I always, always, always wanted to be a writer. I never wanted to be anything else–never. It never entered my mind that I was going to earn a living at it or be well-known as a result of it. But I remember being 10 years old and sitting on the steps of my parents` house and having a vision that someday I`d have a book of poems and a picture of me looking nice on the cover. When I got that first book, it was like that, and I could bring together this reality with that dream.
I sent out stuff when I was 8, 9 years old. I sent out these truly tragic poems: ”I wonder how the angels look and what they do and say/They took my mom and daddy and carried them away.” My parents, of course, were alive and well and really peeved.
I am the queen of rejection slips. I wrote, I sent out, I took short story-writing courses. I worked for Women`s Wear Daily, I wrote about fashion, and they never published it. I worked for True Confessions; I wrote confession stories, and they never published those. I was sending out science fiction stories, poems to the New Yorker. I`d just send it out and get it back. I suppose I thought that was the way it was. I suppose I thought getting published would be a miracle.
So I got married and moved away from Greenwich Village, the publishing capital of the world. There I was, married, pregnant and living in Washington, and that`s when I started getting published.
Because I never got anything published until I was a wife and a mother, I always wrote around my children`s schedules: when they slept, when they were in nursery school, at night and whenever I had sitters. When I was writing poetry, I could stop on a dime. I could stop in the middle of a line if I had to do something for the kids.
I was very worried about what life would be like with all of my children gone. Even though I`d been a very successful writer, my definition of myself as a mother was very high on my agenda. Most of the women I know, quite successful women, if we had to make the list, it`s family and then work. So I worried a lot. People used to say, ”What are you going to do when your third child leaves for college?” And I`d answer, ”I`m going to have a nervous breakdown.”
Then, to my great embarrassment, when it finally happened, there were five minutes of sorrow.
By the time they were sort of growing up and going off on their own, I thought, ”My God! I should at least be writing `The Brothers Karamazov` or something.”
I really wanted to keep doing what I was doing, which was writing about what goes on between people and inside people`s heads. I wanted to pick up another source for writing about that. I wanted to expand the resources in my life. I thought about going back and getting a Ph.D. in psychology, and then I read the catalogue for the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and I thought, ”This is it. This is what I really would love to do more than anything else.” I loved everything they had in the catalogue. I wanted to eat it.
I was sort of a weird person to be going to a psychoanalytic institute. They mostly take M.D.s or psychiatrists and train them to psychoanalyze people. But Freud used to say that it would be very, very valuable to have people outside the field of psychiatry who would go and study psychoanalytic theory and bring that understanding back into their own work, whatever it was –anthropology or history or whatever. So even though I was this writer with no advanced degree–this history major, poet, children`s book writer–I presented myself as someone who was what Freud had in mind.
I think everyone in my family was nervous that I was going to turn into some big household shrink. They were really funny. I told one of my kids,
”So-and-so is looking very sad tonight,” referring to a friend of his, and my son said, ”Ah! There she goes! She`s psychoanalyzing!” They were very nervous about my not thinking I had any inside track on their mental functioning just because I was going to school. So I had to deal with that.
Going back to school was really one of the great thrilling experiences in my life. Everybody who goes to the Institute still works, so it was Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings and a huge amount of reading. I loved it. I`m not an athlete, I don`t do anything physical, but it was like what tennis must feel like. I would sit in the room, and there`d be these ideas flying back and forth, and my heart would be beating fast and I would just feel sort of alert and excited and turned-on.
I went to school for six years. During that time, I did all kinds of clinical things. I worked as an aide with emotionally disturbed little kids in a hospital, and I worked teaching writing to emotionally disturbed adolescents. Then I had seven patients, one-on-one patients. I worked as a therapist under supervision for two years.
I had originally thought that I would just take everything I was learning and keep doing the same kind of writing I was doing and the writing would change somehow as a result of it. But I did fall in love with the theory, I did fall in love with the enlarged way I could see things as the result of it. Psychoanalytic theory made me realize that everything I heard and saw could be better understood with it. And then I knew that I wanted to write more directly about it.
I was starting to think a lot about losses. I was starting to realize that in every kind of way I was bumping up against the issue of loss, not as a tragedy, not as only a negative thing but as a fact of human development. Nobody`s invulnerable. Nobody`s immortal. We`re all in the same boat of giving up, of losing a certain number of dreams, of seeing the people we love die, of getting older. I thought, ”There`s my theme.”
Then it was a question of how far did I want to go? I had always written small books. I wrote poetry, children`s books. Always what I had written had worked with the kind of life I led. You not only got in the car pool, you wrote about getting in the car pool. This book, it wasn`t going to be so easy to stop in the middle. If I was going to use this learning in some sort of a specific way, it was going to really consume me–which, in fact, it did.
I knew I could keep on writing children`s books and funny poems and everybody was going to love me. But I really needed to do this. I wanted to wrap them in the human everyday stories that I`d always written and say,
”Shakespeare and Freud and the lady who lives next door, they`re all talking about the same thing, really.”
This book was a departure in terms of the way my family saw me. My favorite story is about my son Nicky walking into my office one day when I was working on this book. I had everything spread out all around me, and I was just focused.
He had come back from college, and he walked into my office carrying a pair of jeans and said, ”There`s a button missing.” And I looked up from my desk and said, ”What?”
Nicholas said, ”What is that look on your face? I don`t like that look. I hate that look on your face.” It was an expression I`d never had on my face, which was, ”Go away. I don`t want to deal with my children, I want to deal with my book.”
I think that going back to school and writing the book was all part of saying goodbye, of really looking at mid-life and saying, ”You`re not going to be the mommy anymore. They`re sleeping through breakfast, they`re out with their friends for dinner, and they drive their own cars. They don`t need you anymore.”
I wrote a poem, ”No More Babies,” which is all about the pleasures of not having any more babies, ending with, ”It`s positively stupid to be weeping.”
Sure, I wept. It`s sort of a drag to stop being Juliet and turn into Juliet`s mother, to preferring muumuus to bikinis on the beach and all the rest of it.
But after a lot of bitching and moaning, which you don`t skip in any loss –you don`t say, ”Okay, here I am, moving terrifically into the next stage”–after you`ve done that, you start to embrace what you`ve got and where you are.
My friends and I experience our 50s as our best decade by far. We`re not as dumb as we used to be or self-pitying or self-centered.
We`re able to laugh at stuff that once used to seem like the end of the world. We`re able to take very good, loving care of the people we care about. I don`t have anybody ready to have grandchildren for me yet, but up in my attic I have a box of loose-fitting clothes, very pretty clothes from when the styles were very loose. Labeled on it is, ”Dresses for future pregnant daughters-in-law.” So I`m ready.
