Airing out
the (Mildly)
Dirty Laundry
Written By Jacquelyn Mitchard
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Scroll down to read the columns Jacquelyn's kids like best.
She's written 500 columns about her kids. Did they like every word? Not exactly.
For nearly 25 years, I've written first-person essays about my seven children and our family life. In lean times and lush, those essays helped support them, economically and, perhaps, even emotionally. I'm proud of that body of work.
What I look back on now comprises a diary unawares, begun when my first son was born 24 years ago. It's the biography of a family won, lost, and reclaimed — the astounded delight of a newlywed holding her newborn son; the dumbstruck grief of a young widow holding the hands of her little boys; a bride and new mom again at 40, holding the hand of the man the children would eventually welcome as their dad. Over the years, I've chronicled my clan in rather alarming detail. Did they ever mind?
They rarely even noticed. And when they did, they were nonchalant, more pleased than perturbed: "My teacher read your story about how you loved my hair," Francie, then 9, said. At age 7, Mia reported: "I told everyone you wrote about how we found the baby mouse in the snow and fed her formula with an eyedropper!"
When Marty was 15, his teachers teased him about falling in love with the cutest girl in school. He was proud that they noticed and asked me to put the essay I'd written about his first real love in his memory folder. And when he was homesick the first few days of college, he wrote asking for a copy of a story we called "The Mighty Skunk Hunters." It was about him and his friend Shane, who went to Cape Cod to seek glamorous babes but ended up trapping skunks in trash cans and releasing them into the nature preserve. It was about the last days of boyhood and how I would miss the Skunk Hunters after they were gone for good.
"You got it just right," Marty called to tell me, with a catch in his voice, after he'd read it. "You really are a writer." His major is musical theater, but he suggested he might pull back on some of his drama classes to do some writing. "I'd like you to mentor me," said the boy who considered books "kryptonite" (his word) until just months before. Mia also writes; her titles include "The Highway That Drove Itself" and "The Calamitous Ghost." I wonder if the kids will one day want to tell stories as I do, in part because they've seen their own lives interpreted as stories and (mostly) relished the experience.
Only once has a kid (and this time, I won't reveal which one) upbraided me for being too frank. And that was for confiding something that never crossed my mind as a humiliating truth: that he didn't learn to ride a two-wheeler until he was 7.
"Thanks," he said. "You made me sound like a moron."
Beyond that, the complaints have been few. Although I have picked my topics carefully. Do I regret any column? Perhaps one. There was the essay I wrote about an accusation made by two fathers who said one of my sons used a racial epithet on afield trip bus. (I'm blurring the details, since the other families have suffered some pain of their own.) My three oldest boys were prone to not just mischief but downright anger after their dad's death, and I found myself horrfied by some new event more than once. But this...it just didn't ring true. I confronted the pair of dads, who admitted that they hadn't really heard the name-calling, just heard about it — from their own sons, who had bullied mine since they were tots.
And yet, the story spread that I was raising a racist, and my public defense didn't help; it fanned the flames. My kid would rather have admitted wrongdoing than be shunned. And I kicked myself for being a self-righteous fool.
Years later, however, when the son in question accused me of costing him friendships, I was able to show him the story as it really happened. Among all of my children, he's the one who now will fight hardest for a principle, against the steepest odds.
Another incident made me even more careful. One night I came into our darkened house with Marty (then a young teen) and Will (a newborn) and turned on the light to find a beautiful but alarmingly disheveled woman standing behind me in my kitchen.
"Go downstairs," I told Marty.
"I'm a wrestler," he reminded me.
"Go. Down. Stairs," I told him. "Take the baby."
Released just hours before from a stint at an institution, she was a young mother who felt as though she "knew me as a neighbor" because she'd read my essays. I gave her tea and a bagel and called 911. When she phoned us again, at 2 a.m., she was safely back in the hospital.
After that, we took extra precautions and installed motion detectors, and I'm no longer open about the specific rural area in which we live. Yet the point of writing personal essays is to be open . . . the "I" or "my" in an essay really is a "you" or "yours." What my children do and have done matters only because it may be something that your children do or have done or will do — and when a story makes you laugh or cry or makes you crazy, you will say, well, she verges on normal and her kids did that (or she's weird and thank heavens our kids haven't done that!).
When the subject was dicey, such as my friends' tendency to send their children to me to explain how human eggs are fertilized ("Ask her anything," Dan said at 10, "she'll tell you"), I've switched my kids' identities or even genders. In this way, I've given them deniability. Francie could say, "That wasn't me. It was my sister!" And I've never written anything close to the bone without asking permission first. Since most of my essays will probably never be collected and will be seen only by my children (someday after I'm gone, when they pry open a cardboard box before a garage sale that I hope occurs many years from now), they're a sort of maternal Pilgrim's Progress. They encompass points of interest along a very long highway.
If they ever read (or reread) my essays, they'll see that although that road was bumpy, the times when we were, literally or figuratively, stuck in the mud sometimes made for the richest memories. In fact, one of my first pieces was about Dan making a signal for the police by tying his T-shirt to a tire iron when we were stranded on a deserted road. He was 6. And he'd seen it on MacGyver.
Most of all, I hope my kids will see that each essay is signed invisibly — from Ma, with love.
My Kids' Best-Loved Columns: Not surprisingly, each favorite features him or her as the star:
- Rob: "The Day He Was Taller." To kiss her son's cheek, suddenly Jackie has to get on tiptoe.
- Dan: "My Date with Danny." At 10, Dan starts an alone-time-with-Mom tradition.
- Marty: "The Mighty Skunk Hunters." An ode to that last summer when skunks were still cooler than girls.
- Francie: "Francie's Hair." To nix the brushing wars, Francie opts for a bob. And Jackie freaks.
- Mia: "Hey Doll, Act Your Age." Dad thinks Mia, at 6, is too old for dolls. Mom disagrees.
- Will: "Where the Boys Are." Life as a mom of five sons; Will likes the pictures of his brothers.
- Atticus: "Crush Hour." Atticus likes the pictures of his babysitter.
About the Author: One of Jacquelyn Mitchard's first essays on her kids told how Rob, not yet 2, decorated his grandmother's Christmas manger with Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, Batman, Kermit, and a bright blue T. rex.
