It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward

by Elizabeth Passarella

During the early months of talking to Lois, when I wanted things to move fast, I prayed a lot. I wanted something! I’m human. And after a while I noticed a change. I began to hold the idea of the apartment loosely, as if in open hands. I began to say things like, “If it’s meant to be, it will work out, and if it doesn’t, then God has another apartment that we are supposed to live in.” Maybe there was a family or a friend we were supposed to make in a new building, a community we’d adore, even if it came through the heartbreak of losing Lois’s place. I sounded downright Zen, which is not like me.

I am not what you would call a people pleaser. I am the opposite. In many circumstances of my early years, I’ve been a people agitator. A people disappointer. When faced with an opportunity to either go along with whoever is in charge to keep the peace or express my point of contention, I have been inclined toward the latter for most of my life. What happens as you get older, however, is that you have to slog through so many mandatory arguments and difficult relationships that you stop choosing optional ones. You also learn tact and how to read a room and when a dissenting voice will add to the conversation or just ruin everyone’s night.

And then there is the big reason that I prefer a smaller, closed kitchen: islands have barstools. And barstools invite children to sit down with their homework and interact with me. Trying to make dinner under these conditions is like being on a cooking show where the contestant has to simultaneously pull apart a rotisserie chicken and recall the lead-up to the French and Indian War.

One thing we don’t share is an over-romanticization of Memphis. Holland enjoyed her childhood just fine, but when she moved to North Carolina for college, she moved on. She fell in love with a different South and never looked back. It’s one of my favorite qualities of hers, the ability to thrive in new circumstances without making a big fuss about it. I write entire books about my changing identities. She just gets on with enjoying her life and doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her business.

I’M PRETTY SURE I’D BE JUST AS SATISFIED IN LIFE WITHOUT KIDS. (YES, I KNOW I HAVE THREE OF THEM—TWO OF WHOM CAN READ.)

He wasn’t a natural at parenting. He was short-tempered and exasperated by us and constantly willing us to mature, to enjoy things he enjoyed, like Mozart and snapper and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I could imagine a lovely, full life without children. This is easy for me to say now that I have them. I realize this. Once you’ve been lucky enough to get pregnant, carry children to term, and have uncomplicated pregnancies—more than once, no less—you don’t start talking about how nice it would be if you and your husband could instead be sitting, undisturbed, on an adults-only beach. My dad had it right, actually. Declare that you don’t want children on the front end. Then, when the wind shifts, you embrace your good fortune and forget all earlier misjudgments. In my case, I’m second-guessing my earlier assumptions that motherhood was inevitable and that I’d be good at it. And when the wind shifts in that scenario, even imperceptibly, even only on occasion, you are supposed to ignore it.

But it seems to me that there are three groups of people in this world when it comes to having children: those who know definitively that it’s not for them; those who know definitively that it is; and those who assume they are in the second group, due to societal expectations or the ignorance of youth, but realize after the fact that they could be happy either way yet now can’t say anything, because the kids are listening. I’m very much in awe of the first two groups, and I think there are more of us than we realize in the last. That’s all. I love my kids; I also dream of an empty nest. Am I the only one who wants to talk about it?

Like my dad, I’m not what the world would consider a natural in the parenting department. And that has its upsides. I’m not patient or particularly nurturing, and I’ve never once cooed that I wanted to “bottle up” anything about my children. I tend to enjoy them most when they are being independent or funny, because those are traits I like.

My children are very aware that they are not the center of my attention, much less the universe.

The less I look at my kids as some sort of extension of myself or project to be conquered, and the more I see them as neighbors (strange, antagonistic neighbors) whom I am to serve without expectation of thanks, the more everything makes sense.

There have been many surprises in middle age, but a big one has been that the bell curve of marriage, work, and parenthood is completely upside-down from what I expected. From my favorite books, movies, and couples I managed to pay attention to in adolescence, it appeared that a lust for my young husband and for moving up the editorial ranks of different publications would wane with time as my devotion to my children grew. And, well, that hasn’t happened. Marriage has gotten better and better, and I now write with more pleasure and freedom than I ever have. There is an argument to be made that those improvements are dependent on my life as it’s panned out, with kids. I’m a more forgiving and charitable partner because I’ve been humbled by motherhood. Having children has certainly provided content for my work. All true. But I can also imagine a life of reading, traveling, and researching, of not keeping track of time. I follow the work of other writers, those without children, and am jealous of the ability to create organically, without the specter of school pickup hanging over them. Of course, those child-free writers have their own obligations: aging parents and needy friends and volunteer commitments. Few of us are on the exact highway we imagined. Actually, from everything I’ve read, it sounds like Ann Patchett is. Good for her. I am happy here with my crazy neighbors. I could also have been happy without them. I think it’s okay to say that.

Also, I am not an idiot. I write nonfiction essay collections, something you have to be an itsy bit of a narcissist to take on. I have spent years of my life navel-gazing, writing about beliefs and changes of heart and complicated relationships, all to make sense of why I am the way I am and what needs work.

