Have Mother, Will Travel

by Claire Fontaine

  My mom and I have enjoyed acting like old-hand tour guides to a city we knew nothing of three months ago, taking Sarah to the bluff at sunset, shopping at the Villeneuve farmers’ market, introducing her to Chrystelle and the Bar les Célestins gang.

  Sarah and I took a walk down Rue des Teinturiers the other day, and she said how appreciative she’s always been that my mom shared me with her. “She never tried to get in the way, or was jealous of how close we became. I’m not sure if you realize how unusual that is—she was even thrilled that you sent me a Mother’s Day card one year!”

  I’d never thought much about it, but my mom did always let me form bonds with her friends and encouraged me to find female mentors. I think she felt that people have different life experiences, different dreams, different talents and interests, and the more exposure a child has to these, the richer their childhood may be, the broader their horizons.

  Having Sarah in my life nurtured and developed parts of me that my mom didn’t understand or relate to. As a talented painter and artist, Sarah identified with my love of sculpting and using pastels. She loved horses and riding just as much as I did, and has the same spontaneous-borderline-reckless streak that would have had her swimming with elephants, too. During the years that my mom was depressed, it helped to have Sarah take me on adventures, tramping through the woods in Topanga Canyon, swimming in the ocean at Paradise Cove, swinging from rope swings over waterfalls at Will Rogers State Park. She’s also très pas comme il faut, and couldn’t have cared less if she’d seen me sleeping in a hotel lobby clad in sweatpants and flip-flops.

  Today, the three of us are at Kristin’s house, talking and cooking in her kitchen, which overlooks a valley floor filled with the even rows of bright green grapevines.

  “Let’s go outside for a bit, get some fresh air,” Kristin suggests, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “It’ll be hot, but I’ll get us hats. We can walk to the river.”

  The elements hit us the moment the door opens: the pulsing hum of cicadas, the dry wind and beating sun. By the time we reach the river, the ice-cold stream is a sweet relief and we splash around for a while before heading back to eat the meal we prepared earlier. While waiting for Jean-Marc to finish his work in the distillery, Kristin lays out a large sheet for us in the shade of a giant tree in her yard.

  Sarah’s soon catnapping, and while my mom and Kristin talk quietly, I pull out my camera and scroll through today’s photos. On the walk, Sarah had pointed out how crisp and sharp the afternoon sun had made our silhouettes, and we clowned around with different poses and formations. It’s impossible to tell who’s who from the silhouettes; the photos just show curving female forms with arms extended upward, outward, one looking like an upright snow angel, another striking a yoga Warrior pose. There’s an ageless quality to them, a snapshot taken at just the right moment of four women at play, a capturing of laughter and wonderful female energy.

  Growing up, all I wanted was to be a boy, and I still envy certain things about them. They can pee standing up; they don’t have to deal with periods, labor pains, having men talk to your chest, or failing to attain the promotion or salary you deserve because of your sex. They don’t have the same fears of rape, of not feeling safe when traveling alone.

  But they’ll never know how uniquely powerful female kinship can be, it’s less permissible for them to express emotion or cry. They’ll never experience how amazing it is to know that your body can nourish and sustain human life. One time, when I mentioned to Chrystelle that childbirth sounded perfectly awful, she just smiled and said, “Yes, eet’s painful, but you weel not care. With Antoine, when the nurse first put ’eem to my breast, I know that I am never alone again een all my life.”

  I’m thinking of one thing after another that I absolutely love about being female and feeling better and better about myself after each one. I know what it’s like to reach a place within where I truly love and appreciate the unique qualities that make me me, but I’ve never felt a general gratitude and appreciation for my gender. It’s not about pitting one sex against the other, or deciding who has it better or worse—it’s just fuller and greater appreciation of femininity and womanhood.

  Womanhood. There, I said it.

  I say it to myself a few more times.

  I am a woman. I am a woman.

  It feels right this time; I’m pretty sure I could say it to someone else without rolling my eyes or wincing in embarrassment. Maybe in part because I’ve just spent an entire summer with women from all different age groups, something that isn’t always encouraged, or easy to do.

