A Million Years with You (24 page)

Before Jack got back the driver's license he had lost for drunk driving, I would sometimes give him a ride somewhere and, much to his annoyance, find myself flinging out my right arm and pinning him to the seat if we came to a sudden stop—a reaction left over from my own kids in the days before there were seat belts. I never did that to other people. In an earlier life, I probably was Jack's mother.

 

Like me, Jack was in AA, and he came to our house that day because he hadn't seen me in any AA meetings. He also learned that I'd been thinking about a rifle in my upstairs closet and the bullets in a drawer. How did this happen? I must have said something to someone—perhaps to him—as I never would have said anything so dire to Steve. “Hi, Jack,” I said when I saw him in the kitchen. “I'm drunk.”

He said, “I know,” and went upstairs to get the rifle.

 

Soon after that I got a conference call from my two kids—my son, who lived across the road, and my daughter, who lived in Texas. Jack must have alerted them. But they didn't sound like anyone's kids. They sounded like full-fledged, power-mad grownups insisting that I go to a drug and alcohol rehab center. Beech Hill was long gone by then, but they had found two other centers, one in Arizona and one in New Hampshire. I was to choose, they said.

I refused. I apologized for drinking, told them I knew I shouldn't be doing it, and promised to stop right then by returning to AA. I'd do it for Steve and for them, but no rehab center, not then, not ever, and that was the end of it.

They paid no attention. They told me the only choice I had was which rehab center and if I didn't choose one, they'd choose for me.

Jack arrived and the discussion grew heated. I yelled that I was a freaking adult and their freaking mother and was freaking well running my own freaking life. This went right past them. And finally, exhausted and outnumbered, I caved to those full-fledged, power-mad grownups, especially since Steve had joined in on their side. The next thing I knew I was in the New Hampshire rehab center, standing in a circle of hand-holding people, saying the Serenity Prayer.

 

As with Beech Hill, I had a wonderful time at the center. My son and his family moved in with Steve and the dogs and cats, so I had little to worry about. I especially enjoyed the other women over fifty, some of them staff and others residents. One was my roommate. These freewheeling women were emotional giants, wise, brave, and unendingly funny. Other people called us the Golden Girls, but I preferred the names that one of our own circle chose for us—the Drunken Bitches and the No-Uterus Club. (Actually, one of us still had a uterus, but she was an honorary member.) And all but one of us smoked. To be with people like them was all I ever wanted. It was great to be sober. I was exceptionally happy.

Many people ask why the twelve-step programs are successful—not for everyone, to be sure, but for those who stay with them—and a number of theories are offered. But in that rehab center, I was struck with a theory of my own, which came from the Old Way, from the Ju/wa hunter-gatherers when they lived on the savannah.

The twelve-step discussion meetings were similar to the Ju/wa encampments. The most important similarity, of course, was that belonging to the group enabled everyone's survival. But there were other similarities too. Both kinds of groups had roughly the same numbers of people—not exact numbers, to be sure, but on the same scale. Somehow that kind of number seems right. Neither group had chiefs or leaders. Men and women were equal and nobody was more important than anybody else. In both kinds of community, the equality feels right. Why might this be so? Because all members of these groups are in the same situation with similar amounts of knowledge. The individuals are their own leaders and they make their decisions together.

One more factor seemed important. A few months after the No-Uterus Club left the rehab center, we met there again one Sunday when the center held an open house. We had no special reason for going except that we wanted to see one another. The rest of our club had gone the night before, but I couldn't spend a night away from Steve so I joined them in the morning.

About fifty other people were present. Some of them were staff, some were residents whom we knew, some were residents who came after we left, some were former residents who left before we came, and some were local people there to attend an AA meeting. Everyone who knew me gave me a big hug and began to tell me the news of current and former residents, some of it good but some of it bad, about people who had “gone back out” (which is AA-speak for drugging or drinking) and had incurred all kinds of trouble, from jail to detox, all of it upsetting but none of it surprising, as any of this can happen when someone goes back out.

Three things struck me. The first was the tragedy of the bad news. The second was the speed with which I learned it. And the third and most important was that I learned it at all. This was due to our unity. The deep, personal news I got at the rehab center was of the kind that's spread around by a close, functional family in which every member expects to know the facts about everybody else and to know these facts immediately. Most certainly the people in the Ju/wa encampments expected nothing less.

Thus a twelve-step group and a savannah encampment would appear to be similar. Or so they seemed to me. And why might that be? Like all other mammals, we carry a certain amount of inherited information. Perhaps we carry an inherited memory of some of the ancient behaviors that helped our survival for hundreds of thousands of years. If so, such memories may still work for our survival by way of twelve-step programs, all over the world and in many different cultures. To be with like-minded equals promotes serenity, the loss of which left me filled with fear and canceled my sobriety. But I got smoothed out at the rehab center when, after a few days, my stressful life with all its problems receded, and I began to know the other residents. We achieved a sense of community unlike any other except perhaps those of the Paleolithic savannah—and the ease I felt among these people made me calm.

There with the others, I was in the moment. I saw that I should live in the moment. If not, I would spend the rest of my life worrying about terrible things that might happen, everything from a decline in my husband's health to the predicted eruption of the Yellowstone volcano, which, according to the geologists, will end life as we know it. Or I could simply experience each moment as it came. I saw that if nothing bad is actually in progress, most moments are quite pleasant.

 

A dear friend of mine, the anthropologist Megan Biesele, once pointed out something that I found very important, which is that post-Neolithic people are different from hunter-gatherers in the way they experience daily life. Most of us are required to focus on the future, a mindset that began with the Neolithic farmers. The seeds they planted in spring produced food in the fall. Their cow would not give milk until she had a calf, and it took nine months for that to happen. The early farmers were compelled to look ahead, and the concept holds. Today, for all kinds of reasons, most of us continue to focus on the future.

