Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  Nothing earth-shattering, certainly nothing like the events of Mia’s childhood. But those events were explored, expunged, learned from—I felt all the emotions that went along with them.

  These are the kinds of regrets all women have, mistakes and missteps, paths not chosen, opportunities gone. Youth gone. Forever. And until I honestly acknowledge how this regret feels, acknowledge that I’m not okay with how some of my life went, it’s like having a fake past, and a fake present, which is surely a prescription to a fake future.

  And it precludes grace, my life’s slate wiped clean by granting myself tender mercy. You can’t forgive what you don’t face.

  After a while, I heave a sigh. I’m glad I’m not alone. Whenever I cry, which isn’t often, I do it alone. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable or force myself to stop crying before I’m ready. With Mia, right now, I feel free to be honest, vulnerable, to let it all out.

  “Thank you for being here with me, for just letting me cry,” I tell Mia, wiping my eyes on her sleeve for a change.

  I told my mom earlier I wanted to know more about her and I’m getting more than I’d imagined, or perhaps bargained for. Never in my life have I seen her upset like this, there’s a resigned and bitter quality to her anguish that’s extremely difficult to watch. She has so much anger at herself that I’m not sure how I never noticed it before. Either she deliberately hid it very well or she’s simply never allowed herself to feel it. Part of me wonders if impulse-buying the house was my mom’s unconscious attempt to re-create the family life she wanted but never had.

  Living with my mom this summer feels a little like being a fly on the wall of a director editing footage. She’s shifting through scenes, finding patterns, seeing how things could have been alternately filmed. From the moment she called to say that she was going to France, something in her voice told me she was going through a big change, and that the summer would be a pivotal time for her.

  Moments like these make me certain that I did the right thing in coming here; I’m learning more about her than I ever otherwise would have, and our relationship is completely changing, opening up, and becoming much richer.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Avignon

  Those Who Matter Don’t Mind

  Imagine this life: every drive home is through rolling fields of grapevines and sunflowers, dotted with centuries-old farmhouses and garage-size rolls of dried hay. Your lavender-lined driveway ends at a terrace with an enormous tree shading a long rustic table filled most weekends with a bounty of food, family, and friends; your home is a huge old restored farmhouse with a big writing office that looks out on your husband’s dream come true, an organic vineyard of award-winning artisanal wines. When not tending your two beautiful children and home, you’re writing a hugely popular blog on France and the French language.

  Oh, and you’re stunning, beloved, and feel God’s presence in your life. And your husband is a sweet, smart Gallic hunk. Voilà, my girlfriend Kristin’s life. One that she’d dreamed of since she was an adolescent living in the shadow of a freeway near Phoenix. She’d just gotten her first diary and seen a Bain de Soleil commercial and knew her destiny: she was going to be a writer living in France. Which she is.

  She was so determined to live her dream that she created a blog before there was any real Internet. While working as a bilingual secretary in Marseilles post-college, she crafted vignettes describing life in France that she sent by regular post once a week to Francophiles in the United States who might be interested in her weekly “Café letters.” Once she started a blog, she drew fans worldwide, along with a publishing deal for a memoir.

  She picks us up at the train station in Orange, looking breezy and radiant with her long, white gauzy skirt, intensely blue eyes, and tousled blond locks. I insist Mia sit up front, as it’s her first time meeting Kristin. She and Kristin are full of questions for each other, about college, life in France, writing, dating. I love watching Mia get to know my friends. They elicit different things from each other than I do, and it’s a chance to learn new things about each of them.

  Kristin’s normally reserved but she and Mia are chatting away like old friends. Mia has the ability to make anyone open up; she’s genuinely curious and listens well, beneath the words.

  On my last visit, I marveled at how such a soft-spoken, somewhat shy woman could do all the things Kristin does in a day (full-time blogging and photography, speaking, writing short stories, mothering two kids, helping Jean-Marc with a grueling harvest in the fall and a stream of vineyard clients and visitors all year long). What’s allowed her to realize her dream where so many others fail, including me for many years, is how carefully and sanely she chooses exactly where to spend her time and energy. On the way from collecting us at the station to her home, she’d shot enough photos for a few blog posts at the cost of only two minutes’ extra time—the old bicycle leaning against the boulangerie wall, an old tobacco ad painted on a crumbling building, a cat stretched out on a sidewalk. She threw together a wonderful lunch in ten minutes (“instant couscous tastes the same as the longer kind”). Her house is fresh, typically Provençal, and looks neat but lived-in. She wears simple, pretty clothes, a great haircut, little or no makeup, and no nail polish.

  Basically, she’d become a French mother—disciplined about time where it counts most and not too worried about the rest. Though the rest isn’t always something she and Jean-Marc agree on.

  “For example,” she tells us as we walk to the river where Mia and Kristin’s giant retriever, Braise, run ahead to have a swim. “I can speak French fluently by now, but my accent is terrible, even after twenty years.”

  It’s true, she has a strong American accent. We’ve twisted our towels around our heads like turbans to keep the sun off our faces as we amble along a stony dirt path. On our right, Jean-Marc’s grapes are just beginning to turn purple.