Next, I would want to talk about how anger is such a comfortable emotion for me, how I justify it, and how I still don’t feel like I have a hold on it, even after years of trying.

And yet there are times when I think I mask a sense of despair and loss of control by lashing out. Only I do it solely with those closest to me, so that outsiders are incredulous. I’m so fun, absolutely all of the time!

Smith also made this point in the New York Times article: “Therapy can offer a pathway toward understanding [the self], but it can also overshadow the idea of healing in community.”

One evening last week, around 9 p.m., we entered what I like to call the Vortex of Nonsensical Angst, which rolls in a few times a month and involves my daughter alternately barking at me and tearing up over a turmoil she cannot articulate. Interrupting the VoNA with a rational explanation is met with door slamming and calls for your removal. Eventually, in our recent situation, Julia pinpointed that what she was feeling was guilt over a minor incident earlier in the day. She called the person involved to talk it through. But she did not feel better. So then we discussed shame and condemnation and how we often don’t forgive ourselves even when others have. Even when God has. We stay bogged down in shame rather than walking free. More than once, before we got to the gratifying ending, I wanted to: go to bed drink gin straight from the bottle stick my head in the toilet sob Still, again, when all is said and done, I will take that kind of parenting over potty training eight ways ’til Sunday.

My problem was not that I didn’t respect authority. On the contrary, I had a Southern child’s deep-seated reverence for my elders and, despite the above statement, first-rate manners. It was and continues to be my personality to (1) make a joke in tense circumstances, (2) have the last word, even better if it’s funny, and (3) take a righteous stand when I feel I or my classmates have been treated unfairly.

Plenty of folks move to the suburbs for what they consider better public school systems, and we could have done that, but I’ve also said this so many times I might as well tattoo it on my forehead: if I want to live a suburban life, I’ll move to Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and live near my sister or to Memphis and live down the street from the friends I grew up with. I live in New York City because I like New York City.

If the issues of food insecurity or mass transportation delays or navigating the educational system with a disability don’t touch you on a daily basis, you will see it play out in the lives of kids in public school. I’m not even that involved in my kids’ schools. In a sense, enrolling my kids in public school is the absolute least I can do, the laziest action I can take, to have my eyes opened by my community. Proximity, even if proximity is all you can muster, changes you. It has changed my kids, which is exactly why they are where they are.

Even taking into account the uptick in crime since the pandemic, New York City streets are still vastly safer now than they were in the eighties. Once, when he was about Julia’s age, Michael got pushed around on his way to school by some teenagers looking for cash. Did his mother freak out and start walking him to school every morning? Nope. From then on, she tucked a five-dollar bill into his sock. “Mugging money,” she told him. Hand it over and get to school on time. This is the stock my children come from.

I’m not sure what part of the body I am (it’s a toss-up between mouth and rear end, probably), but I tried for years to live apart from community. All I wanted was to be an independent little pancreas or elbow who could live her life how she wanted, without help or demands from other people. I did not want to need or be needed. When a friend invited me to a moms’ group or a community group or even a book club, I would joke that I’m allergic to community. I’m ashamed to say that my greatest fear was that someone would demand more of me than I was willing to give, emotionally or logistically. Obviously, this mindset has failed spectacularly.

It’s lovely to watch her need and be needed and be open to both. I hope I continue to get better at it.

The miracle of letting yourself need and be needed is that you always get something out of it, either way. Neuroscientists talk about the dopamine and oxytocin hit you get from performing altruistic acts. I call it God’s mercy for my inherently selfish character. It is also, in my experience, an antidote to bitterness. When I keep my distance, I am more likely to compare and judge, and bitterness sets in. Communing is the only thing that dissolves it. We have to be in each other’s lives in uncomfortable ways to realize that the shiniest among us don’t have it all together, and the most annoying are still human.

Being able to say, “I was at your wedding,” is reapplying adhesive to all the old friendships that have slid away.

New boyfriends or husbands would filter in, and weddings were an ideal way to scope them out. Did they add to or take away from our friends? Were they insistent that their girlfriend or wife stay with them, seated at a table? Or did they ask the bride’s grandmother to dance? We liked the guys who danced with the grandmothers the most.

You keep what you can carry, and you make it enough.

So much movement is thrust upon us. Motherhood warps and changes your body and mind in hundreds of ways. Age gives you perspective that makes you rethink your priorities and principles. Outside circumstances push and squeeze you when you least expect it.

Writing a book is, as everyone says, a solitary endeavor, but the beginning of this one was more like being part of a three-legged stool. My agent, Kristin van Ogtrop, and editor, Brigitta Nortker, read early chapters, told me when I didn’t sound like myself, and steadied me so I could keep going. I’m so proud of what our little trio turned out.

To every reader who has sent me a DM on Instagram, asked me to coffee while visiting New York City, or stopped me at Target to say hello: I love you. Meeting you is the best part of this job.