But hunter-gatherers focused on the present. They paid constant attention to everything around them, from a rustle in the grass to vultures in the sky, as every little thing told them something, usually something important. Of course they were aware of the future and of course they thought about it, but they lived in the present—in the moment. Megan might compare my former way of thinking to that of the post-Neolithic people and my new way of thinking to that of hunter-gatherers. And there's no one I'd rather resemble.

 

I have a parting thought for people who don't belong to a twelve-step program. They'd be astonished to know who does. Down in those church basements are some of the best and most respected people in anyone's community. I speak from considerable experience when I say that recovering addicts of all kinds tend to be substantially wiser and better informed about life and humanity than is the general population. It has been my great privilege to hear what they have to say.

11

T
O LIVE IN THE MOMENT
was not my only useful lesson from the Ju/wasi. Another was how to raise children. I wrote about this extensively in
The Old Way
, saying:

 

The Ju/wasi were unfailingly good to their children. An infant would be nursed on demand and stay close to its mother, safe in the pouch of her cape, warm in cold weather, shaded in hot weather, complete with a wad of soft grass for a diaper. Ju/wa children very rarely cried, probably because they had little to cry about.
[This, I believe, was true of our species from the earliest times, because crying tells a predator that somewhere a helpless child is in distress and no one is paying attention.]
No child was ever yelled at or slapped or physically punished, and few were even scolded. Most never heard a discouraging word until they were approaching adolescence, and even then the reprimand, if it was a reprimand, was delivered in a soft voice. At least the tone was soft, even if the words weren't always. We are sometimes told that children who are treated so kindly become spoiled, but this is because those who hold that opinion have no idea how successful such measures can be. Free from frustration or anxiety, sunny and cooperative, and usually without close siblings as competitors, the Ju/wa children were every parent's dream. No culture can ever have raised better, more intelligent, more likable, more confident children.
¹

 

I don't claim to have been a perfect mother—certainly not while I was drinking—but at least I adhered to the Ju/wa principles, and this alone must have overridden my sins, because if I say so myself, my children turned out quite well.

The first one—the daughter in Texas who forced me to go to the rehab center—was born in Manhattan on the hottest night of the year. Steve drove me to the hospital in our rattling Volkswagen bug. Then he went home, as someone told him the birth might take a long time and men were not allowed to stay with women in labor. So I was left alone in a tiny, windowless cubicle with no one to talk to, nothing to read, nothing but bare walls to look at. Music was playing on some in-house public address system—sprightly Elizabethan tunes along the lines of “Greensleeves.” The music tinkled away as the pain grew worse, then grew unbearable—more than I'd ever experienced—then swelled into the horrible, blinding pain that's said to be the most the nervous system can transmit.

By then the music seemed inappropriate, piping merrily away while I was smelling my own blood and losing control of my bowels. This went on for nine hours while I swore I'd never look at a man again as long as I lived and certainly not my husband.

At one point someone tried to give me a spinal anesthetic but was unable to insert the needle. Thus I felt the whole thing, just as the Ju/wa women did, just as my ancestors had done before me. But because of an atavistic, prehuman fear of attracting attention while in so much trouble, I never once screamed. Interestingly, neither did the Ju/wa women alone in the bush, crouched down and grinding their teeth as the baby was coming. The last thing one wants to do at a time like that is to attract a predator.

The next thing I knew, I was holding a little baby girl. The past nine hours vanished from memory as if they had never been. The hospital people wanted to put my baby in the nursery, the standard procedure back then, but I remembered the Ju/wasi, who would think this was madness. A newborn baby away from her mother? There could be no such thing. Maybe in fifteen or sixteen years I'd let go of this child, but not much sooner, and certainly not then. I refused to hand her to the hospital people. So they put a crib from the nursery beside my bed.

Steve had returned by this time, and we took turns holding her. We named her Stephanie Kirsti, Stephanie for him and Kirsti for my beloved Finnish surrogate mother. Then visiting hours were over, Steve had to go, and I was alone with my new daughter. Getting born must be a rough experience, and giving birth is even worse, so both of us were tired. But being a grownup, wanting to absorb this marvelous thing that had just happened to me, I was still wide awake. Not so my little daughter, who had fallen asleep.

By then it was after midnight. I still didn't want to let go of her. Nor did I think she would want me to. I'd noticed that her tiny hands had a viselike grip, ready to cling to the long dark fur that would have covered my body if we were still in the African rainforest. Evidently giving birth was nothing new.

But it seemed new. I took her to a window. She opened her eyes. We looked out at the night. We were in the Presbyterian Hospital on Morningside Heights, one of the highest points in the city, and it came to me that somewhere among those miles of dark streets and buildings was a boy who would marry my daughter and take her away from me.

That was true. He was in the Bronx, eleven years old, and his name was Bob Kafka. At that moment he was probably asleep.

Interestingly, just as I was writing the above paragraphs, the phone rang. It was Bob, so I told him what I had just written. He was intrigued. Then he asked, “Were you looking at the Bronx?” I said yes. He said, “Are you sure were looking
right at
the Bronx?” I said I was positive. “That explains it!” he cheered. “At exactly that moment I knew I was extremely lucky. I ran down to the street to play stickball and hit a two-sewer.”

“What's a two-sewer?” I asked.

“In stickball,” said Bob, “a
home run
.”

 

Stephanie was a dream child, very beautiful, an excellent student, loved by all. She also was tough, as she proved one autumn day when we, with her brother and some of their friends, were going camping. We had put our gear in backpacks and were about to leave for the camping area when Steve, who at the time was involved with a political campaign, learned that he couldn't come. Elections were at hand. The candidate needed him.