Warnings from Wizards

Desire, danger and the myth of safe stories

The first time my ex picked up our daughters after we separated, I ran to my room, stripped off my clothes, and crawled under the covers. It was early summer. A Sunday. The world outside was warm and full of promise. My bedroom was on the seventh floor of a gleaming, horseshoe-shaped building in Williamsburg. From bed, I could see the shared rooftop where tenants barbecued and sunbathed. One of them — the founder of a sober morning rave — sometimes hosted all-day dance parties. Glittering bodies in angel wings, cowboy hats, and platform shoes undulated under the sun.

I watched them from under the sheets, naked and dumb, the apartment humming with the electric silence of my daughters’ absence. I lay there in the dark, my body curled like a question mark, conjuring worst-case scenarios — the kind of thoughts you’re not supposed to admit. All the archetypal fairy tale stuff that befalls obedient girls who leave home. But there were no beasts or witches, only men with moustaches handing out candy from shiny cars. No woods — just abandoned parking lots, police tape. Coroners’ reports. Headlines with words like maternal negligence, absent mother, spinning on a loop.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn shone outside the window — sirens, laughter through thin walls, music from rooftop speakers. The city did what cities do: it moved on. It didn’t care if I was divorced or married, broken or fine. It didn’t care if the dishes were done or the deadline met. It didn’t notice the small collapse inside apartment 7F. None of it mattered. My body folded in on itself, chasing silence beneath the sheets, trying to disappear.

*

In eighth grade, my English teacher assigned Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? — Joyce Carol Oates’s haunting story about a teenage girl stalked by an older man named Arnold Friend. First published in 1966 and dedicated to Bob Dylan, the story was inspired by his song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” which Oates said helped conjure its eerie, dreamlike tone. But beneath the music lay something darker: the real-life crimes of Charles Schmid, a charismatic loner from Tucson, Arizona, who murdered three teenage girls. Schmid, the son of a single mother, stuffed his cowboy boots with newspapers and crushed cans to appear taller, and used a clothespin to stretch his lower lip to mimic Elvis Presley.

In Oates’s story, his fictional counterpart flirts with a girl named Connie at a shopping plaza, then shows up at her house when she’s home alone. He stands outside her kitchen door, calling her name, coaxing, promising. Eventually, she opens the door and steps outside. The story ends in a haze of ambiguity. Is Connie terrified? Is she entranced? Are they the same thing?

This was 1990. That same year, Madonna released the video for Justify My Love — a grainy, black-and-white, four minute fever dream of sadomasochism, bisexuality, and voyeurism. In it, a ragged, radiant Madonna, dressed in black leather and lingerie, wanders a shadowy hotel hallway and stumbles into a room where a shirtless man appears to be receiving a blowjob. As the song begins, she drops her suitcase, opens her coat, and sinks to the floor, revealing lace underwear and a garter belt. A blurred male figure — played by her then-boyfriend, Tony Ward — emerges from the darkness.

The video unfolds in an elegant, surreal loop: men in drag, women in drag, a crossdresser, a dominatrix, Ward having sex with Madonna — scenes that today might barely raise an eyebrow, but at the time were shocking. MTV banned it. Networks censored it. The only way I could watch it was on a contraband VHS copy that my friend June’s older brother Lucas — a junior at Dartmouth — smuggled home over holiday break. June and I watched it huddled in her bedroom under a Marimekko comforter, breathless, electrified — feeling everything, but not yet knowing what to call it.

*

When my first daughter was born, I started seeing this line on mom blogs and memes. Something like: becoming a mother is like having your heart beat outside your body. It was very popular. Said in a well-meaning way by women who wanted me to understand the depth of love they felt for their children. This is what motherhood is like! This is how it feels! But having a child didn’t feel like that to me.

The second my daughter was born, she lived deep inside me. This is not metaphor. It’s physical. Beyond language entirely. As I try to write about this feeling, I keep thinking about the word hysteria, how it shares a root with uterus, how hystera was the Greek word for womb, how Freud — coked up and cocky — twisted it into pathology, used it to dismiss the very thing I’m describing. That dark, witchy, hard-to-name knowing. That deep pulse of intuition that women have always been punished for, joked about, misdiagnosed.

When my kids left with their dad on the handoff days, it felt like someone reached inside and scooped out my entire center. Not just the heart, but the lungs, the spine, some ancestral organ we hadn’t named yet. They walked out the door, and I stood there, alone and upright, staring at the space where they had been. And every fairy tale I’d ever read rushed in. The ones with girls in forests. With the mothers who stayed behind, whose absence was the precursor to the girl’s journey into the darkness. The prelude to danger.

*

A year after we read Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, Joyce Carol Oates came to Chicago to read from Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. I was a freshman in high school. I loved the book, and I went with my mom to Barnes & Noble to see Oates read from it. My mother, a poet, was always taking me to things like that — readings, installations, art openings with green-haired, naked women doing spoken-word poetry. Poetry was, and still is, our shared language. Even now, no matter how old we get or how much static builds up between us, we always return to words. We love books. We love women — complicated, aging, sharp-edged, vaguely unstable — trying to survive whatever system they've been trapped inside.

