Prompt 110: A Temporary Matter

Recently I was on the phone with a dear friend, complaining about this conundrum which, if you have been reading this, you know I cannot stop thinking (or writing) about: the difficulty of attempting to remain in the workforce as a primary caretaker of little children.

I love teaching, I told this dear friend, but I really love my kids. I love being a mom, and I actually feel like I’m, relatively, you know, kind of good at it, and this phase that my children are in — between 0 and 3 years old — is, actually, objectively wonderful. And I miss them when I leave, and my breastmilk supply gets out of whack, and it’s true what they say, it costs money to make money. As we head into the third week of the spring semester, I am paying so much to be able to work (in time, if not in childcare dollars, and in the toll it takes emotionally and physically) that the work itself, though fun, inspiring, challenging, and sometimes even transcendent, is, possibly, not even worth it? On the other hand, I don’t want to stop working. Parenting can be magical and fulfilling but it is also, inarguably, repetitive, even stultifying, and the nourishment it provides, though deep and real, hardly qualifies as intellectual. (How many times have I read Cars and Trucks and Things That Go in the past week? A dozen? A hundred?) Teaching adults or near-adults allows me to continue to grow in a very specific way I feel I must continue to grow, to be what I want to be, in the world: a writer, a thinker, an adult in conversation with other adults.

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In fact, I’m afraid of what might happen if I stop working (I continued to rant, to this very patient friend of mine). My sense of self, my confidence and my identity, has been and (for better / worse) continues to be very wrapped up in this, like, go-get-’em, capitalist-feminist ideology that has oriented me in bristly opposition to the idea of “dropping out of the workforce.” I can’t stand the idea of being merely a mother (even as I recognize how diminishing of women’s work, indeed how sexist, that is!). If I drop out of the workforce, my deeply absorbed, highly linear, achievement-oriented ideology tells me, I will fall behind. My intellect will wither, my contacts will forget me, my writing — if I can manage to do any writing at all — will become dull and provincial, and I — whatever of me is left, by then — will devolve into no more than a hopelessly uncool, athleisure-clad, TV-addicted, Diet Coke-swigging, 40-year-old momstagrammer, who, if she reads fiction at all, consumes only the odd bestseller; who has, in other words, nothing more interesting to talk about than her kids.

And, yes, there is a whiff of “me,” as I am in the world, in that portrait. And, yes, I am going to be forty next month. And okay, maybe that has something to do with this.

Anyway. Eventually, I stopped spinning out and paused to take a breath, and this dear, patient friend was able to get a word in edgewise. And here’s one thing she could have said: “Rachel, for the record, we all contain multitudes. That supposedly typical, relatively well-adjusted, Basic American Mom? You know nobody is that simple. But also? She sounds kind of great. Like someone you’d enjoy being friends with.”

And here’s another thing she could have said: “Are you no longer a novelist? Because I hate to point out the obvious, but writing books is work, too.”

But here’s what she did say: “It’s great that you love being a mom. Not everyone does. I think it’s okay to honor that.”

And, also, “This phase is temporary. Try to be present for it.”

I mentioned last month that I was prepping for a literature class on American memoir. That class is in progress now, we have met twice, and one thing that has struck me about it is how funny it can be to teach memoir — particularly in the experiential way that I teach, with lots of creative assignments, etc. — to people who are only twenty years old, and often younger than that. The students I am teaching are, many of them, self-possessed young people with a lot to say on the topic of selfhood and memory. Ideas about performance and persona, identity and the “authentic” self, seem very much in the zeitgeist for this generation, so many of whom have rejected, wholesale, qualities that people my age once thought of as inextricably inherent to who we were: qualities like, for instance, gender. It’s been wonderful — poignant, even — to read some of these students’ short exercises. They are so much closer to childhood than most of the authors we are reading. Their evocations of it are so immediate. Meanwhile that their current identities are in active flux is a situation of which they are well and sometimes painfully aware. One student, who is maybe eighteen, remarked on Wednesday, “I think I become a different person every three years or so.”

Meanwhile, in my creative writing class this week, one of the texts I will teach is Jhumpa Lahiri’s heartbreaking short story “A Temporary Matter.” The story concerns a young couple whose first and only child was born dead. When it begins, they have been living together for three years in distant, often silent grief. Now, due to some repair of their local electrical grid, they have been notified that, each night for a week, between 8-9PM, their power will be shut off. In the dark, they find each other in a way they have been unable to, until now. They begin a game of telling one another something they have never confessed before. In this way, eventually, they are able to break through the wall their grief has built between them.

