I like the wingspan image. I think often it is in a cis-hetero marriage the man who has the full wingspan, it’s often the primary earner who has the full wingspan. One of the questions I have to keep asking myself in this book is, if you out-earn your partner, is there automatically a power imbalance and an expectation of being in some way exempt from a certain amount of domestic labor, including child-rearing? Yet talking about this book and going out on tour and doing interviews, I have heard from so many women who out-earned their husbands and still are the primary caregivers and still are the ones sort of making, I would say, asymmetrical sacrifices to take care of kids. I think the pandemic revealed a lot of cracks in the system that were primarily spackled by mothers.
TS: When you say “move the needle,” when you imagine the needle really moving to a new place where both partners have full wingspan, if you will, to use my metaphor here. What does that look like to you? What would it take? What kind of relationship are you dreaming of for yourself, wanting to create, that realizes that?
MS: I mean, I think part of the reason the needle isn’t moving is because it’s not a needle that can be moved in individual families. There’s just not enough structural support and we’re moving backwards so quickly now in this country that it’s hard. We’re actually moving the needle in the opposite direction. Women are losing basic human rights, not gaining more of them certainly, but I mean the fact that there is no real leave, family leave in this country, there is no real support for working mothers.
So when there’s a global pandemic and schools shut down and daycare shut down, even if both parents are working at home. I think we have a sort of Venn diagram where we have a lot of societal and patriarchal expectations of what women’s work is and then we run up against a lack of structural support for women in the workplace. And where women live, in the slim center of that Venn diagram, is a really dark and crowded place.
TS: I think you’re making a really important point about the social structures, the architecture of our society, and how that puts us in this position. And you went through this deep archeological journey and are now in a different place. When you think of the kind of relationship, at least this is what it appeared to me from reading the memoir, the kind of relationship that you would welcome into your life and invest in again, I’m curious to know, in terms of your own inner development and psychological work you’ve done, what has given you a new sort of consciousness if you will? How would you describe it? Oh, this is the kind of relationship that I will now move forward into.
MS: So I live alone with my two children now, and what that means is I do everything and it’s not a problem, because I know it’s all my work. I think one of the problems I had in my marriage, and I hear this from friends, even happily-married friends. There is a resentment that can happen in a relationship if you think that someone else should be pitching in and helping more than they are, and so those kind of hairline cracks can grow over time. And it doesn’t always create large fissures. It doesn’t always break up a relationship, but those small resentments about who’s not doing what can put a real strain on things.
So it’s not that my load is lighter as a single parent living alone in this house, but it means I have clearer expectations and therefore no resentment about what my work looks like. If I were to live in a house with another human being again, another adult, it would have to look really different from what I did before and in some ways, I think the idea of negotiating that– it’s not a place where I am right now.
It’s not a place that I’m really ready to figure out how to negotiate that. Because I know I’m a caregiver by nature and so part of listening to myself– and this is one of the uncomfortable truths– is if I had another partner living in my house now, I think it would be really hard for me not to repeat the same patterns. So one of the safety guards I have in my own life is that I don’t live with my partner. We live separately, and therefore I don’t have the risk of resentment, or parenting another grownup, or having to argue about how I spend my time or with whom, or what my work commitments are, and what I accept or don’t accept. So the ability to make decisions for myself without permission from another adult has been incredibly empowering for me right now.
TS: Thank you. Thanks for saying it right how it is. Now, this notion of our writing as having the potential for self-discovery and for healing. I want to talk about that, the healing aspect. I think sometimes people have this notion, “So I’m going to do all this writing, I’m going to come out and I’m going to have something like closure. Now I have closure on my grief, or I have closure on this part of my life.” And I’m wondering what your thoughts are. Because as I got to the end of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, it felt like a deep embrace, but not exactly something I would describe as closure.
MS: No, I’m very suspicious of healing as a concept. Which I love the idea of it, I think it works on cuts on the skin, I think it doesn’t–I have never fully healed from any deep inner wound. My friend, the poet Dana Levin, says that she likes to think about the concept of endurance more than the concept of healing and I love that. That feels, at least for me personally, more psychologically true. It’s not about healing and having closure for me and sort of setting the thing down and being done with it. The endurance piece is learning how to carry it better, having it be a little lighter in my hands, having it not be so cumbersome, being able to move more freely but I’m still carrying the thing, and I think I love the idea of resolution. I love the idea of closure, I love the idea of healing but it doesn’t feel quite true to me.
