Narrative Sample Requested: Part III- The Narrative Exam

[Jessica Fauchier]

(Poster/Conference Attendee/Author Note: Our journey toward this conference began with what we initially perceived as a nearly complete book. However, through the assigned readings and the thoughtful prompts introduced during our preparatory work, we realized just how much needed to change. It is with humility and passion-not haste and hubris-that we embarked on this project almost anew. Below is what we currently believe to be the beginning of our book. We now view it as a piece of creative nonfiction rather than a self-help tutorial. We look forward to all the learning that awaits us next week. -Jessica and Joahn )

Intimate Reflections:  

 A Twins’ Journey to Reclaim the Power and Visibility of a Woman as She Ages in a Sexualized Society  

  

Summer of Sorrow: 

We call it the summer of sorrow. My twin and I would lie on either side of our mother on a mattress we’d dragged into the living room. We were home from our freshman year of college, determined to help our shattered mother navigate the darkest chapter of her life. 

Our father had left her for another woman, leaving her so heartbroken that even getting up, going to work, or caring for our little sister seemed insurmountable.  Our parents had tried counselling twice, but during the second session when the counsellor (male) told our mom point blank that “He [our dad] never wants to have sex with you anymore”, she knew it was over.  She confessed only recently that she has not felt desirable since.   

 When my mom told us our family as we had known it was broken forever it felt like we all cried together for days. It was jarring and unmooring to be so young and idealistic, on the verge of building our own adult life, and unexpectedly seeing our mom so shattered and lost. Here we were, ready to build our own futures and potential families, now witnessing the woman we loved and looked up to most without power or strength or a framework for what her next decades would look like. One man, our own father, (had held such a now seemingly precarious hold on our little family.)  

 I took a full time job working at a surf shop and a part time job at the jewelry shop to help pay the bills, while my twin assumed the role of caregiver, preparing small, careful meals for our mother and taking our sister to the public pool to swim away the strange new days in the warm sun. Each night, we gathered as a makeshift family isolated in our bubble of sorrow. 

As the weeks passed and our mother gradually reclaimed her strength, we began taking long beach walks where we discussed the twist of fate that had brought us there and speculated about what life might look like for our mother now—a single woman in her mid-forties, reinventing herself after losing the love of her life.  

The summer of sorrow was not without humor, however. Early on, my twin sister announced “It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all” whereupon we all cracked up, especially because it was way too soon. (Now we use that adage whenever someone says the wrong thing.) We learned that summer through our mom that nothing, not even heartbreak, is one hundred percent dark. Our mom still tried to make us laugh. She would sometimes pretend to answer the phone saying, “Yes, I forgive you, you can come home!”   

Although punctuated by laughs, we learned a hard and cruel lesson that summer. Our power as women can suddenly be taken away by a man whom we love but who no longer loves us – our feelings of self-worth and desirability cut off at the knees. Pain and grief are part of life, but it’s up to us NOT to remain stuck in a bitter and vengeful whirlwind of our own mind. After clawing her way out of those first intense weeks and months of sorrow, our mom has managed to stay childlike in how she views the world and in how she views herself. As a magical being of light, capable of magical things. You can see this in her eyes when she talks, and you can feel it surround you when you join her in conversation. She is a rare person who does not seem to feel loss or bitter as she aged, (just adventure and marvel.) 

Our mom grew stronger over the next year, but she would often talk about feeling invisible in society in this new role as a single, middle-aged woman, that her presence and voice no longer held attention and respect wherever she went. The thrum of youth did not vibrate around her and call attention to her; wanted or not. Without the role of wife to identify with, she felt lost.  

As we listened to our mom talk about her invisibility crisis and drowning sense of self, my twin and I vowed to define ourselves on different terms. We were determined to avoid the vulnerability of being defined by our desirability in our sexualized society. Our young and still- forming minds wanted desperately to guard ourselves against that kind of betrayal and heartbreak. We wanted to be able to face something like that without being cut off at the knees. But as we soon found out in young adulthood, it is one thing to be determined to avoid something and quite another to be successful.  

The Betrayal 

“Just eat this,” she said handing me an orange slice from the orange she had just peeled. I was sitting on my secondhand couch in a nice family home in a bad neighborhood in Sacramento. The tears had dried up and I felt hollow inside.  

“Why?” I asked my twin in a baffled and hoarse voice. We were in our mid-twenties, did not have scurvy and were not even trying to stave off a cold. In fact, my condition was arguably worse than severe malnutrition or the flu; I had just discovered that I could add betrayed wife to my budding resume as an adult. Mixed in with the immediate grief of the betrayal and the details surrounding it was a shocking. How had I let this happen to me? I was sure that I had chosen a spouse who was safe. My then husband had swept into my life right after the summer of sorrow when I was back at college. He witnessed me reeling from my broken childhood family and pledged to be my new home. I couldn't believe this was happening -feeling like my mom must have felt; that my sense of self and confidence was so tethered to the whims of another’s desire. I had been a part of this play before but had played a supporting character in the betrayal drama. I was the daughter who had helped her mom through infidelity and the rebuilding herself. This was a whole new ballgame; it was now my turn to be the aggrieved spouse and to see if the lessons from my youth held strong. 

