The lie I told most often in my twenties during the Reagan era was that I liked other people’s children although I didn’t intend to have my own. I taught at a Catholic college in a small town in Wisconsin and was married to a public school teacher. After my husband, Chuck, and I bought a house, even people we scarcely knew asked us when we were going to “start a family.”
I didn’t like other people’s children at all. I was shocked when my colleagues, in-laws, or neighbors stopped by unannounced with their toddlers in tow and sat drinking coffee, chatting, and making no attempt whatsoever to keep their children from touching everything in sight: my books, the stacks of mail I had just sorted through, my knitting supplies, the ceramic dishware I didn’t get a chance to put away. Standing in the checkout line of grocery stores behind women (it was always women) whose children were screaming, running around, or trying to toss items out of or into their carts, I wondered what kept these beleaguered mothers from abandoning both their provisions and their offspring and driving away. The empty car on an open road would feel like a shot of pure oxygen. I would not stop until I was a few states away, where I could start a new life under an assumed name. When my friends’ children kept interrupting the adult conversation, I excused myself, walked a safe distance away from the house, and pretended to smoke a (nonexistent) cigarette because I was afraid of what I might say or do if I’d stayed.
What have we aged into? We’re still capable of action, change and 10K races. But there’s a new immediacy to the 40s — and an awareness of death — that didn’t exist before. Our possibilities feel more finite. All choices now plainly exclude others. It’s pointless to keep pretending to be what we’re not. At 40, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what Immanuel Kant called the “Ding an sich” — the thing itself.
Indeed, the strangest part of the 40s is that we’re now the ones attending parent-teacher conferences and cooking the turkey on Thanksgiving. These days, when I think, “Someone should really do something about that,” I realize with alarm that that “someone” is me.
“There’s a lot of negativity,” sighs Sam Cook, 34, a founder of Button Poetry, which specializes in spreading the gospel of poetry through YouTube. “Poetry has been such a niche space for so long, and the people in it feel like they’re entitled to decide what is good and what is bad.” They fret that the artlessness of Twitter, and the heightened self-consciousness of Instagram, is diluting poetry’s power, if not making a mockery of the whole canon.
“There are people,” Cook says, “that think it never should have gone to the Internet.”
So as I stood on the weed-eaten paths of our California yard last spring, I couldn’t make the same decision. But it wasn’t just because I knew the weeds, like the ivy, would keep coming back. It was because the moral costs of Roundup seemed to have compounded in the interim. In 2015, the World Health Organization had declared glyphosate a “probable” cause of human cancer. In 2016, my new home state of California notified the public that it planned to add glyphosate to the Prop 65 list of chemicals known to cause cancer. In 2017, it did. And so our gravel disappeared under a blanket of green.
Then this past fall, Island Press, based in Washington, DC, and known for its books on big environmental problems, published Whitewash, an exposé on Roundup by longtime Reuters agricultural reporter Carey Gillam. Erin Brockovich promised it read “like a mystery novel” as it revealed “Monsanto’s secretive strategies.” I quickly reached for a copy, eager for a good read on the chemical’s unstoppable rise and a journalistically objective assessment of the full range of its health and environmental risks. The book, I’m sorry to report, isn’t quite a mystery novel. But it has stayed with me. By the time I finished it, I was more secure than ever in my decision not to spray Roundup, and I went to greater lengths than usual to bring home organic and pesticide-free foods for my family. But the book also raised more questions for me than it answered. And it made me aware of a troubling set of ironies embedded in the regulatory system charged with upholding health and environmental standards while securing economic interests.
Bristling with the urgency of lived experience, this is a short and beautifully written (translated by Deborah Dawkin) account of love’s autoimmunity. Whether or not it’s based on reality, it’s grounded in deep emotional truth.