Unmoored

Jane Eyre would dig a good packing cube. In fact, she’d probably identify with one. Compact and useful, the cube is neither fussy nor proud. Its task-directed presence, quietly doing its duty, contains more inside than one might expect.

I ponder this connection as I nestle my well-considered contents into place, nod in satisfaction, and close my suitcase. I take joy in the packing process, savoring the preparation and the tidy end result: everything I need for wherever I go. This time, it’s extra special: in three days, I depart on a long-planned journey to England with my daughter.

Across the room sits my 20-year-old’s suitcase, which leans decidedly more Catherine Earnshaw, that turbulent heroine of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Chaotic and jumbled and inefficient, its contents appear to have exploded from within, and we haven’t even left.

It is no small task to parent a Catherine. (Is it any wonder Brontë gave her essentially no mother at all? Perhaps she died of exhaustion.) Exuberant and intense, my child is a loud, high-octane presence. At a competition once, in the category that suited her—dramatic performance—she conquered the stage, and we cheered her success. The medal is lost in a drawer somewhere, but cherished in our family folklore is the comment one judge scribbled in the margin of her score sheet: NEED YOU BE FEVER PITCH THE WHOLE TIME? We laugh at this still. Yes. So far, yes.

“Will that zipper even close?” I ask now. My daughter and I look at our respective suitcases, this visual evidence of our personalities. It is a sunny Tuesday and our hearts, like our bags, are full and ready. Despite our contrasting life approaches, the warm cozy center of our Venn diagram is a shared love of literature, and together we’ve crafted the ideal itinerary to celebrate this bookish bond. Tea and bookshops and authors’ birthplaces fill our agenda. I channel the restraint of my inner Jane and keep my useful packing tips to myself—advice that would ease her load, that would simplify her journey. She would dismiss it.

I was not always a sensible Jane. At 14, it was Catherine’s story I found romantic and enthralling, and I wept onto my blue high school bedspread as I read, my heights utterly and completely wuthered. Brontë created a character that seared my soul, and I vowed to name my daughter after her someday. The world had wronged Catherine, I reasoned, was it any wonder she haunts the moors, tormenting Heathcliff, howling in her pain? Rereading the novel years later, though, I rolled my eyes. Spoiled and petulant, Catherine is always flinging herself—across rooms, across the moors, across the lines of decent behavior and good moral choices. How could I have cast her as heroine? And given my daughter her name?

But by then I’d realized I had misread Jane too. As a teenager, I had dismissed Charlotte Brontë’s protagonist as boring and plain, meek as a gray mouse. But is she not, in fact, the larger presence? She feels just as deeply and passionately as Catherine, but she keeps her emotions largely in her heart—a strength Wuthering Heights’ heroine cannot muster. And when Jane does reach her breaking point: she merely leaves.

I see you, Jane, I think now, looking at our suitcases. You kept your head down, worked hard, and did very little flinging. Time has sanded off the flowery sentimental edges of my heart; the renovated result beats a strong, steady rhythm—one that makes me a calm, reliable parent to my spirited daughter. A home with two Catherines would most surely collapse. As it stands, whenever the door slams, followed by her high-volume outburst—of outrage or exuberance or frustration or joy—I am there to calm, to offer a steady counterpoint to her unwieldy, flinging emotions. Jane restores order. Like a packing cube.

 *

Our discordant bags now rest by the door—packing styles aside, we are ready.

St. Samsonite, beloved patron saint of carry-on, please bless this epic voyage. It is finally going to happen. Over time, my expectations have expanded for this mother-daughter journey. I imagine that our Jane and Catherine selves will savor this English pilgrimage of shared joys; afterward we will collapse over the threshold, weary and spent, but harmonious. I’ll open my bag, and it will exhale like a sigh of satisfaction: crumpled shirts and wadded socks and exhausted maps, all bearing witness.

Now, I mentally review each neatly packed item, imagining its changed status upon our return. Perhaps a smudge of ketchup will stain my blue linen pants, but no matter: it will remind me of laughter over shared fish and chips in a dark but jolly pub, gnarled timbers overhead, as we drink beer and giggle, mom and daughter, filling up with love and lager, loitering the afternoon away.