  Magazine spreads frequently advise us how to dress or take care of our skin based on what decade of your life you’re in (this usually spans from your twenties to your sixties, although I once saw a spread including the seventies; I guess they think we’re just beyond help at eighty). Nor do we tend to have close friends running the gamut in age; my friends in their twenties are almost exclusively close friends with other twentysomethings.

  I look at my mom and Kristin laughing, at Sarah stretched out in the afternoon sun, at a group of women in our twenties, forties, fifties, and sixties, women who are constantly evolving as we figure out who we are and what we want. Things that I’ve been grappling with, yet assumed were unique to my age and having just started out in life (conveniently, I also assumed they’d magically disappear as I matured).

  I think when I go home, I’ll see female colleagues less in terms of our age differences and more in terms of the shared experiences of our gender. I think I’m comfortable calling myself a woman because I understand that adulthood isn’t a destination, it’s a process, and, as women, we are always coming of age.

  It’s ironic that a religion that so deified Mary for her ability to do what God denied man the ability to do,” Mia says as she trudges along behind me in Avignon, “went on to so totally disempower women.”

  I love the way Mia’s mind works, how ideas are more important than things for her. We’re on one of our daily meanderings and, for a change, she’s deigned to let me lead in weaving through the spaghetti of passages and streets.

  “It’s because men don’t have the ability that they did,” I answer. “I think it terrified them and left them feeling utterly inferior. Someone pulling a live human out of their very person? It’s the ultimate thing to be jealous of and want to control.”

  I lead her to an unassuming archway in one of the endless stone walls behind the palace. I can tell she’s never seen it before, not that she’d admit it, Miss I-know-every-corner-of-the-city. We slip through it into a long, cool rectangle of sandy gray pebbles enclosed in ancient walls that are lined with huge sycamores. A hidden courtyard, another little gem I already know I shall miss come September. There’s a row of fifteenth-century windows with taupe-colored shutters overlooking the far wall; beyond the wall on our left rises one of the massive rear walls of the palace, blocking the lowering sun.

  We’re directly behind one of the biggest tourist draws in Europe, and somehow, miraculously, it’s absolutely silent here. It’s empty but for some pigeons and a couple sharing a book on a bench beneath a tree, holding it close between them to read. Mia’s as surprised as I was when I stumbled in accidentally last week.

  “Here’s the best part,” I whisper, pulling her along to a spot between the trees on the right. She gasps when she sees it: a brilliant gold life-size statue of a man with his head thrown back laughing. Not a saint or a revolutionary hero. A regular modern-day Joe (I’m sorry, but he looks more Connecticut than French) in a short-sleeve shirt and khakis, barefoot, holding a book. Like your handsome English Lit teacher at a barbecue. It’s a perfect metaphor for a city that’s both a seat of learning and power as well as gritty and working-class, old money alongside North African immigrants, with a big gay community thrown in.

  A ray of sunlight blazes on Joe’s wavy gold hair. It would be a traffic-stopper in Manhattan or
London. In this forgotten courtyard in Avignon, it’s astonishing, genius really.

  I cock my eyebrow and look at Mia. There are some advantages to stumbling around lost for a while. It allows for discovery.

  Call me a cheap date, but this simple little studio has pleased me more than any five-star hotel. Other than the floor, there’s almost nothing to clean or dust, which is freeing. There’s nothing in it that reminds me of anything, anyone, or anyplace I know, which is a kind of mental and emotional freedom.

  Most of us aren’t aware of how much of ourselves is bound up in our visual landscape—the chairs, dishes, clothes, the “stuff” that makes up a woman’s life—until we leave it. And while it may be true that you don’t always know what you’ve got till it’s gone, it’s also true that you don’t know if what you’ve got really matters till you realize you don’t miss it. Other than people, I don’t much miss my life back home.

  As I rise to have breakfast while Mia sleeps another hour, I suddenly realize what my crazy urge to take everything out of the studio was about. I want to wake up Mia and say Hey, Mia, it’s the room in Sister Act! I know she’ll remember.

