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Welcome to The Moth Podcast.
I'm Jodi Powell, your host for this episode.
Throughout 2022, The Moth has been celebrating its 25th anniversary
by revisiting our history, counting down year by year.
This week we're at 2005
and we're playing a story from that year by Joyce Maynard.
She told this at a New York City Mainstage where the theme of the night was
"Can't Help It".
Here's Joyce live at The Moth.
[Breath]
In the family where I grew up,
no blood was ever shed.
In all the years
of living under my parents roof, I never broke a bone.
My mother and father never one time had to take me to the emergency room.
And I strongly suspect that we never had to buy a second box of Band-Aids.
And the reason for that was pretty simple.
My parents were spectacularly protective
of and and hovered over me to make sure
that no pain or physical injury should occur.
I lived in the state of New Hampshire, but never set my feet into ski boots.
I don't think a piece of athletic equipment ever crossed our threshold.
My mother made sure that I didn't enter the water for swimming
until a full hour after eating, and my father stood over me and
brushed away the mosquitoes before they landed.
But every night at 6:00,
he climbed the stairs to our attic and took out the vodka.
And through the night, he drank and painted.
And sometimes late in the night,
he summoned me to his attic studio
where he painted beautiful lyric landscapes of the British Columbia
of his youth as a painter, and expounded to me with poetic eloquence
on the sacrifice that he had made of giving up the life of an artist...
to be a parent.
And in the morning, we never talked about it.
Holidays were particularly stressful time
in our family with a particular amount of alcohol.
More than one Christmas, my father threw the tree across the floor.
My mother
was gone surprisingly often, and when she was,
it was left to me to hide the car keys.
And maybe because of that, although I grew up to have the
the life of a certain level of artistic expression that had eluded my two
enormously artistically gifted parents, the goal
that I found most elusive and wonderful
was to be part of a happy family.
And I believed that my best shot of having happy
relatives was to give birth to them.
So I married quite young at 23, an artist,
although he was a painter and I was a writer.
I think we both felt that there was no creative undertaking
more thrilling and potentially fulfilling than to make and raise children.
And we got right to it.
I think one of the things that I loved about
having babies was the sense that here was a person
who was still perfect, a person with a clean slate.
And I so wanted to keep her that way.
I actually had none of my parents'
tendencies towards physical protection for physical and injury.
I could even have been called a somewhat negligent mother.
I was happy to see toddlers breathe over my babies and didn't
feel a particular need to to wash my hands or worry about germs
because I knew that there were greater dangers in the world
and the greatest dangers to me were the dangers of emotional pain
and the disappointment of failed dreams.
I think my daughter was 18 months old when she got chickenpox,
and I stood over her to make sure that she
she was so beautiful and she had such beautiful black hair.
And I knew that if you scratched the scabs,
there would be no hair that would grow.
And I couldn't yet explain to an 18 month old not to scratch her scabs the way
I just guarded her so carefully.
But I missed on one.
And I said so suddenly this tiny little microscopic dot
on the top of her head, where I realized that she had scratched a scab.
And just the thought that there was going to be this one
hair that would not grow brought me to tears.
I wanted
so many things for her, and one that I had not had
myself as a child was a sibling who really adored her.
And it was the first of the increasing
number of great battles with my husband to provide her with one.
And for four years, we fought about it because he wanted to live the life
of an artist.
And I wanted to live the life of a member of a happy family
if it killed us.
And so for it took four years, but my son Charlie was born.
And two years later, my son Willie,
I was always a fanatically compulsive
protector of my children's magical childhood.
I sort of wrote on the side as a hobby,
but never more so than when holidays and birthdays came around.
I never would have bought a store-bought cake.
And I created extraordinary three day festivals for their birthdays.
A scavenger hunts with with poems, clues
in iambic pentameter and puppet shows with with music
composed for the events and Valentines Day.
The entire month of February we we cleared our on our dining room table
and set out all the art supplies filled with glitter and every conceivable
kind of paint to make amazing Valentines and and the entire month
of December to Christmas and I never went to Toys R Us.
I wanted to provide for my children the kinds of objects,
the kinds of gifts that might really have been made in Santa's workshop.
And to do this, I
once I searched the entire East Coast for a ventriloquist
puppet for my son Willie, and ended up driving 200 miles to find it.
