ALSO BY MARNI JACKSON
The Mother Zone
Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign
Home Free
The Myth of the Empty Nest
Marni Jackson
THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS
TORONTO
Copyright © 2010 Marni Jackson
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Jackson, Marni
Home free : the myth of the empty nest / Marni Jackson.
ISBN 978-0-88762-616-6
1. Parent and adult child. 2. Jackson, Marni. I. Title.
HQ755.86.J32 2010 306.874 C2010-903801-0
Editor: Patrick Crean
Cover design: Sputnik Design Partners Inc.
Cover image: Shutterstock
Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,
a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,
145 Front Street East, Suite 209,
Toronto, Ontario M5A 1E3 Canada
www.thomas-allen.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of
The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.
1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10
Printed and bound in Canada
for Olive and Lola
You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain
Though you’re thinking that
You’re leavin’ there too soon.
—Neil Young
Contents
Treacheries: An Introduction
Leaving
Vertical Travel
The Road
His Version
The Generation Gap vs. The Friendly Parent
Landscaping the Family
That’s That
A Serious Little Mountain
The Saskatchewan River
Be Home by Dinner
The Great Unraveller
The Degree
Love Trouble
Drugs,Music, and Sex in 1968
Long-Term Care
The Broken Year
Spring
Not My Job
The Other Shoe
26 and 99
Hello, Goodbye
The Dump
The Future
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Home Free
Treacheries
An Introduction
IT’S A HUMID SPRING DAY, and my 26-year-old son has just biked across town, from the apartment he shares with some friends, to tackle a strange chore. He’s sitting at the table in our kitchen, reading the last few chapters of this book, which tells the story of our family from the time he left home at 18 to go to college in Montreal to last year, when he moved back to Toronto. I am nervous; I have no idea whether my version of things will square with his.
I don’t expect him to be enthralled. It’s bad enough getting a string of emails from your mother about job prospects without having to read an entire book written by your mother, about being a mother.
So I have to distract myself while he reads, pen in hand. I go upstairs and decide to throw out all our expired prescription drugs. That takes five minutes. I check my email and sign a few online petitions. I look out my office window and see Casey down below. He’s moved out to the table on the patio. He’s turning the pages, making a note now and then. From this angle I can’t tell if he looks annoyed or just neutral. The suspense is driving me crazy.
We’ve been through this process before, with him reading the stories I’ve written about our family, getting backstage glimpses of me as mother. I have writerly tricks, but if I am not telling the truth he will be the first to detect this. At the same time, I need to stand up for how I see things, too. How it felt for me when he left home, went off to school, dropped out, roamed around Mexico, came back . . . how the three of us have negotiated the ongoing shifting of our roles.
His response to this project has been patient, and his advice has been useful. “Just be true to your own experience of things,” he said,“and don’t confuse that with who I am.”
The other editorial insight he gave me was this: “You can’t be mothering in the writing.” In other words, I have to resist the urge to protect him, to fluff his résumé, in the stories I tell. The desire I have to make him (and us) look good immediately gums up the narrative and turns the writing soft. I can’t protect and reveal at the same time.
Writing is the opposite of mothering.
By craning my neck almost out my office window I can see that he is on the last page. I whip downstairs. He is genial, relaxed, smiling.
“No big problems here,” he says, all business. “Just a couple things. Otherwise, good.”
I sit down. He thinks I have been fair in my portrayal of our fight at the cottage.
“Maybe take out the phrase ‘cold blue eyes’; it makes me sound like a psychopath. And in the chapter when I move back to Toronto, you need to indicate that the tone has changed and I’m not angry.” I make notes. I am impressed. His response to this book about how kids in their twenties are taking their time to grow up and leave home is remarkably mature. Clearly, it’s time to stop writing.
In most family memoirs, it’s traditionally the children who blow the whistle on their parents. Mothers who write fretful magazine articles about their son’s online gambling or fathers who publish books about what it’s like to live with an autistic child are new. It’s clear that the protective silence that used to surround the family has been breached. (In England, Julie Myerson caused a stir with her memoir The Lost Child, about her difficult, dope-smoking son. He claims he is not the grim addict she portrays, has publicly called his mother “insane,” and hates the book.)
My family is a little offbeat, shall we say, but blessedly free of genuine damage or affliction. No one is in rehab or small-claims court as I write this. I’m only talking about the ordinary anguish of raising normal children in this book—particularly the twilight stage, when they leave home, then come back, then leave again.