  “It drives Jean-Marc crazy that I don’t even try. But why spend my time focused on that? Everyone understands me just fine.”

  Kristin’s life illustrates that it takes more than passion and a lot of work to make a dream work—it takes focus. What you think about matters, a lot. Your thoughts drive your actions. When I think about much of what I’ve focused my thoughts on in the last few years, I cringe. You stick a perfectionist who hates domestic stuff in a fixer-upper and what you get is someone constantly obsessing on things she isn’t going to do. The thing about that, aside from premature aging, is that focus = time, something most of us don’t really, truly consider. Those are minutes, hours, and days of your life gone forever.

  There is a balance to be struck, however—a trade-off for such big accomplishments.

  “Some people think I live this dream life. Don’t get me wrong, it is what I always wanted, it’s a beautiful life, and I’m deeply grateful. But every minute is taken up and my mind is always busy.”

  I told her it could also just be her nature, that maybe it’s the other way around—her life is busy because her mind is; she’d live a very full, busy life in any career or country.

  “That’s probably true. But I do pay a price; some part of me is almost always worried about something or someone. I’m still upset about that guy last night.”

  She’d shared earlier about a local journalist who had shown up unannounced. She’d had a long day and all she wanted to do was finish an article with a hot cup of tea.

  “But that voice in my head kept saying, Am I being kind enough, or humble enough, I should be nice to him. So of course I invited him in and was a good hostess for the evening, all while shaking under my skin.”

  Because she’d also had a vague instinct that he might not be sincere about the article he said he wanted to write. But another voice kept chiming in, this time rooted in her faith.

  “I kept thinking of that Bible verse in Hebrews, Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise. I’m always afraid I’ll misjudge someone. But you know what? He studied everything, but wrote nothin
g. He just came to snoop. I was so angry at myself—for not respecting myself, for not following my instinct—that I hardly slept all night.”

  I know exactly how she felt, what it feels like to mouth the words Sure, I can do that or Of course you can join me, while some part of me shrivels. What woman doesn’t have that script memorized? Why don’t we say, “Thank you, but I’d rather walk alone today,” or “I’m sorry I’m not able to accommodate you right now,” without having to justify or explain? Why are we so afraid to be hungry? After all, in the words of Bernard Baruch, those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter. Otherwise the person who ends up not mattering is us. That journalist was just doing what he does; she had the choice to turn him away.

  Why do so many of us choose to be good girls going for gold stars, instead of clasping tight the gold of our lives by living as we truly desire? We accommodate, we wait our turn, do what we should. Over a few decades of adulthood, you accumulate so many shoulds, I think some of us feel like our own walking, talking avatars, images of ourselves.

  As if we had all the time in the world, as if our lives would never come to an end.

  We tend to think it’s just the sweet, over-accommodating women. Most of us can’t imagine women with strong personalities, like Kristin or me, not speaking up for ourselves. But all of us learned very early on that honesty and boldness cost us relationships.

  Girls are about connection, belonging, and approval; without it, we form a core belief that we’re not worthy enough, not cool enough, not funny or pretty or smart or successful or whatever enough. Even the pushy girls. So we abandon part of ourselves rather than risk losing connection. We may become outspoken, accomplished women, but in many ways we’ve gone a lifetime racking up gold stars. By the time we consciously make the compromises of motherhood, we’ve long been making unconscious ones, for peers, boyfriends, husbands, family.

  I think of the scene near the end of The Bridges of Madison County, where we see Meryl Streep throwing herself back into her ironing and her family after walking away from Clint Eastwood. How many women must have lain awake after seeing that film! Afraid that they’ll one day know what life they really wanted only by having lived the life they didn’t.

  I think one of the greatest challenges of motherhood is this: how to be a good mother without being a “good girl.” Not just for ourselves. For our daughters. So they don’t learn from us how grown-up girls play pretend.

  The map says to take this right.”

  “You’re reading it wrong, Mia. We’re supposed to be headed east. If we turn right, the sun will be on our left, signifying we’re headed north.”

  “Mom, I know how to read a map.”

  Here we go again. Estrogen. The open road. A tiny French car. We piled into Kristin’s car after lunch to visit Sault, a charming village nearby, and are now completely lost.

  We take a right onto a road leading to a town so small there can’t be more than fifty structures, all of which we see in about thirty seconds, the amount of time it takes to circle the area and end up exactly where we started. Which I know because we already passed these same three older gentlemen, sitting on the same ledge, still smoking, talking, and watching the passing traffic—us.

  They’re so quintessentially French that I’m surprised Kristin didn’t hop out and take a photo. The most vocal of the bunch seems to be the oldest, a still-handsome man in his seventies with snow-white hair, a white beret, and a striped sailor shirt. To his right is a barrel-chested man in a sleeveless undershirt, with a shiny gold medallion, who pauses every few seconds to pat away beads of sweat with a homemade handkerchief. To his left is a man that looks like a thinner, much older Geraldo Rivera, with eyeglasses the size of saucers and a forehead that’s a sea of worry lines.

  “We’ve just made a circle,” I say.

  “I know,” Kristin replies, “but the map does indicate that this is the right road. Let’s go around again and see—maybe the turn-off is just really small and we passed it.”

