Confronting the Primal Core of Literature and Life

But where's their moms and dads?

Photo by Katherine Chase on Unsplash

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Hello Everyone,

I’m going to start today by sharing a personal story.

When my stepson was little, he would spend a month or two with his father and me in Los Angeles, and the next two or three with his mother and her boyfriend in Northern California. By age three, Daniel’s constant refrain was, “But where’s their moms and dads?”

He’d look out the car window, point to a group of college students walking down the street. “But where’s their moms and dads?” Kids playing on a jungle gym in the park. “Where’s their moms and dads?” A middle-aged couple ordering lunch at MacDonald’s. “Where’s their moms and dads?”

The frequency of this refrain intensified when my husband wasn’t with us. It tore at my heart, but I was in my twenties then, and my expertise in childcare was limited to a handful of high school babysitting gigs. I can’t remember what I said or did in response, but whatever I did didn’t help.

Since Daniel’s parents had never been married, they’d never been divorced, so there was no formal custody arrangement. His mother lived with her new guy in a treehouse off the grid. They were followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and eventually their devotion would move them to the infamous Rajneeshpuram in Oregon (yes, the Wild Wild Country), where children were discouraged. At that point, Daniel’s mother had to choose between serving her guru and caring for her son.

She chose the guru, leaving Daniel with us full time.

The deeper the emotional tap root of a story, the more yearning and dread it stirs up. The more it moves us. The more closely we pay attention… The more we care.

One day when he was about four Daniel started crying, and I happened to be the one who tried to comfort him. Through his tears he managed to convey that he didn’t know who my husband and I were, much less why he was staying with us.

I knelt to his level and hugged him close, unable to speak. His confusion shattered me, though it shouldn’t have surprised me. Daniel had been encouraged to call all of us by our first names (in the case of his mother and her boyfriend, by their Rajneeshi names). No one, it seemed, had stopped to explain our respective relationships to Daniel, any more than we’d explained why we traded him between us. On his own he’d figured out who his mom was, but not why she wasn’t here with him. And he thought his mother’s boyfriend was his dad, but then, who did that make my husband and me?

Suddenly, it became apparent that, But where’s their moms and dads? meant, Who’s my moms and dads? Daniel’s whole world — his whole being, I realized — was one enormous question mark pulsing with yearning and dread.

We managed to calm and orient him, and Daniel’s anxiety gradually subsided. He’s in his forties now and, perhaps understandably, has become a therapist. He no longer remembers his childhood refrain. And I’ve never forgotten it.

But where’s their moms and dads? I thought in 2018, when the Trump administration was separating families and putting kids in cages. Where’s their moms and dads? when I learned that Russia has kidnapped over 24,000 Ukrainian children since invading Ukraine. And again, Where’s their moms and dads? when I read that at least 17,000 children in Gaza and Israel have been orphaned or separated from their families during the fighting since last year's attack on southern Israel by Hamas militants.

Each time another wave of children is tortured by the barbarism of adults. I feel as if the entire world ought to be demanding, Where’s their moms and dads? But even in the rare cases where someone knows the answer, that’s small comfort for bereft children. Their yearning and dread can’t be quelled by information. These emotions are too primal.

And that’s why this subject is relevant to you as a writer.

In this post I’m going to attempt to explain, with an assist from the ever brilliant Michael Ondaatje.

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Primal emotions

Primal is what we aim for in literature. By this I mean that great stories tap into the deepest, oldest, and most fundamental wellsprings of emotional need. Or, as Robert Olen Butler puts it:

…at the heart of all narrative. Fiction is the art form of human yearning. What we are striving for. And plots in books are simply yearning challenged and thwarted.

I would tweak that just a bit. I submit that writers must also master the art of yearning’s dark twin, dread. For without dread, the thwarting of yearning would produce mere disappointment, not the gut-wrenching pain of existential terror that must ultimately move us for drama to succeed.