“Just eat it please,” she said shoving the half-moon shaped soggy slice of orange in front of me again. Of course, eating the orange did not rewind time to six months before and keep my gross husband’s pants zipped and my little world tilted right on its axis. It did not stop the tears, nor did it stop the next six months of fear and despondency as I navigated a divorce and life after scandal.  

I ate an orange slice that first night after finding out about the betrayal. My twin raced to my house (with apparently an orange in her purse) from miles away as soon as I called to deliver the news that rocked my world. I ate another orange slice the next weekend when we looked for apartments. I ate still more orange slices when we packed my few belongings I wanted to take with me. I ate oranges when we met at the gym to workout. I ate oranges on my lunch break when I tried to ignore the sympathetic looks from coworkers who knew that I had been so betrayed. I ate oranges as I thought about my shortcomings and why I had not been enough.  

Oranges became a constant in that first year. It symbolized still doing something good for myself even when I did not feel worthy. It symbolized my twin’s determination to do anything she could in a spot where she was mostly helpless. She could not fix the fact that I married an amoral and cruel man but she sure as hell could peel me some citrus and help me help myself. She knew what I needed in that moment was to not just be a broken woman but instead be a woman eating an orange slice. I was doing what I had pledged years before in our summer of sorrow; I was not going to let this betrayal be what defined me. I also knew at a deep part of me that this betrayal hit different than one at 40 or 45. I still had a life to build and a family to create. I could dust myself off and find a new path in what still felt like a long runway of my life. I thought back on what my mom had said about feeling invisible and could only imagine how much harder her heartbreak had felt when she truly believed her years of desirability were behind her. This made me, and my twin, want to redouble our efforts not to be defined by desire and sexualized visibility. 

The Invisibility Crisis; the Invisibility Myth 

The next fifteen years were spent in a blur of career and family building; creating a life and continuing to feel like thriving and youthful participants of our sexualized society. It wasn’t until we approached the same age our mom had been that summer of sorrow that we truly grasped what she had been trying to share with us. It was not until our early forties that we started to experience what we thought was the invisibility she spoke about that we had pledged to guard against all those years prior. Her words started to make sense in our changing world as we left the full color glaze of youth. We realized this idea of slowly becoming invisible is not just something our mom experienced that we could just guard our heart against; it seemed inevitable in the sexualized world we live in. But just as we did during the summer of sorrow, my twin and I were determined to navigate this new phase together. This was not really how life had to be; we were determined not to allow our sense of self wither along with our metabolism.  

As identical twins and now coauthors, we actually have a combined wisdom of over 88 years.  Because that is of course how it works when you are a twin. Everything one of us does is like both of us doing it. A point of pain for one, hits even harder for the other. A moment of joy and triumph for one, felt even more acutely for the other. A sonogram in utero declared us one giant baby. Two heartbeats beating as one from the beginning. Two beings, split in utero, continuing to grow together almost as a unit. Getting ready for school side by side in the mirror in high school, sometimes getting distracted wondering who was doing what and laughing at the silliness of it.  When my boyfriend decided he was actually into her, I sighed in total understanding and we both wrote him off with a laugh and a big glass of wine. When I first found out I had infertility, she barely needed to get tested to know she did too. When I had my first miracle IVF baby, hers of course came months later as well.  

Hitting middle age together and grappling with the feeling of shrinking in the world overtook us like a rogue wave used to in the ocean we grew up in. Engulfing us was a feeling of being isolated and yet too exhausted to know how to be less lonely. It took us a while to recognize the source of this new phase of loneliness and despair, but it helped to give voice to it and realize, like always, we were in lock step with our experiences. As we did during the summer of sorrow and with every challenge before and since, we approached the trauma as a challenge to be worked out. Side by side we knew we could always find the joy, the good and the optimism that was waiting to be discovered. The more we explored the idea of an invisibility crisis, the more we realized that this crisis is a construct of our society that values youth and sexuality above all else.   If we refuse to buy into this idea and realize that we were never, and never will be how others define us, spouses and lovers included, then we are free to unveil who we really are. We want to share what we have discovered with you, in hopes that you will find the same optimism that we have. You, an aging woman past the point of being sexualized, are not destined for invisibility.  You now have the freedom out of the harsh glare of society’s expectations to unveil who you really are. The best is yet to come.