  Around we go, their heads turning in unison as we pass, and when a few minutes later we pass them yet again, Kristin stops the car and puts it in reverse. As she does this, they shuffle from their ledge to the curb. We pull up beside them, they look at us expectantly.

  “Bonjour,” Kristin says, and explains what we’re looking for.

  There can’t be more than one way out of such a teensy village but, being French, they passionately debate among themselves before reaching consensus, and he directs Kristin where to turn. She thanks him and drives away, but within a few minutes we’re back again. Out of a sense of chivalry or pity, he hops into an old, beat-up car parked under a tree, sticks his arm out the window, and motions for us to follow him.

  Finally on the right road, we relax and Kristin and I settle into an easy banter while my mom watches the countryside pass by. When my mom first told me about Kristin, she emphasized (because it’s something she hopes I’ll emulate) that from a young age, she had a clear dream that she never allowed circumstance or self-doubt thwart. That’s fine and well, assuming you have a dream. I’ve never been particularly pulled toward anything. The only thing I can think of wanting to do when I was little was to work with animals, a dream that ended when I was seventeen and my mom pointed out that unless I wanted to study zoology (the sciences aren’t my forte) and become a vet, I’d probably end up dealing with a lot of poop as a vet tech. Or sleeping in a dung hut as a safari guide. Either way, there was some version of poop involved.

  Most days, not having a clear vision of my future doesn’t really bother me; I figure I’ll find my way. But sometimes I’m envious of people who’ve always known exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up. That was always the sticking point for me, not so much the “doing” as the “when I grow up” part of the equation.

  I had somewhat of a lightbulb moment about this the other day when I was talking to Steven, the waiter at Bar les Célestins, and I realized that part of the reason I don’t feel grown-up is because I don’t know what I want to do.

  Steven had told me that he was nineteen, which greatly surprised me because I thought he was at least my age, not six years younger. I don’t consider myself or my friends immature but when I thought about us at nineteen, we were nowhere near as self-possessed or reserved as him. And, like our Malaysian cabbie Aza, Steven’s not the exception to the rule. One thing that’s obvious to anyone who stays very long in France is that Americans my age and younger are often less mature than our foreign counterparts.

  The saying that “Americans live to work and the French work to live” didn’t come from a vacuum; a career is central to a person’s identity in America. In France, for example, you don’t generally ask someone in conversation what they do for a living; it’s considered poor form, and boring. Far more interesting to them are the topics of culture, food, religion, philosophy. In America, “What do you do?” is usually one of the first questions asked, even when making small talk, possibly because our lives are less balanced, but also because it’s how we tend to define ourselves.

  A culture that so closely ties who you are with what you do is fundamentally problematic for many twentysomethings, given that where we’re at on the professional ladder is often the equivalent of a glorified gofer. And that’s for those of us with jobs! The rest of us are temps or bartenders, or avoid the job market altogether by entering grad school or the Peace Corps. Knowingly or not, maybe we confuse not knowing what we want to do with not knowing who we are.

  When I think about my crisis of confidence about writing, it wasn’t entirely unreasonable. Fifty-six rejections is a heck of a brick wall to hit, artistically and financially. But there are many ways to deal with brick walls. You can make them mean anything.

  We pretty much make up everything about the events and people that comprise our lives, and then we take all that and make decisions. Our choices depend on whether our basic view of life is of ease and possibility, or if we choose from a place of fear
and lack, of believing we’re not quite enough when push comes to shove.

  After several years of growth and creativity, and having worked as a writer most of that time, I allowed a major event to plunge me right back into my doom and gloom, victim alter-ego, affectionately dubbed Morticia. Noticing that by the way I’m fifty-one no doubt intensified my paralysis. Whatever I endeavor to do, writing or otherwise, I have less time to do it, less time to make any more big mistakes.

  I had all the garden-variety fears and doubts, rational or not, that midlife women are vulnerable to at three in the morning. Except it started to feel like three A.M. all day long. But again, it’s never about the circumstances; it’s not truly about my age or my career or my house. One can create a new life from a tent camp. Lots of people have accomplished amazing things after devastating injury, after war, rape, acts of God. First they survive, then, if they have a vision, they thrive.

  Without a vision of what’s on the other side of the brick walls we all hit, there’s no reason to find a way around them, because you don’t think there’s anything on the other side. A vision has the wondrous, empowering quality of keeping you both clear and focused on the future and fully engaged and taking action in the moment, no matter what; it prevents a brick wall from becoming a destination, a permanent address for a victim, with a BMW in the driveway (Bitch, Moan, and Whine).

  Without a vision for my life as an independent middle-aged woman, when I hit that brick wall I fed the little black beastie that springs from my shadows a feast of her favorite dish—fear.

  She’s the really bossy one; and she’s not quite the glamorous gal she wishes she was. Calling her Morticia is generous. She’s more like those little humanized monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. She puffs up her black, ratty fur to look big and scary and I believe every word she says: life is hard, life’s a problem to be solved, you’re not enough, not really, just look at what you’ve done buying that house! She can be vicious and soul-sucking, because she wants company in her cage.