As for my chic black dress, I envision a snag on a cab door in our haste to make it to a West End show. It will get tucked alongside crumpled receipts, souvenirs chosen for friends back home, a woolly scarf for Grandfather Poppy.

And surely, tucked somewhere here will be a smooth gray stone, barely larger than a pebble, that I will pluck from our path over the moors and slip into my pocket as we perch on that Yorkshire hilltop and gaze over the feathered grasses, undulating like seaweed across the shadowed heath below. I can see us there, saluting our Brontë sisters with a mini bottle of wine, sharing AirPods for that Florence song we both love, the poetic one warbling the same feminine strength that Emily or Charlotte would recognize, if they were sitting with us. And they will be, sort of, a joyous sorority of soul-stitched hearts under a cloudless, infinite sky.

Finally, I envision this: we will raise our shared glass to dear, complex Catherine, the flawed but deep-feeling character who wedged herself into my tender teen heart, who perched there for ages, as she had at Heathcliff’s window, howling to be recognized, and who finds herself, at last, reborn in my daughter who bears her name.

She loves fully and savagely, too, my Catherine, and shall I judge? From that wind-whipped rocky crag, I’ll breathe deeply. For is life meant to be doled out from a syringe—measured, miserly droplets onto parched tongue? Does love fit into a packing cube? Catherine Earnshaw would insist we shove ’round the feast and sink into life’s juicy marrow, teeth clicking on bone, and savor it deeply, forearm swiping across running chin, head thrown back to heavens, laughing loud, uncontained. We are flawed and fever pitched, all of us, and what of it? Cheers to us all, ladies! May each of our journeys be blessed, dripping with rich meaning and passion and awe.

*

Two days later, my suitcase still rests there on the floor, mute and woeful. It has not moved. Never made it airborne even. My father-in-law, our dear beloved Poppy, passed away just before our planned departure. Flight, moors, joy: all canceled. I wipe my nose, red and dripping, and tug the zipper open. It smells of nothing. Neatly stacked clothes rest there like undelivered mail. I unfold my spotless linen pants, return them to a hanger. My black dress, seam intact, will do for Poppy’s memorial. There are no receipts to uncrumple, no souvenirs to press into friends’ hands.

And no pebble at all.

Life, as so often happens, gets blindsided by death. What painful folly we mortals practice, making plans that collide with the agenda of the universe. The logical part of my brain accepts it, but the less-logical and arguably larger and louder part, the Catherine part, beats on the floor like a toddler, frustrated and sweaty and overtired. YES BUT, I wail, selfish and small. And the world stands there, arms crossed and silent, letting me cry it out.

My daughter appears in the doorway, her tear-stained cheeks matching mine, holding two mugs of tea. We sit side by side on the couch, and we mourn. Our griefs too, sit side by side: for our real loss, and for the loss of what almost was.

“We leave our teabags in,” she says, staring into her cup, which mirrors mine.

“True.”

“They’d hassle us about that, in England.”

“Probably.”

“Who needs that?” she says quietly.

Like Emily and Charlotte, who never ventured beyond their tiny Yorkshire village, I built in my head a splendid, imagined world that could have been, one that almost was, and tried to inhabit its almost-realness. It almost-helps. But I nurse my wounded, mopey spirit, because, like Catherine, I am deep feeling, flawed. My chest heaves, and I rest my head against my daughter’s shoulder. She presses her hand around my head, holds it there. A tender gesture, soft as flannel. A Jane motion.

Maybe the idea of a superior persona, a demeanor cage match—calm versus dramatic, mature versus unrestrained—is, ultimately, a flawed narrative. We are not, in fact, a Jane or a Catherine. I see now that they share our heart space in equal measure—not in conflict, but in harmony. And like Brontë sisters, or like mother and daughter, they take turns, a peaceful duet, stepping into the light when needed, reaching across the shadowed heath for our outstretched hands. They show us, with gentle practiced grace, chapters we are meant to howl, and others, when we are meant to hold.