Jessi Klein - Ill Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

For the mothers

I m driving the three-minute scoot to the supermarket to pick up a few boxes of very safe, instantly dissolving toddler cookies called Nom-Noms, which is really what all cookies should be called (and, while were at it, all food). My two-and-a-half-year-old son, Asher, loves Nom-Noms, and we were about to run out, so this trip needs to happen before the shit hits the fan.

While in the car, Im listening to the writer Elizabeth Gilbert on Oprahs Super Soul podcast (as you do). Gilbert is the author of Eat Pray Love, the 2006 bestseller about her soul-awakening travels to India, Italy, and Bali; its a book I love and have read an embarrassing number of times.

Nom-Noms are these magical little biscuits that are probably about ninety-nine percent air. The rest is a mysterious blend of I think sweet potato juice and Styrofoam. (If youre thinking, Theres no such thing as sweet potato juice, you are correct. But this is precisely the mysterious essence of the Nom-Nom.) Every Nom-Nom is reliably about five inches long and shaped like a mini surfboard with very minor irregularities around the edge. (Im sure they could be baked to be perfectly smooth, but I think theyre going for some kind of wabi-sabi hand-hewn aesthetic, which I appreciate in theory, but it also feels like an unnecessary effort given the audience?)

The day stretching out before me as I drove the three minutes from my house to the supermarket was itself a bit like a Nom-Nom; it would be the same as all the other days Ive been living since my son was born, since we moved to Los Angeles, and since Ive been working part-time. Part-time at home; part-time, occasionally, in an office; part-time, in an existential sense, as a mother; and the smallest part of the time, feeling like myself. My days look and taste a lot like nothing, and yet they are there. They mostly feel the same, but around the edges, of course, they are different.

The most colorful and sparkly, lovely differences are occasional boozy lunches with dear friendstruly, in my opinion, the greatest luxury of a self-employed persons life. But they are infrequent, partially because they feel too indulgent in the middle of the day, even though I know this is the rhythm of a writers routine, and partially because everyone is busy. Im supposed to be busy too, writing, and yet the paradox of being busy writing is that so much of writing feels dangerously similar to doing nothing. I sit and stare and, usually (again, this might be specific just to me), sink into a low-grade (but sometimes high-grade) depression. I have at it for as many hours as I can, the clock ticking down until its time to go home. Im supposed to relieve Ashers nanny at six p.m., but I always attempt to alleviate the guilt I feel about the number of hours our nanny works by letting her go twenty minutes early; Im aware this is nonsense, and also I feel guilty for thinking this nonsense.

So anyway, Elizabeth Gilbert and Nom-Noms.

Gilbert was telling Oprah about how in the aftermath of Eat Pray Loves publication, she was often approached, at book signings or talks, by two subsets of women. The first were those who, inspired by her book, bought plane tickets and attempted, in some fashion, to trace Gilberts steps. (This group of women famously, if unintentionally, contributed to such a dense wave of tourism in Bali that it got to the point where there were almost more Eat Pray Love fans walking around than there were actual Balinese citizens.) The second subsetand this is the one that really caught my attention as I began my fifteenth circle around the supermarket parking lot, waiting for someone to leave so that I could grab a spotwas that group of women who had similarly been inspired to go on a spiritual globe-trotting quest by the book but were unable to do so for one of many reasons: the financial impossibility, a job that couldnt be left, a family or kids or sick parents under their care, or a combination of all of these things. Rapt, I parked my car and plugged in my headphones so I could finish the podcast while I was inside the store.

As I finally threw the Nom-Noms into my shopping cart, Gilbert was talking about the archetypal heros journey, and how throughout the history of literature, the heros journey has been represented as, specifically, a mans journey to a faraway place. There, he conquers or fights some person or army or thing and, in doing so, saves us all. While this quintessential hero is running about, his wife/mother/sister/girlfriend/daughter/all of the above stays home, very much not on a heros journey. She cooks or cleans or weeps or Pinterests while he is out and about, slaying and defending and generally being courageous. Though I was familiar with this trope (youre familiar with it too if youve ever seen, literally, any Hollywood movieStar Wars, for example), I hadnt heard of the book Gilbert referenced at length, Joseph Campbells The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he distills the seventeen universally traversed steps of this tale as its been told forever by cultures around the world. I realize as a writer I probably should have read (or at least known about?) Campbells book, but there are so many episodes of The Bachelor to watch that Im not sure where I would have ever found the time.

As I waited on the checkout line, staring blankly at the displays of Altoids and magazines and realizing simultaneously that it was 4:23 p.m. and that nothing about my life felt familiar anymore, Gilbert started talking about how we need to reconceive our vision of the heros journey. The heros journey is not the exclusive territory of men, she said, and it does not have to involve faraway lands... I paused the podcast as I swiped my card to pay for the Nom-Noms.

Even after I loaded my recyclable bags (good person) into the back of my car and began the drive home, that concept and those words, heros journey, kept echoing inside me. Some lonely, estranged part of my old self, some thirsty little leaf, leaned toward the idea, wanting to know more. I find it harder and harder to read an entire bookdealing with a kid, The Bachelor, so very busybut I can peruse the shit out of a long Wikipedia entry. So I googled Joseph Campbell heros journey and started reading.

Campbells conception of the journey begins with a potential hero, who is just going about his life as normalyou know, texting and taking antidepressants or whatever. He receives a call to adventure, to a place that Campbell describes as: a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight. Reading this sentence gave me the same adrenaline-filled feeling you get when you are almost certain, but not yet positive, that youre feeling an earthquakeyou freeze, and your whole body listens. In this moment of silent anticipation, for the first time since my son was bornhaving spent each day since feeling invisible to the mainstream world, over the hill, like a Swiffer on legs, wiping his nose with my hand, and not having sex, and generally functioning as a kind of automated milk-and-comfort-dispensing machineI began to entertain a thought...

Is it possible Ive been on a heros journey this whole time? Is it possible I am on one right now?

What shook me about Campbells words is how perfectly they describe motherhood. To begin with: a profound dream state. The first three months after my son was born, for sure, were nothing less than a never-ending somnambulance. And even though I was not on a secret island or a lofty mountaintop, once I became a mom, I felt in my bones that deep sense of distance and isolation, of being far away from everyone else, stranded with my new