ALSO BY MARNI JACKSON
The Mother Zone Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign
Home Free
The Myth of the Empty Nest
Marni Jackson
THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS
TORONTO
Copyright © 2010 Marni Jackson
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Jackson, Marni
Home free : the myth of the empty nest / Marni Jackson.
ISBN 978-0-88762-616-6
1. Parent and adult child. 2. Jackson, Marni. I. Title.
HQ755.86.J32 2010 306.874 C2010-903801-0
Editor: Patrick Crean
Cover design: Sputnik Design Partners Inc.
Cover image: Shutterstock
Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,
a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,
145 Front Street East, Suite 209,
Toronto, Ontario M5A 1E3 Canada
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of
The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.
1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10
Printed and bound in Canada
for Olive and Lola
You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain Though you’re thinking that You’re leavin’ there too soon.
—Neil Young
Contents
The Generation Gap vs. The Friendly Parent
Landscaping the Family
That’s That
A Serious Little Mountain
The Saskatchewan River
Be Home by Dinner
The Great Unraveller
The Degree
Love Trouble
Drugs,Music, and Sex in 1968
Long-Term Care
The Broken Year
Spring
Not My Job
The Other Shoe
26 and 99
Hello, Goodbye
The Dump
The Future
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Home Free
IT’S A HUMID SPRING DAY, and my 26-year-old son has just biked across town, from the apartment he shares with some friends, to tackle a strange chore. He’s sitting at the table in our kitchen, reading the last few chapters of this book, which tells the story of our family from the time he left home at 18 to go to college in Montreal to last year, when he moved back to Toronto. I am nervous; I have no idea whether my version of things will square with his.
I don’t expect him to be enthralled. It’s bad enough getting a string of emails from your mother about job prospects without having to read an entire book written by your mother, about being a mother.
So I have to distract myself while he reads, pen in hand. I go upstairs and decide to throw out all our expired prescription drugs. That takes five minutes. I check my email and sign a few online petitions. I look out my office window and see Casey down below. He’s moved out to the table on the patio. He’s turning the pages, making a note now and then. From this angle I can’t tell if he looks annoyed or just neutral. The suspense is driving me crazy.
We’ve been through this process before, with him reading the stories I’ve written about our family, getting backstage glimpses of me as mother. I have writerly tricks, but if I am not telling the truth he will be the first to detect this. At the same time, I need to stand up for how I see things, too. How it felt for me when he left home, went off to school, dropped out, roamed around Mexico, came back . . . how the three of us have negotiated the ongoing shifting of our roles.
His response to this project has been patient, and his advice has been useful. “Just be true to your own experience of things,” he said,“and don’t confuse that with who I am.”
The other editorial insight he gave me was this: “You can’t be mothering in the writing.” In other words, I have to resist the urge to protect him, to fluff his résumé, in the stories I tell. The desire I have to make him (and us) look good immediately gums up the narrative and turns the writing soft. I can’t protect and reveal at the same time.
Writing is the opposite of mothering.