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Dan Kennedy (1:08)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy and I've told you before, of course, that the Moth features true stories told live on a stage and that they're told without notes. The stories that we use here on the podcast are taken from our live shows, which are always happening in New York, Los Angeles, and also in Chicago and Detroit. We also take stories from our tour shows across the country. If you'd like more information on where we are going to be next or where we are right now at the moment, check out the site themoth.org this podcast is brought to you by Audible.com, the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 75,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature and featuring audio versions of many New York Times bestsellers. For listeners of this podcast, Audible is offering a free audiobook to give you a chance to try out their service. One audiobook to consider is Internal Combustion, the Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City by today's storyteller Joyce Maynard. Joyce entered the true crime genre with her 1992 book To Die for, and now Maynard once again takes readers down a stark path of intrigue and uncertainty surrounding one family's violent end. That's Internal Combustion by Joyce Maynard, available from Audible. To try Audible Free today and get a free audiobook of your choice, go to audible.comthemost that's audible.comthemost the story you're about to Hear by Joyce Maynard was recorded live at the Moth MainStage back in 2005, and the theme of that night was can't help stories about compulsions.

Joyce Maynard (2:57)

In the family where I grew up, no blood was ever shed, at least not the kind that was visible. In all the years of living under my parents roof, I never broke a bone. My mother and father never one time had to take me to the emergency room. And I strongly suspect that we never had to buy a second box of band aids. And the reason for that was pretty simple. My parents were spectacularly protective and hovered over me to make sure that no pain or physical injury should occur. I lived in the state of New Hampshire, but never set my feet into ski boots. I don't think a piece of athletic equipment ever crossed our threshold. My mother made sure that I didn't enter the water for swimming until a full hour after eating, and my father stood over me and brushed away the mosquitoes before they landed. But every night at 6 o'clock he climbed the stairs to our attic and took out the vodka. And through the night he drank and painted. And sometimes late in the night he summoned me to his attic studio where he painted beautiful lyric landscapes of the British Columbia of his youth as a painter and expounded to me with poetic eloquence on the sacrifice that he had made of giving up the life of an artist to be a parent. And in the morning we never talked about it. Holidays were a particularly stressful time in our family with a particular amount of alcohol. More than one Christmas my father threw the tree across the floor. My mother was gone surprisingly often, and when she was, it was left to me to hide the car keys. And maybe because of that, although I grew up to have the life of a certain level of artistic expression that had eluded my two enormously artistically gifted parents, the goal that I found most elusive and wonderful was to be part of a happy family. And I believe that my best shot of having happy relatives was to give birth to them. So I married quite young, at 23, an artist. And though I would come to realize over the years that we had surprisingly little in common, we did both share a passion, a creative passion. Although he was a painter and I was a writer, I think we both felt that there was no creative undertaking more thrilling and potentially fulfilling than to make and raise children. And we got right to it. I think one of the things that I loved about having babies was the sense that here was a person who was still perfect, a person with a clean Slate. And I so wanted to keep her that way. I actually had none of my parents tendencies towards physical protection for physical injury. I could even have been called a somewhat negligent mother. I was happy to see toddlers breathe over my babies and didn't feel a particular need to wash my hands or worry about germs because I knew that there were greater dangers in the world. And the greatest dangers to me were the dangers of emotional pain and the disappointment of failed dreams. I think my daughter was 18 months old when she got chickenpox. And I stood over her to make sure that she was so beautiful. And she had such beautiful black hair. And I knew that if you scratched the scabs there would be no hair that would grow. And I couldn't yet explain to an 18 month old not to scratch her scab. So I just guarded her so carefully. But I missed on one and I saw suddenly this tiny little microscopic dot on the top of her head where I realized that she had scratched a scab. And just the thought that there was going to be this one hair that would not grow brought me to tears. I wanted so many things for her. And one that I had