Rachel Simon's Blog

What do you do when you love someone deeply but have fallen totally out of sync with her – maybe to the point where this person, who you once got along with every day in every way, suddenly starts speaking coldly and harshly to you, rolling her eyes at so many activities you once enjoyed together, or even says those most painful words: “I hate you”?

And what do you do when this person is your own flesh and blood? Maybe even your teenage daughter?

As someone who does not have children of her own, I have been spared this all-too-familiar experience and all the associated pain. But as readers of my books and this blog know, my sister Beth, who has an intellectual disability, has the unusual lifestyle of riding city buses all day, every day, and in the interest of growing close to her after years of emotional distance, I rode the buses with her. I learned many lessons while sitting beside her on the bus, but one of the most important was this: If you want to recapture a closeness you once felt with a loved one, it’s extremely helpful to stop standing outside her world, casting judgment and grieving. Set aside all the criticism you have of her life and the hurt feelings you carry around. And, if she’ll give you permission, just enter her world.

This is the same conclusion that my friend, the writer Lauren Kessler, came to when her delightfully compatible and mutually respectful relationship with her twelve-year-old daughter Lizzie molted into constant conflict. The result is her latest book – which I recently read and got a great deal out of, My Teenage Werewolf: A Mother, A Daughter, A Journey Through The Thicket of Adolescence.

Lizzie had been an easygoing child who loved riding bikes, going bowling, drinking hot chocolate, and doing art projects with Lauren. Then adolescence hit. Not only did Lizzie lose most of her interest in these activities, she began reacting to Lauren with loud sighs, testiness, accusatory glares, and dramatically rejecting gestures.

Lauren was stunned and confused. Then she became frightened, since her relationship with her own mother had deteriorated when Lauren was a teenager and never recovered.

But Lauren isn’t just a loving mother. She’s also an insightful and fearless nonfiction writer. In fact, I first met her through the pages of one of her books, Dancing With Rose (retitled Finding Life In The Land of Alzheimer’s for the paperback). Lauren’s mother had recently passed away from Alzheimer’s, and in the interest of coming to terms with that never-healed relationship, Lauren took a job at an assisted living facility. In the course of learning about the last world her mother knew, Lauren also grew close to several of the residents. That book is as informative about the daily life in such a facility (and I say this as someone who’s regularly in one as part of my hospice work) as it is moving about Lauren’s personal journey.

Having learned from that book what I learned from my memoir about my sister Beth, Lauren decided that the way to gain some understanding of Lizzie was to enter her world. But this time she wouldn’t get a job. She’d just ask Lizzie if she could shadow her life. It is a credit to Lizzie’s bighearted personality, and to the endurance of their love for each other, that Lizzie said yes. And it is a sign of Lauren’s courage, and faith in her ability to see truths that might trouble her, that Lauren then accompanied Lizzie everywhere.

The mother joined the daughter in the social minefield that is junior high. She observed teen dynamics, adolescent friendships, and her daughter, as they went from class to class, walked down the hallways, attended lunch and band. As time went on, Lauren went to sleepaway camp, volunteer activities, job internships, athletic events, and even a sex ed session at school. Along the way, she acknowledged her own emotions, which sometimes veered into dismay or annoyance, other times rose to pleasant surprise and even admiration. Sometimes Lauren managed to keep her thoughts to herself, and other times, to her chagrin, she didn’t. She also re-examined why her own relationship with her mother froze in time – and re-committed herself to not repeating that unfortunate history.

Lauren chronicles this mix of anthropology, journalism, relationship deconstruction, and introspection in her book – and she does so in a way that is honest, informative, humorous, and moving. It’s also a good story, which starts with Lauren and Lizzie being totally at odds with each other, and it ends with them coming back together, now in a stronger relationship.

I was drawn to My Teenage Werewolf because of my affection for Lauren’s last book, but I’m writing about this well-written book here for two reasons. One is because I enjoyed how much I learned – on so many levels.

