Wild

For book club this month we read Wild, by Cheryl Strayed. This has been a very popular book and is a New York Times bestseller. In my opinion, with good reason. I loved this book – I assumed that maybe it could be a bit boring because, really, how scintillating and page-turning can a thousand-mile hike be. But it was rather fitting, really, I saw so much of myself in it. At least, so much of my  younger self. On that note, Rach indicated that she did not enjoy the book - because she didn’t love the author; I won’t take it too personally :)

Strayed’s memoir is about hiking the PCT, yes, but also about finding herself and coming of age, so to speak. She was in her early 20s, her mother had recently died, and she had subsequently gone off the deep end and her young marriage ended in divorce. Obviously, the parts about her dead mom spoke to me, and there was one particular passage that I wish I could have written myself:

Page 267:

“But it was too late now, I knew, there was only my dead, insular, overly optimistic, non-college-preparing, occasionally-child-abandoning, pot-smoking, wooden-spoon-wielding, feel-free-to-call-me-by-name mom to blame. She had failed. She had failed. She had profoundly failed me.

Fuck her, I thought, so mad that I stopped walking.

And then I wailed. No tears came, just a series of loud brays that coursed through my body so hard I couldn’t stand up. I had to bend over, keening, while bracing my hands on my knees,  my pack so heavy on top of me, my ski pole clanging out behind me in the dirt, the whole stupid life I’d had coming out of my throat.

It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me. I couldn’t even hate her properly. I didn’t get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I wished she’d done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I’d have to fill it myself again and again and again.”

Although there are several differences between Cheryl’s story and my own – namely, hiking the PCT, young divorce, the age at which her mother died, the type of mother she was – there are many similarities between our feelings. Granted, I did not have anywhere near the level of maturity as she portrays here. Those last lines really get me, about be trapped but being alone, about being an empty vessel in which no one can ever truly fill. My mother has been dead over 12 years now, and only occasionally do I now have such moments of grief, sorrow, or anger as Cheryl describes here. Several weeks ago during a drive out to Manzanita, I had such an experience. The Bean was asleep in the backseat, my heart filled with love for this little nugget that Alex and I created together; a wondrous creature who insists on growing and changing and always blowing our minds by simply being. On the drive over the coastal mountain pass, through the trees that densely lined the road, I was reminded of the last trip my mom and I took together. We spent a night in Seaside, the last time we were together when she was decently well. I explicitly remember the road trip, she had asked me to take the wheel, because she was too tired to endure driving for more than 10 minutes anymore. She napped in the front seat of her red Neon, me increasingly aware of how sick my mother had become, but especially happy to feel like I was helping out some, before I would leave for a summer on the other side of the country. At the hotel while we pigged out on salt water taffy, after a short stroll in the sand, she explained to me about her seizures. Not the kind like in the movies, but more of a “space out,” a result of the cancer having metastasized to her brain. She napped more, me laying next to her in the hotel bed flipping through the TV channels. I still have a photo or two from that trip, an unflattering self-portrait of us during a stroll along the water’s edge. Her in her purple bandana and too-big prescription sunglasses. Me with my upper ear pierced multiple times, my hair pulled back, and my face makeup-free and fuller with youth and the effects of too much drinking.

During the more recent drive, with my daughter instead of my mother, I was struck by the absolute heartbreak of it all. It had been a while since I felt so utterly despaired, but I was smacked down with the anger of not having a mother of my own, no grandmother for my daughter, and then the grief of knowing that no one - not a soul, not even my husband, not my father, not my children, never - not ever, would love me the way my mother did. I only know this know because nothing can compare to my love and devotion to my own baby girl. It’s primal. I can’t help it. I might not always do right by her, but there is something so animal-like about a mother’s love. My eyes are welling up again as I write this, the feelings far beneath the surface, but the tectonic plates of my grief shifting a bit to make my earth quake. The idea,that the one person who loved me above all else perished, was too much for me to handle, my tears quickly turning into heaving sobs, and then retching. I pulled the car over to the side of the two-lane highway, hoping not to wake Francie, not wanting her to see me like this, or to know the threat of losing her mother, as I had mine. As soon as the sobbing turned to heaving, I collected myself, re-established the here and the now, acknowledged the terrible tragedy that is a young girl losing her mother, and prayed that the Bean would never have to share my experience.

My book club gathers tonight, where we may or may not talk about the book itself. And if we do not, this passage right here, written in my blog, is quite enough for me.