Hope is Embarrassing

Last fall, my husband started buying me jewelry from this little Mexican handcrafted goods shop near his work. For a few weeks straight, he’d bring home a new, impossibly detailed piece of jewelry. The other day, I put on these beautiful, sweeping, sunset-colored beaded earrings that click and slide as I move, and I was immediately thrown back to Sarasota, Florida, 1990, sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, who just learned how to make beaded earrings from a book. She used the thinnest needle and strong, metallic thread to make multicolored earrings in colors she liked. The best colors, she would say. Colors that are natural. For my mother, only natural colors are good ones: orange, brown, beige, maybe a pale red for makeup. For Jewelry, blues and greens, because they appear in nature, but never anything flashier than a lavender-purple. Colors that a whore might wear, colors that draw too much attention, those are bad ones. So, only the good colors. She would have liked my earrings, all yellows and oranges and black shooting up like the silhouettes of bare tree branches against the sunset.

I do not remember much about living in Florida except the heat and the loneliness (This was the first time I was taken away from my grandparents, my only family connection outside of our tight little family unit, not tight like close, but tight like this hurts, I want to escape) and my mother’s first failed attempt at starting a business. I would scoot down the flat, damp streets and sometimes even encounter other kids riding their bikes, something that so rarely happened to me in Vermont that it felt unreal, like something from a book or television show. I had my first experience of stereotypical kid stuff there, but seeing myself doing a thing that I had only read about or seen on a screen, something Kristi and Claudia did in The Babysitter’s Club, didn’t make me feel more normal, it just made me feel strange. What if these random Florida kids became my friends and just dropped by whenever they wanted to? I wasn’t ready to devote myself to a normal childhood full-time. So, I’d scoot around the neighborhood, alone, imagining myself sometime in the future, in high school or college, when I’d be free to do whatever I wanted to do and not feel pressured to be any certain way (looking back, it’s funny to think how as a child, I found childhood uncomfortable and imagined adulthood as freedom while most people see their childhood as freedom and adulthood as a prison of obligations).

We came to Florida with nothing, after my brother drove us down from Bennington, Vermont, 24 hours straight, with stops only for gas and food. I remember it was right after Halloween, because a smiling Jack-o-Lantern full of candy was on the floor of the passenger side. In my memory, we left while I was wearing my Halloween costume, still, though I’m not sure if this memory is correct or just a translation of how urgent and sudden the whole move felt, so sudden I left two new Scholastic book fair books back in my desk in my third grade classroom at Molly Stark Elementary. This was the first time, in my memory, that my mother had made a desperate flight to get away from the itchy discomfort of just being herself in the town she was born in. She hated Bennington because it’s where her family lived, her family who she felt had done nothing but betray her by not loving her enough, by not helping her enough, and other more baroque accusations that even as a child seemed unlikely to me.

I don’t know what is true and what isn’t, but what I do know is that my mother is difficult to be in a relationship with - she constantly scans for danger, for evidence that the people around her do not truly love her or want her, that they have some agenda. She demands a great deal of attention and gives little back. She is a nervous bundle of need, back then a bundle of need with long, tumbling chestnut hair and big, startled blue eyes. She smelled of wintergreen gum and hairspray. Maybe she was always full of ideas about how to extricate herself from the minimum-wage jobs she was qualified for, but the actual opportunity to do so didn’t come until her big blue eyes and impossible need met my stepfather, fresh out of a terrible divorce and ready to tumble right into an even more desperate situation with my mother. My stepfather came from a wealthy Florida family in the orange business, and he had some free cash after a business sale. Not as much as he had in the 80’s, before the terrible divorce, but enough to sink into every failed business idea and desperate move she had for a few years until the money ran dry.

The first idea was the earrings business. The earrings were beautiful, and beautiful on her, sweeping her collarbone. But my mother was restless, and she had to leave Florida, which had become yet another place of imagined persecution. My stepfather had family here, and anyone who threatened the tight family unit she craved, anyone who made her feel inadequate or misunderstood or unseen, even if they didn’t intend it, even if those comparisons existed only in her head and from her own projections, had to be removed from her life.

