I have this feeling like the decades of my life have roughly corresponded to… paradigmatic modes, I guess. How I regarded the world and myself, how it felt to me, what I was, what I was becoming. So I’ve been fully expecting my 40s to be something different. And I feel that happening, that becoming, in fact now that I am in it I realize that I had predicted it, not in a magical way, but because I recognized something about myself that could logically progress only in a certain way.
To be here looks different from what I saw from the outside of other people here. I’m not even sure now that I’m in the same place. Is it all my own, or do others share it with me? I don’t really know.
The landscape is changing. I’m aware of things I wasn’t before.
I keep thinking of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. How could anyone think of that as anything but an allegory? It’s so obvious. Maybe not as a child, but now, as an adult, that is the path that I choose to be on. I don’t like it sometimes. But I want to know anyway. Because not knowing, and this is what the story doesn’t tell you, not knowing doesn’t mean that you don’t commit evil. It means you don’t understand it and so cannot challenge it.
When I was a child, opportunities to be unhappy were so much fewer. I was fed and clothed and had time to myself, and that was a kind of Eden. I didn’t know about corruption and greed and the damage it does. I knew about barbies and swings and irises and earth and rain and tricycles and climbing and my front steps.
Now I am angry and hard a lot of the time. I am driving down the road, and here is my internal litany: That girl is a bully and her parents are clueless or don’t care, I don’t know which but I hold them in disdain anyway. Finally spring is here, warm enough to open my windows and smell the trees, and people are burning, filling the air with acrid smoke. The sky could be blue, but it is hazy. My hair will no longer be pretty for me, my face is red, my nose is big. Vanity. Patriarchy, patriarchy, patriarchy. Consumerism and waste. Ignorance. Doctors who have the power to control your access to medicine, who have the power to report you. Dentists who do shoddy work and charge too much, all you have, and what then? Stupid electronics that are not made with any degree of thoughtfulness. Planned obsolescence. I hate current styles, these expensive ugly clothes. The Goodwill charges too much, those bastards, and now I hear they are burning toys because they can no longer sell them under the lead law. Oh, the arrogance! of those who think they are fashionably thin or healthy or rich all because of their own inherent strength and goodness. My children refuse to be independent and self-sufficient on the level I want them to be so I can get on with my things, and I lash out, I am tense and impatient and rushing and critical and just in general a terrible parent. I don’t have time to write, time to allow the right mental space to exist, for the words to flow as they should, as I deserve, as I am meant to do.
What would happen if I let go of that, what would I lose? I tell myself that I would lose nothing that is valuable to be — it’s not going to change things for me to be so angry, and I cannot change those things anyway, so why focus on them? And yet, it seems like an outrage, a wrongness, that I should not rage against them. But I think this is a lie, so I try and try and for a moment at a time there is no hard heart, there is only the joy of children and the scent of spring blossoms and mown grass, and the landscape on either side of me is transformed into simplicity, is-ness, not just the landscape but the shape of my mind in response to the world. I’m in a dream of loveliness. I remember feeling this way. It was exactly like this. I want to stay there, I don’t think I should, that’s not what responsibility looks like to me, but I will if I can, and I will my mind to stay there but then someone cuts me off on the road and it’s gone and I am fuming again.
What I think is that I don’t belong in this world. Or, rather, I do, but not in this society, this culture. It’s ugly to me, and hostile. I retreat. More than that, I quit. I would love to say that. I QUIT! But I can’t, not yet anyway.
Yesterday I did a lot of things, only a few of which I think were really worthwhile. I loved my daughter, who I have a difficult relationship with because she is my opposite in every way. I watched Mario hacks with my sons and understood and shared in their enjoyment of it. I ate chocolate cake with buttercream frosing with my friend, which we made together. I also ate my new favorite ice cream. I washed and fixed my husband’s bed linens and swept his room. (This is not my job. It feels to me like choosing to take care of him, as he chooses to take care of me. I don’t always feel this way about my work, which is why it was worthwhile.) I drank a half a glass of wine in the afternoon. I obliged my friend her magic in dosing me with Bach flower remedies and the Victorian charm of their claims. (I am Water Violet and Beech. )
I finished Doris Lessing’s book The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. [ETA: Link removed because the only reviews I can find I feel miss the mark entirely about the point of the book.] Now I want to read everything else she’s ever written. In thinking of what I would say to people to convey to them that this was an important thing for me to read, something I was already thinking of as having a permanent spot on my bookshelf with only a few dozen other books, I could come up with nothing satisfactory. My inability to explain why this book touched me reminded me of C.S. Lewis’s words: “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. […] For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited….”
I thought about writing a letter to Doris Lessing, and about what I would say about who I am that would explain what this book was to me. And that started off all the introspection that you read about in the beginning, which I am never very far from.