Moving through that stuck feeling

Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years and choice in modern womanhood

In-er-tia:

1. A tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged.

2. A property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.

There is a scene in Anne Tyler’s novel, Ladder of Years, when the protagonist Delia Grinstead watches farm fields fly by out the car window and sees herself, “Feeding chickens, flinging corn or wheat or whatever from her capacious country apron. First, she’d have to marry a farmer though. You always had to begin by finding some man to set things in motion, it seemed.”

Which is a curious observation for a book about a women who sets things in motion, by walking away from her husband and three teenage children while on vacation at the beach, hitching a ride to a small town many miles away, and starting her life over as a single, child-free 40 year-old.

Photo by Denys Argyriou on Unsplash

There are dueling themes of inertia and motion in this book—of what it feels like to be stuck, when everyone else is moving forward or moving away from you. It’s like looking out the window of a parked train as another train passes on the opposite tracks, giving the illusion that you’re somehow moving backwards. When the other train is gone, you realize you’ve been stationary the whole time.

It is the men who appear most inert in this novel, caricatures of unfeeling, pragmatic, and sometimes bullish masculinity, while the women are the ones moving toward freedom and breaking free from gendered roles and expectations. Characters include single mothers, women who only sleep with married men, and women who marry but are boiling with rage.

The first time I read this book I was a teenager, no husband or children in sight, with a hapless boyfriend who was not at all right for me, but who I stuck with simply because I was too scared to leave. Delia’s inconceivable actions—ditching her family, starting a new life in another town, without recrimination and tears—were a lifeline for me at a time when I didn’t even know I was drowning.

I would eventually leave, throwing away two years of university to start fresh in another city, where I knew no one and where I could reinvent myself. The irony, similar to that in Delia’s journey, is that my leaving wasn’t a shedding of the old me as much as a temporary escape from how others saw me, in all my flaws and limitations. The freedom we feel when we leave is temporary, because we always circle back to our true nature, just in a different place and with different characters. “I’m here because I just like the thought of beginning again from scratch,” says Delia.

Many years later, with a jealous toddler and newborn baby in my arms, I would fantasize about getting hit by a truck. I wasn’t wishing for death so much as for reprieve, an injury big enough to relieve me of my aching fatigue, leaking breasts, and red-faced toddler who pounded on the door while I tried to lay her sister down for a nap. As a hospitalized mother, surely someone else would come to my aid, someone who would be responsible for feeding the baby and keeping her alive. It never occurred to me that I could just ask for help with those things, that it was not my burden alone.

“How does that memory make you feel now?” my therapist asked me when I relayed this story to her one day. And all I could do was laugh, to cover up my sadness maybe, or at the absurdity of a mother needing a break so badly that she wishes for a truck—a catalyst that sets things in motion.

Now Facebook assaults me with evidence of those years, of cherub-cheeked smiles and droppy diapers, the weight of a small child in my arms. I weep for those days, for the times when mama’s kiss was the fix for everything—when I was the sun and the moon. All those old ladies that warned me I would miss those days, but I didn’t believe them for a second. If you think this is so good, why don’t you take them for the day, I would grumble to myself. But of course they were right, and now I catch myself telling the new mother down the street how fast it goes, how one day you wake up and they’re a tall mess of limbs and greasy hair and they look at you as though you’re an alien species, not at all the shining centre of their universe.

I read Ladder of Years now as a 45 year-old woman, when I get asked at medical check-ups whether the hot flashes have started, and I see Delia in a whole new yet familiar way.

Her three children, she saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explorers at the ocean’s edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving. Where they were going without her. How to say goodbye.

An older character in the novel, one that Delia befriends, tells her that he pictures life as one of those ladders you find on rusty playground slides. We climb up, up, up and then oops, down the other side we go. We all imagine that as we approach the top more rungs will appear, and more time will be granted.

