Modern Love Revenge: Joyce Maynard's Daughter Gets Her Turn To Speak

For most of us, sitting down with our Sunday New York Times is a relaxing experience. But for subjects of the "Modern Love" column, it can suddenly turn into a choke-on-my-scone nightmare. For those unlucky few, DoubleX launched Modern Love Revenge [2], a series of responses written by the subjects of Modern Love columns. Got a lead? E-mail us [3].

My mother, Joyce Maynard, writes for a living, so I have spent my life learning that an event recounted by one person might not sound like the same event when recounted by another person, even if she was there, and witnessed it, and was at the center of it. It can be frustrating for me to let my mother own her stories—and by proxy, the stories of the people close to her. Even if I can come to terms with her perspective, it doesn’t mean I want strangers to be reading her words and breathing their life into what she claims as truth. Especially when I am the subject.

This past July, my mom published a piece in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column that stretched my ability to accept her profession. The final published piece was my mother’s story, told from her point of view, about her emotional response to a difficult situation. But it still felt like a personal invasion. It was titled “My Secret Left Me Unable To Help [4]” and told the dilemma of a mother who was worried for her daughter’s well-being to the point that she decided to snoop around in that daughter’s private e-mail account. By prying, she did uncover details of the challenging situation that the daughter (me) was in—but she also realized that it was a problem she could not fix. The mother felt left out of her daughter’s life, she writes, in a moment when she wanted nothing more than to be there for her. And to top it off, now she had to live with the fact that she had done something she had vowed not to do: violated her daughter’s privacy.

That’s her story. Here’s mine. I was only 23 years old when I moved on my own to the Dominican Republic, so I don’t blame my mother for worrying. I didn’t really know anyone there when the plane landed. While interning at a nonprofit down there, I fell in love with an amazing young man, Johnny. We were responsible and got blood-tested early on, which led us to discover that Johnny was HIV positive.

Stunned by the magnitude of the situation we found ourselves in, Johnny and I turned inward and toward each other to cope. We focused intently on our immediate, daily-life tasks and chose not to tell people until we, ourselves, had made better sense of what was going on. Thoughts of mortality, access to health care, privilege, and justice were all swirling around in my head in a visceral way that made me ache all over and toss in bed. I was not in much communication with anyone in the States during that time, particularly not my mother, because I knew she would be able to use her maternal intuition to decipher trouble in my voice and even written words. Instead of reaching out to people, I was reading up on the latest medical research and trying to navigate treatment options in a region of little opportunity.

By the time she confessed to me that during that period of radio silence she had broken into my e-mail account, it was six years after the fact. I was offended, but forgave her before I even got mad about it. (Unlike her, I didn’t have the emotional baggage from a diary snoop that left me scarred.) For me, what was much harder was my mother deciding to write her viewpoint on an event that was so personal and life-changing for me. Over the years, my mother has often written works of nonfiction detailing my family’s life and times—but never had anything so intimate or inherently mine to tell been the topic of her writing.

Even though my crisis in the Dominican Republic happened years ago, the story resurfaced for my mother while she was on a writing retreat last spring. I suppose the time had ripened for my mother to deal with her unresolved feelings surrounding that era, and so she felt a great need to write about the intense feelings she had when worrying about me. That’s how she processes things as a writer, I suppose.

To my mother’s credit, she did communicate with me as soon as she had written the story to ask me to look it over:

Dear Aud, I have written an essay that I need to show you. An editor at the New York Times would like to publish it, but I will not do this unless you can feel alright about this. I am guessing that if you could have chosen, you would prefer to have a mother who did not, as I do, write about her life. Though of course, if that were the case, you would have a totally different mother. And be a different person yourself.

When I got this letter, I tried to keep reminding myself that it was her story, and her emotions to resolve, so that I could make peace with what she wrote, rather than allow myself to view it as a not-so-necessary exposé in which I am the main character.

To have my life translated by my mother and aired publicly in a major newspaper was an uncomfortable stretch. My mother’s article had put me in a difficult position. I read it over and felt very conflicted. Beyond the basic feeling of the intrusion, I had many objections to the way she presented the story and her lack of understanding about systemic poverty and the deep-seated nature of centuries of colonial domination and positions of privilege. I knew her primary purpose was not to write an academic piece to raise social consciousness, but I still felt strongly that the original draft of my mother’s piece perpetuated certain stereotypes and assumptions. I knew how much she wanted me to tell her to go ahead with the piece, especially since it would be good publicity to coincide with her new book coming out.

So, there I was, caught in a predicament: On the one hand, I felt I could easily just say no to my mother, but then I feared an undercurrent of resentment could brew, even though she assured me that she would respect whatever decision I made. I also knew I would be untrue to myself and feel like I was betraying my dear friend Johnny if she went ahead and published the piece in the state it was in. In order to feel OK with her project, I knew I would have to edit the piece in some way.

It happened to be one of the busiest times in my life this past spring, when I felt like it was all I could do to keep my head above water. I was in the midst of completing my graduate school course work, doing an action-research project at a local elementary school, and waitressing on the weekends to pay the bills. My mom would send me the various drafts and I would scrutinize her essay down to the syntax, all while I had my own thesis to be working on. Ironically, the edits and revisions my mother and I sent back and forth turned into an informal counseling dialog while I was simultaneously completing my degree to become a school guidance counselor. As we worked through the writing process we were able to appreciate each other’s side of the story and see each other more clearly:

Dear Ma, i think it is a bit extreme to paint the picture that i was so callous and flat-sounding while i was living there, that wasn't the case, but i guess since u weren't there, and u were reading my emails, it could have been easy to interpret my voice to be that way.

i know u were trying to prove a point—but to say the “dark and broken place in my daughter’s heart” is too much! It is all intense and i hurt and i grew, and was also given a great deal through the experience so that by the time i came home I don't think i was as destitute due to the circumstance—as u maybe thought i was. As a mother i respect how hard the experience must have been from your side, and i guess i didn't ever get to talk to you about the whole situation as much as i could have so you could be more at peace with it ...

Over the years that have passed since that first shocking blood test, I believe we have all grown into stronger people not in spite of, but because of what we now know. After going through so much together, the relationship between Johnny and me has evolved into a brother-sister sort of thing that allows us both to teach and support each other regardless of how often we get to spend time together. Johnny is able to stay healthy as long as he is able to take his medications every day. And I live my life informed and enriched by the trips I make to visit him in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I surprised myself by being able to work with my mother to craft a piece that was certainly still her story, but one that took into account my perspective and respected my objections. And now, it comes full circle in that I am given the opportunity to share my own perspective in the artistic form of this story to be published.