I was talking to my good friend Kara (via voice messages) and sort of off the cuff mentioned that while I really appreciated that I’d finally written something on here (Substack) that had made an impact, in a weird way it made me feel bad about other things I’ve posted on here as I felt like they’d said or were saying very similar things and yet, hadn’t made an impact. And also because I’d really wanted to stick it to the intellectual elite and it didn’t seem like they were also being won over by my New-Yorker-style takedown (of their approach to life/motherhood).
I felt a little embarrassed voicing this to Kara (and ditto, writing about it here), but then, voicing it as well as her response, did help clarify a few things for me.1 I’ll start with what Kara said back, which was: “But people should care about your garden!”
Let me explain. Kara was being funny. But she was also referring to one of my recent posts in which I’d contrasted a line from Anne Truitt’s Daybook about “granting grace to natural process” with what I was doing with my garden, which was trying to get rid of a gopher.
(FWIW, the previous summer, I had granted grace to natural process and that had left me with no surviving vegetable plants/ bereft.) (See live footage of my now-vacated gopher below.)
It was funny to me because of course (the majority of) people don’t and won’t care about my garden. And especially not the intellectual elite.
But what Kara’s comment revealed to me is that that is what I was trying to do with “I Speak For the Housewives.” I was trying to get the VIPs of the literary world to care about my garden. I was trying to get on their level, attempting to use their language to make a cogent argument as to why I find it both highly necessary and valuable to have the time to assistant-coach my eight-year-old’s Little League team. (Go, Rangers!)
I’m really of two minds about this. On one hand, I imagine it would be nice to not have to write 3000 words justifying my life and the choices I’ve made. (I mean, do some of the kids on my son’s Little League team even really want it?)
But on the other, I enjoyed writing that piece. I particularly enjoyed the feeling of having been able to get all of my thoughts down and in one place. It was kind of like the feeling you get after having thrown up—when the nausea disappears and you don’t wanna die anymore.
On the one hand: I’ll never be able to convince some people that motherhood is the most fascinating thing in the world.
But on the other: But what if I can?
Around the same time that I was having this conversation with Kara, I was also listening to this superb podcast episode with Dr. Gabor Maté, in which he and the host (Dr. Rangan Chatterjee) discuss the “five regrets of the dying” (as they are presented in Bronnie Ware’s book of the same name).
The entire episode is so great, but it’s during their discussion of the “second regret” of the dying where Maté, in my opinion, reinforces so much of what I’m saying in my housewives essay and also sheds some more light on my instinct to say it. Ha.
The regret in question is: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” and Maté responds by saying that he relates to this one.
He explains how he believes he chose to become a physician for legitimate reasons, that he wanted to help suffering people and also that he felt he could make a decent living doing it; he could support himself and his family. “That’s legitimate,” he says.
But those reasons don’t make you work too hard. They make you work hard, but they don’t make you work too hard.
What makes you work too hard, and that’s what these people [on their death beds] are saying, is you’re driven by something that you’re not even aware of.
And what I wasn’t aware of when I went to medical school and when I was a physician for decades, is how driven I was to justify my existence in the world and to prove that I was important and worthwhile and so on.
And that had to do with the loss of that confidence owing to early childhood trauma.
I’m worried that I could just type out the entire transcript of this portion of their interview, so I’m going to stop myself there and attempt to paraphrase the rest.
What Maté makes a case for here is: in order to avoid the fate of having this regret on your own death bed you must find out why you’ve been working so hard / why you feel driven to justify your existence in the world.
One of the reasons I went back to therapy a few years ago is because of exactly this. Why was I so driven in x, y, and z? In some things that didn’t even really matter! Too bad I couldn’t have just listened to this podcast2 because about a minute or so later in the interview, Maté nails what I discovered so succinctly:
It’s very simple. If, in early childhood you’re given the sense that you’re valued just because you existed… then you don’t have to keep proving it afterwards.
But if you don’t get that sense, then you have to be important.
Sigh. It’s so exhausting, isn’t it? Always tryna “be important.” And I definitely don’t recommend doing it on an artist’s salary. (Artist’s salary = not important enough to exist.)
I think this is the other thing that Kara’s comment was getting at. Writing about my garden isn’t important, at least not by our culture’s standards. Writing about my garden is kind of like asserting my own mediocrity. But what if that were enough?
Point being, may our kids be valued just for existing. May they work hard, but not too hard. And maaaaybe not have a Substack in which they feel compelled to write about all of this.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4bda8598-de4c-4dca-8bfa-f98d2292122c.heic)
Just kidding. My therapist works with my insurance so I can afford it and I actually like going.
That Adam Sandler placement👌 I want a whole Instagram account of Stanley’s head peering into holes. RIP the gopher! Viva la mediocrity! 🏋🏻♂️