  There’s a scene in that movie where Whoopi Goldberg’s character is first shown her room in an abbey. It’s all white and utterly bare but for one chair, one desk, one cup, one bowl, one spoon, one bed, one pillow, one outfit. I can still actually feel the elation I had when I saw it. The utter simplicity of the room, and the life that went with it, felt like a soul stripped bare, and my soul gave me a kick in response, saying Pay attention, notice! How it feels to see stillness and honesty in a place that would elicit the same in the character. Thankfully, we were at home, because out I blurted, “Yes! One cup, one bowl! I love it, one dress, one chair! I want that life!” We all wondered if there was something in the takeout.

  With nothing more than a simple instinct—and trust—I created a snowy cocoon of stillness I must wake in and return to every single day. I wasn’t sure why I wanted the walls bare, but for once just the wanting was enough.

  It may be minor to someone used to always knowing exactly what they want and why and how and when. But to a woman who spent a good part of her life accommodating, protecting, living years where I was authentic in my mothering but in no other part of my life, it was no small thing at all.

  I slip quietly out of bed and head to the sun-washed kitchen. I set out a brioche and Chrystelle’s grandmother’s thick homemade apricot preserves and sit down to a view I’d only find in coffee-table books at home: a sea of medieval terra-cotta rooftops beneath a piercingly blue sky. If I look left, it’s nothing but a chattering wall of green, thanks to a flock of big, boisterous magpies. With their natty tuxedo coats, they dot the tree like fat, sassy penguins tossed from a wedding party for drinking too much. They holler and hop around, making branches dip under their weight, entertaining me while I eat.

  In the yard below them, the tops of two once-white lawn chairs poke out of the tall overgrowth that has swallowed them. A set of French doors behind them is a still life of broken panes, cords of twisted ivy and broken boards. They belong to an eighteenth-century town house, long abandoned; the stone is blackened, the windows boarded up with long-rotted planks. But you can see those ubiquitous blue shutters behind them, a color unchanged in centuries.

  It’s a beautiful place, even in its decay. Voluminous silk skirts and petticoats no doubt rustled up a storm in there a few centuries ago. After an often-bloody civil war here between papists and those loyal to the French Revolution, Avignon was finally integrated into France, just in time for both the Red Terror and the White Terror.

  I think of Le Brun, whose wealth and association with the queen made her a marked woman during the French Revolution. She barely had time to grab her daughter, switch their satin gowns for the servant’s clothes, smear their faces dirty, and make a dash for the border in a cheesy carriage, sitting knee-to-knee with a reeking drunkard.

  Were the wealthy women behind those blue shutters safe, when even smelling of expensive perfume could cost you your head? How far to save one’s life, what kind of cleverness, or ruthlessness? Once that was over, did the women hold salons of the old guard, or welcome the new, embrace the romantic over the rational? Were mothers and daughters split on these issues, like the rational royalist Le Brun and her romantic and emotional daughter, Julie?

  Once she returned from exile, what went through Le Brun’s head as her carriage rolled over the very spot where her friends’ heads had fallen into a blood-soaked basket before being picked up by the hair and held high for the cheering crowd? Perhaps she’d see Madame du Barry’s lace scarf round a shop girl’s neck. An artist selects her subject’s clothes; she would know it among thousands, Belgian lace whose every detail she rendered. Ten years later, she’d recognize the scent of a one-of-a-kind perfume stolen from the queen’s boudoir. That’s a beautiful plot point, I muse to myself, recognizing Marie Antoinette’s personal perfume on someone a decade later, but, wait, not on a shopgirl, on another noblewoman, an old friend of the queen—that has much more intriguing story possibilities.

  My mind wanders to perfumer Annick Goutal’s answer when she was asked what was her greatest luxury. To be warm, she said. I just loved that answer. Warmth. Not something you have or do, something you feel in your bones. She died of breast cancer not long after that, at only forty-two. I wonder if knowing her time here was limited brought a realization that one needs so little, really, but it’s that little that is true luxury.

