S2:E19: Between family and a hard place
Thursday, February 4, 2021
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This past weekend my family and I were hiking through the snow and my daughter Grace grabbed my hand. Grace is almost seven. I see a bit of myself in each of my kids, but in Grace the resemblance is uncanny.
“When I grow up,” she said, “I want to be a writer just like you.”
Her older brother, who was a few feet ahead of us, called back, “I want to be a scientist.”
In an instant I was taken back to my own childhood—to the novels I penned in notebooks that my friends passed around the bus, to the leads I chased for my high school and college newspapers, to my first creative writing workshop when I knew I was finally home.
But there were other moments, too. The phone conversation when I told my dad I was switching my major to creative writing and he responded with, “but how will you pay your bills?” The heartbreak of taking a novel through sixteen complete revisions--only to be told by yet another agent that it was great, but not right for them. The jaded ritual of sending off stories, forgetting about them, and being surprised when I got a response. The tears I’d shed in front of my writing group when it seemed that all of them had reached their dreams and only I was left behind.
It’s not that I don’t want Grace to be a writer, or that I’m even particularly surprised that she wants to be one. It’s just that as a parent, I can’t help but hope for an easier life for my daughter, one that isn’t quite so rife with heartache and rejection.
If you’ve been following Shelter in Place, you already know that the backdrop of this season is a very unexpected Pandemic Odyssey which gave my family and me a little more adventure than we bargained for. You’re welcome to go back to the prologue where it all begins—but if jumping around is more your style, here are the details you’ll need to know: after six months of job loss, pandemic parenting, and watching even the air we breathe go up in smoke, we abandoned ship. We made the very sudden decision to rent our house to friends and travel across the country toward the safe harbor of extended family.
Traveling with three kids under the age of 9 is not exactly efficient; the journey from California to Massachusetts took us nearly a month, and along the way we camped in national parks, had social distance ice cream cones with friends we hadn’t seen in over a decade, and stayed with the few family and friends who were risk tolerant enough to welcome us.
Halfway through our trip we stopped in Wisconsin to see my family. My parents have made two major moves for work in their sixties and seventies, and so my adult life has included a series of visits to houses I did not grow up in. These days my parents and my 98-year-old Texan grandmother live 45 minutes outside of Milwaukee. They’re a stone’s throw away from my brother and his family, and surrounded by woods and farmland. It’s a place where my physician dad can dig into his farmer roots and my green-thumbed mom can grow all her vegetables in the garden. They get to see two of their grandkids every single day. There may be a place that suits them better, but I can’t imagine it.
By the time our family reached Wisconsin, we were tired, but the kids came alive at the sight of their grandparents and cousins. I’d forgotten how good it was to be with family. We took the bikes off the rack and rode through golden cornfields under blue sky. The mid-September air felt like summer on our skin.
I would like to say at this point that the visit continued in this way, that everyone was well-behaved and charming. For the first few days it did. My brother and I sang together while he played the piano, my mom and I cooked together in the kitchen, and we picked apples at the orchard down the road. But inevitably the conversation turned to the future.
Our plans for this move were temporary, but with the California wildfire season getting longer and longer and the cost of living climbing each year, life had begun to feel unsustainable. In our sixteen years of calling Oakland home, we’ve watched dozens of friends come and go. Even in the time we’d been on the road some of our closest friends had left for good. The pandemic made those goodbyes feel unreal. It was hard to fully comprehend what we were losing. Harder still was the question we wanted to answer, but couldn’t: should we be among the exiles? Was it time to let go of California and search for a new home?
The question has been a touchy one since long before the pandemic. In every visit or phone conversation with my parents, it inevitably surfaces. Of course my parents want us close. They want to watch our kids grow up. They want our interactions to go deeper than long distance conversations and holiday visits. I want that, too. For my parents, who have made two major moves in the last decade, swapping our two-bedroom bungalow in overpriced California for a more comfortable life in the affordable Midwest is a no-brainer. On paper, they’re right. It’s an option we’ve tried to be open to over the years.
But these conversations expose a challenge bigger than geography. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Minneapolis and went to college in Wisconsin. I have too much love and affection for the Midwest to ever refer to it as the “flyover states.” There is a part of me that will always feel tied to the people and places there, and there’s a lot that I miss.
