On the Move
As I pack to head for Boston for this week's MFA residency, I'm thinking about stability and mobility and how they affect a person. Visiting biological relatives in Wisconsin last week, I was struck. My half-sister, who's 33, currently lives with our mother in our mother's house, the same lovely house where she's lived since she came home from the hospital as an infant. She's known her best friend since she was two. She's traveled plenty (and has lived on her own in other states), but she's always had a stable base. When she recently got tired of San Diego and wanted to come home, she could, and did.
My husband's parents still live in the house where they moved when he was 6. The same art hangs on the walls; the kitchen, living room, and dining room remain largely unchanged, with furnishings from the 1960s. When we visit, we can walk past the field where he played baseball, the lake where he swam as a boy. He is still in touch with his childhood friends. As far as I know, however, he has no connections to anyone from the town where he lived before his family moved to Louisiana.
James and I read long ago that stability--after the absence of trauma and divorce--is the single most important factor affecting a child's development, so we stayed put for Grey as much as possible, including spending 10 years in the house we bought in Indiana.
Even with those 10 years, our current apartment is my 24th place of residence. By the time I graduated from high school, I had lived in 11 homes and attended 9 schools (in Florida, England, and West Virginia--plenty of cultural variety!). If stability is a crucial factor in a child's development, I'm wondering how these many rapid changes affected mine--each school a new social system to navigate, and so on. At that time, there was no practical way for a little kid to stay in touch with friends across the country--or across the Atlantic!--and I learned to let friends go and swallow the loss. When I left home for good at 16, I continued the pattern, moving at the drop of a hat. Only having Grey made me (eventually) slow down, take stock, sign a mortgage, plant trees.
As a writer of memoir, I've given a lot of thought to what trauma has meant in my life, and divorce, and abuse, and adoption, and ethnicity, and poverty, and weird religion.
But the very fact of moving and how it inflects people's views of the world, their ability to bond, commit, and emotionally invest, and so on--that's interesting, and in a hyper-mobile global society of migration, disruption, and exile, it applies to so many of us.
I'm curious about other people's stories of movement and stasis--the kind that was dictated by parents, the kind they've later chosen themselves. If you've got a reflection about your experience, please comment!
In other news, thanks to Curtis Sittenfeld for plugging the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference on p. 2 of the NYTimes Book Review.
I loved this article about gray whales and their interactions with humans in yesterday's NYTimes Magazine. (The first part is awful--and all too politically predictable. Keep reading.)
The average height difference between male and female romantic partners is 8%. This is "also, it turns out, the downward angle at which most models are photographed." Qué freaky!
Many thanks to David Pruett! He wrote in to share this addition to our conversation about writing by hand:
Poet W.S. Merwin was interviewed on Bill Moyers' show on PBS a couple weeks back, and mentioned writing by hand!
W.S. MERWIN: I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance. If I put a nice new sheet of white paper down in front of myself and took up a new, nicely sharpened anything, it would be instant inhibition, I think. "So now what?" I would think and I would sit there — so now what? — for quite a long time. But if it's something, if I need somewhere to write it down it will be on the back of an envelope, or something like that. Then it's okay. It's just to keep it there so I can find out where it goes from there.
(the whole interview video & transcript is at www.pbs.org/moyers -- click on the "Archive" link to get to older shows. bye!)
irene said:
in the absence of geographical stability, i'd like to think that other things become your home...for me it was the highway, the sky before dawn, the night sky, the small notebooks i carried with me everywhere. in the absence of the same faces and strong familial connections, i'd like to think that it is more possible to change and grow--instead of being caught in the same reflections of who you were, who they think you are. i think all the moving around when i was a child made me who i am. my fervent hope is that it's led to believing commitments are important, that the people in my life are people i've chosen to keep, and that life has more possibilities than we could ever count...
July 13, 2009 7:37 PMFaye said:
When I was six years old my parents moved from New York City to rural, conservative upstate New York, where I was the only Jewish kid in my class and was often referred to as "the city kid." It was a difficult culture shock, and although I lived in the same house from age 6 until 17, I was very ready to leave and go to Boston for college. The strange thing is that since college, I've lived in something like 19 places in 24 years (if you include changing apartments a few times in one or two of the towns/cities where I lived). I lived in two countries besides the United States for a year each, and in five different states. Even now, settled in Boston (and even in the same house!) for about five years, I feel restless. I can't seem to find the place that "has everything." I think it's because I've never been able to shake the feeling that I might end up trapped, when there must be something better somewhere else. I'm scared that life really is finite and possibilities for myself and the future are not infinite. It's a challenge to feel OK with being where I am, here and now, and finding a way to stay.
July 21, 2009 1:57 AMliz said:
My marriage has been over for more than 5 years, yet I do not move out and on. Until a year ago, when one of my good friends asked me why I was so reluctant to leave, the thought of moving--packing up, pulling out deep roots-- actually made me sick, as though my whole body wanted to throw up from the inside out. Her question spurred me to count how many times I had moved in my life and to remember the reasons for the moves.
By the time I graduated from high school, I had moved 10 times. Several of the moves were because of traumatic events: my father’s death, my mother’s marriage to my first step-father—-he did not like me, and their divorce. After high school and until my husband, boyfriend at the time, and I moved in together when I was 39, I moved at least 15 times. (I’ve moved 2 times since.) The reasons for the moves were not due to traumatic events like those in my childhood, but several were due to lack of finances. A few times, I moved back into my grandparents’—the only “home” I had ever known. Some of the moves were because of positive life changes, like moving away to attend college and grad. school.
Through my conversation with my friend, I realized that this is the longest I’ve ever stayed in one place since I was 17. J and my crowded two bedroom apartment, with its ugly, worn, faded blue carpet and ripping linoleum, are my home.
Grandpa passed in 1990. The family moved Grandma out 2 1/2 years ago, and the only home I ever knew, the only place I ever felt at home, was emptied. J is my closest family now; we’ve been living together since 1999. The marriage is over, but we still care a great deal about each other. We’re there for each other: two chubby beach rocks. I haven’t wanted to give that up. The good thing is that I have a choice. I can leave whenever I want.
Because of my friend’s question, I realized that I want to move to a place where I can stay for a long time, maybe the rest of my life, and I no longer want to pay rent. So, I started putting away money. In a year, maybe a year and a half, I’m moving into a home of my own. I no longer feel sick when I think about moving. Living apart from J saddens me, but making my own home in my own place is long overdue.
July 24, 2009 8:03 AM