Two previous non-fiction novels by Topanga Canyon author Hope Edelman–both of them immediate best sellers, Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers–explore how losing a mother affects almost every transition of a woman's life. Her new memoir, The Possibility of Everything (The Random House Publishing Group, $25), is in a sense an extension of this loss and an epiphany of a profound healing.
In 1997, during the California dot-com boom, Edelman was pregnant with her first child and moved to Topanga from New York City to join her husband, Uzi, a stoic Israeli internet manager who soon started a Santa Monica-based dot-com company. Isolated by geography from her network of friends and family, Edelman finds herself feeling vulnerable and concerned when their three-year-old daughter introduces her to Dodo, a mysterious and not necessarily nice imaginary friend. Without a mother to turn to, as most new mothers might, Edelman must find out for herself what is normal and what is not.
The book opens on Christmas Eve 2000, with Edelman traveling with her husband and feverish little girl on a wild ride through the jungles of the Cayo District in Belize to visit a Mayan healer, a shaman, as they search for something: a cure, an answer, comforting advice, perhaps just hope.
Edelman, in her quandary of knowing and not knowing, writes, "My mother died of breast cancer in 1981, when she was forty-two and I was still in high school, too early for her to start handing down child-rearing philosophies or directives. I like to think that my mother, as a grandmother, would have been eager to share stories about her own early foibles to save me from making the same mistakes thirty years later, but really who knows? Sometimes this not knowing makes me so sad I can forget how to swallow."
Edelman arrived for our interview looking unbelievably beautiful, radiant and composed. Not at all like the woman she describes in her book. We sit down together as two mothers who know each other from quick conversations in the Topanga State Beach parking lot waiting for the Malibu public school buses to drop off our children. Sitting on a white sofa, with the ocean waves breaking like a clockwork roar–as if Mother Earth, herself, is breathing in and out, lulling us like a lullaby–we settle into a more relaxed, less frazzled, conversation. I ask her about the confusion she felt when she first started searching for the "right" answer on how to deal with her daughter's imaginary friend and the deleterious affect Dodo was having on their family life.
"I don't know if I would define it as confusion," she responded thoughtfully. “More like obstacles in the way of finding clarity. I had just discovered motherhood. It was the dot-com boom. Uzi was working long hours to launch his company, and it felt at times like I was a single mother. I had a few friends here (in LA)–some of whom I’d found and some who had landed here, among them my best friend from junior high and one a college roommate. I had taken a prenatal yoga class at Yoga Works with Nancy Marcucella's sister, Rocki, twice a week and through that class made friendships that lasted for the first year after Maya’s birth, some longer. Maya had gone to Children's Corner from December 1999 through June 2000 with Linda Hinricks, who was wonderful, so I did know some other mothers through that.
"Dodo started after we left Children's Corner but Linda Hinricks noticed even at the age of two that Maya was a very articulate child–and even when Dodo arrived, she was on target developmentally; a lot of three year olds have imaginary friends, but it was the content that was unusual.
"When we decided to go on holiday that winter, we didn't have unlimited funds, we had a child with us and we only had a week and it was the first time we were taking a trip that didn't involve visiting family. Ultimately, we chose Belize because of the diving (Uzi is a diver) and because it was the second largest coral reef in the world. Diving was very much beside the point once we got there, although we did manage to go snorkeling one day of the holiday."
In the month or two before they left, Edelman began to research Belize online. "Amazon.com was still pretty new at the time and beyond a few travel guides, all that came up when I punched in "Belize" was a memoir by the healer, Rosita Arvigo and a botanical guide to the medicinal plants of Belize called "Rainforest Remedies." Uzi had a birthday coming up so I ordered both books and gave them to him as a birthday present."
Meanwhile, Edelman was still dealing with Dodo and his strong influence on Maya's personality. "It was really only the people spending a significant amount of time with Maya who noticed–the nanny, Carmen, certainly recognized it was disturbing behavior. She was from Nicaragua and I trusted her. She opened up my mind to other possibilities." After conversations with her pediatrician and other parents, Edelman began to think that there could be other solutions. It was from reading Arvigo's book that Edelman and her husband decided that they would like to meet with her. "We knew a little from Carmen and from the book ... I think I was looking for a drop of magic in what felt like a dull and ordinary life at that point."
Because of airline scheduling disasters they missed their appointment with Arvigo, but the hosts of the resort where they were staying told them a bit about a local Shaman. That visit is one of the most dramatic and frightening chapters of the memoir: "Because the language barrier was so extreme," Edelman writes,"he didn‘t really have the opportunity to explain to us what to expect. I've gone back to see him several times since then and we can communicate pretty well now, but between his lack of English and my little Spanish, the first time we were in his village, the whole experience was spooky. It was an overcast day, it had just rained, the air was thick and sticky, and the ground was wet–there was something about that. I met him the second time seven years later, when I went down to study with Rosita in a workshop. I thought, ‘This is him?' He seemed so normal, and I looked around the village and thought, ‘What a charming place!’”
In a moment of serendipity, Edelman and her family got to meet with Arvigo. The most beautiful and nutritious chapter of Edelman's memoir is the bath scene. Edelman is bathing her daughter in a "bath of flowers" Arvigo has picked for her. She has been instructed to pray while doing this. It is an incredibly powerful and moving scene of a mother and daughter connecting–so reassuring an epiphany that no mother will forget the passage. The cure Arvigo handed them seems so benign and simple that at first even Edelman felt less than impressed. "I told my husband, ‘You just paid $45 for nothing!’ but what Rosita did was empower me as a mother ... she empowered me to be the mother–she was the first person to ask me what I thought as a mother. I can tell you even now that I can't quite explain what happened in that bathroom, but something happened in that bathroom. I know less than I thought I did when it comes to having the answers, but I'm happier for having had this experience. For me that was the transformation–to let go, and not have to prove the things I believed in."
"The prayers I said were generic but it didn't matter. Most of the beliefs of the Shamans in South America are influenced by a mixture of the Catholic Church and the indigenous Mayan culture. The ancient Mayans had so many Gods that they were able to incorporate the Catholic saints into their religion. To work with the spirits, they ask each plant for permission to be picked and [they believe] that if you do not say the special prayers the plant will not heal anyone.
"My natural tendency is to always believe that things will be worse and I wanted someone to console me–my mind naturally veers into the most catastrophic outcomes and that's where readers might get stuck when they read this story. We started personifying this imaginary friend as if he were someone real. I believe the reality lay somewhere in the middle. I was frightened that there was some kind of behavioral issue going on, and it felt real and it was frightening. She was my first child. I was so focused on doing everything right and was so influenced by the expectations that our society has on being ‘the perfect mother' that the simplicity and grace of just being a mother was lost. I thought the route to being a good mother was to read all the good books. Nobody ever just tells you how much power and healing you actually have as the mother. As for Dodo, he never recurred. And Maya is now a beautiful thriving eleven year old. She's really, really interested in environmental science. She has an incredible knowledge of the native plants in the Santa Monica Mountains–almost an encyclopedic knowledge. And she has met Rosita Arvigo several times since then…. She and Rosita are big fans of each other…. Rosita is also an herbalist and teaches and I asked Rosita if she could please keep teaching long enough for Maya to be able to be her student one day. The experience took me on the route of letting go of my own arrogance and my own standards of perfection to trusting myself as a mother. To trust your maternal intuition is to be willing to step outside of the box to find solutions. It just might change your life."
Hope Edelman will read from her new book at a book-signing on Sunday, September 20 at 7 p.m. at The Mountain Mermaid, 20421 Callon Drive, Topanga.