*

One of the few things in life I’ve truly wanted is to write and be a writer. I kept this secret as a teenager and for most of my undergrad, and then I kept it secret to myself, even as I ostensibly went to school to become a writer. I did a whole MFA program without ever saying to myself or anyone else that I wanted to be a writer. Sure, I wanted to write and even publish. I published a lot. But I made sure it felt like nothing, really, nothing I ever believed I could do for a living. I might become a professor - an adjunct professor, I wasn’t going to try to aim too high, that would be ridiculous. I didn’t even aim for that, really. I just drifted into online adjuncting early on and got a few gigs, one of which I’ve managed to keep for nearly 20 years. I always fully expected to work a full-time job and make writing a thing I did on the side. No big deal.

To imagine myself as a successful writer felt like trying to sit in somebody else’s easy chair in an unfamiliar house. Who was I, trailer trash from Vermont, from Florida, from Oklahoma, to think I could do that? Maybe other trash did it, but I wasn’t going to be the idiot with hopes that could only be dashed. I wasn’t going to want things that were not for me. Erasing myself before I even started was one way to have power.

And still, I plugged away at novels. I published my first one in 2014. I was excited and tentatively hopeful. It ended up being a disaster - the wrong, unedited version somehow made it to print and I didn’t realize it until it was far too late to do anything about it because I had a baby during a critical time when I could have intervened or insisted on a paper copy to review. I was devastated, but also, it verified the truth I always knew: I was going to fail. I published another book, this time with a publisher who seemed so wildly disinterested in the editing process that I didn’t even understand why they’d agreed to publish it to begin with. The editor seemed to actively hate the book, filling every page with question marks and suggestions implying that the book was ultimately not even worth saving. I revised away most of what they found offensive, until the book was an empty thing, an echo of what I had hoped to write. It was easy to do this. It took away the burden of hoping for success.

I am 44 years old and only recently have I realized how much I slit the heels of my own writing, slowing down my own momentum, dragging my characters into static, suffocating situations and reactions, never allowing them to fully act against their environment or fully make a mistake or go wild or act beyond a passive willingness to let the environment destroy them. Passivity can be fascinating, violent even, but I never let it be that, either - I just would not let my main characters act or the environment truly devastate. I would not let them change or move the world. I would not let myself truly act or actively change anything, and then I would look around and nod, satisfied that I’d kind of tried, hadn’t I? I wrote something, I sent it to a few places, I gave it a shot. What else can I do?

I didn’t let my characters fuck up enough because a part of me didn’t want to risk writing a really good book. This feels stupid to type, but I think it’s true: it’s embarrassing to imagine success, and it’s embarrassing because it would require me to let go of my own carefully managed sense of self as a person who expects nothing and therefore will never be disappointed. I may well not be able to write a really good book, who knows, but I know I pull back from risk. To write a book that gets away from me means I have to risk the reader experiencing me in an uncontrolled way, it means risking them knowing me. No, that’s not right. It means risking them believing they know me, and that feels even more intolerable.

This takes me back to Florida, me in my pleated jean shorts and my mother threading tiny iridescent beads through an impossibly thin needle. She didn’t begin her ideas already defeated - she had an impossible, stupid hope that every new thing she tried would be a success. I was almost immediately embarrassed by her hope, which I could see, even a a 9 or 10 year old, was built on nothing but fantasy. It was embarrassing to see her hope, it made her vulnerable, it made me pity her. I cannot remember a time when I ever believed my mother’s ideas would work, and that knowledge was unbearable. I didn’t want to know more than my mother and I didn’t want to grow up to become her. I would insulate myself forever from feeling embarrassed by hope by having none beyond what I could absolutely know was possible.

I don’t know my mother’s mind at all, but I know her behavior. Maybe she was not capable of imagining a coherent plan and didn’t have enough self reflection to know it. Maybe she set goals that would fail as a way to stay a victim of a terrible world that would always fail her. I have never risked disappointment because I have never hoped for anything. These are just different wings of the same jail.

I have started to change, though. My third book, Summer Girls is the first time I tried something different, less passive, the first time in a long time that I was surprised by a character, and it’s a book I’m really proud of. I am pushing that even further with my latest novel, with a short story I’m working on. I don’t expect anything different in my “writing career,” whatever that might mean, but I do have a different attitude toward my life. When I was a kid, I struggled to make friends, and I thought it was because people didn’t like me. Perhaps they didn’t, but the bigger issue is that I just waited around passively, hoping that somehow I’d be noticed and loved just by sort of showing up. I don’t want to only sort of be here anymore. I want to really be here, on the page, in my life.