It feels like there are always going to be splinters that are not sanded down in this regard. So the best thing I can do is learn to live with them, acknowledge them, talk through them, write through them, sit with them. And then through the writing and the talking and the thinking and the long walks and the ice cream and the music and all the joys of life, the dog kisses, I can carry those things better, they don’t weigh me down in the same way.
TS: Related to this, what about this notion of writing with a goal of forgiveness?
MS: I was so naive. I really did start this book– and I write early on by the time I get to the end of this book, by the time I’ve written the last page of this book, I want to be in a place of forgiveness, and I did. That was a real deep wish of mine when I began this book and I think honestly, an honorable wish. I think I approached the writing of this book from a place of curiosity and empathy and frankly, a need for healing– even if I never quite got there. I didn’t really get to a place of total forgiveness, I think I got to a place of acceptance, and I do think that’s different.
TS: What is the difference? Because sometimes I think acceptance, maybe that’s good enough and maybe that kind of is forgiveness. Because OK, they are who they are, they did what they did. I remember Rabbi Rami Shapiro who taught at Sounds True a program on forgiveness. He said, Tami, “You’re not going to like my definition,” when we were talking about doing the program, and I was like, “Try it on me, Rabbi Rami.” And he said, “It’s just accepting that, that animal has those spots. And when an animal has those spots that’s the way that animal acts. And that’s how they acted.” I was like, “I quite like your definition.” And in reading You Could Make This Place Beautiful, I thought, I don’t know if I know the difference between acceptance and forgiveness.
MS: I’ve never heard that definition, but I quite like it and by that definition I might be there. So I might be leaning toward that definition because I feel like I would like the gold star of getting to a place of forgiveness, even though I don’t feel like I’ve quite earned it. Yes. That’s almost how I would describe acceptance, which is, “These are human things that happened in a human life and I can’t change them and I don’t need to, I can move past them.”
To me, in a way acceptance doesn’t require a relationship with the other person. It’s not actually something that you need the other person for, and forgiveness feels more interactive to me personally. I can accept what someone has done or said to me without forgiving them, even if they’re not sorry. Even if someone does something terrible to me and loved it and is not sorry at all. I might not be able to forgive them for that because they don’t seem sorry and they don’t seem to want forgiveness and it feels like that’s always going to be a kind of open wound. But I can accept that it happened and move on and not think about it every day.
TS: I’m going to ask a personal question here. Do you still feel angry at your ex-husband? I mean, there was betrayal involved of you and of your children and, I mean, a complex story, and of course it would be completely understandable, but I wonder.
MS: I mean, not actively if that makes sense. I’m not walking around feeling angry. Anger to me it doesn’t even feel hot, it feels like nausea. Anger in my body feels a lot like anxiety, it’s a terrible feeling and for a long time I did actively feel that sort of ill, angry feeling on a daily basis which was not something I wanted to feel. I don’t feel that way now. I mean, I think I’ve accepted enough that I don’t actually feel angry.
Now if I start to think about it, if someone gave me a list of all the things that happened and said, “But what about this and what about this and what about this?” I’d be like, “Yes, that was really disappointing and frustrating, and I wish that wouldn’t have happened, and how dare this person?” So am I a human being who can get riled up? Oh yes, I’m Irish. Yes, I can. But no, I think I feel much more at peace than I did two or four, six years ago.
TS: One of the, I guess I would call it writing techniques, I don’t quite know if you would call it that. But it’s also an inner-consciousness technique that you used in the memoir, is to take a witnessing, a kind of bird’s-eye-view perspective on yourself and the events that are happening and I wanted to understand more about that. That seems like a great way to get a different perspective and way of understanding what’s happening.
MS: I think it comes almost from– It happens to me a lot, and not just during painful times, where something really funny even is happening and I just think, “Oh my gosh, this is a scene from a movie. I would laugh so hard at this if it were a scene from a movie.” And it happened a lot for me during my divorce when things would happen that felt too on the nose that I knew I couldn’t– If I were writing a novel, I could never have written the scene the way that it actually happened because no one would believe that someone actually said that or that, that strange coincidence or serendipity actually happened.
But of course life hands us these moments all the time, things that are too perfect to be even believed in literature. And so I think about that a lot. One of the other impulses for writing about myself as sort of a character in an imagined play, which I do in the memoir, was giving myself a little bit of a cushion emotionally.
In poetry, we have all of these kind of distancing devices that we can use if the material feels too hot and personal. So if I’m writing a poem and the material feels too hot and personal to me, I can sort of put on oven mitts formally by moving it out of first person into third person. Moving it out of present tense into past tense, those things have kind of a cooling effect emotionally, I think.
