Going to College with a Book of Her Own

Some of us live our lives in Full Catastrophe. This was true for me that night in November 2000. That time between the stars and the sunrise, between our demons and our angels is a time the Romans call The Watch.

We have all been there. At 3:20 a.m. How did I get here? What should I do now? And why didn’t my mother tell me about that then? 

The next morning I sat down to write to my daughter Charlotte, aged nine. Over ten years this daily note taking culminated in a book called Navigating Life: Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me. I decided to give it to her the day that she went to college.

The writing was an act of desperation, in response to a series of dramas that visited our family: addiction, illness, depression, job loss, divorce and death. It was a rearguard action, an attempt to sort out on paper how to cope with life’s more extreme circumstances. I wanted her to know how to survive life; a rearguard action to share what I had learned as I struggled to make sense of these multiple dramas.

The book was also conceived as an extended love letter between a mother and a girl called Charlie. I wanted to harbor the secret world of her young life and remember it for both of us. I wanted to be both witness and guide to her unfolding life.

Over the years of 10 years writing this, the less urgent but more important question of how to craft a life of meaning took hold. How could I as her mother to create an intentional framework for living a meaningful life, one that I must live first, so they have a model to address life’s mortal questions?

I was not writing a book to groom or guide her for professional or academic success. My goal was to give her tools to help her engage with the world and flourish. I was starting to wonder aloud on the page how not just to survive but to thrive.

Added to which, as I reached my mid 30s, I realized that as a mother I wanted to make more sense of the world, the choices I was making and the path I was shaping for my children. I also had a nagging feeling that as a mother somehow I could do better by my children – better than my mother had been able to do for me.

My family of origin was complicated. I grew up with a sociopath and an alcoholic – and that was my father – and a chronically depressed mother. What is meant was this: that I was going to have to try harder at building a sane life. And how hard I would have to try, thankfully I had no idea.

I wanted her to know specific things: to prepare her but not protect her from the new life she was about to start.

How to hold and handle a conversation. How to put up her hand and be spoken for. How to choose the right partner and walk away from the wrong one. How to learn the difference between solitude and loneliness. That she had to be at college for her own reasons.

High school had not taught her this: I had to. And I wanted it right there memorialized in words on the page. All of me. For her.

There were so many non-academic things that I did not know on arriving at university that I wish my mother had told me: how to deal with fear and anxiety, or at least recognize them. How to be alone and not be afraid. How it’s never too late: for love or forgiveness or new ways of seeing.

I wanted her to avoid some of my own college mistakes: to explore deeply; to ask all the wrong questions aloud in class but with no fear of failure or embarrassment; and to learn her limits, with drink, with drugs and with people.

As I left her in the quad, I gave her a hug and too many kisses; she had the towels and the sheets. She had the books and her music – and now she had me in manuscript form.

The giving of the book was odd and enthralling. And made me sad. Wrapped in a Manila office envelope was 10 years of my daily talking in silence to her on paper.

She read it. She enjoyed it. Then a few years passed and she admitted that moving apartments the manuscript was lost and could she have it again, this time electronically.

Did I think she would pay attention to an entire book? Not really.

But I thought over the decade of writing it that she might in her own time adopt an inquiring approach to life and its possibilities that would act as an anchor during the inevitable travails of student life.

Here is what I really wanted her to know:

• That she might find her rebel yell and take up some cause dear to her heart.
• That she would indeed show up for her friends in their time of need.
• That compassion and courtesy would be her constant companions.
• That she would know that she is never going to be less alone, and not to lose herself in the other.

Arriving at college with a book your mother has written to you is in some ways a burden. Which of the advice do you take? What are you ready to hear?

She is now out of college and has a job. What the book did for my college student was remind me of this: that the advice was good and it mattered. But that what she really wanted at the end of the day was me. To be present. To talk. To be her mother- not just words on the page.

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MARGAUX BERGEN has spent the last twenty years raising three children and working all over the world at large and small institutions focused on international development and women’s leadership. She has held senior communications positions at Vital Voices, The Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty, The United Way and the World Bank and is now at ORBMedia.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing