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

by Claire Fontaine

  Our little beasts have the power to run our life right into the ground. That’s the power of our unconscious beliefs. They make you believe all kinds of lies about yourself, about life. And nothing scares our beasts like a powerful vision, one we’re passionate about.

  My favorite example of an authentic woman with vision has actually been dead over two hundred years: Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, the celebrated court painter to Marie Antoinette. Though she’s best known for her enormous paintings of the queen and the royal family, she created an astonishing body of magnificent paintings that hang in museums all over the world. Fortunately, she left behind letters, a diary, and an autobiography, which she penned before she died at age eighty-six.

  Born in Paris to an artist father, she fell in love with painting as a child, and made it her life come hell or high water. And hell came: her beloved father and teacher died when she was twelve; at her mother’s urging, she entered into a marriage of convenience to an art dealer who spent or gambled whatever she earned as a painter, which was considerable; a bloody revolution that took her friends’ lives and forced her to flee France; in exile for years, as a single mother; a devastating break with her only child, Julie, followed by Julie’s tragic death at forty-two. Not to mention she was a female at a time when women had almost no rights and were denied access to formal education. She had to work twice as hard and be twice as good as a man to get half as much notice.

  Yet she painted almost every day of her life, with a joy she found in nothing else except motherhood. Two centuries before there were workshops and gurus for self-empowerment, Le Brun marched through life as if she owned it—because she fully owned herself. She was a woman who knew who she was and what she wanted and did whatever it took to live a life of her own choosing.

  What better place to look to Le Brun—and Kristin—as role models than where we are right now. And I know of no better, or more enjoyable, way to start than creating a vision map, something Mia and I have decided to do. We’ve spent the last week collecting magazines, brochures, and postcards, cutting out images and making a grand mess in the afternoons when it’s too hot to be outside.

  A vision map is more than a map of dreams, it’s a process of clarifying what you want to focus on, a statement of intention. And, as I’ve learned, it’s something not to be taken lightly.

  The first time I made a vision map eight years ago was at the end of another workshop on—what else—vision, with—who else—Barbara facilitating (Barb’s one of those E. F. Hutton types; when she speaks, you sign up for it, whatever it is). I threw myself into it with complete abandon, not so much because I had absolute faith in it, but because we had only two hours to do it and only a couple of boxes of magazines for fifteen of us.

  There was a method to the madness. Such a short time bypasses the brain, where we tend to analyze our dreams into dust. And there’s a reason for cutting and pasting images like third-graders.

  We may not always immediately know why we respond to certain people, places, things, and situations, but we feel the pull nonetheless. Our brain will usually respond to images of those same things just as intensely. Which is what makes vision maps so powerful. They bring into consciousness what the thinking mind may not see as a possibility, either because we don’t give ourselves permission to, or there isn’t yet conscious awareness of a desire, or there is and we don’t think we’re deserving.

  One of the biggest images I included on my old map was of a woman on the beach with a laptop and the words A CALL TO ACTION. I’d had no clue I’d ever write Come Back, but part of me was very clear that I intended to use my writing to create awareness, make an impact.

  But there’s the be careful what you wish for part, especially if you’re like me, not so much a type A as type F—if you tend toward the freight train, you’d best be darn sure of the ultimate destination, because you buy your ticket with your intention, even if it stays in your unconscious, especially so. You can’t write on the beach in L.A. most of the time, it’s too cold. But you can in the beachiest, hottest state in the United States, which is where I found myself several years later, long after I’d forgotten about the map and against all common sense and my own personality.

  That’s where your conscious mind plays an important role, in clarifying, asking questions, gathering support and information, so you can keep the qualities of the experiences you want while fine-tuning to allow for everything else on the map, for your life to work. Which is what I should have done and didn’t.

