Domestic Affairs

Well, I did it. I finally checked-out Joyce Maynard's book, Domestic Affairs from our town library.

"So?" I can hear you ask.

So I've walked past that book for at least ten years now, averting my gaze and avoiding it's lovely-yet-honest-too pages because I know that Joyce and her husband divorced not too long after she wrote this book all about the adventures and trials of her family's life in a 200 year-old farmhouse on a dirt road in New Hampshire. I started rereading it once after I heard of their divorce, but laid it down because the bittersweetness was too heavy.

When the book appeared in 1987 I requested it immediately through our library because for ages I'd lived for Joyce's monthly columns in Country Living Magazine describing her life on the homefront with three children and a husband and a writing shed in her wooded backyard. I loved Joyce's way with words--I still do. 

Anyway, I probably read Domestic Affairs 4 or 5 times before I heard that Joyce and Steve had divorced and she'd left her children with him for awhile. And then they shared custody, I believe, then she took the kids with her to California, etc..  And I know these things happen--you don't get to be 46 without knowing about real-life--and yet. Sigh.

Each time I ran across Joyce in a magazine article she'd written updating her life or while standing at the library and glimpsing through a couple of her newer books, I longed to, instead, picture Joyce and her husband and her children back in that old farmhouse living new Domestic Affairs chapters. My mind craved a certain happy ending which could never come now. 

Hence, the reason I scuffled past Domestic Affairs on those metal library shelves downtown.

But this morning, I broke through the walls I'd built up with sentiment and bittersweetness and grabbed the book and took it to the librarians' desk before I could change my mind. As long as the whole world is changing, I may as well change too. Well, in good ways. 

And you know? Just after two pages, I was pulled into this book again--yanked in as I always am with Joyce's words, her writing style. I was there with her children at 6:30 on a dark morning with the spilt plastic Cheerio bowls, the cartoons and the crying.

About the only thing Joyce and I have in common is that we are both mothers of one daughter. Hers was born a year before mine and then later, she had two sons. Her early stories always made me want to have more children and to live in a big old farmhouse. Her home seemed so full and disorganized and mine was just the opposite. 

Like most people, I wanted what I did not have. 

At least for awhile. Come to think of it, when I stopped rereading Domestic Affairs, I believe that's when I stopped wanting more children (but I still wanted the big old house). Hmmm. That was 14 years ago. Who says books are not powerful things?

All of this is to say I highly recommend reading Domestic Affairs.

 Especially if this phase of your life is filled with home, kids, pets and cleaning up after all of them and trying to find some time and meaning for yourself in the midst of it all. This is not a "Christian" book but Joyce wrote a delightful chapter called 'Christian Marriage' about a family with whom they shared dinner. She compared the two families and her observations are insightful. But then, her writing is constantly insightful--you always feel as though Joyce is taking dictation from her heart. 

And in the midst of the excellent writing and the stories of day-to-day family-life perhaps you can pinpoint where things began to go wrong inside that old farmhouse--and then avoid that wrong turn, yourself.



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