"Tough love"

I’m currently reading The World She Edited by Amy Reading, which is about Katharine Sargeant White, the woman who basically made The New Yorker what it was in the beginning. It’s a fascinating look at her life and the influence she had on the magazine and on the many many writers she worked with over the years and I will probably write about it in more detail in a future Sunday Book Club. But the book itself is not what today’s post is really about.

White was married for many years to E.B. White, most famously known as the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, though he wrote lots of other things, too, and was a longtime contributor, often anonymously, to The New Yorker. I read a book of his essays a couple of years ago and really loved all of them and felt like I had a sense of the man. The World She Edited has revealed another side of him, a side I did not know. Andy, as he was known, was of delicate temperament and he often struggled with his mental health, to the point that he was often incapacitated or so that his mental struggles began to manifest itself in physical ailments. Writing was often torturous for him and Katharine spent much of her energy and much of their marriage doing everything she could to make their lives easy so that Andy could write. At one point she even stepped away from The New Yorker, a job that was her identity as much as it was a way to earn a living, to move to their home in Maine so that he could be free from the literary world and its attendant pressures so that he might be “freed” to write.

Katharine struggled for years with her own health problems and was often unwell and it’s hard to tell how much was due to her own overwork (with which she was diagnosed multiple times), actual poor health, or from the stress that stemmed from her marriage and her constant vigilance over Andy’s health and wellbeing. In1936, shortly after the loss of his mother, Andy was on the verge of a breakdown and quit his job at The New Yorker. He also asked Katharine for a year’s “sabbatical” from his marriage and parenthood. He wrote Katharine a letter acknowledging her “delicate spiritual tremor” about his request, but that he sees himself as a heroic figure, “turning away from ‘certain easy rituals, such as earning a living and running the world’s errands,’ in order to do the hard work of artistic creation.” And he did it. He left his wife and young son and went to Maine for a year. And then he wrote not one single word.

This wasn’t the first time and it wasn’t the last time that Andy left Katharine to shoulder the burden of supporting their family and at one point I thought, “Get a grip, Andy! Jesus Christ, must be nice to just walk away from your life. None of us wants to be doing the grocery shopping and paying the bills and working in a stressful job to support our families — we’d all rather be in Maine (or wherever) living the ‘artistic life.’” I found myself really annoyed by Andy White at times. He could really use some tough love, I thought.

Tough love. That’s a heck of a phrase, isn’t it?

I am the product of an environment both macro (my generation, X) and micro (my family of origin) in which there wasn’t a lot of sympathy to go around. As a generation we were not spared the fears about nuclear war. Many of us were latchkey kids, left to our own devices. My mother was raised by a woman who brooked no whining, no self-pity. My mother, who realizes how all this affected her and in turn everyone else, recalls once being upset by something and asking, “Why did this happen to me?” and her aunt, who raised her, replied, “Why not you?” A common refrain in my house growing up, usually in regards to taking medicine but also broadly applied, “You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.”

And that is generally my philosophy about life, for good or ill. You don’t have to like everything about your life, but you have do some things, particularly if there are other people counting on you.

But I don’t know that this is the best way to go about things, and certainly not when mental health issues are involved. And though I talk a good game, I don’t know that this is how I raised my children, necessarily. I think in an effort to be more sympathetic my pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction. Or, perhaps in defiance of my philosophy, my children swung their own pendulums in the opposite direction because it seems like at times that if they don’t want to do something, even something that would be beneficial to them, or if it’s a little bit hard or requires some discomfort, they simply do not do it.¹ There have been times when part of me wants to take them by the shoulders and yell and say, “Life is hard. Sometimes, a lot of times, you have to do things you don’t want to do!!” And then a little voice inside my head says, “But why? Why does life have to be hard for them?”

And is that part of it? Is tough love really just wanting other people to do things they don’t want to do because we have to do things we don’t want to do? Like, if my life is or has been hard, then I want their life to be hard, too? How nice for them, says a snide little voice in my head.

I’ve been wrestling with this because I’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch myself. I don’t want to gaze too deeply into my own navel about this, but I can’t write about tough love without addressing it, I don’t think. In addition to the anxiety that I’ve already written about in previous posts, there are many days when I have to force myself to do anything. I don’t want to wash my hair in the morning, or my face at night. I don’t want to go to work and when I get there I don’t want to do to the work. Even though intellectually I know I love dance and the gym, I don’t want to go. Even though I love my friends, I have to make myself leave the house. I make myself do these things because I know they’re good for me, and I’m always glad I have done them once I’ve gotten over the hump, but there are days it has taken Herculean effort.²

A few years ago when I was going through a very stressful time, my mother said to me, “I don’t see how you do it, how you keep going,” and my response was “What are my options?” As I saw it, there were none and are none now. I told a friend recently I would love to take a laudanum cure by the sea, but that option isn’t open to me. I can’t take a one year sabbatical from my life. My mother also used to say that feelings follow actions and so I’ve been acting and acting and acting every day just waiting for those feelings to follow. I have to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I’ve been “tough loving” myself through every day.

In case it’s not clear, this is a confusing issue for me. I have benefitted from some tough love in my own life. I think I am benefitting from tough loving myself at the moment. I think I am as resilient as I am because I was taught to just get on with things. But has it made me brittle? Has it made me too unwilling to ask for help or let people know I’m struggling? Am I sometimes unsympathetic to myself when I could use a little sympathy, a little tenderness toward my own struggling self?

I don’t know. I feel like there must be some middle ground between wanting to crawl under the covers and never come out again and frogmarching myself through every day. And maybe there is. Maybe I’m doing it but I just don’t recognize it. Maybe knowing that the gym and dance and my friends are good for me, like a vitamin, and making myself do these things that are for my betterment even when I don’t feel like it, maybe that is the middle ground? But also giving myself permission to take a day off if I feel like? To give myself a little bit of tough and a little bit of love?

Because I think about what happens if we tough love the tenderness out of people? What happens if we force them to push past their own safety nets, if we ask them to ignore their bodies’ own warning signs. And what happens to us if we harden our hearts to what others are experiencing?

I don’t know. I don’t know what the right answer is, but tough love is overrated.

******

Semi-relatedly, during the height of the pandemic, five days a week I would recite a poem on my Facebook page and talk about why I liked it or what it meant to me. I did it for a year, but after that the project started to feel more like a chore than a pleasure and so I stopped unless I came across a poem that really knocked me out. Below is one of the random videos I recorded later, sometime in 2022, of me reading the poem “Wondrous” by Sarah Freligh. It’s about E.B. White and Charlotte’s Web and so much, much more. And yes, I cried again watching the video.

1. They can work out whose pendulum it was with their own therapist when the time comes.

2. I’m aware that this is an almost textbook definition of depression. I have an appointment with my therapist tomorrow.