The other reason is that we live in a world where, when relationships grow difficult or even break apart, so few of us know what to do. We might ask friends, but they’re so often groping for an answer themselves, struggling as they are with their own questions about how to deal with their parent, sibling, child, or friend. We might turn to therapists, too, and sometimes they do offer insights, or provide the gentle guidance, to help us take some kind of step toward healing – though not necessarily toward understanding, accepting, and actively, while keeping the person in our life, repairing. And of course we live in a time of high drama, where adversarial relationships are all too often viewed as acceptable.

So I think it’s important that, whenever we encounter something that has facilitated our sense of compassion and understanding, we let others know – and perhaps all the more so when that compassion and understanding is directed toward our own flesh and blood.

So I’m sharing this book with you because it seems possible that you too might be in a struggle like this with someone you love, and need just the inspiration that this book offers. It will remind you, as it reminded me, not to fight back or reject or run away.

Run toward.

Everyone’s talking about Shirley Sherrod right now. Not only is this former Agriculture Department official the latest in a series of unknown individuals to find herself cannon-shot to the top of the most emailed news items in the country. She is also the subject of one analysis after another about just what her tale has revealed about our culture.

As we all came to learn, the clip we saw of Shirley Sherrod was not a statement of who she is. It was just the first paragraph of the story she was telling. Breitbart and company were conscious of the fact that they were presenting only that first paragraph. So why was so much of the country, not to mention the administration, so ready to buy what they were saying?

Yes, it’s partially about us not being in a post-racial world. It’s partially about the cleverness of the right wing media machine, the timidity of the Obama administration, and the effectiveness of highly selective video clips.

But I think it’s also about the growing tendency we have as a society to think in terms of nuggets of information, sound bytes, Wikipedia entries, bullet points, and the like – and to glaze over when faced with an actual story.

The initial clip wasn’t only a short glimpse of a longer talk. It was an early moment in a longer story: the moment when the protagonist reveals the shortcomings in her character that will be challenged by the story that lies ahead. It is like the moment when we realize that Nick Carroway is dazzled by the mysterious and charismatic Jay Gatsby. When we understand that Ebenezer Scrooge is a heartless miser who disdains every aspect of Christmas day. When a bitter Rick, who runs a cafe in Casablanca, insists that he is neutral on all matters involving war.

Yet the original assumption made by so many of my fellow citizens was that there was no story. The clip was it, clean and simple. If there was more, it would be only more of the same. It couldn’t possibly be a story.

Why was this assumption made? As a writer of memoirs and novels, I think a great deal about how stories develop from a starting point through an increasingly complex middle to an ending point. This was true of stories in the oral tradition before the advent of writing, and it’s still true of many stories now. My own pet theory about why we’ve always organized experience into story is that story is at the essence of our humanity: we are born, we go through an increasingly complex middle, and we die. Each of our lives is a story.

To my recollection, when I was starting out as a writer in the late 1980s, the average person spent much more time reading books and newspaper stories, listening to friends tell stories, and sitting through a movie from beginning to end. The kind of interruptions we have today – incoming email, ringing cell phones, beeping text messages – didn’t exist. Certainly people were getting phone calls and using the remote control, but it seems that patience was more widespread. When people sat down for a story, there was the expectation that there was much more to the story than the beginning, or any single moment, and that they needed to let things unfold to take it all in.

There were also more stories, at least in print. Back then, when I told people I wanted to be a writer, they assumed, correctly, that I meant a writer of fiction. Now, when I say I am a writer, they assume I write short, informational, skimmable pieces that rely on bullet points and are about very familiar topics: health, style, sports, parenting. In other words, the kind of categories that are easily searchable, and the kind of articles that deliver facts or advice. The assumption is that readers should expect to parachute into what I write on any sentence, and link away from it on any other. The assumption is not that there are some forms of communication that can’t truly be understood without a commitment from first word to last – and yes, without bullet points and without skimmable middles.