not had myself as a child was a sibling who really adored her. And it was the first of the increasing number of great battles with my husband to provide her with. And for four years we fought about it because he wanted to live the life of an artist and I wanted to live the life of a member of a happy family if it killed us. And so it took four years, but my son Charlie was born and two years later my son Willie. I was always a fanatically compulsive protector of my children's magical childhood. I sort of wrote on the side as a hobby, but never more so than when holidays and birthdays came around. I never would have bought a store bought cake. And I created extraordinary three day festivals for their birthdays. Scavenger hunts with poems, clues in iambic pentameter and puppet shows with music composed for the events. And Christmas, elaborate Christmas, Valentine's Day, the entire month of February. We cleared our dining room table and set out all the art supplies filled with glitter and every conceivable kind of paint to make amazing valentines. And the entire month of December, as I say to Christmas. And I never went to Toys R Us. I wasn't really interested in just a lot of stuff I wanted to provide for my children. The kinds of objects, the kinds of gifts that might really have been made in Santa's workshop. And to do this I once I searched the entire east coast for a ventriloquist puppet for my son Willie, and ended up Dr. 200 miles to find it. My father had recently died and left me a sum total of $500 in his will. And my. My husband had it all earmarked to buy snow tires. But I went out one day and bought a $500 dollhouse. That was another of our grand battles, of course, when there are. And I should say that, that he was increasingly appalled and disgusted by the. The display of these Christmases, which he really stepped aside from. So that one morning he came in Christmas morning and saw the array of items which I think that year included a department store mannequin that I'd found in a. In a going out of business department store in northern New Hampshire. And he insisted that half of the items be removed from the room. And our children, I suppose, did not have an entirely magical December 25th that year. Well, of course, one of the problems of providing magical objects in your child's life is that you then must protect that they not get lost. And I had recognized by this time that although blood could be dripping from my veins and I wouldn't notice their pain, I sensed on my nerve endings. And of course, when that's the case, you do everything you can to protect against their pain. So every time a Barbie came into the room, into our lives, the first thing I thought was, guard those shoes. My sons, one year for Christmas, they got the Playmobil pirate ship. And of all the elaborate rigging and pirates and little items on the treasure chests and little coins on the pirate ship, the one particular thing that my son Charlie loved best was this little gold sword. And I knew so well the heartbreak that could come that I said to him very specifically when we went out to the. The station wagon one day, please don't take the sword with you. But he evidently took the sword, because about 20 minutes later, I heard this gasp in the back of the. From the back of the station wagon. And I knew that the sword had fallen out the window. For the next hour and a half, I circled a stretch of highway with my high beams on. I did find the sword, although I was almost struck by an 18 wheeler retrieving it. Halloween. My husband, perhaps understandably, had absented himself more and more. And of the many things that I could provide with my prodigious energies, parenting energies, I could not provide a father who would always be around when I wanted him to. And he was more and more chillingly, familiarly off in his studio Painting. But I had this picture of Halloween, a perfect Halloween. And so, like a surgical assistant, I set out because he said he was too busy and he needed to be painting. I set out all the materials to make the pumpkins, and I carved it. I scooped out all the seeds, and I got it all ready. And I left the knives out so that when he came along, all he would have to do was this. But more and more, we did things alone. If you live in Hillsborough, New Hampshire. I wanted their life to be big, bigger than mine had been also living in a small New Hampshire town. And you have to really use your imagination to find exciting and stimulating events. Sometimes in the particular New Hampshire town where we lived, we went to the Mack Truck Museum many times. Actually, the town dump was one of our exciting and, I'm not kidding, weekly excursions. And one Saturday at the town dump, Audrey saw in the very center of the pit. This was in the days when there was a big hole, the Barbie rocker van that she had always wanted. And there was no question that I was climbing in to get it. We didn't have a lot of money. We had very little money. And I would never have supposed that I could take my children to Europe, much as I would have loved it. And then one day I saw an ad for a weekend in London for a hundred dollars. And so I thought