Splinters

by Leslie Jamison

When my mother arrived from California, I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and my mother held me, and I cried uncontrollably, because I finally understood how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.

All my adult life I’d considered time a resource that could be converted into other things—more than anything else, into art. Time was the instrument of my endless ambition, which was itself a frantic thing, an attempt to grasp the materials of the world and fashion from them a justification for my own existence. Being alive involved constantly justifying why I deserved to be alive, as if I were building a bridge one rung at a time across a vast chasm.

Eventually, of course, there was another side. Years later, he told me that even though I’d managed to convince the world I was a good person, he knew what lay behind this façade: the selfishness underpinning my ambition, the virtue-signaling others mistook for virtue. Some part of me believed him. Some part of me would always believe him. Where others looked at me and saw kindness, he saw the elaborate puppetry of a woman desperate for everyone to find her kind.

Everyone knows you’re not supposed to visit the grocery store famished, because you’ll want to eat every single thing you see. Sometimes my ambition felt like that. I wanted everything because I hadn’t satisfied my hunger elsewhere. Or rather, what other people called ambition often felt—to me—more like justifying my own existence. If I’d failed at happiness, then success seemed like a consolation prize. As if some tribunal in the afterlife would ask, Were you happy? And I could say, Well, no. But I did all this.

We can’t imagine ourselves doing many things until we do them.

My boyfriend’s boredom came as a personal rebuke. Couldn’t he see that it was a rejection of my entire being?

He loved me because I’d said all the right things. It was the great victory I’d been working toward. But there was a stubborn sadness waiting for me on the other side of finally being good enough. Turns out it didn’t guarantee anything. You could spend your whole life becoming as interesting as possible (“With your father, at least I was never bored”) and love still might not last.

Being an adult meant watching many possible versions of yourself whittle into just one.

You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it’s necessary.

No-fault divorce? More like, Everyone’s Fault divorce. Fifty years later, the language on my own settlement did not say “irreconcilable differences,” but “irretrievable differences.” It was as if our love was something we’d dropped down a storm drain, and we couldn’t reach in far enough to get it back. No one’s hands were clean. The rise of the no-fault divorce suggested that you didn’t need a justification for ending a marriage beyond the desire to be happier. There was still a waft of shame around saying this directly—that my reason was wanting to be happier. His anger was a more legible reason.

Romance was what I’d always felt most consumed by, but my relationships with women were the ones I’d trusted more. They built and rebuilt my inner architecture. The version of myself made possible by conversations with friends was the self I most readily recognized—the self that demanded the fewest contortions. My close friends were not all versions of my mother. Each was no one but herself. But with all of them, I found a version of the safety my mother first introduced me to: You don’t have to keep earning me. I’m here.

But who were we kidding? The doom embedded in our premise was also fuel. We both liked turning ourselves into stories. Even our impossible future was a story we were writing together. I want your morning breath and your however-many-scars, I wrote. I want the messy five-hour truth under every dime-store gag you’ve got for all the things that ever hurt you.

Almost ten years of recovery and it was still hard to live anywhere but black-and-white extremes, still hard to inhabit the gray tones. The wild vacillations of melodrama offered refuge from muddier truths. It was easier to argue with C’s accusations in my head than it was to sit with the pain that fueled them.

He believed self-transformation was impossible, while I found it addictive. Choose your heartbreak: stuck in prison, or always on the run.

But it was also a performance of that knowledge, that presentiment of doom. He was a man in love with the way he broke things.

The twenty-two-year-old in me believed in love as an unstoppable engine of transformation, capable of excavating new selves from the ashes of our old incinerated stories.

We aren’t loved in the ways we choose. We are loved in the ways we are loved.

Almost two decades earlier, near the end of my eating disorder, a psychiatrist told me I’d have to figure out what my anorexia did for me, before I’d be able to get rid of it. Whatever it did for me, I would need to figure out another way to do that for myself. These instructions were more useful than most of the wisdom people offered about self-destructive behavior. This shrink understood that my disease was also an attempt to make something happen.

My aunt once told me she’d always believed that some love affairs were epic novels, while others were short stories. Some were just poems. One-night stands were haikus. You couldn’t fault a poem for not being a novel.

Roland Barthes once asked, “Why is it better to last than to burn?” A sober heroin addict once told me, “I like being hungry. It’s my body telling me it wants to be alive.”

Intellectually, I knew that love wasn’t an assignment—something you could excel at, or make yourself good enough for—that it existed outside these logics of achievement and was more about failure, and wanting, and trying. That it involved being an imperfect version of yourself—

grouchy and defensive, telling the same story over and over again—and feeling this self loved, too. Viscerally, I wanted to experience the sort of love that could liberate everyone involved from their hamster wheels of self-performance.

I’d written a book about sobriety and creativity, and maybe parenting was the new sobriety—a condition of regularity, rather than recklessness, that I needed to prove generative; a way of living built from daily accumulations more than epiphanic watersheds. You didn’t write in the glow of your own self-immolation, but in the puddled light of a cell phone screen, or by the metronome of a breast pump.

both of them invited me to live in the story of our relationship rather than its daily texture.

This was one of the lessons I kept learning: the difference between the story of love and the texture of living it; between the story of motherhood and the texture of living it, the story of addiction and the texture of living it, the story of empathy and the texture of living it.

Crazy to say so, but being rejected felt like free fall—as if one person not loving me meant that I wasn’t good enough for anyone to love. I clutched at certain fantasies of purity that I was too ashamed to name: intimacy without boredom, love without contingency, beauty unhaunted by guilt; an experience of motherhood that wasn’t shadowed by divorce.

Loving her wasn’t a pure feeling. It was an everything feeling. It shuttled back and forth between wanting to merge with her completely and wanting to flee. Was my love for her contaminated by checking email every two minutes on my phone? Did this polluted attention count? And who was doing the counting, anyway?