Before You Read This Book
Let me state for the record that all of the things I have done in life made sense at the time. I have never once thought, “Well, this will be an expensive, foolish, and ultimately useless endeavor. Where do I sign up?” No, I always think it is absolutely the right course of action under the circumstances.
Graduate school: Where else do you go when you keep getting fired from jobs?
Martial arts: Obviously I was trying to quit smoking.
Marriage: A transparent ploy to get my parents off my back.
When my daughter was born with oh let’s call it special needs, it was like someone had set off a bomb in the middle of my life. At that point in time my idea of a challenge was a hotel without room service.
When the neurology resident said, “Your daughter’s brain is massively deformed,” I wasn’t thinking serious thoughts like, What is the prognosis? and What are the best treatment options? I was thinking WTF? WTF? not unlike a squirrel running up and down an oak tree.
Now an adult, Jessica moves slowly and carefully but loves to dance. She has a serious cognitive impairment but enjoys philosophical debates about abstract concepts like truth and justice. She has a significant visual impairment and needs help navigating unfamiliar terrain but is an inspired glass artist.
Over the years, I learned how to be the kind of woman who could raise this child. But that is not today’s story. Today’s story is about what happened after that, when all the dramatic action paused for a moment and I took a breath, and thought about me. At first it went like this: me me me me me glorious me! Then I began having deeper thoughts, which is a course of action I cannot in good conscience recommend to other people. Introspection is a dangerous activity when not handled correctly. Proceed at your own risk.
Achieving Planned Objectives
It is the winter of my daughter Jessica’s senior year of high school, and I am emptying her book bag of all the accumulated debris of a semester, old homework assignments and empty food wrappers, and at the bottom is a pile of pencils, different colors, never sharpened, never used. I am about to have an epiphany but I don’t know it yet, and frankly if I had known what was coming, I would have burned the damned book bag instead.
But because I have no idea what I am loosing into the world, I open Pandora’s bag, and I see the pencils, and I say, “Hey, Jess. Why don’t you pick three or four of these to keep? We can get rid of the rest.”
“No,” she says.
She so rarely says no to me that at first I’m not sure I’ve heard her correctly. I stop, a fistful of pencils in my hand. At this point, I can still avoid what’s coming, if only I spot it in time. I can set the book bag aside and continue with my serene and untroubled presence. But I don’t. I persist. I try to explain myself.
“But there are so many.” That’s what I come up with. That’s my persuasive argument. I want you to see what happens when you make idle remarks without considering the consequences.
“Yes!” she beams. “At school, when I have done a good job, I get a special card, and that means I can pick a prize on Fridays.”
I look into the book bag. “And you always pick pencils. Don’t they have anything else?” Here, too, is a moment when I could back away slowly and get out of the path of the oncoming train, but I don’t hear the long mournful whistle or see the flashing red lights. It is not that I am attempting to outrun the train, which might at least be entertaining. I don’t even know the train exists, let alone that it is bearing down on me.
“Mom,” she says, and gently but firmly takes the pencils and book bag away from me. She puts the pencils back in the bag and zips it closed and gives it a little pat.
And then I have the epiphany, and it’s too late to save me from myself. I realize, in one mad rush of insight and emotion, like an anvil landing on my head, that she doesn’t pick her prizes out of any idea that she will use them, only that she will collect them, physical emblems of her achievements.
I have a list of accomplishments in a folder on my computer and I look at it now and then when I need to be reminded that I have done good work. So many books published, and so many satisfied clients, and all a way of counting up my worth because it is so easy to forget. I have the list and my daughter has pencils in the bottom of her book bag.
If only I had stopped there. An option would have been for me to think Like mother, like daughter and to experience a moment of satisfaction. Or I could have thought Well, whatever. I am very good at thinking Well, whatever.
There are many ways to consider this, almost all of which would allow me to continue my serene and untroubled existence. But I’m looking at the bag and thinking of my accomplishments list, and a certain knowledge washes over me.
Life is not about adding accomplishments to a list. The value of my life is not in how many projects I finish.
I look at the pencils.
This is so wrong. Everything about this is wrong. Everything I have taught my daughter about what’s important is a lie.
I don’t know what to do with the knowledge. It’s a wave I didn’t see coming and now I’m spitting sand and seaweed out of my mouth.
Jessica is waiting for me to say something, so I lean over to kiss her cheek and say, “That is very good work, darlin’ daughter.” She looks relieved but I am gutted: It’s a lie and I can’t seem to stop telling it.
The pencils weigh on my mind for a long time. On the whole, I think it is better to work hard than not, but I am less and less sure that hard work is a measure of anything. All the things I worked so hard to accomplish haven’t amounted to much.
Becoming a published author didn’t change my life in any appreciable way. It didn’t cure my daughter or secure my place in the pantheon of literary lights or result in invitations to glittering soirees.
Working as a book development editor paid the bills but had become a treadmill of beginning authors all making the same mistakes and me running out of new ways to drum up the enthusiasm to encourage them to do better. My personal life wasn’t much more engaging. A single mother with a massively disabled child doesn’t get a lot in the way of rejuvenating downtime not matter how hard the people around her babble about self-care.
I think of Fitzgerald and Gatsby. You pay a high price for living too long with a single dream.
It is better to be productive than a drain on society. It is better to have pencils in the bottom of a book bag than phone calls from the principal. Yes. That must be right.
But I feel that I am counting the wrong things, that there is a missing link, a thing that used to be there, at least for me, but now no longer is. I do the work, I get a reward. Only a lot of the time I don’t get a reward and sometimes even when I do, the reward is not enough. I don’t care sufficiently about the reward.
There is a disconnect and I feel it everywhere in my life. I am alienated from everyone around me. I don’t even know who I am anymore; I am alienated from myself.
Everything I do widens the schism instead of healing it. I reach out to a friend but the phone call goes unanswered. I try even harder to make an editor happy and am rejected once more. I argue with Jessica’s teachers about the obnoxious boy in her class and get nowhere. The labels I use to describe myself, friend, mother, writer, they are all in error. I am living on the table scraps of my own life.
For Jessica, the weight of the pencils in the book bag is a welcome reminder. For me it is another burden. She can carry hers, if she chooses. But I no longer will. No more labels, I say to myself. No more stories I make up so I can lie to myself about the life I am living. It is January, 2016. No more words.