No Saint
December 13th, 2007
Don’t get me wrong, Annie Dillard’s writing still knocks my socks off, her descriptions of things are powerful and poetic. And I love that about the Maytrees, but I ended up throwing the book across the room last night in frustration with the main character, Lou’s, equanimity.
I don’t usually get violent with books, and I really LIKED this character except for this paragraph where she is working in a nursing home and describes the residents as needing to be special at someone else’s expense, this one looking down on immigrants and that one on tourists, all informed and none of them wise “Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else’s, but their many experiences’ having taught them so little irked Lou… Even dying they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself, for this way of thinking began to look like human nature — as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.” But I DON’T understand how Lou manages to avoid it — she manages to forgive her husband for leaving her by practicing letting go a few minutes at a time; that is managable. And maybe she is capable of her inscrutable equanimity because of that, but I resent her not struggling.
I don’t want enlightenment like a light switch, I want my own struggles and broken heart and scavenging for the strength to get up and try again to promise hope of bringing me closer. The saints in my head have compassion because they didn’t get to where they are easily. Somehow I feel about Lou the way I feel about a parenting blog I stumbled on yesterday where it seemed that this woman’s children had never misbehaved in any way because she had made all of the enlightened and right choices. Oh, I am opinionated about parenting, but I hope I don’t come off that way.
And so, right now, I just want to say, I struggle. I struggle parenting, I struggle writing, and I struggle spiritually. Yesterday my son kicked a girl on the playground, chased the group of girls that he didn’t know how to join, and I didn’t have an answer. The other child’s father confronted me about it, and for a few minutes the love I feel for my son was completely overshadowed and overwhelmed by shame and guilt, that I was standing, talking to another mother instead of watching my son, and fear that his behavior is a sign I am foundering here, achey with allergies and PMS and the greyness of December, not giving him enough attention among his attention-hungry siblings. And this man put my son on the spot about kicking not being acceptable, which was reasonable, but I felt weird because I smiled and introduced myself to this man before he confronted me, and he didn’t introduce himself back, and my younger son was running off without me, and it was too much to deal with then and there.
And in the car on the way home, my son cried that he hated me, and the way things work is, I’m his mom, I’m supposed to be on his side. And I felt bad, that I had handled it wrong. Because I think deep down I do believe that even when my kids do stuff wrong, they do have a side, their own version of events, and that at five these kids are beginning to be at an age of working things out without as much grown-up intervention. And I blame the school for exposing my son to lots of aggressive behavior and endless tattling… Or maybe it’s growing pains, and adjustment. Maybe I am projecting how I feel like an outsider, still, in this group of parents who all seem to know each other and have endless playdates outside of school. Or maybe it really is my inadequate parenting, and I am intellectualizing when I ought to be on the ground, engaging with my kids, thinking up new games and listening attentively. And I don’t know why I am obsessed with this incident 24 hours later except it isn’t clear to me what happened until I write about it. And this is my struggle today. I got no equanimity, no sage wisdom, only, just because I am feeling bad I don’t get a day off to re-consider what I am doing, how I am doing it.
