Authors: Joyce Maynard
Sometimes, smack in the middle of things, it has seemed to me that all I’m here for is to make peanut-butter sandwiches and clean up the crumbs. So much of the job of parenthood is taken up by mundane concerns, it’s easy to lose track of what the whole thing’s for, easy to forget there is a meaning and importance to the sum of those tasks that goes way beyond what any one of them appears to possess, viewed all by itself.
I once thought our life here was about nothing more than getting through the days on a basically upward curve. We’d have a baby, build a few bookshelves, put in raspberry bushes, have another baby, reshingle the roof. Have another baby, modernize the bathroom and clear land for a pond. Someday we’d have time and money enough to raise sheep, get a pony, take trips, concentrate on our work in a way that’s just not possible while one’s children are young. Meanwhile we’d go swimming every chance we got, Steve would make paintings and play ball, and I’d grow zinnias and bake lots of pies. And that was pretty much how it went. We had plenty of hard times and plenty of good ones. There were times when I wondered if we’d still be married in six months, and times when I wondered how I could ever have questioned that we’d be together always.
We’ve learned some things along the way. We seldom had, in our ninth year of marriage, the kind of arguments we used to have (about who changes the diapers, who clears away the dinner dishes) in our first. By our tenth year—this one—we still argued some, but we had become more conscious of what every battle cost us, and the value of peace, of compromise. I no longer had to buy diapers; we were getting a regular eight hours unbroken sleep nightly. We had a family van that had never gotten stuck in snow, and full medical insurance coverage. When our old black-and-white TV set finally gave out, we even bought a color model and a VCR. Steve and I were still working hard, but I began to picture a life for us, within reach, in which we’d take vacations, put in a second bathroom. We had both scaled down our nearly infinite expectations some. And that might have been that. I might have lived out my life at the end of this dirt road, taking pleasure in watching our children grow up, tending my own back yard.
Then last January we were listening to the news (half listening only: Steve was reading to Charlie, I was chopping vegetables for a salad) and got the word that our town—the very piece of land on which our house sits, in fact—had been named by the federal government’s Department of Energy as one of twelve proposed sites for a high-level nuclear waste dump, the single largest public works project in our nation’s history. Over the weeks and months that followed we learned that there was no dump of the kind proposed for our town anywhere on the face of the earth. We learned that the waste they were thinking of burying in this back yard we’d been so busy tending included the most dangerous, most highly radioactive substances known. We heard a man from the Department of Energy explain that these radioactive wastes would probably not leak into our water systems “for thousands of years”—although, he added, there were no guarantees. We learned that our town could be subjected to as many as twelve years of testing before we’d know for sure whether the government would be buying us out. It was explained that the Department of Energy was not concerned with our grief and sense of violation at the prospect of having to give up our property to make possible the disposal of a private industry’s waste, and the even larger outrage that our whole region could be contaminated for tens of thousands of years to come. Our home, a safe future for our children, everything we’d been working for, and everything that mattered most to us, were suddenly threatened. “If you don’t vacate your house voluntarily,” said the man from the Department of Energy, “then we’ll call in the Army Corps of Engineers.” At first all I could do, hearing that, was cry.
Then our little town got organized. We wrote letters by the hundreds and had meetings, mapped our historic sites and wetlands, made speeches, sought out television cameras, organized a truck convoy to the state capitol. I stopped cooking meals, I let the laundry pile up, I lost ten pounds from sheer worry. I was on the phone for hours, while Willy wound himself in my long telephone cord. Charlie woke in the night with dreams of dumps, bombs, explosions. (This was also the winter of the
Challenger
tragedy, and the spring that brought the Chernobyl disaster.) On the morning of her birthday Audrey woke to say, “Could I please not hear the word nuclear all day?” And though I tried, I couldn’t even get through the day without breaking my promise. It was a draining, exhausting time.
But some good things came out of our dump crisis too. I loved seeing our community pull together, laying all our differences aside. I felt very sure of what we were doing—not a trace of ambivalence, for once. I realized, when I had to face the prospect of losing the life we have here, how dear it is to me. And though I had never before been conscious of having been a voiceless member of society, once I had become an active participant in the workings of my government I could no longer imagine functioning any other way. So even when the announcement was made, last May, that the search for a nuclear waste dump in our area had been “postponed indefinitely,” Steve and I were incapable of going back to the old life of tending our garden and our garden only.
