The Lost Daughter

Thanks to those who asked me to send them the essay and wrote back, including dear Greg, who wrote Your essay about your father and Alice Neel is magnificent. I was captivated by the first sentence and you didn’t let me go until the very end. I loved the second last sentence…a brilliant summary. Thank you for sharing that noble piece of writing. Take a deep bow. You deserve it.  

How to live up to that? If only publishers were so effusive! 

It was mild today, thank God, so I rode my bike to Loblaws to pick up a few luxury items not available at No Frills - Quaker steel-cut oats, Adams crunchy pb, Icelandic wild cod on sale etc. Had a great convo with the man behind me in line, who was buying two cartons of cherry-flavoured water. He thought it would help him lose weight. Yuck. "I'm from New York," he said, after our long chat. "People in Toronto aren't usually so friendly." When I told him I was born in New York, he shouted, "Aha! I knew it!"

Finally watched The Lost Daughter - both compelling and repellant. (Yes, spoiler alert, I think she's dying at the end.) How Olivia Coleman can make us care for a selfish, borderline sicko woman, I don't know, but she does. The film made me replay the many times in my own motherhood years when I wanted to leave and never come back - the time I ran screaming from the house into the snow to avoid strangling someone. But unlike Leda in the film, never in a million years would I actually have left. Inconceivable. 

It's clear in what I think is the most important line in the film, when Leda's desperate husband threatens to send their daughters back to live with her mother and she shouts he can't send them to the "dark shithole" where she grew up, that her relationship with her own mother was not good. Which helps explain, perhaps, her truncated soul. 

After, I thought, I think the thing I can be most proud of in my life - yes, books and teaching and friendships too - but the main thing is that my adult children like and trust and take care of each other, and I like and trust them and they me. I really like them. I do not understand some of their choices and disapprove of others - tattoos! taste in partners and media entertainment! alcohol and food! - but they are fine fine human beings and the love between us all is the best thing in the world. Leda ended up teaching at Harvard, so her gamble for her career worked for her. But, my guess is, not so much for her children. 

I have decided to take a lot of credit for my kids. They nearly drove me, their single mother, mad for 15 years. And yet we all came through. 

Speaking of which, I was over at Anna's yesterday for Sushi Saturday - we ordered sushi for us all which was expensive as Eli can eat most of it all by himself. Sam is the king of uncles, tossing the boys in the air to screams of joy, hauling them around upside down. The day may come when it will be harder for him to do that.

So many people have Covid. In the meantime, one friend is going through chemo and another is waiting for the results of a biopsy, but major surgeries are being cancelled because hospitals are overflowing with the unvaxxed. It's infuriating. Maybe we should be less tolerant. As we saw Joe Biden finally ramp up the rhetoric about Jan. 6 and the attempted coup - maybe the time has come to take the gloves off, both with American fascists and with the anti-vaxxers clogging our health care system. I know, we must take care of them, as we care for chain smokers and people who live on cherry-flavoured water. But sometimes, in fury, I want to run screaming into the snow. 

On the other hand, here's the view over the lake from Anna's front window last evening: