Writing Is My Drink (19 page)

2. List teachers and professors who’ve played a significant role

in your development. Beside their names, jot a note or two

about the lessons they taught you, including the inadvertent

ones. Pick one teacher and write about what they taught you.

3. Identify your role models for working. Who do you know who

seems to have already gotten “permission” to write or do other

creative activities? My grandmother, JoJo, never seemed to be

waiting for permission to be creative. She supported herself

most of her life with her part-time landscape architecture busi-

ness and the rest of the time she did whatever she pleased. Some

of her art was displayed and sold in galleries, but much of her

art she did simply for her own enjoyment. When I think of her,

I feel this sense of peace and freedom to use my time however I

like. Who are your creative role models? Make a list and maybe

post it or a picture of these people near your workstation.

4. Answer this: Who has given
you
permission to write?

5. 5. Answer this: How can you give
yourself
permission to write?

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10

the Mother and Child

Reunion Is Only a

Motion Away

My second daughter, Jessica, was born near the end of the first

year of the MFA program. I brought her bundled in her Baby-

Björn carrier to class the next week, and I think that says a lot

about me—and it’s not all good. Being a mother of now two

small children didn’t melt away any of my ambitions as a writer

or alter or mitigate any of my passions as a person. Whether

that’s made me a bad or negligent mother, I’ve frankly stopped

wondering, though this question once possessed me. Raised on

Mary Tyler Moore
and cautionary tales such as
A Star Is Born
,
I was certain most of my life that family and career were either/

or propositions for women. It took me a long time to decide to

become a mother, and I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that

during that time I would often read book jacket bios of women

authors for clues as to whether to go forward with the family

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

idea. Each time I read “The author lives in New York City with

her husband and two children,” the scale tipped toward mother-

hood.

Living in Utah the first two years of Natalie’s life, I effort-

lessly rebelled against the state’s Woman as Selfless Mommy par-

adigm and breast-fed in my college office in between classes. I

thought by moving to Seattle I’d be drinking once again from the

feminist communal cup, nodding and agreeing with the hipster

mothers in Grunge City that as much as we love our children,

that’s how much we love our own lives as wel . But my arrival in

Seattle landed me in a preschool coop community that rivaled

the Amish in the women’s pledge to a certain homespun brand

of domesticity. Babies strapped to their chests, the women cooed

over their two-year-olds and exchanged techniques for grind-

ing up apples and squash. When questioned (and I did ques-

tion), these women all seemed to have had tremendous careers

in commerce, law, and the like, which they’d given up instantly

and without visible struggle for the sake of their children. For a

while I wondered if it was just that the women were older than

me, which had perhaps made the transition out of career a bit

easier, but nope, they were my age: mid-thirties. Yep, mid-thir-

ties and rocking Birkenstocks and dowdy, oversized sweaters. I’d

felt better about myself as a mother in Utah, where I was seen as

that crazy outsider and could pretend to myself that in my own

world I wouldn’t be a misfit. But now I
was
in my own world and yet still didn’t quite fit in.

As long as I was ensconced in the MFA program, I was pretty

okay, my identity bolstered by the camaraderie of my fellow writ-

ers, a group of nine of us who spent many an hour in excited dis-

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

cussions about writing. But once the program ended, and I was

shuttered into a domestic routine with my very young children, a

new, shakier social identity was forged around the other mothers

in my daughters’ preschool. And it was around then, when I was

spending most of my time wiping counters and snapping smal

people into car seats, that I began to realize how badly suited to

full-time motherhood I was and how there was a good chance

that this had everything to do with my own childhood.

As I sunk deeper into the lives of my daughters, my child-

hood started coming back to me in chunks, and I began to see

that I’d never had
interested
motherhood modeled to me. My

mom, an anomaly in our California neighborhood in the mid-

sixties, drove a convertible and owned an insulation contract-

ing business. Glamorous and unapologetical y disinterested in

all things domestic, my mom found happiness rather readily in

a smoky bar talking stocks with a George Clooney look-alike.

Part of the unspoken contract between us was that I’d maintain

that I was total y good with this, that I even maybe
preferred
a mother on-the-go over a mother in-the-home. But now that it

was my turn to give up a portion of adult pursuits and ambi-

tion for the welfare of the family—something I was convinced

I needed to do in order to be the thing I wanted most to be,

a “good mother”—resentment that this same sacrifice had not

been made for me began to go from simmer to boil.

Motherhood began to seep into my writing; the crazy over-

whelmed feeling that I felt a dozen times a day—I tried to figure

it out on the page. But I was afraid of writing about motherhood

with too much vigor, lest I find out that I real y shouldn’t be

married to the person to whom I was married, that I was a bad

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

mother, and that I was very angry with my own mother. It was a

lot of work to keep all that from myself
and
write
and
teach a few hours a week
and
take care of two kids, but I did it, although not always wel . But under the cloak of fiction, I did manage to wrest

a story from myself that captured at least a gimlet glass of the

truth about my frustration, which became the first piece I ever

got published. A short story about a mother of two young chil-

dren (a boy and a girl, so clearly not me, right?), the story’s plot centered around the fluke shooting of the narrator’s husband.