I was finishing this book the day I learned that the ground I was standing on might become the nuclear waste dump of the nation—and after the news sank in and changed our lives around here permanently, none of what I’d written up to then made sense anymore. Words written in the days of my innocent bliss ran through my mind like the film footage of the space-shuttle crew heading out to the launch pad the morning of the explosion. Like a bad and tasteless joke. My stories about cooking spaghetti sauce and arguing over replacing the car muffler seemed irrelevant, my old life meaningless. All I wanted to talk about was how our world is in danger, how our children might be deprived of their future.
But it has come to me, in the months since that first rude awakening, that our concerns here—before our nuclear dump ordeal and since—aren’t different: Keeping the woodchucks out of our vegetable garden and keeping the Department of Energy off our soil. Making sure our children brush their teeth and stay a safe three feet away from the color TV and questioning the term “acceptable levels of radiation.” Packing away the best baby clothes for future grandchildren and calling up my Congressman to register my support of a nuclear weapons test ban. Looking out for our back yard and beyond it as well. Neither can go on to the exclusion of the other. I will never become one of those people prepared to fast to the death for world peace, and I’ll never make my children sit out in the rain all day with antinuclear placards, because it seems to me there’s nothing left to fight for if, in the name of the cause, you sacrifice everything you love about your life. I still bake pies and I still grow zinnias, only now I think those small pleasures seem more precious to me.
A year ago our focus shifted radically here, from domestic affairs to global ones. (Not simply nuclear waste in my back yard, but nuclear waste in anyone’s back yard. And the power plants that produce it. And the site in Nevada where the bombs are tested that have the capacity to destroy everything. And that invisible shield up there in space that we’re supposed to believe protects us better than a total weapons ban would.) But it is not, in fact, that this new cause of mine has replaced my children. Just the reverse: Where I used to think that being a mother and taking good care of my children was reason enough not to be an actively involved citizen, I have come to see there is no dirt road so far out of town, no house so well protected by trees and woods, that the people who live there can escape whatever is going on beyond their stone walls and fences, and there is no way to be a good mother without also looking out for the world one’s children will someday inherit.
I used to be home to tuck my children into bed and sing to them nearly every night. It wasn’t a competing set of concerns and passions that took me away from them then, to go to meetings and make phone calls. It was only more of the same fierce longing every parent feels: to protect her children.
Charlie—who, at four, has perhaps registered the recent changes in our household more than either his older sister or his younger brother—asked me a couple of nights back, as I was tucking him into bed, “What will the future bring?” I told him how he’d grow bigger, make new friends, learn how to read and how to ride a two-wheeler. Someday he might play a musical instrument, someday he might sail across the ocean. He would find out what kind of work he liked to do, and have a job. He might fall in love, might marry, become a dad. It’s the old dream—a variation on the one (Ozzie’s and Harriet’s, and Beaver Cleaver’s) that always propelled me when I was growing up, and while the details change, it’s still the one I believe in. Even large and lofty goals need to be grounded in small, earthly matters.
We were at an antinuclear rally a couple of months back. There stood Dr. Helen Caldicott, on a podium with the huge white dome of the nearly completed Seabrook reactor looming behind her, and a chilly April wind from the ocean blowing in her face as she spoke to the crowd on the grass (where I sat, with my sons on my lap, handing out the peanut butter sandwiches). “There is only one reason we’re put on this planet,” she said. “And that’s to save it.”
What we are all concerned with here is the future, and our own small emissaries to it. Seeing to it that they are just as brave and strong and healthy as we can make them, for the day when we won’t be there to wipe their noses and look both ways before crossing. Seeing to it that they will someday be able to have and raise children of their own.
I got a letter the other day from a reader of my newspaper column—a man, thirty-eight years old, married a few years. “I’ve been reading stories about your family life every week now for a few months,” he wrote. “And I wanted to tell you” (at this point I reached for my coffee, to better savor the compliment I thought I was about to receive) “it was reading about your children that made me decide, once and for all, to get a vasectomy.”