that I can afford. And I bought three tickets for them and one for me, and we headed out to London, and I told them that they could each have one object in London. And my son Charlie chose these wonderful, brightly colored leather juggling balls. And we went down into the London tube. And Charlie began. He couldn't wait. And he began to juggle with the juggling balls. And I, knowing so well all the dangers that could happen, said, no, Charlie, don't juggle in the tube. But it was too late. One of the juggling balls fe the pit, and I jumped in after it. And that was the moment, as my daughter stood on the edge of the subway platform screaming for me to climb out, that I realized that I was becoming an insane mother. Well, that Christmas, which was the 12th Christmas of my marriage, when my husband once again found objects under the tree that seemed understandably excessive. I stuffed the bush de Noel homemade down the garbage disposal. And once again, I suppose the perfect Christmas fell a little short. That Mother's day, I was 35 years old. I got a call that my mother had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. And I was going, of course, to be with her for what proved to be the last weeks of her life. And before I left home, I sat the children down and I explained to them what had happened. And my youngest son said, is grandma going to die? And I said, yes. And then he asked the next question, which was an even harder one and one whose answer was more painful to deliver, and, will you ever die? And once again I had to say yes. And then came the third question, and, will I ever die? And I had to say, well, not for a very long time. In fact, my mother's was not the only death. That summer, my marriage also ended, and it was probably time for that to happen. And I found that although my grief was extreme, it paled beside the extraordinary sorrow over having to inflict this pain of the news to my children. And in fact, it was the last experience, I think, that my husband and I could truly share together our shared sorrow over telling them that news. And we brought them into the living room, and I can still see them very clearly. 5, 7, and 11. Willie, Charlie and Audrey sitting on the couch, looking as if they expected news of another great adventure coming up. And we told them instead that we were not going to live together as a family anymore. And each of them responded in their very different ways, so like themselves. Audrey, the oldest, who had learned by now that I felt her pain and wanted to spare me that, so she didn't show it, made a stiff little smile and said, I think I'll go watch Cosby now. Willie, the youngest, who never spared anybody anything, he was five, stood up and let out an animal moan, a wail, a sound I had never heard come out of him before or since, thank God, and flung himself against the wall with the force of a grown man and said, you mean you'll be divorced for all my life. And Charlie, who was 7, got up silently and went into the kitchen. The table was, as always, covered with art supplies, and he took out the colored pencils, and he began to draw. And I later saw he had drawn almost as if he was drawing it in blood, a heart. Not like the valentines of our February festivals, but inch by inch, so centimeter by centimeter, so painstakingly. And then after he drew the heart and shaded it with little sort of shadow marks behind it, he made a line like a piece of picture wire, like the heart was a picture. And then he made a little dot in the center, like the picture was hanging on the wall. And then my second grader wrote for his writer mother and his artist father the words, love is the best art of all. And I think that was the moment that I knew the foolishness of ever supposing that I could protect my children from pain and the folly of the ways that I had attempted to do so. That was 16 years ago. Since then, many injuries have been incurred. My children for many years traveled back and forth between our two houses with their belongings always in brown paper bags. They never seemed to get it together to get actual suitcases. They lived through the interview of the Guardian ad litem asking them which parent they wanted to live with. They lived through their mother standing in the kitchen one morning, Christmas again pouring all the milk on the floor, and car accidents and girlfriends breaking up with them and boyfriends breaking up with them and a case of malaria on a trip to Africa because they continued to be adventurers. They just went farther and farther away. And when she was 21, my daughter sent me a letter from Haiti where she was working as a social worker, to say that she had met the love of her life and when she was 21 and a half, she sent me a letter and told me that he'd been diagnosed HIV positive. The thing is that I have discovered that although I failed abysmally at protecting my children from pain, I am in fact related by blood to three amazingly happy and well adjusted human beings. And what I believe now is that as impossible as it is to spare our children pain, the real task before a parent is to raise them so that they will be strong enough to survive it. Thanks.