This analogy defines life as linear—a steady progression: job, partner, pet, house, kids, promotions, accolades, wealth, retirement, grandkids. Uniform motion in a straight line. Delia gets off the ladder, though. She disrupts that steady motion, and then we get to see what happens when a woman makes a choice that’s a radical departure from societal expectations. It’s an uncomfortable feeling to witness Delia’s journey, because it forces us to examine our own choices and whether we believe them to be organic and genuine, or a response to societal and evolutionary pressures. Did I get married and have children because I truly desired it, or did I just fall in line with what I was conditioned to want? There were hundreds of years when women lived as property of men, with no rights or personhood. Maybe I am reenacting some version of wifedom and motherhood because deep down I believe this makes me more secure, as it did in centuries past.

“Inertia sustains patterns,” writes Melissa Febos, in her memoir The Dry Season, about her year-long quest to be celibate. “There are given and chosen lineages…as an adult I have the power to choose how I live.” The given lineages seem the most influential because they are invisible to us, like the silent communication of the mother tree to her forest underlings.

When Delia chooses to walk away from her husband and children she is breaking a lifelong pattern as dutiful daughter, devoted wife, and loving mother—roles that define her solely in relation to how much she can give, how much she can empty herself for others. And yet, the choices she makes in her new life bring her full circle back to her role as caregiver, albeit on her own terms and in a way that seems a better match with her true self.

I’ve been reflecting lately on how often I’ve felt trapped in my own life, and whether this is related to some type of childhood wound that I have yet to heal, or if it’s just part of my genetic make-up. My relentless pursuit of change is why I’ve held so many different jobs, and why I take on so many projects, because as soon as I settle into something I get that itchy feeling. “I just like the thought of beginning again from scratch.” (Or another thought: is my constant motion an escape from something?)

Planted firmly in my middle years, a time when I’m supposed to experience more freedom, or at least much more than when my children were little, I feel constrained by a job, money, and looming retirement—of having enough to make it up that ladder in comfort, if indeed I make it that high. And I do love my job! I get to learn about cutting-edge health research and tell the world about it, and I rest easy knowing that the organization I dedicate 37.5 hours to 48 weeks of the year, has a strong moral compass.

Yet I also love my art, and I know that the “stuck” feeling arises from the demands daily life puts on me and the miniscule time I find to create. Creating art is an expansive and fluid process, one where time ceases to exist and I live in a present state of flow. “Work,” in its modern definition, feels restrictive—I am on the company clock, and there is no choice in how my day unfolds. Even when 5 p.m. hits, the reality of virtual work is that I will return my desk at 6, or 8 p.m., just to knock off a few emails before morning.

I am old enough, and (hopefully?) wise enough to know that the answer is not to throw it all away. Give up a permanent, well-paying, fully remote position in the time of fascism and new world order? Methinks not. Plus, I suspect my longing for change has a lot to do with greener grass on the other side syndrome, where I fantasize of “writer life” as a utopia, leisurely days spent picking away at my magnum opus. I conveniently forget the frustrating days when the words don’t come, when the freelance money dries up, when the book doesn’t sell the way I’d dreamed, and when I have to piece together multiple sources of income to make it all sustainable. The truth is that being a full-time writer is no better or worse than my current job, which I find very meaningful, although tedious at times.

Understanding this doesn’t make the stuck feeling go away, and most of my creative writing these days is me working through the paradoxical role of modern motherhood/womanhood, in all its competing societal, professional, and personal demands. I can only hope I’m writing myself toward some sort of clarity, and not boring you in the process.

I’m discovering that there is a wiser response to my itchy feelings. I can move toward what feels free within the structures that surround me—make art within the life I have. My favourite words from the poet John O’Donohue are about discovering the internal freedom we all have: “A place inside you that no one has never got to, or hurt or damaged – a place where there is peace, serenity, courage and healing. At your deepest core you don't actually belong to yourself. But you belong to a beauty, an intimacy and a shelter that offers you every freedom that you could ever imagine.”

We do not belong to ourselves, but to beauty, to art. I imagine all of art as a search for that undamaged place, a fossil dig past the layers of hurt and intergenerational trauma—an unearthing of my deepest core. Once I find it, I have a duty to claim that freedom and reflect it towards others.

Here is our beauty, I say. Do you see it, too?

From my heart to yours,

Misty