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.

To talk about her love for me would feel tautological; she has always defined my notion of what love is. Just like it’s meaningless to say our ordinary days meant everything to me, because they created me. I don’t know any self that exists apart from them.

I made promises to C before letting myself figure out if they were promises I wanted to make—because he’d suffered and I wanted to believe I could give him another, better life. I listened to the part of myself that was falling in love, and ignored everything else.

When she told me this story, I was struck by the fact that she told it from my perspective rather than hers. She felt indicted by my tears, took them as proof that she’d allowed herself to become unfamiliar to me. But I wonder if I cried not because she no longer felt familiar, but because she still did. With her, I was finally home. It was okay to fall apart.

Safe to fall apart; not always recognizable from the outside.

Where had I absorbed the notion that distraction only compromises attention—rather than, say, pivoting or deepening it? Sometimes your mind leaps away and when it comes back, it notices more keenly. Sometimes distraction sparks observation like a rough surface striking a match into flame. My daughter distracted me from the rest of the world, but she also made me even hungrier for it.

Was she breathing? How could a creature just suddenly exist, when she had not existed—not like this, at least—two days before? How could she just keep existing at every moment? It seemed so improbable.

When I was a teenager, even daydreaming about heartbreak felt pleasurable, because I always imagined heartbreak as something ultimately provisional, the necessary threshold to an even deeper love on the horizon.

This was the essential bait and switch of couples therapy. I went to get my narratives confirmed, and instead they were dislodged.

On the surface we were talking about two very different ways to be a woman—married with a child, and childless with many lovers—but underneath I think we were both talking about ways to find relief from living trapped inside ourselves. We were both looking for the freedom that lay on the other side of surrendering control.

Digging underneath the cocktail-party version of a story was like turning over a smooth stone to get at the moss and dirt below.

Most of the men had been slated for three or four panels, while I was doing just one: a conversation with the only other female participant. Our event was called “The Strength to Be Kind.” I thought of making a little joke onstage, saying they should have called it “The Strength to Be Paid Less and Still Be Kind.”

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. This left me with a dizzying sense of vertigo. If being good enough wasn’t the answer, what was?

Louise Bourgeois sculpture, which was very nice. Two gleaming silver lovers dangled from a massive tree branch, their bodies like spires of soft-serve ice cream with arms and legs sticking out.

There is a photo of that day, actually. My daughter looks happily blurred by jumping and my students are leaning forward, listening intently, and I do look like both a mother and a teacher. But I never felt doubled. I felt more like half a mother and half a teacher, constantly reaching for each identity as if it were a dangling toy—mother, teacher, mother, teacher—until the elastic tether of the other self snapped me away again.

My therapist had something to say about this wondering. “You can recognize the trailheads of these thoughts,” she told me. “But you don’t have to follow them.” She also told me, “All this will have an impact on her. You need to accept that.” I sat there waiting for the but, for its balm. “There will be an impact,” she said again. “And your response will sit beside that impact.”

It was as if I’d stabbed him and then offered him a plate of cookies. The questions his eyes asked were astute ones: How much of my goodness was performance? How much of my desire for civility came from a desire to assuage my own guilt?

When I described the nights my daughter was away, it cracked in two. One piece of me said, It’s unbearable. The other piece said, It’s fine. Both pieces were lying. Nothing was fine, and nothing was unbearable.

Prayer didn’t require certainty. It could take root in all this wondering. It could take root in the honesty of wanting things. Years later, my sponsor told me I didn’t have to worry about asking God for the right things, carefully editing out all the requests that felt frivolous or selfish. Who did I think I was fooling, anyway? Might as well bring all my yearning.

Being a mother made me feel as if every choice had to be framed in terms of what was best for my daughter. I’d started to think of my own happiness as a resource I could spend on her.

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.

Sometimes the solution has nothing to do with the problem, and missing my daughter was not a problem to be solved. It was something to be met with stunning, ordinary beauty, and then left intact—pain living behind the radiance, both its shadow and its spine.

Every moment I spent away from her felt like a moment that needed to be redeemed—justified by making money or making beauty. Sometimes all I could hear was this unforgiving arithmetic. But sometimes I could hear something else, like static-crusted music between radio stations: the song of other mothers making. Their art was easier to believe in.

I’d spent so much time trying to figure out what he wanted that I honestly didn’t know what I wanted. Even though I hadn’t had a drink in years—maybe because I hadn’t had a drink in years—I knew I was not done with the part of myself that wanted everything.

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.”

A few days after I lost my sense of taste and smell, I started seeing articles about this new symptom. That’s how it was—bodies in the news, and the news in our bodies.

I wanted to learn how to treat myself more like a stuffed animal—the way my daughter tucked her stuffed fox under a blanket tenderly each night not because it had been good enough, but because it needed to sleep.

Of course you’re having trouble writing. The world is broken.

He would often preface things he told me about his job, his home, his exes, by saying, “The thing I always say about this is…” Letting me know I was getting a secondhand sentiment. A polished stone of selfhood.

When I finally stood up to leave, he asked if he could give me a hug. I said no. Without any explanation, or apology. What little person lived inside me, saying no like that? She was someone I wanted to get to know better.