What Happens When a Mother Wants to Break Free?
Author Caitlin Shetterly shares a personal story and then examines the question of what happens when a mother wants to break free.
Many, many years ago my mother published an essay in a magazine which doesn’t exist anymore. And in that essay, she described her divorce from my father. As I remember it, she had a line in there which seared right through me as a young adult: She wrote that after a divorce, you come-to but everything is hazy. And I am paraphrasing here, but she said that you look around and ask yourself, “Who are these people?” And then you realize, “Ah yes, these are my children.”
Not only was this window into my mother’s psyche painful for me to read, as I, after all, was one of those children, it was also elucidating. I was interested in the haziness a parent can fall into, how they can lose track of their kids, or their kids can get blurry, even when the kids are right there, needing them.
When I sat down to start my new novel, The Gulf of Lions, I was thinking about that essay of my mother’s. I was also thinking about how hard Gen-X parents have worked to transform parenting as we know it—one thing I hear from fellow Gen-Xers, over and over, is how much they care to repair the hurts from their own childhoods, pouring themselves into their own parenting. I am very proud of my generation, actually; I think we have totally retooled parenting for the better (Millennials, you can thank us). The truth is that, Gen-X parents want to be friends with their kids; most Gen-Xers have tried more effective ways of redirecting than corporal punishment; we've wanted to listen and communicate, never shutting down; and, more often than not, we want to support our kids, no matter whom they love, whomever they want to be.
There was a third thing that was entering my brain via osmosis: I was listening, over and over again as I ferried my sons hither and yon, to Homer’s The Odyssey read by Ian McKellen. And I kept asking myself, “I wonder how this story would change if it were about women adventuring, not men?” I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about Telemachus, Odysseus' son, who goes looking for his father. If I were able to drop into his heart, what would it say, I wondered? What if Telemachus were a daughter?
All of this was intellectual, emotional. It wasn't going to help me—yet—put down those all-important first sentences. I knew I needed something I could hang my hat on. So, I figured out three basic points to add to my three thoughts (I like the number three) I was sure of. They were:
- My main character, Alice, was going to take her two daughters, Sophie and Iris, on a once-in-a-lifetime road trip across France after Covid lockdown, after a long and hard battle with stage 2B breast cancer, and after her husband has cheated on her.
- Her older daughter, Sophie, almost 14, will be deep in the throes of teenage angst and moodiness. But in addition to that usual teenage stuff, I knew, somewhere inside me, that I wanted to also capture some of the ways kids absorb and carry the trauma of their parents’ flawed marriages and familial dysfunction. Kids are so porous, so totally absorbent—they know, they always know everything—I needed to go deep into that. I was familiar with some of that story from my own childhood.
- Lastly, I knew that Iris, the younger eight-year-old daughter, would be hovering in that rich territory where she is still young enough to play with Lego and sleep with stuffies. But she’s also just starting to turn the corner from small child to pre-teen who is beginning to catch on to some of the subtext of the adult world. I wanted to make sure that there were gaps between what she understood and also what was elusive for her—which made her feel left out, lonely, confused. (I was a younger child, after all!)
OK, so I had three thought bubbles and three concrete character arcs. The rest I’d have to figure out as I wrote, feeling my way through it.
I love making up a world in fiction. There is something about the process of falling into a story, when you have no idea of the direction, that I find so liberating. I know that there are novelists who plan their books out, right down to the last notecard. And I totally respect that. But for me, that takes some of the honesty out of it. I like to write moment to moment, living the entire experience along with my characters. Usually, after the first few weeks of writing, I know where my book is going to end—what’s going to happen. But between that and my first lines, it’s all unchartered and there for the taking, day by day.
As my pages accumulated, I realized I was writing a deep mother/daughter story. And as I wrote, there was a theme that hovered over the writing: What if a mother wants to break free? Children, I reasoned, are often the collateral damage when parents, but especially mothers, try to seize their lives. I had that Queen song in my head, "I want to break free…"
And I was thinking about how, for instance, when my two sons come home from school, I want to make them a snack—and these days, they are teens and both athletes. We're talking two grilled cheese each, a huge glass of milk, three brownies. On the one hand, I LOVE making them these sandwiches and pouring the lovely whole-fat milk into Bonne Maman jars. On the other, I sort of resent it because I want to get back to work, there's still so much day left, and I know that in two hours I'm going to be making dinner again and then it's clean up time and bedtime and more and more of my wishes and dreams will have been attenuated. I've been a mom for 18 years by now!
So, with Alice, I was thinking: This woman has come out of Covid lockdown, gone into an even more serious lockdown of cancer; her husband has cheated on her, and she gets a greenlight on a magazine article to go to France with her two daughters. My God, she would want to break free. So, while there, she reconnects with sensuality—her own body's sensuality, the salty water of the Mediterranean, the luscious French food, the sunlight, and beautiful people she meets along the way.
But—and this was the hard part for me to write—I knew that nothing would be free. Especially for a middle-aged mother of two. She wants to break free, but freedom has its reckless costs.
So I was always walking the knife's edge of how people in a family are so connected that whenever one person tries to save herself, she may be inadvertently hurting her children, her partners, or, even, perhaps, most dangerously her own ideas of who she believes she is, or was.
Check out Caitlin Shetterly's The Gulf of Lions here:
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