The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.
–Cheryl Strayed–
1995 was a year of transformation for bestselling author Cheryl Strayed, as it was for me. In March of that year, I became a mother. A few months later, in the summer, Strayed went on a solo trek for 1,100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail. Her journey, detailed in her memoir Wild, resulted in what she calls her “genesis story”.
My transformation from solo driver to infant-seat-in-the-back-mama was certainly more showy (I had a baby:she had blisters) yet the real growth—so much more “discreet” in real life transformations, says Strayed — was equally terrifying. Was I ready?
After watching the gorgeous 2014 film adaption of her book at the Books on Film event earlier this week at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, Strayed broke it down to a rapt audience.
How do we bear the unbearable?
This very question forms the spine of the forty-seven year old’s memoir, as much a treatise on grief as it is a feminist fable. By now, Wild— her experiences using sex and drugs to escape the pain of losing her mother at age twenty-two, her failed marriage, and eventual epiphanies on the trail— has become an inspiration for many around the world. Wild has been translated into forty languages. Within a week of publication, the book caught the eye of Nick Hornby. The celebrated UK screenwriter and novelist told Strayed he liked the book’s authenticity: she didn’t go on the trail in order to write a book, but waited seventeen years to pen her memoir. By then, she was an award-winning essayist, as well as a mother of two children (Among her writings is an essay about her deep respect for Alice Munro. As she told the audience this week, this Canadian icon was her literary mother for many years.)
Okay, stop right there, I blinked: enough with all this. Are you my sister from another mother? (fangirl on Munro here)
So I skipped some of her life chapters and am still waiting for a brilliant screenwriter to make a film about my life (an experience Strayed highly recommends. She had Reese Witherspoon*. I’m holding out for Amy Schumer). What connected me were a series of profound insights only available through age, motherhood, a few wounds and wrinkles later.
Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.
–Cheryl Strayed–
These sentiments; many expressed in Strayed’s popular advice column, and her books Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough; are like warm towels for her thousands of fans, including this writer. Mostly, I champion her sense of “gathering oneself”. This is what mothering has been for me for two decades. It is as apt a description as I’ve heard yet. If I could, I’d wear it as a t-shirt uniform (loose and baggy, thanks. Those snug little numbers belonged on my twenty-year old self).
The day I gave birth I was a shivering mess. I called my mom on the phone, minutes before they wheeled me into the OR to have a C-section. A newbie to surgery of any sort, I had not responded well to the news of this unexpected procedure, a full twenty-four hours after labour: my very wild state was on full display. My mother (an old pro:I’m one of five) assured me it doesn’t matter how you are to become a mother, embrace the fact that it’s about to happen any minute now!
Still I wailed,
They’re going to cut me open!
Twenty-one years and two daughters later, and I now know.
That was a prophecy.
No, I wasn’t ready. Ready is overrated.
*If you haven’t seen the film, Wild was one of my favourites from 2014. See my whole list here.
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