  For me, this is that kind of luxury, this silent, sitting-still-ness, and the inner portal it opens, like a train window full of prairie sunrise, a view to world after world, in my mind’s eye. How wonderful to let my imagination play again, without simultaneously thinking of everything I should be doing or forgot to do or don’t want to do. Scenes and characters, images and dialogue, are quietly back, effortlessly and unsummoned, like flowers blooming in a dead garden.

  I’m almost tingling with the sense of curiosity and delight that only writing brings me. How did I ever think I could continue writing without stillness, silence? Well, I didn’t. I simply stopped writing. Was it a way to keep myself busy to avoid any midlife self-reckoning? Or is it nothing that complicated, just simply the lifelong habit of an undisciplined, too-busy mind?

  Either way, even now I can sniff the beginnings of “Okay, that was a nice few moments, thank you trees and birds and God, time to get up and get going, there’s so much to do and think and ask and say, and why didn’t I do this or get that or give more, give less, blog more, blog less, call my brother, find that earring, and Paul is crazy, the studs under the east bedroom window are sinking.” A mind like a shark—swim or die.

  Change happens in the small moments, when a sliver of light finds its way through the cracks. Until I did inner work the first time around, I had no idea how much discipline it takes to stay conscious and present, to put in the kind of every-moment-of-the-day work it takes to change your way of being. I taped affirmation cards everywhere, made Wheel of Life Charts on which I wrote down every single thing I did in fifteen-minute increments for three entire weeks (that’ll shatter any illusions you have about how you spend your time, take my word for it). I asked myself a thousand times a day before acting—and, miraculously, speaking—What am I creating with this choice right now?

  So what new choices am I willing to make, right now, to support this essential part of me? Same thing I used to do, set an intention, right now. Four hours a day in silence, minimum, with my notebook or laptop.

  It feels good to be going back to tools that have worked for me in the past. Simple things but hard to actually do, like keeping commitments to myself, choosing from intention rather than feelings, excuses, or circumstances. But if I could do it before, for several years, I can do it again. I weel do eet again.

  I’m not religious but hymnal music moves me like little else. It’s stirring, the deep hum of collecti
ve voices, the way they seem to vibrate within stone walls and floors, up through your feet and into your bones. When I left our apartment for an evening alone on the bluff, I didn’t expect to hear singing coming from inside Notre-Dame-des-Dômes, any more than I expected that toward the end of the church’s vespers service my face would be tearstained.

  A hand comes and rests lightly on my shoulder, and I look up to see a nun gazing softly at me. Embarrassed, I smile and apologize but she just looks kindly at me without saying anything. She radiates such calm and compassion that I don’t feel compelled to brush away my tears or leave. They probably see a lot of this here, people in varying states of emotional rawness. After a minute, she tells me gently that the church is closing but that I am welcome back at any time.

  I smile at her in silent thanks before walking outside and finding an open spot to sit on the bluff. In a world where we put up so many barriers, where we carve out different times and places for even the most fundamental of human emotions and experiences, spaces like churches give the gift of sanctuary, a place where unburdening yourself doesn’t burden someone else.

  It reminds me of a trip to Paris I took several years ago, when I’d stopped into one of the city’s many churches. I was wandering through the side alcoves when I noticed a man I’d passed on the way in, a nondescript, middle-aged businessman. He was kneeling in a red velvet pew beneath a large oil painting of a saint, his hands pressed against his forehead in prayer as he quietly sobbed.

  His back was to me, so I stayed a second, wondering why he was crying, and feeling badly for initially dismissing him as a boring older man. At seventeen, seeing a grown man sob was startling and uncomfortable.

  I don’t think I’d feel that same trepidation today. I wouldn’t focus on my discomfort, or feel the need to do something, like I did then. Pain or sadness aren’t repellents, they’re a normal part of life, and shying away from them denies you a chance to deeply connect with, or assist, someone else. Even with everyone blogging and tweeting, I think families and individuals still privately suffer more taboo experiences like addiction, abuse, or mental illness—which only further contributes to all three.