Because I Said So (39 page)

The two responses I am given are so appropriate and encouraging they bring tears to my eyes. The first reads: “THE TAMING

POWER OF THE SMALL / Has success. / Dense clouds, no rain from our western region / . . . The wind drives across heaven.” (Dense clouds indeed; it is February in Brooklyn.) And the second seems, without forcing, so relevant to my expectation that in a few weeks I will be nursing my baby and worrying about the possible loss of my writing, that it stuns me.

A devout rationalist, I do not really believe in the predictive power of any book, but, still, this pure voice seems to be speaking directly into my ear. “THE CORNERS OF THE MOUTH (PROVIDING NOURISHMENT). / Perseverance brings good fortune. / Pay heed to the providing of nourishment / And to what a man seeks / To fill his own mouth with.” The prosy interpretation reads: “In bestowing care
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and nourishment, it is important that the right people should be taken care of and that we should attend to our own nourishment in the right way. . . . Nature nourishes all creatures . . . He who cultivates the superior parts of his nature is a superior man.” Everyone alluded to in the
I Ching
—except the maidens who occasionally show up to be wed—is male, it goes without saying. But, as a creature about to give suck to a child, and who is concerned about attending to my own mental nourishment, this oracular directive is enough to make me swoon with relief.

A few weeks later I am indeed in the hospital, my beautiful little girl-baby, whom we have just named Elana, beside me in her plastic basinet when my husband brings me the galleys of my first published story—I have recently ventured into prose—and I correct them on the rolling bed table that has just accommodated my breakfast tray. I take it as an augury, the perfectly timed fulfill-ment of the
I Ching
’s promise—or was that a challenge? I am ready to write my own mini-
Ching
poem: “DARING. / There are many roads to the same destination / and better ones, perhaps, than you can yet imagine.”

But of course, even the
I Ching
did not say it would be simple.

Another picture: I am at the dining room table, typing out my handwritten day’s work. Elana is at day care; Adina should be on the school bus on her way home from first grade. She is six.

Eager not to steal from our time together, I am always careful to pack away my writing when she’s due at home—we live now very far from the road, down a wooded drive, so I can’t hear the bus, but I certainly know what time it is, and I make sure to be ready for her return. But this particular day, I am in the middle of a paragraph and just need a bit more time when I hear her come up on the porch and in the front door.

“Give me a minute, honey,” I call out to her. She stands in the arch between the living room and the dining room, where my pages are spread out around me on the table. “Sorry, Dina, you know I never do this. Just give me a second, okay? Take off your stuff.” It’s winter in New Hampshire; she’s trammeled down with snowmobile suit (red, navy, and yellow, I remember it so well, and those clumsy, complicated boots with the felt liners). “There
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are milk and cookies on the table!” For which the Good Mother gestures her to the kitchen.

And she continues to stand beside the table, stubborn, silent, looking hard at me and my typewriter. Finally, guilty and exasperated—can’t she cut me this much slack? I
never
do this!—

I say, “Adina.
Please!
” To which she replies, shyly, “But I never get to see you
working
.”

It is thirty years later as I write this. Adina is, herself, a writer; after nine years as a film critic, she has come out of the dark and published a superb book of essays. If I were to ask whether she suffered for my occupation, and the concomitant
pre-
occupation that so often accompanied it, I dare to think she would only laugh.

As for the girl-baby who tamed my distraction with her power, I still cringe at the memory of her calling me from school when one of the class chaperones failed to show up to take her second grade to see—oh, what a clutter stays forever in our minds!—the dubious choice of a movie,
Pete’s Dragon.
She knew that I was a reluctant class mother; I protected (and taught her to protect) my time the way violinists protect their hands, and so I remember all too vividly how tremulously she asked me if I could possibly—“Oh, Mom, please, could you just this once?!”—fill in for the missing mother and come along with them to Nashua for the afternoon. Of course there was no way I would say no. But it is the way her regret and apology and something almost like fear accompanied her entreaty that lives with me even now. (It didn’t make it any easier that, because I was one of those mothers with too many opinions, she knew what I thought of her teacher’s choice of movie!)

And yet, and yet . . . here is a fragment of a letter she sent to me when she had just started college and I was away at the MacDowell Colony, where artists of many kinds retreat for a long spell of uninterrupted work: “I guess I don’t get very much opportunity to tell you how proud I am of you. . . .When people find out who you are, although none of them knows your work (‘Nothing personal’), they are so impressed. Although I usually answer with ‘She’s just my mom!’ (because you are just my mom, after all!) I realize how . . . wonderful your accomplishments are.

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. . . I know you’ve been having trouble with this book. I hope your time at MacDowell is peaceful and productive. . . . You can give me your
completed
novel for my birthday. If you are pleased with it, it is the best present I can get.”