But just as the Midwest shaped my childhood, Oakland formed the adult I am today. When we moved from Minneapolis to Oakland, my husband Nate and I were newly married and still figuring out who we were. Maybe because I moved there for writing, to get my MFA in fiction, for me, Oakland will forever be tangled up in creativity. Before I moved to Oakland, I’d wanted to be a writer, but over the years of living there, I actually became one. I learned to push myself, to take chances, to embrace even failures when they came. We had three kids there, and bought our first and only home. I learned how to be a mother and a writer partly through practice, but also through the friendships of others who were doing it with me. It was a place where I was surrounded by other artists, where I rarely felt alone.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this pandemic trying to understand why the idea of leaving California is so hard. Logically I know that we could make a life just about anywhere else. We’d figure it out. We’d find a new community and learn to appreciate what was around us. We’d miss California, but we’d be okay. Nate and I have spent endless hours discussing these points. We’ve examined them from every angle. We’re planning on traveling back to California in August, but we still don’t know whether the end of that journey will be selling our house or coming home for good.
All my life I’ve been mystified by the strange reversion of self that happens around family. Here I am with the people I love most in this world, people I admire and miss and wish I could see more. People who have shaped me, who mirror pieces of myself back to me. At first that reflection is the best version of Laura Joyce Davis. I am self-actualized and wise from many years of counseling and a steady slog of self-reflection. I am helpful and kind and grateful.
And then just like that, it shatters. Often it’s sleep deprivation or an offhand comment that drudges up a rusted, lost memory of feeling left out or misunderstood. Whatever the trigger, the result is always the same: my dusty old shadow self emerges and whispers convincing half-lies. She hisses that my emotions are too big. That I’m difficult to be around. That the choices I’ve made are the wrong ones. She says that my family loves me--they just don’t always like me. No matter how hard I try, I will never be the person they wish I would become.
It’s that last part that usually gets me. In this particular instance, when I was worn out from a journey I hadn’t been ready to take, my shadow self took over and I blew it. I said things I immediately regretted--things that weren’t even true, though they felt important to say at the time. Like any family blowup, it was less about the fight itself and more about what it represented: all of these years later, despite my best efforts and the rather obvious truth that my parents are my biggest cheerleaders, that hissing voice was still able to convince me that I would never belong.
In the space between the blowup and the reconciliation, I sat outside on a large rock and sobbed. My dad found me there and wordlessly pulled me into a hug. I was sick with shame and anger at myself and everyone around me, but I was grateful for the embrace.
“You’re always saying I’ve made different choices than the rest of our family,” I said. “What’s so bad about the choices I’ve made?”
My dad was quiet for a long time. “You moved to California,” he said.
“What’s so terrible about California?” I howled. “There’s a lot that is really good about our life there. It’s not always easy, but it suits us.”
He swallowed and pulled me closer. “I see the way you miss out on things--not just because you’re in California, but because of the choices you’ve made to pursue writing. I see how disappointed you are when things don’t turn out. If you were closer--if you were near us--it could be different.”
I didn’t argue with him. If I’d stayed in the Midwest and pursued a path with a more consistent paycheck, all of those family events I was missing out on would be part of my regular life. Maybe I would have faced less disappointment.
“Have you ever thought about letting this writing thing go?” My dad said after a long time. “Just saying that you’ve given it a good run and now it’s time to try something else?”
In that question was everything that plagued me. There was that shadow self, telling me that my dad would never understand--or worse, that maybe he was right. But there was something else, too, a fundamental divergence not just in vocation, but values. It was too painful to say aloud that our years apart resulted in two ways of living that bore little resemblance to each other. I understood my parents loved their life, but it wasn’t the life I wanted.
About halfway through the original Odyssey, Odysseus has a choice to make. After being trapped on Calypso’s island for seven years, the gods persuade Calypso to release Odysseus and let him travel back to Ithaca. The first time I read that story the choice seemed so obvious: of course Odysseus would want to leave the island and get back home. Now I read it differently. For one thing, Calypso hadn’t exactly made his life miserable. She was in love with him, which was why she kept him there in the first place. Maybe he was a little bit in love with her, too--or at least with her magical singing--since for seven years he hadn’t tried very hard to go.
Back in Ithaca, life wasn’t so simple. His son was about to give up on him, and while his wife was doing her best to put off her suitors, she also hadn’t flat out told them no. From a certain vantage point, Odysseus might have been better off if he’d stayed put on Calypso’s island. Life there was comfortable, secure, predictable. Setting out on the journey back to Ithaca would mean encountering the worst parts of himself, not to mention being shipwrecked and losing his crew.
