Excerpts from “Blue Nights” and My Own As-Yet-Unwritten Memoir

Joan Didion wrote “The Year of Magical Thinking” after her husband, John Dunne, died of a heart attack at the dinner table, and her daughter, Quintana Roo, collapsed into a serious illness from which no doctor could retrieve her for 20 months.

Shortly after The Year of Magical Thinking went to press, Quintana died as well, in an ICU in New York City.  “Blue Nights” is the book that came after.  This book is for Quintana, says the inscription.

You may not know – I didn’t when I first heard her unusual name – that Quintana Roo is the name of a state in southeastern Mexico, on the eastern part of the Yucatan peninsula.  In Blue Nights, Didion writes of seeing that name on a map, of the two of them (her and her now-dead husband) enchanted by the name, reserving it for a daughter, should they ever have one.

They had one, and then he died, and then the daughter died, and now Joan Didion writes one memoir and then another, one for each of them.  For everything there is a season, she writes.

Ecclesiastes, yes, but I think first of The Byrds, Turn, Turn, Turn.

I think first of Quintana Roo sitting on the bare hardwood floors of the house on Franklin Avenue and the waxed terra-cotta tiles of the house in Malibu listening to The Byrds on eight-track.

The Byrds and The Mamas and the Papas, “Do You Wanna Dance?”

“I wanna dance,” she would croon back to the eight-track.

. . .   For my having a child there was a season.  That season passed.  I have not yet located the season in which I do not hear her crooning back to the eight-track.  I still hear her crooning back to the eight-track.

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They followed me into the shower today, my boys, and as I tried to keep them out of the stream of water while washing my hair, I thought about how annoying it is and also sweet it is that I can’t take a damn shower without these children coming along.  They demand to be with me at every second, yesterday busting in while I was on the toilet doing my business and trying to dick around on my phone for a quiet moment.  They crowded around me, craning to see what I’d done in the bowl (poop or peep, mom?), congratulating me on using the potty like a big girl, offering me toilet paper so I could hurry up and come back out to cuddle on the couch.

People tell me all the time “It goes so fast!  Enjoy every minute!”  And when I’m trying to use the restroom and fending off my children’s interest in my own waste, I kind of want to lay it on those people, like shut up, this isn’t that enjoyable.  I am exhausted, I am wrung out, I am constantly demanded, by work, by children, by my housework, by children, in every corner and crevice of my daily life and even, most nights, in my sleep.  But then sometimes I realize that what they’re really saying to me is “I miss my kids. I miss my goddam kids I miss them so much.  I miss them when they were four and I miss them when they were two and I miss them when they were home and thought I was amazing and wonderful and everything and I don’t want to be this old.”  Then I realize that they’re talking about them, not talking about me, and I let the comment slide.  Because I miss my kids, too, and they’re right here.  I miss Jack when he was six months old and sitting on the guest bed, a wobbly sitter still, scrabbling his unskilled baby fingers toward a stack of books, slowly, determinedly, ignoring the stuffed octopus I had plopped on his head as a joke.  I miss Liam when he was one, and would rock side to side all the time, in his high chair, in his pack n play, cruising around the furniture, when he was excited or upset or bored or just any old time, really.  He doesn’t do that rocking thing anymore.

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When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

I just said that, but what does it mean?  All right, of course I can track it, of course you can track it, another way of acknowledging that our children are hostages to fortune, but when we talk about our children, what are we saying?  Are we saying what it meant to us to have them?  What it meant to us not to have them?  What it meant to let them go?  Are we talking about the enigma of pledging ourselves to protect the unprotectable?  About the whole puzzle of being a parent?

Time passes.

Yes, agreed, a banality, of course time passes.

Then why do I say it, why have I already said it more than once?

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My sons have two stuffed Snoopy dolls – a big hand puppet one, and a smaller one that wears an Uncle Sam style hat with the words “Met Life” on it.  They call these dolls “Puppet Snoopy” and “Snoopy-the-American,” and they like to play together with them.  Jack makes Puppet Snoopy play the role of Mama, and Liam plays Baby with Snoopy-the-American.

Jack/Puppet/Mama: You have to get out of the bath and take a shower now, because you pooped in the bath!!

Liam/American/Baby: (in a high, squeaky, exaggeratedly baby voice) O-tay, Mama!  I sow-wee!  I no poop-ee in da baff no mo!!

J/P/Mama: I love you.  You’re a bad baby.

L/A/Baby: I wuv you, Mama.  Wet’s go cuddle on da couch.

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Once she was born I was never not afraid.

I was afraid of swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet.  I was afraid of rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides, strangers who appeared at the door, unexplained fevers, elevators without operators and empty hotel corridors.  The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her.  A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away?

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Hey mom, Jack says to me earnestly as he lovingly places Old Bear and Puppet Snoopy in his carseat.  Hey mom, I don’t want my toys to be cold.  Can you leave the heat on for them while I’m at school?

Sure, buddy, I say, arms full of bags and coats and homework folders, getting them shuffled into daycare, only half paying attention.

It’s ok buddies, he says to them, you’ll be all nice and toasty warm today.  I’ll miss you guys.  I love you.

He’s a little sad to leave them.

I promise to take them into work with me.  So they won’t be cold in the car.