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This autumn, fall for Moth Stories as we travel across the globe for our mainstages. We're excited to announce our fall lineup of storytelling shows from New York City to Iowa City, London, Nairobi, and so many more. The Moth will be performing in a city near you, featuring a curation of true stories. The Moth mainstage shows feature five tellers who share beautiful, unbelievable, hilarious, and often powerful true stories on a common theme. Each one told reveals something new about our shared connection.
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Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Jodi Powell, your host for this episode. Throughout 2022, the Moth has been celebrating its 25th anniversary by revisiting our history, counting down year by year. This week, we're at 2005, and we're playing a story from that year by Joyce Maynard. She told this at a New York City main stage where the theme of the night was, Can't Help It. Here's Joyce, live at the Moth. Thank you.
In the family where I grew up, no blood was ever shed. In all the years of living under my parents' roof, I never broke a bone. My mother and father never one time had to take me to the emergency room, and I strongly suspect that we never had to buy a second box of Band-Aids.
And the reason for that was pretty simple. My parents were spectacularly protective of, and hovered over me to make sure that no pain or physical injury should occur. I lived in the state of New Hampshire, but never set my feet into ski boots. I don't think a piece of athletic equipment ever crossed our threshold.
Mother made sure that I didn't enter the water for swimming until a full hour after eating, and my father stood over me and brushed away the mosquitoes before they landed. But every night at 6 o'clock, he climbed the stairs to our attic and took out the vodka, and through the night, he drank and painted. And sometimes late in the night, he summoned me to his attic studio
where he painted beautiful lyric landscapes of the British Columbia of his youth as a painter, and expounded to me with poetic eloquence on the sacrifice that he had made of giving up the life of an artist to be a parent. And in the morning we never talked about it.
Holidays were a particularly stressful time in our family with a particular amount of alcohol. More than one Christmas, my father threw the tree across the floor. My mother was gone surprisingly often, and when she was, it was left to me to hide the car keys.
And maybe because of that, although I grew up to have the life of a certain level of artistic expression that had eluded my two enormously artistically gifted parents, the goal that I found most elusive and wonderful was to be part of a happy family. And I believe that my best shot of having happy relatives was to give birth to them.
So I married quite young, at 23, an artist. Although he was a painter and I was a writer, I think we both felt that there was no creative undertaking more thrilling and potentially fulfilling than to make and raise children. And we got right to it.
I think one of the things that I loved about having babies was the sense that here was a person who was still perfect, a person with a clean slate, and I so wanted to keep her that way. I actually had none of my parents
towards physical protection for physical injury. I could even have been called a somewhat negligent mother. I was happy to see toddlers breathe over my babies and didn't feel a particular need to wash my hands or worry about germs because I
I knew that there were greater dangers in the world. And the greatest dangers to me were the dangers of emotional pain and the disappointment of failed dreams.
I think my daughter was 18 months old when she got chicken pox and I stood over her to make sure that she was so beautiful and she had such beautiful black hair and I knew that if you scratched the scabs there would be no hair that would grow and I couldn't yet explain to an 18 month old not to scratch her scabs so I just guarded her so carefully but I missed on one and I saw suddenly this tiny
little microscopic dot on the top of her head where I realized that she had scratched a scab and just the thought that there was going to be this one hair that would not grow brought me to tears.
I wanted so many things for her, and one that I had not had myself as a child was a sibling who really adored her. And it was the first of the increasing number of great battles with my husband to provide her with one. And for four years we fought about it because he wanted to live the life of an artist, and I wanted to live the life of a member of a happy family if it killed us.
And so it took four years, but my son Charlie was born, and two years later, my son Willie. I was always a fanatically compulsive protector of my children's magical childhood. I sort of wrote on the side as a hobby.
but never more so than when holidays and birthdays came around. I never would have bought a store-bought cake, and I created extraordinary three-day festivals for their birthdays, scavenger hunts with poems, clues in iambic pentameter, and puppet shows with music composed for the events. And Valentine's Day, the entire month of February, we cleared our
our dining room table and set out all the art supplies filled with glitter and every conceivable kind of paint to make amazing Valentines and the entire month of December to Christmas. And I never went to Toys R Us. I wanted to provide for my children the kinds of objects, the kinds of gifts that might really have been made in Santa's workshop.
And to do this, I searched the entire East Coast for a ventriloquist puppet for my son Willie and ended up driving 200 miles to find it. My father had recently died and left me a sum total of $500 in his will, and my husband had it all earmarked to buy snow tires, but I went out one day and bought a $500 dollhouse.
Of course, when there are, and I should say that he was increasingly appalled and disgusted by the display of these Christmases, which he really stepped aside from, so that one morning he came in, Christmas morning, and saw the array of items, and he insisted that half of the items be removed from the room. And our children, I suppose, did not have an entirely magical December 25th that year.
Well, of course, one of the problems of providing magical objects in your child's life is that you then must protect that they not get lost. And I had recognized by this time that although blood could be dripping from my veins and I wouldn't notice, their pain I sensed on my nerve endings. And of course, when that's the case, you do everything you can to protect
against their pain. So every time a Barbie came into the room, into our lives, the first thing I thought was, "Guard those shoes."
my sons, one year for Christmas, they got the Playmobil pirate ship, and of all the elaborate rigging and pirates and little items on the treasure chests and little coins on the pirate ship, the one particular thing that my son Charlie loved best was this little gold sword, and I knew so well the heartbreak that could come that I said to him very specifically when we went out to the station wagon one day, please don't take the sword with you, but
And he evidently took the sword because about 20 minutes later I heard this gasp from the back of the station wagon and I knew that the sword had fallen out the window. For the next hour and a half I circled a stretch of highway with my high beams on. I did find the sword, although I was almost struck by an 18-wheeler retrieving it.
my husband, perhaps understandably, had absented himself more and more. And of the many things that I could provide with my prodigious energies, parenting energies, I could not provide a father who would always be around when I wanted him to, and he was more and more chillingly, familiarly off in his studio painting.
More and more, we did things alone. I wanted their life to be big, bigger than mine had been, also living in a small New Hampshire town. And you have to really use your imagination to find exciting and stimulating events sometimes in the particular New Hampshire town where we lived. We went to the Mack Truck Museum many times.
Actually, the town dump was one of our exciting, and I'm not kidding, weekly excursions. And one Saturday at the town dump, Audrey saw in the very center of the pit, this was in the days when there was a big hole, the Barbie rocker van that she had always wanted. And there was no question that I was climbing in to get it.
We didn't have a lot of money, we had very little money, and so it was, and I would never have supposed that I could take my children to Europe, much as I would have loved it. And then one day I saw an ad for a weekend in London for $100. And so I thought, that I can afford, and I bought three tickets for them and one for me, and we headed out to London, and I told them that they could each have one object in London, and my son Charlie chose...
these wonderful, brightly colored leather juggling balls. And we went down into the London tube, and Charlie began, he couldn't wait, and he began to juggle with the juggling balls, and I, knowing so well all the dangers that could happen, said, no, Charlie, don't juggle in the tube, but it was too late. One of the juggling balls fell into the pit, and I jumped in after it.
And that was the moment, as my daughter stood on the edge of the subway platform screaming for me to climb out, that I realized that I was becoming an insane mother. Well, that Christmas, which was the 12th Christmas of my marriage, when my husband once again found objects under the tree that seemed understandably excessive, I stuffed the bouche de Noël homemade down the garbage disposal.
And once again, I suppose the perfect Christmas fell a little short. That Mother's Day, I was 35 years old, I got a call that my mother had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. And I was going, of course, to be with her for what proved to be the last weeks of her life. And before I left home, I sat the children down and I explained to them what had happened. And my youngest son said, "Is Grandma going to die?" And I said, "Yes."
And then he asked the next question, which was an even harder one, and one whose answer was more painful to deliver, "And will you ever die?" And once again, I had to say yes. And then came the third question, "And will I ever die?" And I had to say, "Well, not for a very long time." In fact, my mother's was not the only death that summer. My marriage also ended, and it was probably time for that to happen. And...