I wrote my first book, The Mother Zone, after having my first (and only) child at the age of 37. I am a bit astonished at my own candour, now that I riffle through it again. My son grew up from birth to the age of eight in the course of the book, and all I had to do was read him the relevant passages and remove one or two that involved bodily functions to acquire his permission to go public. It was obvious to him that writing books was a silly activity, and less fun than drawing.
As for my husband, luckily he is a writer and film critic, someone who understands the exigencies of storytelling. He didn’t mind playing a role in my version of things, even when it wasn’t always flattering. A good story, like a long marriage, has to have some conflict.
The Mother Zone was published in 1992, when parenting was still a non-subject. The lusty outback of mothers who blog did not exist—nor did the word “blog”—and my notion that the interior life of a mother was a compelling and unexplored topic was not yet shared by publishers. Still, it felt like a book I had to write.
Eighteen years later, I am surprised to find that it is being read by a new generation of women, as if nothing has changed. Well, that’s not true; strollers have evolved. Now they have cup holders, if not GPS. But I’m convinced that despite the new visibility—in-escapability, some would say—of the subject, motherhood will always ambush women. It’s the great unraveller.
This is because we keep making up new rules to mask the truth of parenthood, which is that raising children is a bottomless and unfixable state of being in love. We’re swept along in family like a current. One moment it’s exhilarating; we think we’ve got the hang of it. The next moment our children swirl out of sight, and we panic. Along the way, to deal with the fear of loving and losing our children, each generation creates new myths about motherhood.
For instance, there is this wistful notion that caring for kids is a temporary passage. New parents are shadowed by the expectation that they will, and should, “get back to normal” once the children (a) sleep through the night (b) eat solids (c) go off to college. But whether you embrace it or run away from it, family is forever.
One myth, which must have fuelled more than a few cases of postpartum depression and countless gin and tonics, was that all women love being mothers and are instantly good at it, thanks to a mystery hormone called “maternal instinct. ”The past two decades of women writing frankly about motherhood have put that one to rest.
More recent myths are that “all mothers are ambivalent and conflicted about their role” and “being an at-home, full-time mother is best for our kids but drives women crazy.” Young women now plunge into motherhood armed with information, ready to finesse it, like grad school or a job interview. But parenthood is not just a skill set. Nor is abundant love going to solve all the stuff that family puts in our way. Nobody anticipates the heartache that comes with the normal course of things, let alone life plus bad luck.
Three years ago, a publisher asked me if I would consider writing a sequel to The Mother Zone. “You must be joking,” I said. “My son is 24.” Then it struck me that I was in the grip of yet another myth: the empty nest. Although my son was living in another city, he was often back under our roof, and certainly never far from my thoughts. This was a new and growing suburb of the mother zone. And I knew from talking to my friends that many parents of my generation are deeply engaged, if not ensnared, in their grown kids’ lives.
The moment I said to my publisher that I wasn’t a card-carrying mother any more, I knew it wasn’t true. As a mother, I am chronic. It’s part of the job description, apparently.
Twenty percent of North American children between the ages of 18 and 29 still live with their families. Many are taking their time to find their way. Yet this is slightly embarrassing terrain for parents, our habit of staying awake until the 23-year-old son comes through the door at 3 a.m. or our delicate manoeuvrings to help a daughter snag an internship. We read articles about the listlessness of the “boomerang generation,”their entitlement and lack of direction. We don’t like to consider how our overparenting may have contributed to this. Or is a long incubation period simply the new face of family?
Helping our children make their way in the world isn’t unique to this generation,of course. Long ago sons automatically went into their father’s business, whether it was stone masonry or innkeeping; daughters married the boy from the next concession. In fact, it might have been only the boomers who proved the exception,when they rebelled against family values and subscribed to the “generation gap,” confident that they could totally re-engineer human beings, capitalism, and music. It was unthinkable to live with our parents after the age of 20 or to work in dad’s office. We had better things to do. What, I can’t remember.
But now that some of us are hitting 60, the future has narrowed. We see the end. Sure, we’re all going to live in funky geriatric communes, where we’ll organize euthanasia parties with excellent live music. We still have contributions to make to the world (thinning out our ranks, for starters). But in the meantime, our lifelong, fierce attachment to youth, to changing the world and staying young ourselves, may have found a new focus—our twentysomething kids and what they can become for us.
