly called his beloved uncle “Stupid.” All dads were suspect. When his father returned, the boy beat the parent he had missed with his small fists, before giving way to a passionate embrace and tears.

The normal pains of love and anger most children suffer when separated from a parent are usually repaired when the parent returns. Some separations can’t be helped. A child or parent has to be hospitalized for sickness or an injury, for example. In his book
Thinking About Children,
D.W. Winnicott, the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, tells the story of a four-year-old girl whom he treated in the hospital for possible tuberculosis. “She is a solemn little girl,” he writes, “and the joy of life is not in her.” Winnicott then discovered that when she was two years old the child had been hospitalized for diphtheria. She had been taken to the hospital while she was
asleep
and woke up in strange surroundings with strange people in the room, and then her mother was forbidden to visit her for three months! One can only imagine that child’s despair at finding herself once again in a hospital bed. Winnicott adds, “Possibly her removal from home will be found to have been a great trauma to emotional development. I cannot say.”

Winnicott is typically honest. We can only tell a story backward, not forward, but at the very least we must understand that as parents our comings and goings, our presences and absences, are a fragile business. It is well known that children who are repeatedly abandoned or lobbed from one caretaker to another often suffer developmental problems, both cognitive and behavioral, and sometimes what might have been love becomes rage. In the second volume of his classic work,
Attachment and Loss,
John Bowlby quotes from two case studies of teenage boys who killed their mothers. One boy said, “I couldn’t stand to have her leave me.” Another, who put a bomb in his mother’s suitcase as she boarded a plane, said simply, “I decided that she would never leave me again.”

The four-year-old who punches his dad for leaving him and the teenagers who commit matricide may appear to be creatures from different planets, but the difference may well be one of degree, not quality. Traumatic separations from parents have long been connected to delinquency, and if physical separation is reinforced by a parent’s emotional distance or rejection, the damage to a child may be irreversible.

As I sat and listened to those girls at my daughter’s camp bemoan the belated appearance of their mothers, I remembered how long childhood is, how a summer can feel like a year, and a year like a decade. I remembered the trip to Chicago, the hundred-dollar bill, the magical arrival of my mother, and the fact that on the train to Chicago, Liv and I didn’t feel the slightest twinge of fear when we saw those baggage robbers rush past us, but the sight of that empty bathtub, without a mother to fill it, caused us considerable alarm. In short, I remembered myself as a child. Looking at my daughter, who is now on the brink of adolescence, I couldn’t help feeling that I should keep my memories alive, that if I remember the sometimes bitter trials of being a teenager, both she and I will better negotiate our inevitable separation, the one that will initiate the adventure of her own life, a life she will make alone.

1999