Fear of Fifty (8 page)

Mothers tend to seed their daughters with their own unexpressed rebellion. As a result, rebelling generations follow quiescent ones, quiescent ones follow rebelling ones, and the world goes on as it always has. Just at the moment when women find their intellectual or artistic powers, hormones kick in, making the yearning to bear children overwhelming. If we have learned from our mothers, that childbearing defeats creativity, we will rebel by not having children or rebel by making childbearing our only creativity. Why not break this vicious cycle and become the women our mothers wanted to be? Because we feel we cannot do this without killing our mothers, and so, in retribution for the murderous wish, we kill, instead, the mother within ourselves.

In my twenties, after winning most of the writing prizes in college and even publishing a poem or two, I went through a period of excruciating blockage. I would sit at my desk trying to write and have an anxiety attack as I envisioned a man with a loaded gun standing behind me, ready to shoot me if I wrote a line. I was lucky to be in analysis with someone smart enough and patient enough to guide me until I made the association between the man with the gun and my imaginary mother, who both wanted me to write and wanted to kill me for writing. The mother in my fantasy felt I was a traitor for writing, even if my real historical mother did not. I had to fight this battle between self and soul in order to write a line. And in some way or other this battle comes back with every book I write. Each time the solution is the same: Bring the demons to consciousness and they may leave me alone long enough to let me break through the blockage and finish the book.

Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. It means revealing murderous rage, the marksman behind the writing desk, the inner demons that confound us all.

How can creativity be other than a terrifying force full of unexpected turnings? If you give your life to creativity, you give up forever the promise to be a good girl. Creativity will inevitably lead you to give away dark family secrets. It will lead you into the labyrinth to face the minotaur. You can't face the minotaur and stay a good girl. You can't look the minotaur in the eye and continue to silence the artist in yourself.

I imagine my mother at nineteen or twenty, worrying this same sad bone of female creativity. “I will defeat the dybbuks!” she must have thought. She chose a man who shared her loves. She chose a man who loved her art. But the sabotage of the world played nicely into her own self-sabotage. Art is hard. You have to be on your own side. And it is difficult for women to be on their own side when they are told they are supposed to be on everyone else's. The world reinforces all their doubts. And then comes the baby and the need to earn a living—and what unequal opportunity doesn't kill, love lays waste.

A baby is a full-time job for three adults. Nobody tells you that when you're pregnant, or you'd probably jump off a bridge. Nobody tells you how all-consuming it is to be a mother—how reading goes out the window and thinking too.

All this assumes the baby's normal and healthy. What if the baby's sickly, or starving, or what if the mother is? Every mother who ever lived has faced that fierce moment when a baby turns its milky mouth to her breast and she knows she is all it has.

My mother panicked and went home to Mama and Papa—with their clutching competition and their infantilizing care. She took the path of least resistance and hated herself for it. Harder to break with your parents when you depend on them. Harder to break with your parents when you're a parent too. The dependency of an infant links women to their mothers. So one generation gets lost in the wars of the previous one. My grandmother's struggles were passed to me by my mother. My grandmother, with her crushing marriage to my tyrannical grandfather, with her barbaric abortions on the kitchen table and her inexhaustible maternal sweetness and nurturance, admired most of all her friend who was a woman dentist. She always spoke of her with awe and pride.

“Having a friend who was a dentist somehow gave her status,” my mother says. “Mama was a feminist too—and she didn't even know it.”

Thus the generations of women are linked in their ambivalence. And so it goes. So it goes. So it goes.

I had waited until I was fledged as a writer before I succumbed to the seductions of motherhood. Fear of Flying was my emancipation proclamation—which also, by chance, gave me the material success to support the child I bore.

My mother didn't have this luck. Raised by immigrant parents who had left their own parents young and therefore needed to hold their children too close, she began her rebellion against her mother early and let it fizzle too soon. Faced with the unfairness of a world that didn't treat women artists equally, she retreated into a more acceptable form of female creativity—as women have done throughout the ages. Then she filled her daughters with feminist rage—as women have also done throughout the ages.

But that dynamic alone wasn't enough to fuel my ambition. My father also needed me to be his son. My drive came from a potent brew my parents made together. The ingredients were just right to make a girl who thought she was allowed to be a boy. But who also had to punish herself for this presumption.

This brew is certainly no recipe for contentment. I went out and thrust myself into the world like a boy, and then I atoned with female fears—fear of flying, fear of the marksman behind the writing desk, fear of fifty. I paid for my success by making myself fat, by depriving myself of good relationships, by depriving myself, for many years, of the joys of mothering. I also pushed my mother away because her example was too scary. And she pushed me away because my success was too painful. In that mutual repulsion-attraction dance, I feel my mother and I are all too typical of mothers and daughters of the whiplash generation.

I try to see my mother as a separate person, and still I cannot. She is a part of me, a part that criticizes and stings and disapproves. She will never be satisfied because what she wants is basically impossible: for me to be just like her and yet to succeed as she did not.

I was really the marksman behind the desk. It was not my mother or even my imaginary mother. I wanted to kill the traitor self that wanted to break from my mother. I knew my writing was my means of escape, and I wanted to stay, yet go at the same time. Hence the perfect metaphor I devised was fear of flying.

Fly I would, but never without fear. Fly I would, but always in a state of torment—a metallic edge behind the teeth that says: You cannot dare, dare this. I flew but suffered for my hubris like Icarus. Even my chosen symptom was half-father, half-mother. Even my chosen symptom expressed the split in my soul.

In Isadora Wing, I invented a typical heroine of the whiplash generation. She flew and fucked and achieved in the world, but she punished herself with men. With her heart in the past and her intellect in the future, she was doomed to suffer no matter what she did. Her self-mockery and humor became her survival tool, because only through irony can you say X, yet mean Y.

I think Isadora touched women of my generation because so many of us are similarly split. We are our mothers, but we are also women of the future. We earn our own livings, support our own children, fight for our careers in a world that still does not give us economic equality with men, but that dark undertow is pulling us back to our mothers, making us feel guilty even for the crumbs of autonomy we achieve.

Often we express our darkest ambivalence with our men and our children. Fierce competitors in the world of work, we crumble in relationships or become slaves to our children. Some of us finally give up men because it is just too tough to keep on suffering. We tend to give too much in love, so some of us decide to give nothing at all. Some of us turn to women, hoping that way to break the sadomasochistic chains that bind.

With our children, it's harder. Often we spoil them because we have no model of mothering that includes independence. We can't stay home as our mothers did, but the mothers in our heads still have the power to make us feel guilty. So we set too few limits and buy too many goodies we cannot really afford and consequently we raise children who dictate to us, all the while feeling deeply insecure.

Thinking of my mother's life, I am overcome with feeling. Talent alone is never enough. My mother had talent to burn. She could draw and paint, model clay, cut patterns, create collages from bits of silk and paper, create ballet dresses from ordinary crepe paper, embroider a green needlepoint forest without any pattern but the pattern in her head. She once turned me into a forest sprite for Halloween, covering my leotard with green and gold and orange leaves until I fluttered in the wind like a quivering autumn tree. She made me cut-outs, sewed my baby dolls Victorian bonnets and crinolines, painted tiny portraits to hang over the mantelpieces in my doll's house. There was nothing her nimble fingers could not do, nothing her visual mind could not conceive. But all this talent was not enough. She lacked the courage to follow her talent into the dark woods of any artist's destiny. She could-n' t bear the world's criticism as I could. Her inner bad reviews were so sharp and biting that she could not risk a single outer one.

Or maybe her maternal urge was too strong. She couldn't stop at one child as I did. She gave birth to me and gave up struggling to be free. And how can I protest her giving birth to me?

I suffer too, and my kind of writing has never left me free of criticism, but I also have my father's mad tenacity. Rejection and criticism hurt, but I can bear them as long as I go on writing. I know that the world will not beat a path to anyone's door. I drag the world to my door by never giving up.

It was not that my mother gave up. It was just that she chose a more acceptable female path: outer capitulation, inner resentment—the old, old story. The world controls women by playing on our need for approval, for love, for relationship. If we behave ourselves, excising our unruly creative impulses, we are rewarded with “love.” If we do not, “love” is withheld. The woman creator pays a fearsome price as long as she is controlled by love. Creativity is dark, is rebellious, is full of “bad” thoughts. To suppress it in the name of “femininity” is to succumb to an anger that leads to madness.

What I remember most about my mother was that she was always angry.

 

I wanted to undo this spell, break this cycle, so for the longest time, men and motherhood were secondary. Men were acceptable as long as they typed my poems, and motherhood frankly terrified me. It had been my mother's Waterloo, I felt, and I had no intention of taking that risk.

“No sperm could ever get through that goop,” one of my husbands said about the excessive amounts of jelly I used to use with my diaphragm. I was unapologetic. I hated the idea of losing control and I knew that an abortion would certainly break my heart. My diaphragm was the guardian of my literary ambitions, and about those I had no ambivalence. I was absolutely single-minded. It was number one on the bestseller list or bust!

Now, at fifty, when it is too late, I wish I had more children. What safe nostalgia! But when I was fertile, I mostly saw motherhood as the enemy of art and an appalling loss of control. My mother was always so torn. “The drive of women to have children is stronger than anything,” she used to say—somewhat ruefully, it seemed to me. I did not confront that drive until I was thirty-five, and by then, I was a writer first and a mother second. I had, like Colette, a “masculine pregnancy” —book-touring in my sixth month, finishing a chapter about an eighteenth-century masked ball as my water broke. I nursed the baby as I wrote Book II of a picaresque novel.

For years, I resolutely remained a writer first, a mother second. It took me the whole first decade of my daughter's life to learn to surrender myself to motherhood. No sooner had I learned that essential surrender than she was entering puberty and I menopause.

What do I regret? Nothing. I have raised a daughter who also recognizes no limits. And I have learned at last that my mother was right. Surrendering to motherhood means surrendering to interruption. Molly comes home from school and work stops. She claims all my attention. I become her sidekick, her buddy, her duenna, her walking credit card. I resent it, yet I also love it more than anything. She fills me up with feeling as no one can. She also has the power to drive me mad. She assumes her own primacy, as all healthy children must. If there were three of her—as my mother had—this book might never be. Would that matter? Or only matter to me? Who knows? I write because I must. I hope my books are useful for you, too. But if I did not write them, I would surely be half-alive, and half-mad.

So I have made my choices and I am mostly glad of them. The intensity of one mother-one daughter sometimes makes me wish I had a household full of noisy kids, but the truth is I know now that even I, with all my prodigious energy, can't do everything. Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and pediatric visits may also be done by fathers (and surely we could make life easier for mothers than we do), but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do. A mother is a mother is a mother, as Gertrude Stein surely would have said had she become one.

Certainly children need dozens of parental figures: mother, father, grandparents, nannies, cousins, teachers, godparents—but still, nothing substitutes for good old Mom. Am I a female chauvinist? So be it. The power of being a mother is actually quite awesome when you think about it. Who but a megalomaniac would be willing to take on such power without a backward glance?

Years after giving birth, I became a mother against my will because I saw that my daughter needed me to become one. What I really would have preferred was to remain a writer who dabbled in motherhood. That felt more comfortable, more safe. But Molly would not permit it. She needed a mother, not a dabbler. And because I love her more than I love myself, I became what she needed me to be.