Authors: Shelly Fisher Fishkin

Silences (43 page)

Sitting by the bedside of her young sleeping daughter, her tears “falling fast,”

most earnestly did she wish that she could shield
[her] child from the disappointment and mistakes and self-reproach from which [she] was suffering; that the little one might take up life where she could give it to her—all mended by her own experience. It would have been a comfort to have felt that, in fighting the battle, she had fought for both.
^†

Sustaining Interruption; Postponing (1877)

“Where [now] is the strength and glory of the vision?”

Scarcely had the palette-knife struck the cobalt to the Naples yellow, when the studio-door shivered, stirred and started with a prolonged and inspiriting creak. Van admitted his little nose on
probation into the crack and heaved a heart breaking sigh.

“Shut the door, Van.”

His pretty mamma had an unhappy habit of expecting to be obeyed, which
was a source of serious disorder to Van’s small system. He shut the door in—nose and all—with a filial haste and emphasis, the immediate consequences of which fell heavily upon both parties. . . . When the outcry is over, and the sobbing has ceased, and the tears are kissed away, and the solid little sinner lies soothed upon the cramped and forgiving arm, where is the strength and glory of the vision?
Where are the leaping fingers that quivered to do its bidding in the fresh life of the winter morning hour?

“Run away again, Van: mother must go to work now.”

“Mamma,” faintly, “I’ve sat down on—something. I’m all blue and colors, Mamma, on my sack behind. I didn’t know it was your palette, Mamma. I didn’t mean to.”

By and By

Avis left the unfinished
sketch or painting patiently. She said, “By and by. After a while. I must wait a little.” She was still able to allure herself with the melody of this refrain, to which so many hundreds of women’s lips have shaped themselves trembling; while the ears of a departing hope or a struggling purpose were bent to hear. Life had become a succession of expectancies. . . .

Women understand—only
women altogether—what a dreary will-o’-the-wisp is this old, common, I had almost said commonplace, experience, “When the fall sewing is done,” “When the baby can walk,” “When house-cleaning is over,” “When the company has gone,” “When we have got through with the whooping-cough,” “When I am a little stronger,” then I will write the poem, or learn the language, or study the great charity,
or master the symphony; then I will act, dare, dream, become.

—from
Story of Avis
by Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps, 1877—a century or so ago.

Sustaining interruption—a century later

a child with untameable curly blond hair. i call her kia, pine nut person, & her eyes so open as she watches me try to capture her, as I try to name her . . .

. . . what of the lonely 7 year
old (7½ mommy!) watching tv in the front room? what of her?

what of yesterday when she chased the baby into my room & I screamed

OUT OUT GET OUT & she ran

right out but the baby stayed,

unafraid. what is it like to have

a child afraid of you, your own

child, your first child, the one

who must forgive you if either of you are to survive . . .

& how right is it to shut her out of the room
so i can write about her?

how human, how loving? how can

i even try to

: name her.

—from Alta’s
Momma: A Start on All the Untold Stories,
1971

Writers, Mothers: It is humanly impossible for a woman who is a wife and mother to work on a regular teaching job and write

People ask me how I find time to write with a family and a teaching job. I don’t. That is one reason I was so long
with
Jubilee.
A writer needs time to write a certain number of hours every day. This is particularly true with prose fiction and absolutely necessary with the novel. Writing poetry may be different, but the novel demands long hours every day at a steady pace until the thing is done. It is humanly impossible for a woman who is a wife and mother to work on a regular teaching job and write. Weekends
and nights and vacations are all right for reading but not enough for writing. This is a full-time job, but for me such full attention has only been possible during the three Depression years I was on the Writers’ Project and during that one [graduate] school year in which I finished
Jubilee.

—Margaret Walker, thirty years (1938–1968) from the inception of
Jubilee
to its completion:
four children and twenty-six years in “the teaching harness” in that time.

And yet I do not regret the shape my life has taken.

