I’ve been doctoring a terrific book on Integrated Chinese Medicine, which addresses health issues caused by an overabundance or deficit of certain “elements”, including wood, fire, water, and air. It got me thinking about my wood, how much more of it I have at this stage of life. And about this post, I wrote years ago on The Joy Luck Club. One of those books that changed my life.
When I turned thirty, I was angry and unhappy but didn’t really know it. I figured that niggling feeling, the one I couldn’t really identify, the one that wouldn’t go away, was the natural result of having two little kids, too much time with nothing to think about on my hands, and, thanks to living in Iran, a really foreign country, a serious case of culture shock.
I believed that the unexamined life was absolutely worth living. Probing too deeply into my psyche, to my way of thinking, wasn’t going to lead me anywhere good. I prided myself on being a survivor. Someone who didn’t waste her time dwelling on things that couldn’t be changed. Someone that, when in the heart of something awful, eventually adjusted, and then forgot what normal ever looked like to begin with.
Plus, it was a whole bunch easier on my marriage if I didn’t dig around in all that inner mud.
If I didn’t put a voice to what it was that I really wanted. Or felt.
Somewhere early on, all by myself, I had decided that my feelings were never as credible or important as those of my husband. So attuned to small shifts in his mood, in his body language, in his tone, I could sense what he wanted, what he felt, long before he came out with it himself. Long before I could figure out what was going on inside my heart.
And when things did boil over–as they will, even when you decide to ignore your secret rage–I was quick to blame myself.
Being angry at my husband quickly evolved into being angry with myself.
I assumed that discord sprang from my lack. A predictable byproduct of my thousand and one rather unforgivable flaws.
Instead of hashing issues out with my husband, defining what was bugging me, demanding or negotiating a solution like a healthy adult, I said and thought the most horrible things about myself.
I flirted off and on with eating disorders. Starving myself when I was a little too close to coming unglued. Binging and purging when the anxiety level spiked a bit too high from baseline.
I abandoned myself in order to remain in a relationship free of conflict. I feared losing the relationship far more than losing myself.
Perhaps it was my Mom who’d sent me the book. Or maybe I’d borrowed it from one of my ex-patriot friends. But, the timing couldn’t have been more serendipitous. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan centered on the lives of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. And while the complicated relationships between two generations and two different cultural mindsets resonated with me, it was the floundering marriage of one of the daughters that held me in its grip.
How is it that when you can’t see the mistakes of your own life because they’re too up close and personal when you’re used to distracting yourself from yourself with an ever-present, vague sense of panic, it’s easier to see the truth–the truth about yourself– when observing a fictional character? How is it that other people’s problems, even made-up ones, are easier to face than one’s own?
Married to a man who possesses all the power in the relationship, Lena St. Clair, prompted by a visit from her mother, begins to evaluate her marriage with the eyes of an outsider:
She can see all this. And it annoys me that all she sees are the bad parts. But then I look around and everything she’s said is true..she knows what’s going to happen to us…And she looks at me and frowns but doesn’t say anything. And I feel embarrassed, knowing what she sees….I think how to explain this recalling the words Harold and I have used with each other in the past…But these words she could never understand.
l started to imagine what Mom would see if she stood in the middle of the 10X10 dorm room we were living in. Mom: A woman who had once asked me in a fit of frustration, “Do you have any idea how Muslim men treat their women?” The very same woman I had accused, in turn, of being a cheerleader. Waving her pom-poms around in an attempt to rally enthusiasm for her marriage. To a volatile alcoholic–the one person in our family whose troubles were considered legitimate emergencies.
I could picture her pursing her thin lips at the talk-to-the-hand attitude my husband would adopt whenever I worked up the nerve to complain. About the lack of privacy, what with his mother moving in with us and sleeping at the foot of our bed. Or the lack of money, sharing our resources as he did with 2,521 aunts, uncles, and cousins.
I could hear Mom clear her throat when she got a load of just how quickly I backed down from an argument, deathly afraid of losing the life I’d once believed I’d wanted. Had fought tooth and nail for. But now suspected I really didn’t want anymore.
But it was Lena St. Clair’s dawning recognition of her own unhappiness, that gnawed on me as I read. The depth of the trouble she and her marriage were in.
Her utter lack of self-awareness:
I love my work when I don’t think about it too much. And when I do think about it, how much I get paid, how hard I work, how fair Harold is to everybody except me, I get upset..It’s been on my mind, only I didn’t really know it. I just felt a little uneasy about something…
Lena was me. Like her, I ran from the truth. Had done so all my life.
Long before I wore a bra, I had become detached from my feelings. I had been taught in an alcoholic household to dismiss my intuitions. To accept, without argument, that black was white, and night was day. Here I was, an adult, perpetually dazed and confused.
I had no wood.
Too little wood and you bend too quickly to listen to other people’s ideas, unable to stand on your own.
I wasn’t easy going like I claimed to be, I was dangerously bendable.
And I wasn’t just lost in a foreign country, barely able to read the street signs.
I was lost as a person. I no longer knew or remembered, who I was.
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years. Washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
A year after I read The Joy Luck Club. Arrived at the truth. I came back to the U.S. with the kids on vacation. And I never went back.
After all this time, I still struggle with my fear of confrontation. My intense desire to ignore uncomfortable feelings. To put a happy face on and pretend there’s nothing wrong. So as not to rock the boat.
I get that this is the worst thing I can do.
Because when the explosion comes, and it always does when you’ve stuffed so much down inside there’s simply no more room, it will take everybody down with it. Nothing is left standing in its aftermath.