On “Letter to my son”
1. Introduction to the book
I’m one of the many daughters of Simone de Beauvoir, the author of The Second Sex, published in 1949, and of Elisabeth Badinter, the author of Maternal Love, published in 1981. If I had not read their books I would not have written Letter to my son, my last pubished book, and the one I am willing to speak to you about.
It is not easy to speak about this book as it was not easy to write it. I did not plan to write this book, it happened because I needed to write it. For different reasons my son, my unique son, didn’t want to speak to me and he left home. I knew it was no use running after him. I knew that I had to wait, but I could only do it writing to him.
Writing a letter that I could not send and that I did not intend to publish helped me to have patience and therefore to change my way of relating to my son. It made me think about motherhood and love, and afterwards it made him think about childhood and liberty.
I wanted to know what kind of mother I had been and how could I possibly avoid the mistakes I had made. In order to answer the question I had to remember our life together and I let myself be guided by the idea that life is a cryptogram, it has to be deciphered, like Breton said. Like Kerouac would say. Because these writers, Breton and Kerouac, identified litterature and life. They reintroduced the subject in the poetical creation, for they wanted a more visceral expression.
The first thing I told my son in the book is that the cherry season began the day he was born and that I owe his birth to a close friend. She had a dream about me and she told me to get to the doctor quickly. In her dream my son’s life was at risk. I went the same day and the doctor found that the blood-flow was no longer satisfactory and scheduled a C-section for the next day. The placent was drying up.
This friend is a poet, she is clairvoyant, and it was thanks to a vision of hers that my son was born. I, who used to be sceptical about clairvoyance, have believed in visions ever since. In order to be clairvoyant, one must be sensitive to the unconscious, and poets are.
So I first told my son in the book that we both made it through by the skin of our teeth and that I could not undestand that he would refuse to speak to me. To that I added that I was writing in order to make him present but also to ask myself what is it to be a mother. In a way it was theater, but theater can change our lifes.
The act of writing, enabled me to resist the imperious desire to contact my son. Why not, after all? Didn’t I raise him? As if, for having reared a child, a mother has the right to insist on his presence. The letter taught me to be patient. That is perhaps why I first wrote about our trip to India, where smiles are cultural and people don’t lose their cool. Not even on the roads, where traffic doesn’t obey set rules and disaster seems imminent in all times. India, mother India, teaches patience and, that alone, would justifie the trip.
2. Telling my love story
After remembering my son’s birth I started to tell him my own story, because I thought that he could only have a new relationship with me if he could accept that I have a story that is independent of both of us.
I told him that my passion for his father was delirious because of our belief in freedom and I also told that we never separated but we were not faithful. Or better, we were faithful to our loyalty. I explained this saying that the ideal of fidelity is the ideal of love. But it could not be the ideal of those who were a part of the sexual revolution of the Sixties.
While writing, I realized that we had a communication problem, as my son had told me more than once. I realized that I listened without hearing him. That was horrible because besides being a writer I am a psychoanalyst. I considered that being a psychoanalyst, I should not have that sort of problem.
After being married to my son’s father for 25 years I fell in love with another man. This was unnacceptble to my husband and I. We were open to occasional encounter, but we couldn’t conceive of the possibility of a love triangle. The only acceptable lasting relationship was our own. But one day I met Oswald, whom I couldn’t leave and a triangle came into being. Each man knew of the existence of the other and they ignored one another. Is it because they were both French? I suppose so.
I had never spoken about this to my son and I felt I should try to explain what happened. This is the way I did it in the letter:
«Your father was a man of the north. My lover, like me, was from the south – for I am the granddaughter of Lebanese immigrants. I saw the Mediterranean in him. Eyes the color of the sea, his skin the color of mine, brown, and with habits of my ancestors. He never sat down to eat without tomatoes and olives. Like my grandfather, my uncle, my father. With him, I returned to the small town in São Paulo where my paternal grandparents had settled and I had spent the holidays as a girl.
I couldn’t resist my lover, although I wanted to. Who can resist their childhood? No one. With my lover, I was transported to another realm where nothing contested me. But I was in an unsustainable position. Like all of us, your father was contradictory. Although he was a libertine, he was jealous, and I felt sorry for him. I didn’t like being responsible for the suffering of the man who had taken me under his wing in Paris and enabled me to be as Parisian as I was Brazilian.
I tried to change things, but couldn’t. In spite of his jealousy, your father gave me the freedom I needed. He was incredibly generous with me. When he died I was inconsolable because I lost the person who had most believed in my freedom.»
I mourned my dead husband until I realized that losing someone doesn’t mean not having them and someone doesn’t necessarily stop existing just because he or she is dead. They exist in memory. This is our solace. Without remembering, we wouldn’t be able to bear the loss, that of a loved one or of the time that passes.
Without overstepping the limits that my relationship with my son imposes, I wrote about my love life, ignoring the centuries-old taboo that mothers should not talk about such things with their children. As if children did not know everything we hide.
Letter to my son taught me that right from the start a mother has to accept differences. My son was born in October. That first day I thought there was something odd about him. His little eyes were Asian-looking. They were like that because of the C-section, but my narcissism didn’t allow me to see it. How was it possible that my son didn’t have my features, that he didn’t mirror me?
