I sometimes feel like flinching from the self portrayed in these pages, a self as selfish as she is honest. My hope is that the honesty redeems me, at least to some extent.
Without meaning to, thinking I was writing a series of separate pieces, I accidentally composed, over many years, a story of how I formed a family, the people I pulled around me, loving them so imperfectly, learning to love as we inched along, feeling for the contours of our space. Truthfully, I know very little about love. Just yesterday, driving my now-thirteen-year-old daughter to the orthodontist, she asked why she does not know her grandmother, my mother, who is a total absence in our lives. It was hard to explain to her then, as it is now in these pages (and I’ve tried), the wretched way we were under my parents’ care, four children and a father perpetually pale, in flesh and spirit both. Eventually, when things got brutal enough, I left my family for a foster home and never went back, reuniting with my sisters and brother when I was well into my twenties and finding their faces as familiar as they were strange. How do you explain the severity of such a rupture to your daughter? How do you tell her that, in truth, you did not learn to love as a child and thus have come to the task of mothering with deep deficits? These pages describe the deficits and, equally as important, they describe my attempts to cope with them, to find my flame, my love, all crumpled and warped by water but still there and there for the taking. I took it and from it fashioned a house, a marriage, two fantastic children, and a train of enchanting animals to round out the shelter I built—birds, cats, dogs, and . . . a mule.
A mule? Why would anyone ever want a mule? In some sense this is what I am, sterile inside, an animal incapable of breeding or even of sex. Mules cannot perpetuate themselves, and thus, I must assume, they do not mate. These pages describe, in some metaphorical sense, a mule-woman, a woman who shuns sex, who could not believe she could care for children and therefore birthed two babies with deep misgivings. And yet, despite my obvious limitations, my brayings and buckings and truculence, I see in reading these pages that I have somehow learned to come around. I have shed the old matted fur of mental illness and frank violence and allowed myself to find enchantment in all the likely places, inside cupboards painted deep pink and the melted wells of scented candles that we, as a family, sometimes light on Chanukah, the flames flexible, bending, providing for me an alternate image, so the mule is replaced with warmth, from the outside and from the inside, too.
These pages mark the path I’ve walked—heeled, hooved, barefoot, clad and unclad, way up and deep down—to family, a constellation I’ve created even as it creates me, shaping me over and over again, I, changing with my children, who both tug and tether me, who lead me while I lead them, my husband here too. And so onward we go, we four, flickering, bickering, lost in a lacuna and found in much mud, with spoons and socks and pillows and pencils and all the other accoutrements of home; we hold on hard. We have each other. In the end—and there is, most definitely, an end—this is much, much more than enough.