Playing House (28 page)

And yet this I can count on: I made my way up over the embankment and stepped on solid ground. Imagine what I must have looked like from far away, my family far away, pulling in, tumbling out of the Subaru, seeing a black woman with a silver halo of hair stumbling across an infertile field, tears making tracks in her Nigerian face, this is what I must have looked like from the outside. But from the inside? Well, that’s a different story.

I was on a whole different pole but not polarized, no, no longer. I was simply on the inside, in a shining bright room, a small bundle of fire flickering in the hearth, well-steeped tea in a saucer by my side, beloved book in my lap. I looked around. Outside butterflies massed by the windows, so many species, so many colors, such a plethora of filmy wings. I could just barely hear them beat, just barely smell the garden pouring its perfume. I was inside, in a space and a grace called
this place here is home
, and I held out my hands and my children came running and my husband came walking and the butterflies came flying and the frogs came hopping and the locusts came shrieking and Job came limping and god came on his chariot and Bad Luck on his stallion and Good Luck in her Mercedes and my children on their lean and thank-the-lord-healthy legs and my husband powered by his steady and thank-the-lord healthy heart, they all came, such a crowd beyond counting, five football stadiums came as I held out my hands and everyone ran and I let them inside. We went inside and lit a small fire, and I told them this tale, this story, of sinking, of stumbling, of summer, and of finally finding some stillness, small fire, the fall of my footsteps always in my ears here;
fall fall fall
, the sound no longer ominous, oddly sweet now, like the autumn that is coming, like the leaves that will blaze, like the trees turning to torches while I watch all this, my hands held out, in humility, for balance, my borders;
here is where I stand
.

These essays were written over a period of so many years that it is impossible to thank all the people who had a hand in helping me, in ways small and large. My husband, Benjamin Alexander, has been perhaps the one constant, continual presence during the time span these essays describe; he has read every one, at times with a grimace, because he, unlike me, is a deeply private person who cannot fathom the autobiographical impulse, which is not, as people think, a narcissistic need to perform on your own personal stage but rather a reaching out, from some deeply personal space, a reaching out into the world in the hopes of hearing your words echo in the lives of others who, like you, share your struggles and your joys. I’d like to thank, therefore, my readers, many of whom e-mail me to let me know my work has reverberated for them; this is the greatest gift a writer can receive. I’d also like to thank my children; they have enchanted me and enriched me in so many ways, lending me language and image, plot and prism, allowing me time and space to write while also insisting that I return to the real world each afternoon, the world of peanut butter and homework, spelling tests and track meets. My children are both inspirations and anchors, as well as amazing individuals, and becoming more so every day.

After I gathered these essays together, which was in and of itself a significant task as they were strewn across computers and hard drives and disparate publications, I sat down to read them in the order my editor at Beacon Press, Helene Atwan—whom I also need to thank for her masterful mind and vision—had suggested. And I was, well, a little shocked, a little shaken, by what was on the page.

These were indisputably my essays, but some I hadn’t seen or touched for ten years or more, and thus reading them in a chronological arrangement was like peering at my past through a hole someone had punched in the air. There I was, pregnant and despairing. Here I was, still bleeding from my mastectomy, my daughter’s words and comfort—remember that? I did. I saw myself starkly, a self capable of greediness, small heartedness, fear, and also love. It was uncomfortable to see myself from so many angles, rendered so starkly, all jagged and ripped and incapable, at least at times.

Each essay in this book was written “on assignment” (though here you are seeing the full-length versions, sometimes two and three times longer than what was first published), and thus I always took these essays less seriously than my “real work,” my books, which I wrote not for money but for love. And yet, looking at these arranged essays, I realized that, without ever knowing it, or meaning to, I had told a sober, serious, and scathingly honest account of one woman’s life straddling two centuries.

I want to thank each and every person who put up with me during those years. I want to thank the friends who nurtured me, despite my prickly nature. I want to thank, especially, the editors at the magazines from which the assignments issued, specifically Laurie Abraham at
Elle
, and Paula Derrow, who was at
Self
, and Deborah Way and Pat Towers at
O, The Oprah Magazine
, and Cathleen Medwick and Nanette Varian at
More
; I want to thank every editor at every women’s magazine where these essays all initially appeared.

Women’s magazines—they get a bad rap. If you can publish in the
New Yorker
or the
Atlantic
, then you can publish with pride, but to publish in a glossy with advertisements for lingerie and lip gloss and attendant articles about lovemaking techniques—that can be embarrassing. And I
was
always a bit embarrassed about publishing in “women’s magazines,” as they don’t have the pomp and polish, the intellectual heft, of some of their more serious competitors. And yet, I now see that I was wrong to feel that way.
Elle
,
Self
,
O
,
More
, and the other women’s magazines that published my autobiographical work were willing to show their readers much more than eyeliner and thongs. My essays are about the darker aspects of being a white, middle-class female in our times. These magazines, for more than a decade, allowed, even encouraged, me to tell the truth about my life, the whole unruly, unpretty truth, which they then published, proving, along the way, that “women’s magazines” are capable of carrying complex stories about difficult subjects to their vast audiences.

In making this book, I have revised my notions about women’s magazines and want to encourage you to do the same. These glossies have provided me with pages to tell stories that had no gleam or gloss in them, stories my editors celebrated each and every time, their mission, I now see, to bring to their readers honest accounts of what it is like to live inside a mind and body with two
x
’s in every single cell, this body, this mind, grim, difficult, delighted, in every state, in every way, with thanks to all the hands held out, from all these magazines. My stories exist because they do.

Beacon Press
www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

© 2013 by Lauren Slater
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

Text design by Ruth Maassen

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Slater, Lauren.
   Playing house : notes of a reluctant mother / Lauren Slater.
      pages cm
   eISBN 978-0-8070-0174-5
   ISBN 978-0-8070-0173-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Slater, Lauren—Family. 2. Women authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Mothers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
   PS3619.L373Z46 2013
   814’.6—dc23
   [B]

2013013073

Parts of some chapters in this book were previously published in significantly different versions in the
New York Times
;
O, The Oprah Magazine
;
Self
;
Elle
;
Iowa Review
;
Sun
;
Salon
; and in
Behind the Bedroom Door
, Paula Derrow, ed. (New York: Delacorte Press, 2008);
Kiss Tomorrow Hello
, Kim Barnes and Claire Davis, eds. (New York: Doubleday, 2006);
Searching for Mary Poppins
, Susan Davis and Gina Hyams, eds. (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2006);
Coach
, Andrew Blauner, ed. (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2005); and
Maybe Baby
, Lori Leibovich, ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 2006).