Facing the Truth 15 comments

By Caroline Langston

I’m not too happy with myself these days. Just as the leaves are falling from the tree in my front yard, returning its limbs to their stark, spindly state, it’s a season for me, too, of cutting back, of paring things down to their essence.

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago (I turned 41), and the combination of becoming one year older and being struck, again, by the responsibility of raising now two children has given me a sense of urgency that this is the Time to really get it together. It is time to root out bad old habits, and consciously engage the question of how to live and believe.

All ages are a good time for facing the truth, of course. It’s the essence of Eastern Orthodox mysticism and the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, to take just two examples. (And more than one writer has commented on the similarities between these two.)

But there’s something about early middle age (for that’s what it is, no matter how many fool greeting cards talk about Forty is the New Thirty) that makes it an especially appropriate time for such moral reflection. Midway through the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood read the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the classic gloss on the issue.

Contemporary American culture thrives on the notion of “improving” oneself, of course.

Far too often, the improvement is narcissistic, and goes barely below the surface. To wit, take a look at this advance blurb for the November 2009 edition of O: The Oprah Magazine: “This month: Who are you meant to be? Get a step-by-step guide to finding (and fulfilling) your life’s purpose. Plus, four ways to make yourself heard, gorgeous new winter coats and so much more!”

Whatever value there may be in “finding (and fulfilling) your life’s purpose,” consider how self-oriented the mandate is, how little it says about how we treat the delicate web of relationships around us, which, 98% of the time, is where our true purpose lies.

Because if we really think about it honestly, we have to admit that, 98% of the time, we are the ones who screwed up.

It was my original intention for this post to talk about facing the truth in the context of Zöe Heller’s fabulous novel The Believers, whose wonderfully ironic title refers to a family of old Leftists who hold idealistic notions of a revolutionary humanity, but who are supremely unkind to one another. I could talk about former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, or current South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.

But the only person I’m really responsible for talking about is me. So here goes:

One morning about a week and a half ago, I was dealing with the usual morning anxiety about getting out of the house on time to get my son to school, trying to bundle the baby and not think about the dirty breakfast dishes left behind on the table. My son is a chronic dawdler in the morning, using any and all excuses to take too much time in making his bed, putting his shoes on, and brushing his teeth. (I have been treated over the years for symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, which tend to come out at moments of stressful transitions, like the very one I was then experiencing.)

I’ve made a vow not to yell at him, not to hit the roof, not to call him names in an effort to cajole him down the stairs, but to calmly urge him down the stairs and let him know that I am the one who’s in charge. But this was the day he sat on that one last nerve.

Oh, I stayed calm. I didn’t yell. But while I was walking down the hall on that one last sweep of the house before getting everyone outside, I saw that a little Styrofoam airplane toy of his—left in the hall, despite all warnings—was left on the carpet, and, angry, I brought my foot down on the toy and crushed it in two.

In retrospect, I can hear that sound of the plane breaking as if it were a tiny animal’s backbone, snapped. At the time, though, I swept the pieces into the guest room wastebasket and forgot all about it.

A few days later I was sitting downstairs in my house, my husband and son upstairs, when I heard my son from the guest room, in a voice at first perplexed at finding his plane busted, moving to great volleys of sobs as he wailed, wanting to know how it had been broken.

I stepped on it accidentally, I said. The lie that came so easily tasted like metal in my mouth, and I know that if I’d just let the matter drop, he would still believe it to this day.

But it was not the truth. It was just an embarrassed attempt to cover up my nakedness. And as the minutes passed, I felt the guilt of that lie begin to burn in me, until finally I went up the stairs, sat down beside my son at the computer where he was looking up dinosaur pictures, and said, “Alex, there’s something I have to confess to you. I stepped on the plane deliberately. I was angry at you, but it was wrong to do that, and I’m sorry.”

It was my turn to sob then, in front of his placid and disbelieving eyes. But then it was as though a cloud passed, and his face lit up like the sky: “Mama, you shouldn’t have done that. But of course I forgive you. I’m still mad, but I forgive you.”

I’m still mad, but I forgive you. How I felt then, as though I were in the presence of something serious and holy, the almost physical feeling of the burden lifted from me.

I could be a good woman, I think, if I had somebody to shoot me every day of my life.