Elizabeth has come through a horrible divorce, is determined to never marry again, but then is put in a situation where she has to marry. The thing that hits me hardest while reading this book is her absolute clarity around that fact that she does not want children. She wants to work. I want to work too. Living in a house with two struggling teens (hell, all of us are struggling) means that time to work is hard won.
It's not just that there are no uninterrupted hours. It's that there are no uninterrupted thoughts. Brad says he thinks about sex every 30 seconds. I laugh at that but thoughts about relationships fill most of my waking hours and not just my relationship with Brad. My relationship with my children (that's the worrisome one), my relationship with my parents (definitely better now), my relation to my sisters and my failed relationship with my sister-in-law. At least four times a day I think, "I'm not the right person; another person could manage these relationships better. There must be someplace I can go to be free of these relationships and then become the person I was meant to be. Mexico? Bali? Iceland?"
Elizabeth Gilbert is maybe not the best person to turn to when one is tempted to run away to foreign lands. I'm stuck on the idea that if I live alone, I could be good. When I live with others (especially sixteen-year-old others) I'm angry, mean, even sometimes violent. This is not who I am in my head, but this is who I become when I'm scared and frustrated, angry and tired. I'm envious of families whose children are in step -- soccer-playing, straight A, polite readers -- and I kill a big part of myself with the thought that my children would be those teens too if I'd just been a better mother.
I think about having twin babies in New York City, moving to Manhattan when they were only two months old. I remember the intense loneliness of it but also days when sun poured through the window, and I lay on my back inside the huge corral that I'd constructed in the center of our apartment. Danny and Rachel would crawl over me, each one clutching a Cheerio between thumb and forefinger. And who they were did not depend on me. Their well-being depended on me, and I did a damned good job of making sure they were never hungry, that they were warm and clean and dry and safe always, always. They were happy. But now, somehow who they are depends on me. The fact that they haven't achieved is my fault. And fear is the ruling emotion, fear that Danny will land in jail, fear that Rachel will become pregnant, fear that I'm somehow keeping them from doing their best or not doing enough to help them become the person I think they could be, should be.
How do mothers bear this?
I drag myself out of bed, and make potato salad. My Dad always made the potato salad in our house, and I think about how hard my parents had it with five children and not enough money. I chop vegetables just the way that my Dad does, small mounds of diced celery, red onion, and sweet gherkins. I leave out the hard-boiled eggs and mayo, and cook really beautiful Yukon golds (a pain to peel but such a gorgeous yellow). I make two bowls of it, one just chunks of potato, a good deal of Olio Nuovo, and a sprinkle of sea salt. In the other bowl, I mix the potatoes with the Olio Nuovo and all the veggies. Danny and Rachel fall on the no-veggie potatoes, and pronounce it "bomb-y." I take a spoonful of the vegified potato salad and there's something about commitment right there: that my parents and I struggled and yet I make the potato salad, I try to stay. That's a sort of commitment.
copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack
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