Well, I persuaded Steve to get a haircut once. I got Charlie to try asparagus the other night. But this was a new one.
And the thing is, these stories I’d been telling about my children and the frequent havoc they wreak on our home were mostly about times I wouldn’t trade for the world. At midnight, finally sponging off the last counter, turning out the lights, heading upstairs, and finding Willy wide awake and sitting on the steps, in total darkness, with his toy chain-saw on his lap, his face beaming. “Happy New Year,” he says brightly. (In fact, it is March.)
Who could be angry?
Although often, of course, I am. The other day (with Steve out of town, and the rest of us feeling a little lonely), I dressed the children up and announced we were going out to dinner. Put on socks. Tied shoes. Buckled belts. Sponged off faces. Sent the three of them outside, then raced to run a comb through my hair. Looked out the window: saw my two sons ankle deep in mud. Audrey rushing, in pink-satin Chinese slippers, to rescue her brothers, who were stuck. (Mud on dress. Boot in mud. Head in hands.) Everybody had to be cleaned up and dressed all over again, naturally.
“Are you mad, Mom?” asked Charlie, cautiously, after five minutes’ drive in total silence on our way to the restaurant. And to my surprise (having been furious for a second there), I burst out laughing.
Our house has suddenly become overrun with mice, and after weeks of gentler (and unsuccessful) forms of mouse-deterrent efforts, Steve decides to set out traps. Audrey finds one, complete with dead mouse, and carries it outside, using corn tongs. Three days after the mouse burial (and the funeral, and the memorial service, and the construction of grave markers and funeral wreaths), Willy wanders into the kitchen, tightly clasping a mysterious muddy object in his fist. It’s our mouse, raised from the dead (trap and all). “Look, Mom,” he announces, triumphant. “He came back.”
There is a day when Charlie, demonstrating a sudden leap in manual dexterity development, removes every lace from five different pairs of boots. Willy, who has been suspiciously silent for half an hour, turns out to have pulled every one of approximately three hundred children’s books off the shelves. “Bookland!” he cries, as he brings me to come see.
Charlie and Audrey have applied what was supposed to be a press-on decal, featuring a life-sized image of Michael Jackson’s head, not to Charlie’s shirt but directly onto his belly (where it remains, resisting all my best efforts at scrubbing, through the next five baths and two trips to the YMCA pool). Willy pours Rice Krispies into the bathtub. Audrey loses her fifth hairbrush this year. Willy sets a new record: spilling four glasses of milk at a single sitting.
If I went on at this, maybe they’d be forming lines at the vasectomy clinics tomorrow.
Or not.
No question, there’s disruption and disorder that comes with raising children: physical commotion in early years, followed, I guess, by turmoil of a more emotional nature. But truthfully (though you will never hear me admit to it the morning I’m down on my hands and knees sorting through the pieces of seventeen different jigsaw puzzles Willy has seen fit to dump on the playroom floor—“puzzle land,” he called it), frustration, disruption, exasperation—despair, even—are surely necessary parts of the whole process of raising children. If one can say of hiking the Appalachian Trail that it’s the journey, not the arrival, that matters, the same is surely true of child raising. The point is not getting it done and over with, but doing it. And if there were no spilt milk—no need, ever, to peel off the snowpants, untie the double-knotted boot laces, pull off the boots (all so the seams of the socks underneath can be lined up, just so, along my son’s five toes)—well, life would be easier going, and less tiring, but less mysterious and rich.
It’s ten o’clock at night. I am standing over Willy’s crib, which contains not only Willy but a stack of about twenty Little Golden Books, a pile of stuffed animals, his chainsaw, his football, his skis, an avocado seed, a fireman’s hat, a plunger, and his riding motorcycle. I am singing to him, for the third time tonight, his current favorite song—a made-up number we call “’Willy’s Riding in a Truck.” I am so dead tired I start to fall asleep, standing up, in the middle of the verse about the windshield wipers, but it doesn’t matter—Willy finishes the song for me. “Night, Mom,” he says, signing off. (We’ll hear from him again around six
A.M.
) “Happy New Year.”