Why is it, I wonder, that no one in those Q&As has ever asked if I think that having a mother deeply committed to work like mine—exceptionally solitary until (one prays) it becomes exceptionally public—might be useful to a child, might be a model of dedication against difficult odds, with an uncertain outcome and modest rewards. Instead, the questions always seem to suggest a zero-sum game. And for mothers with other kinds of jobs, with different issues (long commutes, awful bosses, inflexi-ble hours, paper grading long into the night, too many hours in airports and hotels, or sheer gut exhaustion and aching feet), why must the assumption be that children derive nothing from their example? No one dares challenge those who have to work for the paycheck, but it seems that those who fulfill less visible, internal needs will always be suspect, no matter how many days we devote to “Take Your Child to Work.” (Boys get equal time these days. And why not? When my brother was a child and someone asked him what his father did at work all day, he brought forth all he knew about the matter: “He grows whiskers.”) There is no moral to this story. No one knows, when she is grabbing that nap time to disappear from the
here and now
into her own imagination, that she will ever hear her daughter speak lovingly of her “accomplishments.” No one can promise herself, acknowledging her frequent absence even when she is present, that she is not cheating herself as well as her child. But there is will and there is need, and somewhere in the equation I suppose there must be—there was for me, however blind—faith that things will balance out; that for every choice that I would do this thing I had to do, with a different passion than the one I felt for my child but a passion nonetheless, that somehow she would gain something from it, too. Burying that passion is no solution; its denial will be smoke that rises from an invisible fire.

Tillie Olsen, who so often allowed her family and political obligations to distract her from her writing, published an entire
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book about the
Silences
that eat up so many lives (mainly, though not solely, women’s). In it she speaks of the need to become a

“habituated” writer, so that the work habit is ingrained and one needn’t face down fresh guilt and self-denial, not to mention rusty muscles, every time she feels the tug of words.

Something that saved me, I think, is what comes of being so

“habituated” that by now it takes more discipline for me
not
to write than to get a long day’s work done. Just as my husband always insisted that my work was as important as his, and that I had the right to assume for it whatever protection it needed, so I had to respect it sufficiently to indulge that narcissism that every artist must have at her core. But that is what creative ambition—

reflexive and rarely lucrative—looks like. Disappearing into oneself seems just as disruptive of a family’s equilibrium as walking out the door in the morning with a briefcase or a black bag.

So be it, I finally learned to say. It is what it is, and if it feels like a choice, then perhaps it is one that can be ignored. In the end, to use the most frequently repeated words in the
I Ching
—they recur and recur, like a tolling bell sounding across the centuries—“No blame.

No blame.”

A little poem from my book,
Cora Fry
, uttered by a character who is describing me:

I have a neighbor

who is always deep

in a book or two.

High tides of clutter

rise in her kitchen.

Which last longer, words,

words in her bent head,

or the clean spaces

between one perfect

dusting and the next?

Why I Left My Children

M a r i L e o n a r d o

As told to

Marina Pineda-Kamariotis

and Camille Peri

I came to the United States
three years ago on a tourist visa and I never went home. I work cleaning houses and taking care of people who are sick, and sometimes I take care of children. But it has been very difficult for me to see children here.

Every night I have looked for my own children when I go home, but they are not there. That’s why I don’t like to go home. I just want to be out, because when I go home I remember them. I look at their photos. I say to myself, I’ve lost three years with them.

My mother grew up in Guatemala, one of four children who lived with their mother on the streets. Sometimes they slept in the park and their mother would put newspapers over them for blankets. Sometimes they slept in the doorway of a restaurant, and the owner would throw water on them to wake them in the morning.

My mother never went to school. Today, even though she has not been homeless for years since she came to the United States, she still looks for things on the streets to take home.

My mom experienced life and death on the streets. Her mother beat her. She had too much responsibility for a little girl.

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One of her most vivid memories is of bathing her baby brother in a public
pila
when he slipped from her arms and died. My mother watched her mother suffer a horribly painful death of ovarian cancer. She had no medicine to ease her suffering because she was homeless and destitute.

At nine years old, my mother was an orphan with nowhere to live. She was hired by a woman to help around the house, but if she broke something while cleaning, the woman would beat her on the head. The woman had a daughter for whom she bought beautiful clothes, and my mother would think, “When I get paid, I’m going to buy a dress just like hers.” Then my mother and her younger sister were taken in by another woman. They earned their keep by helping her care for and clean up after her five children. Eventually my aunt ended up a prostitute. She would hide if she saw my mother coming, because my mother would give her a physical beating to stop her from continuing that lifestyle. She died, probably of AIDS, when she was about thirty-five. We don’t know where her body is.

My mother’s other sister was sold to a couple by her mother before she died. My grandmother must have thought that at least one child would be taken care of. My mother never saw her again. It’s been thirty-two years, and she is still trying to find her.

My mother moved to Guatemala City and met my father when she was about seventeen. She went to a movie with him and then just went home with him. She didn’t have anywhere else to go. About a month later, a woman knocked at the door, claiming to be his wife. My mother was already pregnant with me.

Although my mother was in love with him, my father put her on a bus to the country, where his sister was living, and he went back to his wife. After I was born, he showed up and demanded that my mother give me to him. His plan was to take me away from my mother to raise me as a servant to his wife. He said to my mom, “You are nothing and you have nothing, so the baby is mine.” But my mother had something—she had me. That was all she had. She ran to a park and sat crying with me in her arms. A kind woman saw her. When my mother told her what happened, the woman took her into her home for several months.

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When she was twenty, my mother got together with my stepfather, and they had three children together. He was a hard worker, but she was too young to be married. She was not really in love; she was looking for security. She still wanted to go out to dances without him. They were physically abusive with each other. I remember one night when I was twelve years old, she scratched his face while defending herself from him, and he broke a bottle and came after her with it. I was right in the middle of it, and I just fainted.

Just as my stepfather beat her, my mother beat me. But only me, not my half-brothers or half-sisters. I think she saw my father in me—literally, because I guess I look very much like him. And she was emotionally abusive, too. When I was thirteen and she was resting in a hammock, I went to her and said, “I love you.”