I also noticed, in the years when I was teaching writing on the college level, that every fall I had more students who didn’t quite understand what a story was. They got that it presented a situation. But the idea that the character would go through a series of events – or even one – and would come out changed (or making a decision to remain unchanged), was new to them. It seemed they’d spent so much of their young lives listening to and watching people state positions, rather than tell stories that called those positions into question, that they couldn’t get their minds to work any other way.

In addition, I started to notice that when I asked people if they’d read such and such books, they sometimes said yes when really they’d meant that they’d leafed through. Once I asked a friend if he’d read a certain large book that was popular at the time. He said he had, but when I asked him what he liked about it, he groped so inarticulately for an answer that I said, “Wait. I thought you said you’d read it.” He responded, with a defensive tone in his voice, “Well, not every page.”

As one friend of mine pointed out when we were discussing the Shirley Sherrod incident, “Our country is still very racist and a great deal of the racism is because we don’t hear the whole story. A story has many parts.” I agree. Without getting the whole story, we allow racism – and so many other quick and easy judgments – to thrive. We do our fellow humans a disservice and an injustice.

We need to be careful. The people who show us clips in the interest of making a quick point know that many of us are have lost the patience we once gave to stories, and are willing to accept a single moment as representative of the whole. They also know that many in the media are so overworked that they might just present the same clip, with the same point, without any independent examination.

Shirley Sherrod is not the first person to suffer because of someone exploiting our impatience. But maybe her tale can make us remind ourselves, consciously and loudly and as a culture, that when we see a disturbing excerpt of a longer presentation, someone might be trying to manipulate us.

If we don’t remember that, then we’re talking about a lot more than race, media, or politics. We’re talking about our very humanity.

When my three siblings and I were kids, living with our mother, there were only a few activities we did outside the house as a family. We saw movies (usually at drive-ins), got ice-cream (usually at a local family restaurant), and went bowling.

We were champion commentators throughout a movie. Hence, the merits of drive-ins. (Being able to take the dog was a plus, too.)

We were champion devourers of ice-cream, as long as we each got our favorite flavors, which ranged from chocolate to coffee to black raspberry. Hence, that one local family restaurant.

But when it came to bowling, we were clods. The balls were heavy. We dropped them. They careened into the foul lanes. Occasionally we did hit pins, though only when guided by the hand of luck. Skill sat off on the sidelines.

I remember scores of 27. Once, one of us bowled a 1.

Not surprisingly, when we grew up, although we continued seeing movies (in theaters) and eating ice-cream (or less calorie-loaded cousins like sherbet), we left bowling behind. We were oafs. We were so inept that bowling was sheer comedy, an opportunity to laugh at ourselves as a family.

Many years after I had last fit my fingers into a bowling ball, I read the groundbreaking, data-packed book Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam. You’ve probably heard of it, or its premise: American were once avidly involved in social groups, from organized gatherings like Rotary and bowling leagues to informal visits with friends. But increasingly we don’t join groups and don’t see friends. In other words, we figuratively, and sometimes literally, bowl alone.

Putnam provides many reasons for this decline, most of which we could name: more solitary attractions like TV and computers, changes in family structure and work commitments that ask more of our time, a suburban environment where large lawns separate neighbors and cars are required to reach nearby stores.

Bowling Alone made me think about why I don’t belong to any organized groups. Pretty much all the reasons Putnam gave applied to me at that time. In addition to living in car-oriented suburbs, I was single, childless, lived alone, and had multiple part-time jobs. I supported organizations with donations, but lacked the time—and maybe the necessary level of passion—to give them my presence. I did better with friends, but wondered if I’d ever become someone who joined.