I found that although my grief was extreme, it paled beside the extraordinary sorrow over having to inflict this pain of the news to my children. And in fact, it was the last experience, I think, that my husband and I could truly share together, our shared sorrow over telling them that news.
And we brought them into the living room, and I can still see them very clearly, five, seven, and eleven, Willie, Charlie, and Audrey, sitting on the couch, looking as if they expected news of another great adventure coming up. And we told them instead that we were not going to live together as a family anymore.
And each of them responded in their very different ways, so like themselves. Audrey, the oldest, who had learned by now that I felt her pain and wanted to spare me that, so she didn't show it. Willie, the youngest, who never spared anybody anything, he was five, stood up and let out
an animal moan, a wail, a sound I had never heard come out of him before or since, thank God, and flung himself against the wall with the force of a grown man and said, "You mean you'll be divorced for all my life?" And Charlie, who was seven, got up silently and went into the kitchen. The table was, as always, covered with art supplies.
and he took out the colored pencils and he began to draw. And I later saw he had drawn almost as if he was drawing it in blood, a heart, not like the Valentines of our February festivals, but
inch by inch, so...centimeter by centimeter, so painstakingly. And then after he drew the heart and shaded it with little sort of shadow marks behind it, he made a line like a piece of picture wire, like the heart was a picture. And then he made a little dot in the center like the picture was hanging on the wall. And then my second grader wrote for his writer mother and his artist father the words,
"Love is the best art of all." And I think that was the moment that I knew the foolishness of ever supposing that I could protect my children from pain and the folly of the ways that I had attempted to do so. That was 16 years ago. Since then,
Many injuries have been incurred. My children, for many years, traveled back and forth between our two houses with their belongings always in brown paper bags. They never seemed to get it together to get actual suitcases. They lived through the interview of the Guardian ad litem, asking them which parent they wanted to live with. They lived through their mother standing in the kitchen one morning, Christmas again, pouring all the milk on the floor.
and car accidents, and girlfriends breaking up with them, and boyfriends breaking up with them, and a case of malaria on a trip to Africa. The thing is that I have discovered that although I failed abysmally at protecting my children from pain, I am, in fact, related by blood to three amazingly happy and well-adjusted human beings.
And what I believe now is that as impossible as it is to spare our children pain, the real task before a parent is to raise them so that they will be strong enough to survive it. That was Joyce Maynard. In addition to being an essayist and writer, Joyce is a longtime Moth storyteller. We asked her if she had any thoughts about the Moth's 25th anniversary. Here's some of what she wrote.
As a note, the memoir she's talking about is At Home in the World, which upon release was met with some pushback as it revealed her romantic relationship with the much older author, J.D. Salinger, when Joyce was still a teenager.
After the publication of my memoir, a book of which I'm deeply proud, I lived as a largely cancelled writer. Publishers didn't want to work with me. Once, at a big literary gathering to which I'd been invited by a kind writer friend, an entire row of eminent writers got up from their seats en masse and left the hall as I took the stage. It is not an overstatement when I say that the email I received from Joey Zanders inviting me to tell a story at the Moth changed my life. In many ways, I
I named that night at the Moth one of the earliest Moth gatherings, held in a small club in Greenwich Village with an audience of no more than 50 people, if that, as the moment I got my voice back. Wow, that sounds so special. I've had so many nights like that at the Moth myself.
Joyce Maynard is a writer and essayist, author of the memoir At Home in the World and the novels To Die For and Labor Day, both of which were adapted for film. Her most recent novel, Count the Ways, is out in paperback now.
If you enjoyed Joyce's story this episode, Count the Ways also explores a mother who's obsessed with sparing her children pain. It was recently awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire in France, I hope I'm saying that right, for the best novel of the year published by an American writer. That's all for this episode. From all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week. Jodi Powell has been at The Moth for more than five years.
She is a producer, director, and educator who enjoys listening and seeking stories from beyond the main corridors. This episode of the Mouth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Ginesse, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger.
The rest of the Moss leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Cloutier, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Leigh-Anne Gulley, Inga Glodowski, and Aldi Caza. All Moss stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoss.org.
The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the public radio exchange, helping make public radio more public at PRX.org.