After the news of Alice Munro's monstrous behavior toward her daughter, some critics are looking at the story "Vandals," about sexual abuse. But my own thoughts are on "The Children Stay," from 1997, five years after Munro's daughter apparently made her filial confession.
In "The Children Stay," a woman is attached to an inadequate husband. But she falls for a flashy, sexually powerful artist. If she leaves the husband for the artist, she will lose contact with her small children. She is torn between the correct choice--an awareness of her parental duties--and the overwhelming, unforgivable choice--the affair. She chooses ego. She leaves her kids.
This is acute pain. It will become chronic. Chronic will be permanent but perhaps not constant. It may also mean that you won’t die of it. You won’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it. You won’t feel it every minute, but you won’t spend many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get. It isn’t his fault. He’s still an innocent or a savage who doesn’t know there’s a pain so durable in the world. Say to yourself, you lose them anyway. They grow up. For a mother there’s always waiting this private slightly ridiculous desolation. They’ll forget this time, in one way or another they’ll disown you. Or hang around till you don’t know what to do about them, the way Brian has.
The cliche says that poetry grows out of the quarrel you have with yourself. That's what occurs in this paragraph. The protagonist tries to rationalize an ugly decision--and she loses the battle. If she could effectively silence her doubts, then the paragraph would not need to exist.
Thinking of Andrea Skinner this week (and thinking of Skinner's family). The mind reels.
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