“I found after becoming a mom that I was responding to various experiences or happenings in really particular ways.” Professor, author, and mother Courtney Zoffness discusses how the lens of motherhood inspired her new collection, Spilt Milk. She shares her own experience with childhood anxiety, ponders nature vs. nurture, and talks with Zibby about parenting techniques.
Eilene: From that and the shock of learning that it was not a heart attack from working too hard as I thought it was, that it was actually this infection from drug abuse and that he had been addicted for at least a year probably, I started to examine what happened in terms of what happened to him and how I missed it. I am a journalist. I'm used to asking questions. I'm a smart person. Yet I decided it was not that, whether consciously or unconsciously. I decided it was going to be everything else, bipolar disorder, a cognitive disorder. Maybe he was psychotic. Maybe he had an eating disorder instead of the very obvious thing; oh, he's a drug addict. He's struggling with a drug addiction is a better way to say it. The book grew out of that investigation and also looking at myself and my own culpability and what was happening to our family, the fallout -- we had two children -- and then an investigation a little bit into what's going on in the white-collar professional world that you know so well in terms of unhappiness, depression, anxiety, substance use, and substance abuse. It was a very sobering exploration for me. I ended the book sort of looking at what's coming for all of our kids in the next generation of white-collar professionals and societal leaders and judges and lawyers and things like that.
Laura: Separation Anxiety is about a couple who can't really afford to get divorced, and so they have to live together and stay in the same house. They live in separate parts of the house. The cover for their newly teenage son is that one of them snores. Of course, it's Judy who snores, but she claims that it's Gary who snores. He sleeps in the basement in a spare bedroom. It's also about Judy who has gotten to a point in her life at fifty, where a lot of us get at that age, where loss seems to be the prevalent thing. She's lost both of her parents. Her career has gone downhill. She can't seem to get things going. Obviously, her marriage is challenging. Her son is now a teenager who becomes the typical quiet, secretive, kid that she can no longer snuggle. In that emotional space, she one day looks at the dog and decides to start to wear the dog in an old baby sling that she never even wore her son in. She was cleaning out the basement to try to declutter and suddenly finds a sling and thinks, oh boy, I'm going to put the dog in there. That's her form of self-comfort.
Randi: I was a yoga teacher for a handful of years while I was juggling a lot of other very complicated parts of my life, which I have a feeling we'll get into. Yoga was my saving grace personally. It also became the place where I could take a lot of the struggles in my life, take the lessons I was learning from them, and help people. It was a very direct equation. My favorite part of teaching yoga was not so much about the poses. Although, I love the poses. They're incredibly healing. I loved telling stories. That was where I dug the experience of teaching. If you're a yoga person, you might know that as the dharma talk. The dharma talk is that moment in the beginning of class where you take a deep breath and then your teacher gives you some kind of nugget of wisdom. That was my favorite part. Then connecting that to the postures felt like this incredible opportunity to weave whatever I was going through and give something, a gift, to a people that could, in a way I might never know, help them.
Reema: That's one of my favorite scenes. When you're a memoirist, you're bound to the truth, meaning you can't fabricate any scene. Strangely enough, my life has that experience of being, not directly ordered, but certainly given the cue that I need to hold my breath. To say that I spent many years holding my breath around my father wouldn't be hyperbole or metaphor. My mother and I, we recall that story quite often. It’s one of those scenes that unzips so much. From the time I was a child, I knew that my father’s love was constant. His love was nonnegotiable. However, I did feel that his affection, his attention, and certainly his approval was based on conditions. I felt that even the slightly imperfection was a failure on my part as his daughter, as a person.
Jill: I was always the last picked. You know when they used to go, “You're the two captains,” and you each got to pick, I was always picked last. Maybe that was a good thing in hindsight because I knew that I wasn’t good at it. If it was where the coach did it and made everything equal, I might have actually thought I was good at something that I wasn’t.
