Previously, my monthly newsletter had a section called "Your Monthly Baby" where I showcased a picture of my growing son. Now that he is not a baby, I write something about parenting instead, which I am posting retroactively here now. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.
One little eccentricity I have, which I’ve discussed here many times before, is my annual Halloween watch of Steel Magnolias. I watched it by accident a few years ago without knowing that—sorry to spoil a movie that’s as old as I am, but—Julia Roberts’ character Shelby dies partway through the film. Steel Magnolias is a staple in the tear-jerker subgenre of cinema, which was a shocking discovery for someone (me) who didn’t know that at the time they innocently hit play. You really wouldn't know what's coming, because the rest of the film is VERY funny. I discover new lines that make me laugh every time I watch, and the story becomes richer for me every time, too, as I discover some new relationship complexity I hadn’t noticed before. It’s my second favorite movie (mm, maybe tied for first with About Time) and it also happens to cover a lot of ground in terms of commercial holidays. Hence it being my Halloween movie.
The purpose of watching Steel Magnolias every year during the time of year when I am second-most insane (first-most being March) is because no matter what, I have a massive, full-bodied cathartic cry to the monologue Sally Field delivers after her daughter, Julia Roberts, has died. That kind of cry is good and necessary for my body, I swear! And also for my stupid, equinox-addled brain. But the reason I bring it up here, in the parenting section of this newsletter, is because my relationship to that monologue has changed a lot since my son was born.
The monologue has a few distinct parts, jerked around on Sally Field’s deft depiction of unsuccessfully restrained grief, but the main bit goes like this:
“I couldn’t leave my Shelby. I just sat there and kept on pushing the way I always have where Shelby was concerned. I was hoping she’d sit up and argue with me. Finally we realized there was no hope. They turned off the machines. Drum left, he couldn’t take it. Jackson left. I find it amusing. Men are supposed to be made out of steel or something. But I just sat there—I just held Shelby’s hand. There was no noise, no tremble. Just peace. Oh god, I realize as a woman how lucky I am. I was there when that wonderful creature drifted into my life and I was there when she drifted out. It was the most precious moment of my life."
At this point in my viewing I am usually already in tears, but on the days where my emotions are less accessible to me or my mood disorder, it’s the next part that really destroys me.
“I’m fine. I’m fine! I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m FINE. I can jog all the way to Texas and back but my daughter can’t. She never could! Oh god, I’m so mad I don’t know what to do! I want to know why—I want to know why Shelby’s life is over! I want to know how that baby will ever know how wonderful his mother was! Will he ever know what she went through for him?”
For the record, I don’t know if it’s just me and my read on the situation, but Julia Roberts’s husband Jackson strikes me as the kind of man who will remarry immediately after the death of his wife because he can’t handle raising a child on his own (I doubt Jackson, who is repeatedly referred to as coming from “a good old Southern family,” is capable of doing any domestic labor, and his diabetic wife who had been advised not to have children for the sake of her own survival says about their marriage “I think [having a baby] would help a lot,” aka a massive red flag). So, in that sense that last line hits extra hard, because Jackson, the baby’s father, is DEFINITELY unlikely to know or discuss in earnest what kind of love Shelby offered her son, and how much her body sacrificed just by bringing him into the world. Sally Field basically spends the whole movie petrified that this marriage will destroy her daughter’s life, and in this particular moment, we can see so clearly that it does. It has. So that part has always made me very sad, particularly because earlier in the film, Julia Roberts specifically says that her dream is to grow old with someone—to get old and sit on the porch covered in grandchildren. But this is, of course, not to be.
What has changed for me now is, obviously, the baby of it all. The little boy, Jackson Jr., who is a little over a year old at this point in the movie, and who will grow up without his mother—who, by the way, was an incredible pillar of her community. Someone beloved by everyone. Surely many people will tell him how wonderful his mother was—and yet it’s true, Sally Field’s grief is justified, because even if Jack Jr. is told for a lifetime about every wonderful thing Shelby ever did, he will still not know who she was.
And that’s Shelby, who is, again—it really can’t be understated—wonderful.
I am… not.
I’ve talked a few times about how I wrote Vi in TWELFTH KNIGHT the way I did because I felt there were no characters like me in media when I was a teenager. Meaning, I’d realized at an early age that I was an “unlikable female character,” in that my ambition and my anger at a world that so frequently underestimated my competency or misunderstood my intentions made me a harder person than I might otherwise have been, because women like me were always punished. It took me a long time to value intimacy, or to put my trust in relationships with people who were kind to me and likewise encouraged me to be kind to myself. Actually, that’s kind of the gist ALONE WITH YOU IN THE ETHER, too—it’s about learning to love someone else when you have never felt worthy of love before.
I love my husband as deeply and madly as all the songs say, and anything I write about love is true because of the way he loves me. To him, I hope, I am as wonderful as I am physically able to be, and I love my son with an intensity that feels closest to insanity most of the time. There’s a line I wrote somewhere—I don’t remember where, everything is a blur, but I feel semi-confident it’s in GIRL DINNER—that one of the difficult things about motherhood is that pretty much every parent I know would take a bullet for their child(ren), but the question is never how much are you willing to suffer. There is a massive disconnect between the suffering you are willing to accept to ease your child’s pain, and the way your love will actually be transmitted over the course of your child’s life.
Which is to say, how will he know? If something happens to me—and I write this on an airplane, having narrowly escaped a crash on the Uber ride to the airport, so this is not an unfounded concern—then what will he know about me? What parts of me—the kind of person I am, the kind of love I give—will he understand if I’m not there to deliver it myself?
But then I’m reminded of a story by Ling Ma called “Peking Duck.” There was a time during pregnancy when I suddenly knew in my soul I was having a boy, despite waiting until the birth for a grand reveal, and I was struggling with it. Because I knew I was only having one child, I was in mourning for the daughter I would never have. I was angry, for a period of time, at the experience I felt I'd been robbed of; some imaginary shared experience of womanhood, or the sense that maybe my daughter would be able to understand me. In “Peking Duck,” the character's narration says that a boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a daughter can understand her.
And then Ling Ma goes on in the story to show how daughters don’t understand their mothers, actually. Because maybe children can’t really understand their parents at all.
I often say I write fiction to be understood. I make art to be understood. And for this reason it is devastating to me when people don’t seem to get what I put so explicitly on the page for them to see (!). It’s a silly vulnerability, completely idiotic and unresolvable, because of course each person brings their own experience to art—their own interpretations, their own inferences, their own lens. There is no such thing as a universal art piece, or something that everyone feels equally, objectively strongly about. So this is all an exercise is fatalism, really. Parenting, artistry. Only a small percentage of what we say or do will be accepted, much less understood.
Ironically, knowing that eases the burden for me in some way—the tragedy of not knowing a person in a world where you’re unlikely to really know a person regardless. So then, it’s simple! Right? You could choose to just accept it, then. The miraculous moments when you know you are seen, witnessed, and loved. The thirty minutes of wonderful that are worth more than a lifetime of nothing special, as Julia Roberts would put it.
So yes, that monologue still destroys me, but it's catharsis now. It’s sad, but it doesn't have to be haunting. The movie does go on to show how life continues; how others keep Julia Roberts alive for her son and will continue to do so, honoring her memory by loving him. And yes, while I may be selective enough about my love that fewer people than Shelby’s entire town may know the exact degree of wonderfulness I am capable of, I try not to let that bother me so much.
I’m busy writing it all down for him. Most of it will probably escape his notice or attention. But I put it there, plus something-something conservation of energy, right? So I can choose to believe that if and when he wants it, there will always be some form of my love to pass along.