That same year, J. and I ate a bag of mushrooms and sat on my front stoop, our pupils blown wide, black as burnt-out moons. The air was heavy with humidity. A car stereo played Digable Planets from somewhere down the block. J. told me that when he pictured his future, all he could see was a black square. Then came the sound — something splitting. A scream. Maybe his. Maybe mine. I remember the taste of the air — wet bark, asphalt, something vaguely electric.

Around that time, in our Fiction and Poetry class, we learned to analyze Robert Frost’s Birches. J. loved that poem. He loved birch trees, said he liked the bark — its texture, its restraint. He probably appreciated the aesthetics of birch bark, it’s simplicity. The same way he loved Jil Sander and Helmut Lang and Ann Demeulemeester. Elegant. Stripped back.

But I also think it was something deeper. The idea that a tree could bend. That something expected to grow straight could lean, gracefully, toward the ground and still be called a tree. That it could give under pressure without breaking.

I’m sure, somewhere, in a box, is a paper on Birches that I wrote that same year. How it’s a poem that takes you into the woods and nearly up to heaven. How life is brutal — so why not transcend the ache of the real, and swing for a while? Frost once said it’s about “two fragments soldered together” — one about the ice storm that bends the branches to breaking, the other about the boy who climbs them anyway.

But the poem is not just about a boy. It’s also about death. Of course, I didn’t write my paper about that. I didn’t understand the complexities of the poem when I was fourteen. Not until after J’s funeral. Not until I went through my old folders and reread this line: “And life is too much like a pathless wood “Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs * Broken across it, and one eye is weeping * From a twig’s having lashed across it open * I'd like to get away from earth awhile * And then come back to it and begin over.”

That’s when I remembered that night. The mushrooms and the moths, the smell of wet bark, the scream. It was all there, soldered together — the bark, the boy, the bend.

But J. knew it all along. That’s what he was trying to tell me on the stoop when he said the thing about the black square. I just didn’t hear it until fifteen years later.

*

The first time I read The Giving Tree to my daughter, she threw the book across the room. She was three.

The Giving Tree was written by Shel Silverstein — a former Playboy cartoonist who served in the Korean War and wrote the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue.” It’s the story of a boy and a tree, the kind of love that starts out wild and joyful: he swings from her branches, devours her apples, collapses into her shade. And the tree gives it all freely, because that’s what love is supposed to look like, right?

But as the boy grows, he returns only when he needs something — money, shelter, escape — and each time, she gives a little more of herself away. Apples. Limbs. Trunk. Until all that’s left is a stump.

When I was little, we were told The Giving Tree was a parable about selfless love. But it’s not. It’s a story about a mother who vanishes by degrees. Who gives until there’s nothing left and calls it devotion. Who’s so depleted, she can’t even name her own rage. It’s about the myth of mothering as holy sacrifice — a myth that seeps down through bloodlines, that makes me ache for my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and all the women before them who were taught to disappear. To dissolve. As if the less space they took up in the world, the more room the world would have for their children.

As if love is an equation. As if it’s all just math.

They said those tree poems were bedtime stories for children. But they weren’t stories for children. They weren’t moral parables. They weren’t even really about trees. They were warnings from wizards. Weird, messed-up messages from broken men staring down the barrel of a gun.

*

The thing is: we were allowed to fear wolves. And stalkers. And sadistic men with mirrored sunglasses. The same adults who urged us to dissect fairy tales about girls swallowed by monsters — who praised the literary merit of Connie’s seduction by a man in boy-drag in Joyce Carol Oates’s stories — decided we couldn’t be trusted with a video in which a grown woman dared to claim her own hunger. In the classroom, we were taught to admire the subtle horror of a girl’s undoing, as long as it was filtered through the cool remove of fiction. Oates was literature. Her violence was symbolic, and therefore, acceptable. But Madonna, writhing in lace and crucifixes, naming desire without apology — she was filth. Pornography. Trash. One woman was canonized. The other was condemned.

It was never the danger they were trying to censor. It was the power. *

Once, on Father’s Day, I was so bereft that I ate a can of cat food. I know this sounds insane. I guess it is insane. I thought it was a can of tuna fish. I mashed it with mustard and capers and ate it on a brown cracker before I realized it was cat food. Still — I finished it.

When my daughters are with me, I perform care like a religion. I roast delicata squash with brown butter and sage. I zest lemons for vinaigrette. I plate things with color. I say things like, "Look at that rainbow on your plate!" I am Daniel Boulud in an apron from Target.

When they are gone, I am, at times, Brittany Murphy in her final days — bone-sick, unwashed, popping Mylanta and Prozac, calling a single Snickers bar a meal.

That's the part no one wants to hear. That motherhood is sometimes just surviving your own mind. That love this big turns your bones to glass. That guilt can become a ritual, a comfort, a place to rest when there's nowhere safe left inside you.

Before a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it enters the pupa stage. It builds a small, silken sack — a chrysalis — and disappears inside. What happens next is not gentle. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar dissolves into a goopy soup. In the first few days inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar must eat away at its old body, releasing the genetic information that will form the butterfly's wings, its legs, its antennae. It's not an easy transformation. It's an undoing.

In order to become a butterfly means first you must eat your old self. First, you must dissolve.

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