[header image: flower chain in the hair of a middle schooler...perfect example of quote #2 below...]
A couple of weeks ago, I read Secret Language by Monica Wood for our lovely little book club that meets once a month at church. I’ve been meaning to post a few quotes that I loved from the book since then. It’s the absorbing story of two sisters and their quite dysfunctional parents, Billy and Delle – who happen to be actors, which made the story both interesting and disturbing for me in a number of ways. The sisters desperately wish their parents really were the lovely people that they watch onstage. As an actor, I know it’s entirely possible to act out something that I haven’t personally experienced; as a mother I want it to be impossible to feign love that you’ve never actually expressed. And yet I know that at times I work much harder at the person my kids see onstage than the one they have to live with. Billy and Delle will stay with me for a long time…
But the story is really about the sisters and their complicated relationship. Faith, the quiet older sister, and Connie, the outgoing younger one, both struggle to understand and find love, having been denied it when they were young.
Faith, upon seeing her infant son for the first time:
When she sees her son, no bigger than an eggplant crooked into his father’s arms, she is felled by love, and by an insidious fear that her heart is indeed a finite thing that has run out of room in a day.
I love this one for the opposites – overwhelming love and overwhelming fear all at once. How many times my emotions come strongly, and on both ends of the spectrum. And again with the acting: it’s so great when an actor says to me – am I supposed to feel this? or this? So many times the answer is yes. Both.
Later, when her son is older:
Chris is eleven, still a child in many ways, but already there are signs: he takes a shower every day; he likes salad.
That one’s just true for anyone who has an eleven year old; the child and adult living side by side in the same body, and the rest of us never knowing who’s going to show up that day. Certainly not that cute little eggplant crooked into his father’s arm…
When she and her husband have difficulty in their marriage:
How does she tell him what she has known all along? There hasn’t been a day in their marriage that she didn’t expect this, exactly this, her worst fear come true. She had made it come true, by simply being Faith.
She had made it come true. How many times have I thought I knew that would happen. And then, looking back years later, thought of course it happened. I expected it to so much that I made it that way.
And finally, about really loving:
There was so much she hadn’t told him for so long, back when telling might have made a difference. How her baby boys had terrified her! She was stricken by love, and feared its unbuckled force, as if it might kill her; she feared it in the most literal way, her heart making dangerous fluttery pats just under her skin.
Love comes right alongside of fear for everyone, I think, in varying degrees. But some of us are so unused to it, so afraid. It was good for me to get to know Faith, to remember that someone that appears the way she might – quiet, aloof, even difficult in her shyness – might just be so very scared of it all. With good reason, even.
This is a small, melancholy, sweet, story – one that I would definitely recommend. Every character you meet along the way is so real, so full of the twists and turns that make people so very fascinating. There should be a few copies floating around now that we’re done…