Three contemporary writer-mothers speak:

My grandmother, who wrote and sold short stories at one point in her life, before raising six children, used to claim with some bitterness that bearing and raising children drained a woman’s creativity. Her disappointment
reminds me of my own failure to solve the
problems of raising children and carrying on a fulltime career. I haven’t lost my sap, but I have certainly lost time: five out of the past ten years, at least, have been “lost” to bearing and raising three boys, and the end is not yet in sight. My work is reduced to five or six hours a week, always subject to interruptions and cancellations; and yet I
do not regret the shape my life has taken, although it is not the one I would have chosen, ten years ago.

I don’t believe there is a solution to this problem, or at least, I don’t believe there is one which recognizes the emotional complexities involved. A life without children is, I feel, an impoverished life for most women; yet life with children imposes demands that consume
energy and imagination as well as time, and that cannot all be delegated—even supposing there were a delegate available. . . .

A woman’s response to a child’s illness is part of her whole involvement with that child; it is not logical, perhaps, and yet it may be essential to that child’s belief that his mother cares for him. I cannot imagine continuing to work when one of my
children is running a high fever or is in pain; my mind would be totally distracted. Nor can I easily imagine leaving him in someone else’s care; my thoughts would still be preempted.
^*

—Sallie Bingham, author of the memorable
The Way It Is Now,
1972—and no book since

Why discourage women from the colossal swallowing up which is the essence of all motherhood, the mad love (for it
is there, the love of a mother for her child), and the madness that maternity represents? For her to feel like a man, free from the consequences of maternity, from the fantastic shackles that it implies? That is probably the reason. But if I answer that men are sick precisely because of this, because they do not have the only opportunity offered a human being to experience a bursting of the ego, how
would I be answered? That it was man who made motherhood the monstrous burden it is for sure. But to me the historical reasons for the burden
and the drudgery seem the most superficial, because for those there is a remedy. And even if men are responsible for this enslaving form of motherhood, is this enough to condemn maternity itself?

—Marguerite Duras, in an interview

The meaning
of work, and the need to learn to insistently be an artist in the midst of family is what I am now always trying to understand, and after each moment of understanding to painstakingly, always with great attention to detail, structure my time. In Adrienne Rich’s book on motherhood [read in galleys]
^*she uses portions of early diaries kept when her boys were young. She is always planning her time.
I must not accept any social engagements. I must not do anything but work when not with the children. I must learn to sleep less. That is what it is like. I feel still caught in the middle, between that time when women will be able to devote themselves to work and have children and love . . . and the past, the physical and emotional crampedness. I have my desk in the middle of the living room and
the apartment is mine at least four days a week for four hours each day
^**(not enough) but emotionally, I sneak off into a corner to grab an idea and promise to transform it into something whole. There is so much to be written about this motherhood and its holds on us. . . . My children are only two and six years old, still babies, whose bodies I yearn for every afternoon around four when I must
go and get them.

—a letter from Jane Lazarre, author of
The Mother Knot,
1976

Integration—and a Looking Back: A Question

As you, the children of my body, have been

my tasks, so too are my other works.
^†

I am gradually approaching the period in my life when work comes first. When both the boys were away for Easter, I hardly did anything but work.
Worked, slept, ate, and went for short walks. But above all I worked.

And yet I wonder whether the “blessing” is not missing from such work. No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes. . . . Perhaps in reality I accomplish a little more. The hands work and work and the head imagines it is producing God knows what, and yet formerly, in my so wretchedly limited
working time, I was more productive, because I was more sensual; I lived as a human being must live, passionately interested in everything. . . . Potency, potency is diminishing.
^*

Käthe Kollwitz, forty-three, rare in being great artist and mother. One wonders what work was lost to us, undone, in that “wretchedly limited” time. Her greatest work was still ahead, but then the strength began to
be “wretchedly limited.”

IF—needed time
and
strength were available simultaneously with “the blessing,” the “living as a human being must live” . . . (as, with changes, now could be).