Brambles

The Brambles (2006), published by Knopf is a beautiful rendered novel of family life that I picked up for a dollar at the university bookstore last week. It is written by Eliza Minot, who I have not read before, but I will try to read her other novel The Tiny One next. I can relate to and laugh out loud with each of the three siblings in this book and I'll pull out some especially lovely passages here:

Margaret, mother of three, thinks, "Much of raising chidlren, Magaret realized long ago, is providing a blow-by-blow account of what, exactly, is occuring and how. And why" (125).

Her little sister, Edie, has her own issues: "It all seems so silly: her going to the hosptial when here is her father, terminally ill; her puking into the toilet bowls dotted across the country; her longing for something, for someone, for what exactly she has no idea. She is alive and doesn't know what to look for. She leans on the counter. She laughs harder and harder, her nose starting to run, her eyes watering, the muscles of her stomach beginning to burn. To be a grown adult and to feel so lonely . . . . It was just ridiculous" (100).

Their brother Max can't seem to communicate how he feels to his wife: "Chloe's pretty body, her pretty hair and face, the pony prettiness of the whole package, the fresh sight of the stroller with Rex in it, and now the motion of them moving away, the two of them one unit, mother and child, his wife, his son, his own family - the sight of all this makes him feel so claustrophobic, so unworthy. Not claustrophobic in the low-down dog sense of wanting other women or wanting to break free - he loves his wife, he knows that, and he loves little Rexie. But the effor ot it. The burden. the fact that it is a burden, that somewhere in the marriage arangment he feels that: the burden of it. This is his pbrolem. the tiny apartment that they're in. This job situation. How he's letting them down" (109).

Needless to say, all these words resonate with me on all kinds of levels now. My own life, so complicated now by multiple arrangements, is hard to track. I'm back home on a sunny Sunday morning, E having driven me back across the river after we drove back to his place following the barbeque at one of my school friend's places last night, his two kids in tow, mine passed off to her father for the night. He knows I hate the drive, the 20 minute + (more in traffic) trek across to his small town in another province, where I often spend some part of my weekends and another weeknight, cozying up in the queen-sized bed he bought with his former wife, who is getting married next weekend to the man she left him for. It makes my head hurt sometimes to think of all this . . . it keeps me up at night worrying about the implications for us all of trying to come together at all, trailing our children with us back and forth. Oh well.

Oh well. It will be okay, I think, most of the time. Our kids are loved, are healthy, are happy. We love each other, too, even though, I know, we aren't able to give each other the original and intact image of family we both started out with, with other people who let us down. How these other people (our exes) have managed to go on so swiftly and effortlessly always amazes me. They needed to, I guess, to prove something to themselves. Or to us? I'm not sure which.

Life is full of brambles and . . . it is unavoidable that we'll get scratched or torn a bit . . . and you do just have to live with it and seek the sweetness nonetheless. I guess that's what we all do.