  Just as important is what’s not on your map. The one thing everyone else had on their map that I did not was, sigh, a house. I knew myself, I knew it was not where I wanted to put my time and energy. I’m not a nuclear gal, I’m that restless electron always seeking valence. I could live in a nice hotel room as long as it had a desk and a view.

  This afternoon Mia and I are working in the studio, each lost in our own world. I’ve organized my images and words in categories: home, relationships, career, travel, mind/body/soul, legacy.

  As Mia and I gather images, I show her a lovely photo of a curvy nude woman, seen from behind, sitting in a lush alpine meadow with a deep blue lake. I’m really drawn to the image, but I can’t figure out where to place her.

  “Hey, Mia,” I ask, holding up the woman. “Where should I stick her?”

  She studies it a minute.

  “Well,” she replies, “did you cut it out because you want to live somewhere like that? What do you like about it?”

  “Well, it’d be a beautiful place for a home, but I was mainly drawn to her—she seems so serene and content, at home in the world.”

  “Oh,” she answers, matter-of-factly. “She goes in your ‘you’ pile.”

  “What do you mean the ‘you’ pile, it’s all me.”

  “No,” she says, “those are things you want to do and have. Where’s you, you know, the person creating all that?”

  I walk to hers and sure enough, there is my daughter right in the middle, an image of a strong-looking young woman surrounded by words like “blissful,” “powerful,” “confident,” “giving,” “brave.” Her core self, with everything else radiating out from her. Of course.

  It’s like God just keeps flunking me back to third grade over the last five years. Mia is right—I had lots of evidence of myself, what I’d create and enjoy, and leave behind, but I forgot my very essence, the me that will experience all of that.

  Mia shakes her head and goes back to her area. Aside from my being a mother at twenty-five, Mia has had so much more life experience, both positive and negative, than I had at her age. I think Mia would agree my generation was more mature and capable in terms of life skills in our twenties. We expected to be self-sufficient; we didn’t expect our first jobs to be fun or well-paying. And most of us would have rather slept at the YMCA than move back into our parents’ homes.

  But that’s just about how we interacted with the world. In terms of self-awareness and psychological savvy, she knows more at twenty-five than I ever did. It never occurred to me to do the kind of soul-searching and self-examination she’s doing now. And her life is going to be much better for it.

  As I look at my piles, patterns emerge, recurring motifs and themes. Nature, mothers and daughters together, powerful women, authors I admire, libraries, a Finance for Dummies book, cities of the world, desks looking out on vistas, interiors with French doors opening to gardens, art, books, outdoor fitness, yoga, meals under trees with lots of people.

  I realize how like writing a memoir this process is. When I looked back at all the major events of my life while writing our memoir, at the highs and lows, certain themes and patterns also emerged. Not what I thought or wished my life was, what it actually was, the results that told me what I had really been committed to all my life. I could see where I’d mistaken drama and conflict for life, which meant years of living reactively instead of generatively, a life I let be determined by circumstances and the choices of others. We like to thin
k life happens to us, but pretty much everything in your life is there because you wanted it, even if unconsciously. Results, I have learned, don’t lie.

  I look at the pile of images for my relationship with Mia. Nature, books, travel, family, art, food, as well as words for our shared values: “love,” “respect,” “fun,” “adventure,” “art,” “knowledge,” “support,” “accountability,” “honesty,” “communication.”

  I have a pile of moms and kids, oddly enough, given I’ve traveled half a world away to figure out who I am apart from being a mother. My favorite is of a woman around seventy with her hands cupping the face of a woman around forty. When I was cutting it out, I had to swallow hard, because it reminded me of my mom. But it’s not just the younger woman I identified with. I also identify with the maternal feelings of the older woman. Part of me knows I’m headed that way, closer to being seventy than thirty.

  “What is that?”

  I look up to see Mia holding a print of a fifteenth-century etching of a hairy little beast, probably what a northern European artist who’d never seen a monkey imagined one would look like if it also happened to be the devil.