Or even using a received form ,like a sestina or a sonnet, automatically sort of formalizes the experience in a way that kind of cools it down and makes it feel less like you’re just handing a hot emotional experience to another human being. So when I got into the memoir, I thought, “I need to be able to use craft and form as a way of holding some of this material at an arm’s length from myself, just for my own comfort in sharing some of this really vulnerable material with other people.”
So the play and the third-person writing about myself as a character and imagining some of these things was a kind of device I used to make myself more comfortable with the level of disclosure that I had to do in this book.
TS: Maggie, I’m going to ask you a personal question that will require me to be personal. It’s a little confessional here.
MS: Deal.
TS: OK. I don’t think of myself as a writer, meaning I don’t spend a lot of time writing, and yet I feel there’s something in me that I want to share in writing. One of the obstacles, and I think this very well could be an obstacle for people within the Sounds True audience, the Insights at the Edge audience as well, is my first commitment is being of service. That’s really what I want to do with my time and energy in my life and I’m not saying that to put myself–It’s just true for me as a person.
If I’m going to write, I want to make sure that what I write, especially if it’s for any kind of publication, is of service to people. They don’t need to know all my personal stories and all my shenanigans and the funny things that happened to me. I want it to be medicine for people, and I don’t know how to do that, how to find the medicine, what will really be helpful and uplifting to others in my personal experience. And I’m wondering if you could help with that?
MS: The short answer is, I don’t think we know what our medicine is for other people most of the time. I wrote in the memoir, at a certain point, that I wanted to fashion this book into a tool that people could use. I wanted it to be useful, that’s that service impulse. I think my impulse ,by and large, is a caretaking impulse. So how can I be of service to you, reader? How can I give you something that you can use that will make your life better? What can I offer to you that’s not just my own life? Then I realized a little bit later into the writing experience that experience itself is instructive, that we don’t necessarily know the good that our words might do even if we’re just talking about our shenanigans. I would actually love to hear about your shenanigans, because the medicine that your shenanigans could offer someone else is what? Like, laughter, or a point of connection where they remember a time when with their mother or cousin or daughter or best friend, they did X, Y, or Z.
One of the most counterintuitive things about writing and sharing, I think, our lives with other people through the written word, is that you would think that something really general and universal would attach to the most people. Right? Like writing a poem about capital L love, certainly that would have a wider readership than a poem about walking my dog around my specific block on a very specific day and yet that’s not the way it works.
Actually what we, as readers, attach to the most, the things that have the most little hooks in them for us as readers are the most specific, could only have happened to that particular person on that particular day items. I have no idea why that’s true, except for the fact that I think we go to books as lenses through which to understand our own lives. And even if we’re looking through someone else’s very, very specific lens, what we’re seeing is ourselves.
TS: A final question for you, Maggie. Towards the end of You Could Make This Place Beautiful you write, “I joked that a more accurate title might be ‘Notes From a Shipwreck’ or ‘Anecdotes From an Airship in Flames.’ ” And then you continue, “Now I see the title as a call to action, a promise I’ve made not only to this book and to you but myself, a promise I intend to keep.” What I’d like to know more about is, what do you do and what can we do to make this life more beautiful?
MS: First, do no harm. I mean, I think I sort of move in the world the best I can to put love first in my actions. And that means on the page and with my kids and with my students and with the members of my family and community that I don’t understand or see eye-to-eye and agree with. I mean, I think that’s some of the hardest work, I think all of us have to do right now, is not being siloed and sort of living in bubbles with people who agree with us. But how do we reach out and have difficult conversations with people who don’t? So I love your main focus being acts of service and how you can be useful in the world. I think I’m most useful in the world as a writer and probably as a parent, those are the two jobs I take most seriously. Those are the two jobs I feel like have the highest stakes for me personally.
So how can I with my words and with the ways that I’m raising my kids, put more love and light into the world and encourage connection and communication? I think thinking about that, focusing our intention every day. How am I going to reach out instead of staying siloed? How am I going to lead with love even if it’s a tough day, even if I’m dealing with people I don’t agree with? Or even if I have to communicate with someone I still have some bitterness toward, how can I be charitable to the best of my ability? I think we have that in all of us even if it’s difficult, even if it’s uncomfortable, even if it’s a splinter that doesn’t quite want to be sanded.
TS: Maggie Smith, you certainly made my life and the lives of our listeners at Insights at the Edge more beautiful, and I think helped us find deeper inside ourselves our own integrity as human beings. So thank you so much, to me that’s a form of beauty. Thank you.
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