My father had recently died and left me a sum total of $500 in his will.
And my my husband had it all earmarked to buy snow tires.
But I went out one day and bought a $500 doll house.
Of course, when there are and I should say that
that he was increasingly appalled and disgusted
by the display of these Christmases, which he really stepped aside from.
So that one morning he came in Christmas morning
and saw the array of items and he insisted that half of the items
be removed from the room and and our children
I suppose did not have an entirely magical December 25th that year.
Well, of
course, one of the problems of providing magical objects in your child's life
is that that you then must protect it, they not get lost.
And I had recognized by this time that although blood could be dripping
from my veins and I wouldn't notice their pain, I sensed on my nerve endings.
And of course, when that's the case,
you do everything you can to protect against their pain.
So every time a Barbie came into the room, into our lives,
the first thing I thought was, guard those shoes.
My sons.
One year for Christmas, they got the Playmobil pirate ship.
And of all the elaborate rigging and pirates and and and little items
and the treasure chests and little coins and the pirate ship.
The one particular thing that my son Charlie loved
best was his little gold sword.
And I knew so well the heartbreak that could come that
I said to him very specifically, when when we went out to the station
wagon one day, please don't take the sword with you.
But but he he evidently took the sword because about 20 minutes later,
I heard this gasp in the back of the from the back of the station wagon.
And, and I knew that the sword had fallen out the window
for the next hour and a half.
I circled a stretch of highway with my high beams
on. I did find the sword, although I was almost struck by an 18
wheeler retrieving it.
My husband,
perhaps understandably, had absented himself more and more and
and of the many things that I could provide with
with my prodigious energies, parenting energies, I could not provide
a father who would always be around when I wanted him to.
And he was more and more chillingly familiarly off in his studio, painting.
More and more, we did things alone.
I wanted their life to be big, bigger than mine had been also living
in a small New Hampshire town.
And you have to
really use your imagination to find exciting and stimulating events.
Sometimes in the particular New Hampshire town where we lived,
we went to the Mack Truck Museum many times.
Actually, the town dump
was one of our exciting--and I'm not kidding--weekly excursions.
And when one year at the one day
at the one Saturday at the town dump Audrey saw in the very center of the pit.
This was in the days when there was a big hole,
the Barbie rocker van that she had always wanted.
And there was no question that I was climbing in to get it.
We didn't have a lot of money. We had very little money.
And and so it was and I would never have suppose that
I could take my children to Europe much as I would have loved it.
And then one day I saw an ad for a weekend in London for $100.
And so I thought that I can afford and I bought three tickets for them
and one for me.
And we headed out to London
and I told them that they could each have one object in London.
And my son Charlie chose these wonderful,
brightly colored leather juggling balls.
And we went down into the London tube and Charlie began.
He couldn't wait, and he began to juggle with the juggling balls.
And I, knowing so well
all the dangers that could happen, said, "No, Charlie, don't juggle in the tube".
But it was too late.
One of the juggling balls fell into the pit and I jumped in after it.
And that was the moment as my daughter stood
on the edge of the subway platform screaming for me to climb out,
that I realized that I was becoming an insane
mother.
Well, that Christmas,
which was the 12th Christmas of my marriage,
when my husband once again
found
objects under the tree that seemed understandably excessive,
I stuffed the Buche de Noel,
homemade down the garbage disposal.
And once again, I suppose the perfect Christmas fell a little short.
That Mother's Day, I was 35 years old.
I got a call that my mother had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.
And I was going, of course, to be with her for what proved to be
the last weeks of her life.
And before I left home, I sat the children down and I,
I explained to them what had happened.
And my youngest son said, "Is grandma going to die?" And
I said, "yes".
And then he asked the next question, which was an even harder one,
and one whose answer was more painful to deliver.
"And will you ever die?" And once again, I had to say, "yes".
And then came the third question,
"And will I ever die?" And I had to say, "Well,
not for a very long time".
In fact, my mother's was not the only death that summer.
My marriage also ended,
and it was probably time for that to happen.
And I found
that although my my grief was extreme,
it paled beside
the extraordinary sorrow over
having to inflict this pain of the news to my children.
And in fact, it was the last experience I think, that
my husband and I could truly share together.
Our shared sorrow over telling them that news
and we brought them into the living room and I can still see them very clearly.
