Tag: villains

Mothering and Nostalgia

A current meme on Facebook compares what Moms used to say to their kids with what they say now. It is held up as a clarion call to the virtues of yesteryear, when Moms—and their kids—knew what was what. Over and over again, stuff (stuff) like this careens around the internet, in casual banter on news shows, in conversations in my workplaces. Those of us who grew up in the mythical “then” look back with nostalgia, and look at this moment with a jocular disdain. I would like to call “bullshit” on the whole enterprise.

I don’t now what your mother was like. If she was anything like mine, there were highs and lows. My mother stayed at home with my brothers and me. She bowled in a league. Went shopping. Had bridge parties. Took tennis lessons. She was a den mother for my Cub Scout troop, and took us to the Devault Meat Packing Plant, among other places. Her sons were a handful. She scurried us out at a reasonable time in the morning, set out lunch when it was time, and made dinner for the family. She made us Batman capes for Easter one year; she sewed. I remember her stitching up an injury to one of our cats.

Was she happy? Her happiness was never an issue for us. Nor was our happiness overly attended to. We all were content, which, to my gimlet eye, is a horse of a different color. It was only later, some 13-14 years after I was born that she began to explore art, and then took on the work of a painter, and artist. If she found genuine and durable happiness, it was in that work—and the work of making art is not about easy delight, or even contentment (so says her son, the writer).

My mother did what she thought and felt was right. She learned her lessons from her mother and family—and what lessons they were. Some things, she changed. She never leashed us to trees in the front yard. Others were more indelible. I am certain that most of us parent in the same way—sifting through the conscious and unconscious lessons that we received from our parents. What we do, we do almost on a kind of autopilot—in the heat of the moment, dumb memory takes over. Change is hard.

I cannot and will not say that my childhood was perfect. I can recall exceptional moments on both sides of the ledger. Making a judgment seems beside the point. Here I am now, and I go on. There’s a ton of privilege built into that statement, and I fully recognize exactly how fortunate I am to be where I am, and to have traveled to this point in my life. The choices I can make now—and the way I make those choices—are predicated on the choices of my mother and father. And so on. For ages.

I guess that any time I hear someone pass judgment on another’s parenting—and mothering especially so—in that gross, if semi-benign “Look at the snowflakes” kind of way, I want to yell, “Really? Cast aspersions carefully, oh paragons of perfection!” All those old lessons about the log in your eye and casting the first stone ring out loudly for me. Those are the lessons I remember. Besides, the old joke about walking five miles to school in the snow, uphill, both ways, gives the proper lie to ill-kept nostalgia.

Life, and mothering, are hard. No one needs anyone to chide them for the daily duties. The significant missteps require a different consideration. No more abuse, please. But keep the quibbling to a minimum. Please.

In general, and in a larger sense, I distrust nostalgia. Yes, remember, always remember, but without the haze of candy floss. At heart, I am more focused on where we are going, adapting, and learning—and in passing those lessons on. Have I failed? Indeed. I keep at it. I will fail again. So what? I keep at it. Where I came from is a starting point, but not my destination. Eyes up! Here comes life.

Villains and Stories

 

In a certain kind of writing, picking out villains is simple.  Whether they wear an iconic black hat, or kick small animals, they make themselves known in a way eases the reader into a comfortable understanding of the world.  These days lesser writing simply overturns the conventions: white hat—bad guy! (Surpirse!).  Better writing muddies that understanding: the villain acts out of sincerely felt good intentions (hence the road to hell), and in such a way that we can sympathize (if fleetingly, or longer) with their motivations.  When we pillory these bad actors we do so gently; after all, we could just as easily be in their spot.

Real life is the sticking point.  I’ll admit that I read to find out about and reflect on life.  Writing, after all, is easier to understand than life.  Life, with all its fits and starts, resists narrative cohesion. Beginnings do not always lead to middles or ends.  The setting often has nothing to do with the plot.  And the plot is repetitive and makes no sense. I hazard to suggest that we build stories as a bulwark against the confusion and chaos of life.  Stories narrow our focus and create a framework for understanding the world.

As we meet people, we turn them into characters that either fit or do not fit into the long standing master plots of our lives.  Someone who disrupts that story risks becoming a villain—or in rare occasions, a hero—but chances are that our daily heroes are those people we encounter who affirm the story we have told ourselves, who give us comfort in what we already know.

And in all this, I wonder whether we are ever the actual authors of our life stories, or whether they simply accrue around us in response to the life that happens. Most of us inherit a story  before we even begin our own.  When Fitzgerald wrote, “there are no second acts in American lives,” I think he was pointing to this phenomenon.  We (privileged) Americans hold the truth of our freedom so closely, that we fail to grapple with the fundamental lack of self-determination in our most essential stories.  We swallow those stories whole and they become an inexorable and unexamined part of who we see ourselves to be. Without a chance to address, let alone to change that story, we get stuck in a first act that repeats and repeats and repeats.  The second act is the place for a turn and a change; resolution comes in the third.

When I think about the villains in my work, my writing, I know I need them to maintain some kind of conflict.  They are the “B” to the protagonists’ “A.”  But in the need to create something like verisimilitude, such easy binary relationships seem false.  I can’t help but think about how the stories of “A” and the stories of “B” surround them like straitjackets, and how they either wriggle free or remain obstinately stuck inside.  And for me, that is the true definition of a villain—a character who refuses to escape the boundaries of one story, even if it’s a really good story.

I think of David Copperfield, who begins the narration of his story with, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”  Spoiler alert, David becomes the villain, but is entirely unaware of this horrible fact—or almost, he leaves a trail of bodies and breadcrumbs obvious enough to belie his eventual rise.  His story is powerful and uplifting, and not a little inspiring.  But the “upward” at the end of the novel speaks as much to his class aspirations and a justification of all that has happened around him on his road to success.

Of course this also has something to do with my life.  How can it not?  I have wrestled with the stories that surrounded me since I was young.  I have tried on one story after another like the ficklest of shoppers at an all-day sale.  Some I have worn long and others dismissed quickly. I am drawn to those who have deeply certain stories and devastated by their lack of room for my uncertainty.

I am a tailor of stories, and an escape artist, busily making one while I wriggle out of another.  The contradiction makes me and destroys me. And then makes me again and again and again.