  “Hey, show a little respect,” I answer. “That’s Tish!”

  “Morticia?”

  “Yes. I’m going to put her in a pink tutu, so look for images of ballerinas.”

  “You’re kidding! How cute!”

  “Well, she’s not going anywhere, so I’m making her presentable and sticking her with family.”

  Yeah, Tish can sabotage me if I let her, but mostly I think she just wants to be loved and reassured. I want her out in the open where I can see her coming. Lest I mistake her fears for reality. To fully reintegrate all the parts of myself, including little Tish, means all the feelings that go with them, even the painful, despairing, or shameful. Everybody has to come to the party for there to be a party at all.

  She laughs. “You’ll be like that pope with his little black demon following him around.”

  Spending the past few days immersed in a grown-up’s version of arts and crafts has been great. Not just because it’s fun skimming magazines and saying, “Yes please,” to whatever tickles my fancy, but because it’s nice to feel excited about the future again. Feeling unanchored is one thing, not knowing why I felt that way is another altogether. This trip’s clarified, specifically, what wasn’t working for me, and I feel like a horse behind the starting gate.

  My mom gets up from where she’s been working and walks over to study the images I’ve chosen. Many are lifestyle-related, friends laughing while hiking, countries I want to visit, a beautiful city apartment, photos of the kids in Rabin’s SOS Children’s Village Jorpati, in Kathmandu, to represent organizations I want to be involved with, an artist’s studio, a library, a chic couple eating at a scenic restaurant, words like “adventure” and “excitement.” Other images evoke feelings I want to regularly experience: a woman riding bareback on a galloping horse, a woman relaxing at a spa looking comfortable in her own skin, words like “relaxed,” “joyful,” “inner calm.”

  “What?” I ask, noticing my mom’s skeptical expression. “Why do you have that look on your face?”

  “Well,” she says, squatting down beside me, “I love all of it, it feels very you, but, remember how you pointed out—quite wisely, I should add—how my map was missing a big section?”

  “Yeah,” I say slowly, sensing an impending lecture.

  “Tell me if I’m missing it, but where’s your career? You know, the part about how you’ll finance all this stuff.”

  “Oh, that,” I say matter-of-factly, reaching for a picture of a bedroom that looks particularly inviting. “I’m skipping it for now because I don’t know what I want to do yet.”

  “Shouldn’t you be thinking about it? Travel and fine dining aren’t cheap.”

  “Mom,” I sigh. “Why do you have to make everything so serious? This is supposed to be fun, I’m not thinking about career stuff.”

  “This isn’t an arts-and-crafts project, Mia. It’s an exercise in creating an intentional future for yourself. You don’t want major professional regrets, and financial stress feels terrible, trust me. Not thinking about retirement funds when you’re young almost guarantees you won’t have one when you’re old. But, mainly, doesn’t a successful career excite you? Don’t you envision that for yourself?”

  Here comes the lecture.

  “Of course I want a successful career, but I have no clue what I want to do. I’m not about to cut out publicist pictures since I don’t want to do that long-term, and I don’t want to paste a giant question mark, so I’m just skipping it.”

  “Mia, you’re not ‘skipping’ anything, nonaction is an action. You’re making a conscious choice to omit it. You don’t know where you want to live, but you cut out pictures of interior décor and pretty bedrooms, right? Do the same for your career. Forget the exact title, just think about the elements you want in a career. What excites you? What do you gravitate toward? Do you see yourself in a busy office or working from home? What qualities do you want in your colleagues? I saw some great images of professional women in beautiful offices. Why don’t you—”

  She interrupts herself a second, bends down, and squints.

  “Is that Tinkerbell??”

  I look at the winking pixie in a cloud of fairy dust and feel somewhat sheepish.

  “I happen to like Tinkerbell—she’s a perfect symbol of feeling lighthearted and free.”

  “Honey,” she says, looking at me, “you’re an accomplished and wise young woman.”