Writing the book made me realize that a mother must give birth and then never cease to give life, accepting her child as he is. Motherhood implies restraint in addition to giving, which begins immediately after birth and can be costly.
3. Analysis with Jacques Lacan
I could not have written Letter to my son without writing about my analysis with Jacques Lacan because if it were not for this analysis my son would not have been born. Before analysis I could not imagine of being a mother.
Jacques Lacan, who is better known in Europe and in Latin America, had a very special way of working. I sent a letter to him and he scheduled our first session. I went from Brasil to France in order to work with him. As soon as I got to France, I called. He answered my call in an odd manner, saying, «You’ve arrived? So?»
At first I could not believe what I had heard. How was it possible that I had crossed the Atlantic and all he could say was «So»? If it weren’t for my transference, I might not have been able to bear it. But the transference was complete and I said: «So, I want to undergo analysis». He listened, made an appointment for the following day and hung up with no further ado. I just stood there with the phone in my hand, but the next day, at the scheduled hour, I presented at 5 rue de Lille.
It took me many years to understand the strange procedure. Lacan was aware of the intensity of my desire for analysis and wanted it to manifest clearly. His «So» forced me to say what I wanted. By hanging up, he made me hear what I had just said. It was enough to begin the work.
From the outset, analysis made me see that I wasn’t in France merely to hone my skills as an analyst, but because it was the country my lebanese ancestors had dreamed of. I saw that Lacan’s phrase «Desire is the desire of the Other» held meaning for me and the act of departing Brazil wasn’t entirely free because I love Brasil even if it insists on being the country of the future. I love it because it is the only country with a mass counter-culture, expressing itself continuously –carnival and soccer. Through this vital conter-culture we can realize the universal fantasy of being able to play in spite of age, and thus to drink at the Fount of Youth.
During my analysis in France I missed home, but Paris charmed me continuously. So many writers to read, the city that I would never finish visiting and where I was constantly learning… discovering the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Classicism. I would stroll along the Seine, even when it was raining, to see the monuments up close and from afar and imagine what life must be like there. For one who came from São Paulo, a city where the past doesn’t matter, Paris was a discovery every day. It is no accident that A Moveable Feast was written by an American. Because he was a foreigner, Hemingway was constantly surprised by the city, and the great feast is surprise. This is why I wrote a book whose title is Paris never ends. It is a dialogue with Hemingway and it says:
«at the top of the tower of Notre Dame, to the sound of the sublimely coarse voice of Edith Piaf, you regret only that you will not be on earth a thousand years from now to witness the same scene.
exile becomes a rainbow and Paris is a feast.»
Besides its history, which seduced me, Paris allowed me to get to know myself in a way I never could have imagined. I was a young woman discovering my femininity through what the city had to offer.
In elementary and middle school in Brasil, I had worn a uniform. In high school, all I cared about was studying to get into a good university and a single red dress was enough for me. During university, I was also unconcerned with clothes, a «bourgeois concern» that a left-wing student couldn’t have.
Paris changed the situation. It was no longer possible to ignore fashion. Except that it wasn’t made for a woman of Mediterranean descent, whose way of walking was Brazilian, and I had to learn to negotiate with French fashion. I couldn’t go without the mirror until I had worked out how to dress without losing my style. That is, without losing sight of my Brazilian soul.
In fact there are two ways to look at oneself in the mirror. To see what it doesn’t show, narcissistically, or to see what it does show, critically. The first way is that of the queen in Snow White, who looks at herself and says, «Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?». She doesn’t ask in order to learn anything at all, but because she is certain that she is the most beautiful. The second way to look at the mirror is that of one who looks at herself to discover what she doesn’t know, and that was what I did.
From the moment I discovered the mirror, I started using it to write fiction and I wrote my first novel The Parrot and the Doctor, inspired by my analysis.
I would perhaps have become a fictionist without analysis but I would certainly not have become a mother. Why is that so? I will try to explain briefly. I’m the third generation of a family of Lebanese immigrants, and I am the eldest child of my family. In the concept of my ancestors the first born is supposed be a male, and I felt I could not be loved if I did not disguise my gender. A woman that has to disguise her gender cannot be a mother, she has to renounce motherhood.
During my analysis I first had a dream that made me express my desire of having a child and I then realized that it was not possible because I was unable to imagine a father for the child. I couldn’t imagine a father because I wanted my child to have my name and not his. How could the man I was because of being the eldest not name the child? Through analysis I became conscious of my oppressive phantasy and motherhood became possible.
This was the theme of The Parrot and the Doctor
I escaped repetition and reinvented myself. I wanted my son to know my story because I wanted both of us to be able to hear one another.
Letter to my son made me realize that I don’t recognize myself in any style of motherhood and that in order to act appropriately a mother needs to listen to her child. There is no such thing for me as a model for a mother or a model mother.
I wrote the book allowing the words to do the talking, trusting in their wisdom. Writing has put an end to my past clinginess. I am no longer in the position I was in, having forgotten the vital forces of separation. I have moved on to another position. And so has my son.
Letter to my son is my last book. Before it I wrote twenty three published books and from now on I want to live for the activity that I most enjoy, and among peers, those for whom writing and listening is a privilege.
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Miami International Bookfair, 22/11/2014; “Betty Milan on Letter to My Son”.