Have Mother, Will Travel

by Claire Fontaine

  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.

  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 think 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.