Mommy the Minstrel Pig

...a long-held secret

A couple of weeks ago, after I published an essay about rage, I got an email from an acquaintance, let’s call her Tiff. “I read your essay. I feel we must speak,” she wrote.

“Yes! That’d be great. Name the day and time!”

“Tomorrow, 2pm.”

I loved the urgency of this exchange. I loved that Tiff just had to speak.

We talked for a couple of hours about the usual things: the way we became buried in motherhood and lost ourselves to the laundry; how we’ve come to see drinking and gossip as toxic cousins. We talked about The Artist’s Way and wanting to write about our childhoods. We talked about the fear of telling the truth and hurting those we love.

“I just feel like I have a lump in my throat every time I start to think about writing these things,” she said, tapping her throat. “My throat hurts,” she repeated and her eyes got red and welled and I could feel them stinging. I knew the feeling. I used to walk around with my hands over my neck, trying to soothe the wire that ran down my throat. Once, in college, a man shouted from across the street: “You’re gonna choke!” My body felt the truths I was not sharing.

When we parted I asked Tiff: “What would it be like if you weren’t holding onto all of this anymore? If the truth was just out there? If you owned it?” She looked at me as if I’d just spoken Chinese.

I meant this as a gentle confrontation. I’m dying to see the elegance of Tiff’s rebellion. She wants to write the best story she has, but she is not allowed. Her truth has been quietly forbidden. She is NOT crazy not to speak. She is doing the very sane, very safe thing. And her throat hurts.

Each time I publish one of these essays, I feel my wire dissolving. Circling the truth, trying to say it out loud, relieves me. It makes me feel grounded and expansive; brave and exquisitely tender. I find that when I tell the truth, I have nothing to protect, yet the world feels increasingly benevolent. The freedom has felt especially huge lately and it’s because Whitney called me out on something I wasn’t saying—even to myself. What she did for me is what I hope to have done for Tiff.

Julia Cameron offers many zany prompts throughout The Artist’s Way. She wants you to remember how to play; how to daydream and imagine. I was a bit surprised when my creative longing pointed, repeatedly, at theater. In week one of our Artist’s Way group, I rolled my eyes and joked about joining an acting class. “Bananas,” I said. But Whitney looked at me dead-on and responded: “Isabel. I want to see you act. Will you, please?”

Instead of countering with my typical excuses, I sat with my desire to be on a stage, making art with other people. In the days that followed I felt nauseated, like I’d swallowed a kaleidoscope of monarchs. But lurking behind my thrill was the braided wire of longing, shame and regret. And my throat began to hurt in that about-to-cry way. I took three Covid tests, knowing they’d be negative.

It’s really hard to look at regrets; at the choices we wish we’d made differently; at the stories we’re not telling; at the bad habits we’re not breaking. It’s like sticking your fingers in a wound to find out how deep it goes. But we know, as we prod, that we’ll find lifesaving information. It’s important to note that we don’t owe anybody what we find—you don’t have to be like me and say it on the Internet (to those of you who think I’m sharing all my secrets here, don’t worry, the well is bottomless). Honestly, though: we need to recognize the difference between keeping information for ourselves and keeping it from ourselves.

I love the word gozar. It’s Spanish for savor, and it implies a deep, heady satisfaction. I want to gozar every damn day—even the ones when I’m confronted with my own longings, shames and regrets. Because underneath those feelings is the grief about the truth I’m not telling. And even grief, fully felt, fills an emptiness and leaves me satisfied.

I met Christopher when I was twenty-one; the same year I’d enrolled in an acting conservatory. I loved it. Acting made me feel lit up and alive. But I also loved fiction writing; and I felt it was a more practical path. (Ha!) When the year was over, Christopher and I moved to Houston to follow his well-paying job. I wrote articles for a website back in New York. But I missed acting. After a few months, I answered an ad for a play. What was more humiliating…auditioning for two stone-faced women in metal chairs inside an empty Weight Watchers franchise, or not getting the part? I forbade myself from trying again. It took me fifteen years to see that I missed the point. I was supposed to go into that strip mall audition and gozar, but instead I crumbled at the threat of not being perfect. I started saying things like: “You can’t be an actor and have a happy family.” I began braiding the wire.

We tell ourselves many lies to preempt our creative dreams, but this one most of all: our lives can’t withstand honest expression. Our mother will disown us if we tell the truth; we’ll lose our security by destroying our reputations. I recently thought of Lawrence v. Texas, the case that de-criminalized gay sex in the Supreme Court. (This was in 2003! In 2003 the plaintiffs, John Geddes Lawrence and Tyrone Garner were arrested, at home, for having sex.) Justice Scalia famously dissented, arguing about the parade of horribles that would follow. What’s next? He asked. “Bestiality?” This is the same flimsy argument we weaponize against ourselves when we deny that we can be creatively honest and also secure. We pronounce the world is black and white, even though the scenery is undeniably grey.

Joan Didion has an essay called “On Self Respect,” in which she says: “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” (212, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Picador Modern Classics.) I was surprised by the relief I felt after grieving those lost years as an actor. I came to see that I made the best choice I could in the circumstances—I wasn’t ready for rejection—and it saddens me anyway. Owning the truth means accepting its complexity.

I think about my renewed commitment to my writing, and to the acting class I’m starting this spring as gifts to Max, Augie and Clyde. Our children see everything. They don’t always have words for what they’re identifying, but their antenna are up and they are processing and becoming. The boys complain when I don’t pick them up from school, but they watch me skip home after a day of writing, verv-y and glad. They have a mother who wrote the wire out of her throat.

The end of Didion’s essay haunts me. “We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others is an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give….” One day, she warns, we’ll find that: “every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. But to assign unanswered letters their proper weight is to free us from the expectation of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” (216)

I confess to cowering in shame from the unanswered, modern letter—texts. But I’m finding it easier not to care whom I might be disappointing. I’m in recovery from being unwaveringly likable. What have I been worried about, clutching perfection? My in-laws' friends in Florida, drinking G&Ts and wondering what the Hell I might be thinking, thirty-seven years old and signing up for acting class? And telling everyone about it?! That fear has lost its magnetism. I have nothing to protect. I cannot describe the joy of this liberation.

I feel my freedom at the sandwich shop; at the gas pump, bopping through the grocery store. I show up differently, unashamed. My boys watch me and I see them thinking: “Oh, this is how we’re supposed to be in the world. We’re supposed to be singing and laughing and shimmying through the chip aisle.”

Yes, kiddos, we are.

Images from William Steig’s Roland The Minstrel Pig