If there’s a new generation gap, I think it’s the one between how parents and their grown kids now imagine the future. Getting a liberal arts B.A. and going into the self-employed creative fields, the path I took, now seems as precarious as heading out to sea to catch (non-existent) tuna. The so-called secure professions, in business or finance, are no longer secure. The notion of finding a career that will do you for life and end your days with a pension has become a fairytale. It doesn’t matter what you do; it’s going to be change and change again from here on in, and we’d better be light on our feet. What sometimes looks like stalling on the part of the young may turn out to be our kids saying no to the things that will no longer carry us forward. And yes to strategies we don’t yet recognize.
That is what I think on good days.
Writing this book was full of contradictory impulses. I had a strong urge to engineer a good ending for us all, even as I dealt with the death of my parents along the way. At the same time, writing about my son was also a comfort to me, a chance to mutter into my hat and to control the narrative in a way that was impossible, or at least unwise, in real life. I clung, and I let go.
In many ways, the current wave of parents writing candidly about their lives constitutes a new sort of fiction, an alloy of truth, hope, and fallible memory. No parent can write the true story of her own children. Love casts a light on everything that is either too pitiless or too forgiving.
One problem with our family, for instance, has been our closeness. It’s just the three of us, and we share a lot in common, especially music. When everyone in the family likes Etta James, it’s not so easy to break up.
And then there was the business of trying to get some distance on what was unfolding day by day: almost impossible. As Joan Didion has said, a writer always betrays her subjects, sooner or later. This has nothing to do with whether the portrait is loving or critical; it’s the act of putting someone on the page that feels mildly, inescapably treacherous. For me the writing itself was an act of separation that I wasn’t prepared for. But my son was a step ahead of me in that department.
Leaving
WE WATCHED him disappear into airport security. He walked with his usual bounce, even though he wore a towering backpack,with a pair of sneakers and a water bottle tied to the top. As the opaque glass doors slid shut behind him, he didn’t turn around, but I waved anyway. Maybe it was the kind of glass that he could see through on his side, but we couldn’t on ours.
Then we drove home in an indefinable state, without saying much. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. I had already had all my feelings about our 20-year-old son dropping out of university to hit the road—or “taking a semester off to travel,” as I preferred to call it. I had already been sad, annoyed, alarmed, and finally excited, because that’s how he felt about this adventure. He was taking a cheap charter to Las Vegas to “ramble around” the southwest desert. Hitchhiking, alone. Then he thought he’d head south to Mexico for a while.
Mexico is very big, I pointed out.
I reminded him that the era of hitchhiking was long over, and that in 2003 only serial killers and hookers would stand around on some ramp in Nevada. But there was a romance going on. Casey had Woody Guthrie’s hoboing and probably Chuck Berry’s “Route 66”on his mind.
I gazed out the car window at the floral sculptures along the highway, advertising insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Not the Wild West by a long shot. I told myself that this was perfectly normal, for a 20-year-old to test himself. Boys are going to put themselves in harm’s way, one way or another. I tried to think of it as a delayed gap year—the one he probably should have taken after high school, before heading off to university in Montreal, at the still-tender age of 18.
Why do we assume that this is the natural order of things, f
or boys to leave home at the height of their restlessness, to sit in classrooms for four more years?
Then, in the first week of his first year of a history degree—the official version of why things happen in the world—along came 9/11, and the dominant narrative was blown up. No wonder he was rattled. It didn’t help that despite being a good student he had always questioned school, waiting for it to click into focus. That winter he put his shoulder to the wheel. He poured himself into writing ambitious essays then couldn’t understand why they came back marked B or B+.
“Try less hard,” I suggested. “Just give them what they ask for.”
When had I arrived at that sort of advice?
“He’s taking a semester off to travel,”I explained to friends whose sons were working on MBAs or off digging wells in Africa. A couple of footloose months, I thought,and he’d be back in school,grinding out essays on medieval concepts of time and postcolonialism in Africa.
I knew how useless a B.A. in liberal arts had become. But the parent part of my brain had swollen to such unseemly proportions that I still believed university was the last good daycare, the safest channel to a secure future in our unravelling, unforgiving world.
Promise you’ll come back and finish your degree, we both argued, in our mild way.
He didn’t say no. But he’d wait ’til he got back to make up his mind.
I did what I could; I went down to Mountain Equipment Co-op and bought him a small, shiny camping stove. A shard of home. He reassured us that he would stay in touch, although not by cellphone. Historically, hobos didn’t have cellphones. He would email us from Internet cafés. Every village in Mexico has one, he said.
There were no fights about this, but then conflict has never been our forte. Brian’s family is British, and his mother’s mantra, to which I aspire, is “Never mind!” Casey has always been civil and tactful with us but firm, as if negotiating with slightly impaired, part-time employees.
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