I felt guilty. Here I was, a voting, law-abiding citizen who always returned library books on time, held doors for strangers, and was consciously trying to be the good I wanted to see in the world. Yet for the most part, I was a lone bowler. Actually, I wasn’t a bowler. The thought of bowling gave me such feelings of incompetence that joining a league was out of the question.

The same, in its own way, applied to most other organized gatherings I could think of. I’d try to envision myself as an attendee and I’d imagine myself feeling socially clumsy. I was part of the problem, and I’d just have to accept that.

Then in 2001, I got married. My husband lived in an old, artsy, urban neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware. It had narrow streets, generous porches, and a mix of ethnicities, ages, and sexual orientations, and pretty much everyone agreed that we were an actual community. Dog walkers, porch sitters, backyard gardeners would pause to chat, trading the news of their lives, commenting on the news of the day. Neighbors would help neighbors shovel snow and rake leaves. We would attend each other’s art openings, admire each other’s porch gardens. And the parties! Block parties, progressive dinners, backyard celebrations of seasons. I learned what it was like to belong.

And I realized that part of why I had, figuratively speaking, bowled alone was I hadn’t naturally found myself in a group that suited me. In this neighborhood, I could chat at the curb or drift into my house, attend parties or stay at home, make dear friends or keep it to acquaintances. I could do as much or as little as I wanted, the way I wanted. And so could everyone else. If our balls went into the gutter, no one cared.

It was luck, again, that guided my hand. Or may be it was something a little wiser than luck, because it gave me what I needed, and what would make me be the good I wanted in the world, without my even needing to try.

If you’d like to read about how this sense of community changed the course of my life, go to my most recent memoir. In hardback, it’s titled Building A Home With My Husband, and in the paperback, which comes out in May 2010, it’s titled The House On Teacher’s Lane. (Yes, it’s the same book, but with a different title and cover.)

You can also see my neighborhood in these two videos, both made by our neighborhood videographer, Tom Davis, whose professional name is TCDavis. The first one is from our block party this fall, and the second from the blizzard this winter. Both videos are about four minutes long, and give a good feel for the architecture, friendliness, and diversity of our community.

I married later in life. I was forty-one, and it was my first (and so far only) marriage. In my earlier years, I’d had all kinds of negative ideas about marriage. Who knows whether these ideas came from the aftermath of my parents’ divorce (at least an 8 on the Domestic Horror Show Richter Scale) or the sight of so many severely unhealthy marriages in film, TV, and real life. But my image of marriage was that it was constricting, stultifying, and ultimately doomed. By the time I got married, however, I saw it as joy-filled, comforting, and life-brightening.

I’ve talked over the years with many people who didn’t marry – or didn’t marry successfully – until later in life, and pretty much everyone agreed that their later marriage was worth the wait. They were more mature, less apt to look to a spouse to complete them, more accepting of the other person’s shortcomings, less interested in comparing the partner to an ideal, and, in general, more inclined to love consciously.

I’ve asked myself why this happened to so many of us, and I think it was because we all became more interested in the other person’s character than we’d been when we were younger. In those days, qualities like charm and sex appeal and friends’ opinions weighed more heavily than whether the person had integrity, exercised good judgment, had the capacity to feel compassion, and prized others not for what they could give, but for the depths and breadths of their personalities. At the same time, in my and my friends’ younger incarnations, we didn’t tend to cultivate those qualities in ourselves. We were more focused on other things, like ambition, social approval, and finding clever approaches to shedding our birth families, unsatisfying jobs, pitiful living situations, and under-developed selves.

Granted, I’ve certainly met people who married wisely when they were young. From what I can tell, they were either lucky or had their heads screwed on better than most of us.

But for the rest of us, there are the youthful missteps, and then, if we’re lucky, or our heads finally get screwed on right, we find it: the person of character who has the ability to love another person of character, too.

This is what I wish I had understood when I was younger:

You think you want someone to love you, and you do. But you also want someone you respect, and who respects you.

How I wish I’d known that long ago.

How glad I am that I know it now.