No anger there! Bonus: The narrator’s widowhood status—un-

like my own married status—gave her every reason for feeling

alone and overwhelmed and alienated from the other mothers

in her community.

What does this have to with finding my own voice? With

your finding
your
own voice? Everything. Because it isn’t Bach string quartets and split-shot, nonfat lattes, and general y placid conditions that bring us to our own voices. That’s what we
think
will get us there. That’s what we
want
to get us there. If I just keep showing up at Starbucks with my laptop, it’ll show up, too,

right? Maybe. I hope so. But for me it was more like running

through fire, feeling like you’re going to total y lose it, then trying to act like it’s a regular day when you show up at Starbucks

with your laptop. And that’s pretty much what happened the day

that I felt like my real voice was starting to show up on the page.

I didn’t get there with the two advanced degrees in English (I’m

not bragging; in fact, I’m embarrassed that I still wasn’t there, to that “real writing place” yet). I didn’t final y get there because I wanted it. I got there because I was desperate.

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

On this desperate day, I had somehow gotten a one-and-a-

half-year old and a five-year-old dressed and fed and out the

door and into the car. All that seems easy, but anyone who’s had

to do it knows it’s not. The rest of you, just picture a real y bad day. Now, every day for many days in a row is pretty much like

that, and then once in a while a day is real y easy—laughing at

the park with the kids and effortlessly making dinner—and on

that good day you question your sanity. Why are the other days

so hard
?

With my two amazing, beautiful daughters tucked into pre-

school for the next 1.75 hours, I arrived with my laptop and

notepad at the café across from the preschool. It was a nice day

and I was sitting outside. Green Lake stretched below me and

the Cascades drew a jagged line on the horizon. It was the type

of day when one should be thinking: I’ve got it made. Here I am

balancing motherhood and my own interests. I live in a great

city! It’s sunny!

Instead, I brought out my notepad and let out a low, long

growl. My thoughts were something like: Fuck everything,

what’s the use, grrr, #@!%. I then took out a pen and I wrote this

sentence: The women in my family don’t real y like children.

I looked up. I looked to the preschool and then the lake,

waiting for the bolt of lightning to strike me dead. When it did

not, I wrote for the next hour and a half about the women in my

family. I wrote about being neglected, about being uncared for

as a child, I wrote about my mother’s distraction and distrac-

tions. I wrote about how true nurturing was never modeled to

me. How motherhood always seemed to be the last thing on ev-

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eryone’s agenda in my family. And when I wrote “in my family,”

I meant one thing: my mother.

I know you might be real y worried about my mom’s feelings

right now. I was worried about them, too, but beginning that day

and over the next few years I became certain that I had to write

about my relationship with my mom—so certain that I might

even cart out the word “destiny,” as in: I felt it was my
destiny
to write about my relationship with my mother. It’s not easy to be

a mother whose daughter has taken to writing about you (and

there’s a good chance that I will have a shot at that experience

myself one day, as both my daughters seem to be jotting things

down). But it’s also not easy to be a daughter who’s been holding

her mother’s denial in her hands for as long as she can remem-

ber. It’s not easy to be a daughter who was raised to be good in

a time when “good” meant quiet. I knew that day—and I still

know—that there are a lot of daughters just like me out there,

daughters who needed to articulate the inchoate frustration that

we’ve carried in silence for far too long.

I didn’t do it for them, though. I did it for me. I did it to sur-

vive. And that desperation to survive daughterhood and moth-

erhood brought me to my knees, and it was on my knees that I

final y heard it: the unmistakable sound of my own voice com-

ing from the page. And it was saying: Fuck it!

That day I wrote the bones of a piece called “Women Like

That, Like Us,” an essay born out of the triptych form about my

family’s tradition of ambivalent (at best) motherhood and how

that tradition was showing up on a daily basis in yours truly—

about how I wasn’t exempt no matter how much I wanted to

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

be. The essay was eventual y published in
Brain, Child
magazine and nominated for a prize that meant a lot to me. But the most

important thing—in a way, the only important thing—is that

it was the first piece of writing I finished that I felt was truly a manifestation of my voice and vision as a writer. I was doing

it. I was final y freaking doing it. Thirty-seven years old. Nearly twenty years after I started writing.

And now everyone in the world loves me and is proud of

what I do.

No.

And now some people think it’s okay and some have been

very hurt and angry. A few people real y like it.

Yes.

I explain it to my students like this: You know you’re near

what I call your “real material” when you feel equal parts com-

pulsion to express and terror of expression. It’s not enough just

to be afraid to tell the story. There are lots of things I’m afraid to write about and which I have no real interest or compulsion

to write about. Besides the fear, there also needs to be magnetic

pul . Attraction plus terror.

Being a mother and a daughter brought me to my voice, and

those roles have complicated everything about my way there. I’d