  She walks back over to her area, sits back down.

  “But in some ways you really need to grow up.”

  I look down at my map, which isn’t really even a map yet but just a pile of images I now feel like tossing out the window.

  “Well, thanks for ruining a perfectly nice afternoon!”

  I walk out of the apartment, closing the door loudly behind me, and stomp my way downstairs to brood on a bench in the park across the street. Throughout the park, people are papering tree trunks with posters advertising upcoming plays.

  Every July is Le Festival, a monthlong theater festival that typically draws some hundred thousand people, and it’s all anyone’s talked about for the past few weeks. Bar les Célestins rolls in large shipments of wine and beer every day, and new faces are increasingly peppered among those we’ve come to recognize.

  By the time flyers for The Penis Monologues have been strung above me like popcorn garlands, I’ve cooled off enough to see my mom’s point. I initially avoided adulthood because I associated it with the loss of carefree, childhood fun. Within the past two years, however, I think it’s less to do with fearing adult responsibility (it’s not the most fun thing in the world, but I know how to live responsibly), and more to do with fearing I don’t have what it takes to succeed. There weren’t images of professional women because I often don’t have faith in myself as one. I’m bored with publicity but it came easily to me and I know I can do it. If I switch fields, (a) I have to figure out what else to do and (b) I may be terrible at it.

  Until about two years ago, it never seriously occurred to me that I could fail. Not failure along the lines of borrowing a hundred bucks from your parents to make rent, but really, truly, failing. I spoke to my mom about this, expecting her to be sympathetic and regale me with anecdotes about times her idealistic bubble burst, but she was rather amused. Of course I knew I could fail, she said, we all did, we’d failed plenty as kids—we got flunked, we got detention, we didn’t get picked for teams. It was a lifelong reality that motivated us to work hard.

  Granted, I can’t help that failure was hardly part of my generation’s educational vernacular; most of us were taught early on that we could do and be anything. Praise, meant to foster high self-esteem, was the staple of many millennials’ upbringings, both at school and at home. As Jean Twenge wrote in Generation Me, we were applauded just for turning our homework in and frequently told how
smart, talented, and special we were. Is it any wonder we anticipated relatively easy and immediate professional success?

  But when rewards aren’t tied to results, I think it actually fosters insecurity. Kids aren’t dumb; on some level you know you don’t deserve the accolades and you start questioning your abilities, in part because you’re never sure exactly what they are. I’m sure that’s partly why, after a few rejection letters, I stopped submitting articles altogether. I often give up when things don’t come easily to me, a pattern I want to change. Sometimes I feel like my self-esteem is similar to a beautifully constructed house of cards; the slightest of shakes and everything falls flat.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Avignon

  If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

  April 4, 1671, in a letter sent from Madame de Sévigné to her daughter:

  I told you the other day about Madame de Nevers’s new coiffure . . . this hair style is just what will suit you, you will look like an angel and it is quickly done . . . Now, imagine the hair parted peasant-fashion to within two inches of the back roll; the hair each side is cut in layers and made into round loose curls which hang about an inch below the ear; it looks very young and pretty—two bouquets of hair on each side. Don’t cut your hair too short, because the curls require a lot of hair as several ladies have found out and are example to others. Ribbons are arranged in the usual fashion and a large curl on top which sometimes falls down the neck. I don’t know if I have explained it very well. I shall have a doll dressed with this hair style and send it to you.

  November 1, 2007, in an e-mail sent from Claire Fontaine to her daughter:

  While at the hairdresser, why not get some soft highlights put in? It’s kind of mousy now and some brightness in your hair will light up your whole face. Your eyes and eyebrows will pop more . . . Also did you ever buy new foundation? That’ll help with rosacea and breakouts because yours has got to be laden with bacteria (from your fingers to face and back to bottle, yech). I’m ordering the copper cream today and the mineral powder foundation will be my gift as well.