i dont know if this counts as a confession really or if it’s just me rambling again like i do these days but sometimes you just have to say it aloud or type it anyway even if no one reads it and i think maybe it’s a universal thing a certain kind of dissimulation you enact without even knowing you’re doing it for years and years and then all of a sudden you’re seventy-six and you look back and see the chasm between what was displayed and what was truly felt you know that feeling when you become an archetype to people a symbol of something you’re absolutely not i remember being a young mother three children all so close in age so much noise so much mess so much need and i was trying to be an artist trying to make something of myself in between the endless diapers and the tantrums and the meals and i had this little column in the local paper writing about the beauty of childhood the simple joys of motherhood and i’d write these pieces about patience about finding the quiet in the chaos about letting them explore and learn at their own pace and i’d come home from interviewing other mothers who seemed so serene so composed and then i’d walk into my own house and it was like a war zone every day there were spills there were fights there were screams and i’d just feel this hot fury bubbling up this frustration that was just SO profound SO overwhelming but then i’d sit down to write my next column about the virtue of gentle guidance the importance of understanding their little worlds and i’d think oh my god if they only knew i dont know if it was a protective mechanism or just a desperate attempt to manifest what i wanted to be instead of what i was this very impatient very easily exasperated woman but i kept writing those columns kept painting this picture of a mother who never lost her cool who always had a kind word a soothing touch and i got fan mail letters from other mothers saying how much my words helped them how much they inspired them and i’d read them and feel this surge of guilt this deep sense of being a fraud a charlatan and it never really went away that feeling even now after all these decades of trying to live up to the person i pretended to be sometimes you just wonder who you actually were underneath all that artifice all that performance for the audience and whether anyone ever really saw the actual you the one who just wanted to lock herself in the bathroom for an hour of blessed silence and a cigarette even though she didn't smoke