Five, seven and eleven.
Willie, Charlie and Audrey sitting on the couch
looking as
if they expected news of another great adventure.
Coming up.
And we told him instead that we were not going to live together as a family
anymore, and each of them
responded in their very different way; so like themselves.
Audrey, the oldest, who had learned by now
that I felt her pain
and wanted to spare me that so she didn't show it.
Willie, the youngest who never spared anybody anything, he was five,
stood up and let out
an animal moan, a wail, a sound...
I had never heard come out of him before or since, thank God,
and flung himself against the wall
with the force of a grown man
and said, "You mean you'll be divorced
for all my life?".
And Charlie, who is seven, got up
silently and went into the kitchen.
The table was, as always, covered with art supplies
and he took out the colored pencils and he began to draw.
And I later saw he had drawn almost as if he was drawing it
in blood, a heart not like the valentines of our February festivals,
but inch by inch, so
centimeter by centimeter, so painstakingly.
And then after he drew the heart and shaded it
with little sort of shadow marks behind it, he made a line
like a piece of picture wire like a like the heart was a a picture.
And then he made
a little dot in the center, like the picture was hanging on the wall.
And then my second grader wrote for his writer
mother and his artist father, the words
love is the best
art of all.
And I think that was the moment that I knew
the foolishness
of ever supposing that I could protect my children from pain
and the folly of the ways that I had attempted to do so.
That was 16 years ago.
Since then,
many injuries have been incurred.
My children for many years traveled back and forth between
our two houses with their belongings always in brown paper bags.
They never seem to get it together to get actual suitcases.
They lived through the interview of the guardian ad litem,
asking them which parent they wanted to live with.
They lived through their mother standing in the kitchen when morning
Christmas again pouring all the milk
on the floor and car accidents and girlfriends
breaking up with them and boyfriends breaking up with them.
And a case of malaria on a trip to Africa.
The thing is that I have discovered
that although I failed
abysmally at protecting my children from pain,
I am in fact related by blood to three
amazingly happy and well-adjusted human beings.
And what I believe now is that as impossible as it is
to spare our children
pain, the real task before a parent
is to raise them so that they will be strong enough to survive it.
Thanks.
That was Joyce Maynard.
In addition to being an essayist and writer, Joyce is a long time
moth storyteller.
We asked her if she had any thoughts about The Moth's 25th anniversary.
Here's some of what she wrote as a note, the memo where she's talking about
is "At Home In the World", which upon release was met with some pushback
as it revealed her romantic relationship with the much older author J.D.
Salinger... when Joyce was still a teenager.
"After the publication of my memoir, a book of which
I am deeply proud, I lived as a largely canceled writer.
Publishers didn't want to work with me.
Once at a big literary gathering,
to which I'd been invited by a kind writer friend.
An entire row of eminent writers got up from their seats en masse
and left the hall as I took the stage.
It is not an overstatement when I say that the email I received from Joyce Zanders
inviting me to tell a story at The Moth changed my life.
In many ways, I named that night at The Moth one of the earliest
moth gatherings--held in a small club in Greenwich Village with an audience
of no more than 50 people...
if that--as the moment I got my voice back".
Wow, that sounds so special.
I've had so many nights like that at The Moth myself.
Joyce Maynard is a writer and essayist,
author of the memoir "At Home In the World" and the novels "To
Die For" and "Labor Day", both of which were adapted for film.
Her most recent novel, "Count the Ways", is out in paperback now.
If you enjoyed Joyce's story this episode, "Count the Ways"
also explores a mother who is obsessed with sparing her children pain.
It was recently awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire in France.
I hope I'm seeing that right for the best novel of the year
published by an American writer.
That's all for this episode.
From all of us here at The Moth, have a story worthy week.
Jody Powell has been at The Moth for more than five years.
She is a producer, director and educator who enjoys listening
and seeking stories from beyond the main corridors.
This episode of The Moth podcast was produced by Sarah
Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson and me, Mark Sollinger.
The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Catherine Burns,
Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers.
Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant,
Lee Ann Gullie, Inga Glodowski, and Aldi Kaza.
All Moth stories are true as remembered by their storytellers.
For more about our podcast information on pitching your own story
and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.
The Moth podcast is presented
by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio
more public at PRX.org.