I admit the metaphor gets a little muddy here, but life is often messier than stories. I honestly don’t know if California is Calypso’s island or Ithaca. Depending on how you look at it, the braver choice is to go. Or to stay.
Perhaps a clearer metaphor is one between risk and security. Oakland doesn’t just feel like home because I have friends there or because the weather is temperate. It feels like home because it’s a place full of people who, like me, set out on a journey to find a life that was different than the one that made them. When they got there, they didn’t just survive--they let the place change them. You can trace that history back as far as it will go. Long before the Spaniards came to California, it was home to adventurous Asians who’d traveled across the Bering Strait. Even then, California bred a certain kind of adventurer; you had to be okay with mountains and deserts that made it difficult to travel or grow the usual crops. It was a place that forced you to grow, that inevitably would make you different.
As a Nebraska farm kid whose parents lived through the dust bowl and the Great Depression, my dad was raised to think about security and survival. His ambition led him from small town Nebraska to medical school, and his work ethic and compassion made him a great doctor. That he was able to pursue a career that he loved was lucky, but it didn’t hurt that medicine offered job security in any economy.
What I was trying and failing to explain to my dad in that awful conversation was that I was caught in the tension between what I love and all of the difficulties that the thing I love caused me. The conversation is the same whether I’m talking about California or creativity.
Looking at Oakland is a bit like looking at myself: there’s a lot of brokenness, a lot of disruption--but it can also be a beautiful place, where seemingly conflicting people and ideas come together around the hope for a better future. In the light of a certain sunset, all of those big emotions feel like an asset. Even the pain is fodder for a good story. Sometimes it can feel a little melodramatic. Sometimes it’s exhausting. But there’s no danger of becoming stagnant. All of those years of living in between the thing I love and the pain it causes me have made me grow. I don’t for a moment think that leaving Oakland would stop me from writing--or even from growing.
I think the root of my fear in leaving isn’t just the loss that would come with it, but in leaving a piece of myself behind.
A few weeks ago I called my dad while I was out walking in the woods near our Massachusetts apartment. It had been a while, partly because I’d been busy, but also because without realizing it, I’d been avoiding calling him.
“It’s hard for me to call you when I’m not doing great,” I admitted. “I don’t want you to worry about me, or try to fix me. Sometimes I just need it to be okay that I’m struggling.”
“Of course it’s okay,” he said immediately. “I love you no matter how you’re doing.”
“The thing is, I’ve tried doing other things besides writing,” I said. “I don’t think it would matter if I did another job. I think this is just my lens on the world. It’s how I make sense of things. I feel like this is who I was created to be--even if I don’t always succeed at it.”
“It’s obvious that this is what you were put on this earth to do,” my dad said. “Mom and I are incredibly proud of you. But I just--” he stopped. “You’re so compassionate. I don’t want it to defeat you.”
For months I’d assumed that he was quietly wishing I’d do something else, that he’d be happier if I moved on from both writing and California and settled somewhere safer. Now I realized that what he was feeling was the same thing I’d felt when Grace told me she wanted to be just like me. Of course I want her to find work that fulfills and challenges her. But I’m also a little afraid for her. I want to spare her the tailspin of rejection, the hollowness that follows even success. I want her to avoid the seasons of depression, the stress over bills, the disappointment when the effort or even the quality of your work doesn’t match the result the world gives you. She’s so compassionate. Just like me, she’s got a lot of big feelings. I don’t want them to defeat her.
It took stumbling across some forgotten research to remind me of what I was missing. Years ago, after Grace was born and we were trying to have a third child, I had a miscarriage in the same week that a high school friend committed suicide and our church lost a beloved pastor to pancreatic cancer. I spent most of the next year trying and failing to get pregnant again, all the while listening to that shadow-self telling me that I was too much of a mess to love. From friendships to family to my marriage to writing, every area of my life seemed to prove this point.
Somewhere in the middle of that mess I learned about Kristen Neff’s meditations on self-compassion. Even the phrase “self-compassion” seemed a little woo woo to me. It seemed weak. But I was desperate, so I listened. What I found for myself is what Kristen’s research has shown: berating and shaming myself achieves the opposite of what I’m hoping for--and yet somehow it feels perfectly natural. What doesn’t feel natural is extending the same compassion to myself that I would to a friend.