In one simple passage, describing the third or fourth day they have spent the evening this way, Lahiri writes,

When she came downstairs they ate together. She didn’t thank him or compliment him. They simply ate in a darkened room, in the glow of a beeswax candle. They had survived a difficult time.

That sentence, “They had survived a difficult time,” is one of just a few straightforward expository sentences in a piece that is largely written in scene, with very little editorializing. It arrives in the story as it arrives in the couple’s perception: clearly, spontaneously, after a few days of relieved reconnection; a final, conscious acknowledgment of their shared trauma, just six words, at once validating and wholly inadequate. For almost as soon as the couple have acknowledged their shared experience, even tacitly, it becomes clear that their experiences have in fact been vastly different — and the chasm between them will become, in the end, unbridgeable.

This short story specifically, and the short story more generally, as a form, is particularly good for this, I think. For reminding us that life is made up of phases. All of them temporary. All of them potentially meaningful.

A few weeks ago, I heard from an old high school teacher of mine. She taught a playwriting seminar, in which, as a senior, I wrote what was then probably the best work I’d done in the medium of language, a one-act play about a woman with two kids in the midst of a divorce, and in the early stages of a new but temporary love affair. How I landed on that premise at the age of seventeen, I couldn’t tell you. But my former teacher wrote to say she’d found it in her papers, and would I like her to send me a copy. I wrote back with thanks and enthusiasm, and pretty soon the package arrived: a Xeroxed and typo-riddled Word Perfect document, written in the year 2000 by a version of me that I am but barely, anymore.

What I do remember: laughing in her class. Typing it out as a series of homework assignments on my teal iMac G3. The thrill, on the night my play was performed, of feeling how it touched people: the hush in the audience after the last actor quietly left the stage, the applause. A girl I barely knew gave me a hug. To say the event was formative would not be an understatement. It was one of those first, early, affirmative experiences that helped cement my self-perception as a writer.

You will not be particularly surprised if I tell you that, reading it now, more than twenty years later, I was not exactly impressed. It is by a 17-year-old, after all. The grown-up characters are, predictably, not very. The scenes escalate from zero to impassioned rather quickly, and remain there, at an eleven, for far too long. It borrows liberally and embarrassingly from my own childhood life. And boy, is it dated! The year 2000 was a lifetime ago. Literally. The Bennington students I’m teaching now were not even born yet when I — teenaged me — wrote this thing.

So I wasn’t moved by the play itself, but I have to say, it was somehow moving to me to revisit it. Not because it was good (it wasn’t, very), but because it gave me the rare opportunity to reconnect myself-as-I-am with a past version of me. As an adult, and especially in the past few years, what with Covid and having kids and moving to another state, I have tended to experience my life as a series of Lahirian phase states, temporary, all. Thus the person I was before having kids feels totally unrelated to the person I am as a parent; the person I was before the pandemic feels like a stranger to the person I have become since; etc. Getting to read this work I wrote when I was a kid, during a period of my life when I also happen to be teaching people who are not much older than I was then, I had an unusual sense of my self as one, linear, if meandering, being, having grown over time from Rachel-then into Rachel-now, not at a constant rate of change, but remaining, somehow, constant, despite what has felt like a great deal of very dramatic change.

Anyway.

Here’s what I’m trying to do, now, with my own, talky-talky, perseverating mind. I’m trying to detangle the capitalist from the feminist. I’m telling myself that my own, personal feminism needn’t mean having it all or staying in the workforce continuously. It can mean choosing to live, for a phase, as, primarily, a visiting faculty member at a college; for a phase as, primarily, a caretaker; for a phase as, primarily, a novelist — and these phases can be temporary, they can pass, and they can cycle. It can mean — must mean? — in other words, retaining the ability to choose how to live.

Meanwhile, I can embrace cozy stereotypes, if I want to, if they have some value to me, for a period of time — and then break them, and remake myself, indefinitely. Identity itself can be “a temporary matter,” even as, meanwhile, contrariwise, the self is inescapable.

How sweet, really, that we are who we are, despite it all, until it’s over.

Your prompt, this time around, is to consider the temporariness of whatever phase you are in, and its relationship to the phase(s) that have come before. Perhaps this means connecting your current creative project, thematically or otherwise, to your larger body of work. Perhaps it simply means — and this, I think, is how I’m understanding it today — staying present with the stage you’re in, and appreciating it in the context of all the selves you’ve been.

Is that a prompt? I don’t know. I have been using the idea of “prompts” pretty loosely, these days. Is it too close to last month’s prompt? Forgive me. I am working something out, here — albeit one-handedly, while nursing. I hope it helps you work something out, too.

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