During my pregnancy with Balthazar I was filled with rage. I
attributed it then, and still attribute it now, to the fact that I was writing
a memoir, and the stuff that gets dredged up during that process isn't pretty.
Jonathan still talks about how alarmed he was. He shakes his head solemnly and
says he was afraid I was going to wreck the car, or stab an unnamed person with
a barbecue fork.
The truth is that I am, and have long been, an angry person.
I am never physical and I almost never raise my voice, but I can make my house
vibrate with it. I can nurse a grudge like an old Scottish grandmother. The
rage I felt in my pregnancy differed from the usual sort in intensity but not
in kind. I had to bite my tongue until it bled to keep from doing I didn't know
what, but my tongue already had a dent in that place.
I have complex feelings about my anger. I was brought up to
believe that anger is dangerous. Well-bred people (and what does that even mean?) and women in particular are not supposed to ever
show, or even feel, anger. Anger is unbecoming in a yogi. Anger is undeniably
bad for your health. If you displace your anger and take it out on bank tellers
and grocery store clerks and your daughter's soccer coach and the people at
Kaiser Permanente, it just adds to the negative energy in the world. I don't
want to be the person who is pissed off and determined to ruin everyone else's
day.
I owe anger my life, though, and it seems ungrateful to
completely disavow it. In childhood and adolescence, saving my self, my
personhood, required a MOAB. I know jack about weaponry, but my son is obsessed
with it. He's the one who told me about the mother of all bombs. Without my
anger's explosive power I would have been captured instantly, thrown into the
dankest, darkest prison, from which there would be no escape. But like a
soldier home from war, I've still got my gun at the ready all the time.
Anger is vigilance. It warns me of impending danger, alerts
me to threats. It informs me of patterns, of what I should pay attention to. I
trust its voice.
*
For a little while after Balthazar died I thought that I had
killed him with my anger, that the toxic stew of cortisol circulating in my
body had dispatched him.
When he was gone, all of the anger leached out of me like
minerals from tired soil. I just didn't have it in me. For a moment I let go of
any expectation or desire for control, and the feeling went away. I ascribed
the best motives to everyone, I forgave everyone their failings, I was grateful
to everyone for the smallest gesture and word and touch. I thought maybe from
the crucible of grief I would emerge as some higher, purer being, free of all
the score-keeping and grievance-hoarding.
I'm sure you know how that turned out. When my baby died I
didn't lose my anger permanently, because, at least for me, anger is life, and
here I am.
When I started the blog, I made a vow to myself that I
wasn't going to write angry things about other people. If I found myself being
critical or nasty or recriminatory, I would hold the piece until I could get
past the anger to a more compassionate place. Anger directed at myself was OK,
obviously. Anger at God, also. Everyone else was off limits.
Now I'm not sure I can keep my promise.
*
When I was in graduate school I read Slouching Toward
Bethlehem by Joan Didion, so my mom did, too. My being in a creative
writing program was like a family book group with an endless reading list. The
thing that struck her most in that book, she told me, was something Didion said
about her profession: "A writer is always selling somebody out." I
know that my mom was thinking of me, and of herself, and the future, and
wondering how long it would be before I sold her out.
The thing that struck me most was that Joan Didion could
think that having to charge all her lunches on her Bloomingdale's card
constituted poverty. The ethical quandary of whether writing about my family
was selling them out, and whether and/or when I was going to do it, didn't
trouble me all that much. I think I knew that I wasn't ready. So I started
writing the farthest thing from myself: a piece of fiction about some people
who lived in another country a long time ago.
A few years later, when my aunt Ellen was dying of cancer
and I had just sold the historical novel I had been working on all that time,
she suggested to my mother, her sister, that they pool their resources and pay
me off so I wouldn't write about the family. My mom told me about this in the
kitchen while she was making dinner. She kind of laughed. So did I. That Ellen,
such a jokester. Then my aunt died, and left me $20,000, which I used to pay
the closing costs on my house and buy a washing machine.
Last year I told my parents that I was writing a memoir. It
took several weeks for my mother to realize, correctly, that any memoir I wrote
would feature her prominently, and that her image would be both public and out
of her control. So during our first-ever family business meeting, conducted
last Thanksgiving by my father, brother and me, my father delivered a message
to me from my mother. It was her request that I not publish the memoir until
after she's dead. It would destroy her, he said.
I refused to promise. After all, she might guess a few of
the things I'm going to say, what stories I'm going to tell, but how could she
know what I will make of them?
Except that she knows about the anger, of course. She knows
because, like some demon from the Hellmouth of Sunnydale roused with an amulet,
she called it forth, and now here it is, manifest. Couldn't I just run through
the town waving my arms and scaring the children, until some slayer comes and
fells me with a roundhouse kick? Do I have to write everything down and put it
out there?
*
I somehow managed to avoid reading Eat Pray Love for
all these years, but I just finished reading it for a perinatal loss book group
and research study. I expected to hate it. I don't hate it, but I think it has
a fatal flaw, which occurs right off the bat. Elizabeth Gilbert tells us that
the impetus for setting off on this journey of spiritual discovery was the end
of her marriage, and then she says that she's not going to tell us how or why
her marriage ended. She says it's too personal and too sad.
Well, you know, fuck that. I don't think she can expect me
to follow her if she is not willing to be honest with me. She cannot expect me
to sympathize with all of that crying on the bathroom floor just because she
tells me I should. I'm not going to immediately assume that divorce isn't that
bad, just because I've never had one. I believe it really could be that bad.
But she refused to show me, and I'm not one to take that kind of thing on
faith.
When I first started writing a memoir I took a workshop with
Cheryl Strayed, whose memoir Wild is everywhere right now. With only a
toe dipped in this confessional genre, I couldn't believe some of the stuff she
was telling us about: divorce, abortion, heroin addiction. She was empathetic
in the telling, even to people who had hurt her deeply, but she was never coy
and she was never dishonest. She didn't spare people's feelings, just because
they had them.
This blog is personal and it is sad. I don't want it to
sink, though, under the weight of whining or ranting or enumerated grievances.
Which is why I made my rule about waiting until the anger had dissipated. But
as Elliott Smith says, "I'm so angry, I don't think it will ever
pass." So maybe it's time to damn the torpedoes.
I guess what I'm saying is some rough stuff is coming. If
you are especially sensitive maybe you should stop reading. I'll try to be like
Cheryl Strayed, I really will. But that doesn't mean that it won't hurt.
No comments:
Post a Comment