Kristen’s research has helped me often--but even five years later I find it difficult to practice. Recently I listened to an episode of another podcast I love, The Happiness Lab, where Kristen was a guest. You know those moments when you’re listening to or reading something and you realize--this! This is what I need right now! That was the experience I had listening to Kristen talk with Laurie Santos about self-compassion. I’ll include a link to that episode in the show notes, and I also highly recommend checking out the episode following it, where Tara Brach gives you practical tips to practice self-compassion on a daily basis.
Kristen says that even though the research shows that self-compassion makes us more resilient and hard-working, and improves everything from our immune system to sleep, it’s hard to do. She says that sometimes we need to see others treat us with compassion so we can remember how to treat ourselves.
I had this experience recently. My scientist friend Nick told me that for years, his career has been a cycle of rejections. Nick is no slouch. He’s got a PhD from Johns Hopkins and leads a research group at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. He said that his career has fluctuated between the mania of applying for research grants--and the despair that inevitably follows when almost every grant proposal is denied. It sounded a lot like my life as a writer. He said that the cycle was really hard--that sometimes he even got a little depressed--but also that he’d learned a lot from accepting that failure was just part of the journey--that failure is, in fact, a great teacher. That perspective changed the way he treated both himself and his team. Basically, he said, you’re not alone. Experiencing failure doesn’t make you one.
I found this deeply comforting. Nick’s compassion for me gave me an example to follow, so I could extend compassion to myself.
What Nick was describing was familiar for another reason. I’d watched my dad go through his own version of that cycle. My dad works harder than anyone I know, but he still has to contend with the heartbreak of occasionally losing patients. He’s won awards and his name is in history books for putting in the first artificial heart, but over the years, he’s had some big dreams shattered. I remember one particularly rough patch when he was driving to six different hospitals to patch together enough cases to pay his employees at his private practice, and going for months without paying himself.
“How do you do it?” I asked him as I walked through the snow that day on the phone. “How do you work so hard all the time and not get discouraged when the results don’t match your effort? How do you not let the hard parts of life knock you down?”
“It’s not easy,” he said softly. “I try to remember everything I have to be grateful for. I try not to focus too much on the negative. I try to remember that I almost always feel better when I help other people.”
All at once, my perspective shifted. My dad wasn’t trying to stop me from failing--or even from writing. Once he’d even told me that if it really came down to it and we decided that we needed to stay in California, he’d help me problem-solve to make that life work.
When Grace told me that she wanted to be a writer someday, it took me a minute to figure out how to respond. I thought about all of the joy that writing has brought me, about the best moments when it makes me feel connected to others.
I thought about those conversations with my dad, how it was hard to realize that we’d made different choices, and that those choices reflected a difference in the things we valued.
It’s what we’re all contending with right now. When we make different choices--especially from the people we love--it can feel really personal. But it doesn’t mean we don’t care. It doesn’t have to stop us from figuring out how to make it better.
I wish my dad and I wanted all of the same things. I wish that instead of living in the country in Wisconsin, he wanted to live on my street in Oakland. It hurts that we don’t always want the same things, that the things we value most are sometimes at odds with each other. But I know he still loves me. I know he’s proud of me.
I know now that I can fail and it’ll still be okay. As Kristen Neff said, the point of practicing self-compassion isn’t to be perfect; it’s to become a compassionate mess.
I tried, as best as I could, to say this to Grace.
“The thing about writing is that sometimes you make something you’re really proud of. It’s like this wonderful magic trick, to make even the sad things into something beautiful. Sometimes it can help other people and give them hope,” I said. “But not always. Sometimes people don’t like it. Sometimes they won’t even look at it in the first place.”
“I didn’t know it was so hard,” she said. “But maybe I’ll still do it. I like writing a lot.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said. “And you know what? It’s okay if sometimes it’s hard. I have some experience with that, so maybe I can help you. And also, if you decide you don’t want to be a writer, that’s okay, too.”
Shelter in Place is part of the Hurrdat Media network. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Isobel Obrecht was assistant producer for this episode. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 apprentices are Sarai Waters, Winnie Shi, Eve Bishop, Melissa Lent, Gabi Mrozowski, Isobel Obrecht, and Alana Herlands. Until next week, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.