This is Part 2 of The Artistry of Julia Child. Here’s Part 1, about latebloomers.
Throughout my life, I often thought I’d like to find my purpose, my means. Then when I found it, I wanted it to be be some other purpose than the one I got: writing. “Writing is stupid,” I’d say, sniffling to my husband the same way I once cried when my sister got the better toy. “That’s how you know you’re really a writer,” my husband would quip, he with much less doubt than me, his lack of doubting making me question his IQ.
For me, just knowing what I’m meant to do hasn’t made feeling confident about it any easier. I’m in a writing group and one of my goals has been just to introduce myself to people I meet as a writer.
That’s it.
Not as a writer and stay-at-home mom; not a writer who copyedits for money; not a writer but of poetry, which really what is poetry “about” anyway, do you know where the restroom is?
Some of my most remarkable friends don’t think they’re up to any good. They feel they’re behind or have missed their chance or are too weird for words or not good enough for jobs or kids or they aren’t doing enough. Their families or in-laws or mentors or cohort don’t get it. They receive lots of unsolicited advice.
This has me thinking about invisible lines. Lots of these lines (or planes) are drawn on our lives by others (for instance, the glass ceiling). But I’ve drawn lots of lines for myself in invisible ink and treated them as though they’re laser beams, that if I touch one in trying to maneuver my own path through, I’ll set off the booby trap that reveals me as who I am.
Last month, I talked about Julia Child, who followed her sense of “je m’enfoutisme!”— an intuition to not care what happens but to learn. She followed it from California to working in intelligence during World War II. She followed it into marriage and cooking lessons and through many drafts of an incredibly long cookbook. From the outside, it looks joyful, like the life of someone who just trusts herself and knows what she likes.
But I don’t think that’s the lived experience. Someone has to be pretty brave to follow intuition. To say, “You don’t see what I see, but that’s all right. I’m not hallucinating.”
It can look to the outside world like sheer insanity, or, at best, like you need your prescription adjusted.
There’s a William Stafford poem, “The Way It Is,” that resonates with this as well:
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
Child’s life, now preserved under history’s glass case, looks seamless. But of course it was full of threads. A spool she unwound and unwound that only she could see. Society women jobs in her youth; espionage support and a move abroad in young adulthood; and then a cooking empire. We can tell the story, but there’s no way that looked like a clear trajectory at the time.
Ah, yes, but the thread! (But the thread!)
And there’s the thread I follow.
It’s also a nearly invisible line. When I don’t follow the thread, I regret it. And it doesn’t matter if not following the thread has made conversation at the holidays easier, or has made my peers respect me more, or more people read my work, or has made me more money.
People can critique it, but I have to live on the side of the line that I draw. People can say I’m headed nowhere (or straight to hell!), and maybe I am, but I have hold of the thread.
As a new parent, I’m constantly losing the threads of my thoughts, of my conversations. A few weeks before I went into labor, I checked the refrigerator for my keys. It seemed likely that I’d put them there. At that same time, I had just started reading Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott. In it, Lamott describes following her thread—as a West Coast Bay Area Christian alcoholic in recovery, a novelist, raising her son as a single mother during his first year of life. She writes like she’s your best friend, and more often than not, I find that’s what I’m looking for these days. In that time, her actual best friend, Pammy, gets diagnosed with advanced cancer; Lamott isn’t sure how she’ll make financial ends meet; all the swimmy feelings of new motherhood happen. And then she remembers a program on TV, with its invisible lines:
I heard this amazing East Indian doctor talking about autistic kids back East who were so severely withdrawn that if you stood them up, they’d just fall over. They’d make no effort to stand or even to shield their faces when they fell. Then these people working with them discovered that if they ran a rope from one end of the room to the other and stood the kids up so that they were holding on to the rope, the kids would walk across the room. So over the months they kept putting up thinner and thinner pieces of rope, until they were using something practically invisible, like fishing line, and the kids would still walk across the room if they could hold onto it. And then—and this really seems like a brainstorm—the adults cut the fishing line into pieces, into twelve-inch lengths or something, and handed one to each kid. The kids would still walk. What an amazing statement of faith.
… I feel like every time the phone rings and it’s Pammy and she needs to talk about this horrible thing that’s happening now, or, come to think of it, every night when I don’t get any sleep and then the baby is crying to be fed at 6 a.m., or every day when I sit down and try to get a little bit of writing done, that I am clutching my little piece of fishing line as I go to the phone or the crib or my desk.
And how can I be so courageous as to be the person who I am without apology or explanation? To say I see what you don’t or can’t or won’t see? I guess I’ll carry my foot of fishing line. Maybe thinking of a line I don’t draw in the sand but plumb into water: this fishing line I’ve brought with me, all these years, to reel in a creature or old boot from a body of water—the line connects me to what’s tugging at me and I’m working to reel whatever it is that I want but can’t see in. I don’t draw the line: I just hang on as the line draws me.
To follow an invisible thread, as Lamott notes, we need faith in ourselves and our art. We also need to be faithful to ourselves and our art. This second kind of faithfulness bolsters the first, drawing us nearer to each other. This second kind of faith, I’ll call it devotion.
