Fear of Fifty (9 page)

“Earth to Mom: Space in. You're zoning out again,” says she. Molly hates it when I wander through the house (the store, her school), writing in my head. So I space in—the hardest of all things for me to do—and I try to be present for her. Can I delegate that to anyone else? No. Would I want to? Sometimes, yes. (So I'm not a perfect mother—who is?) But I do attempt to focus on her needs above my own. And I know in my heart (as I know I will die) that Molly is more important than my writing. Any child is. That's why motherhood is so difficult for writing women. Its demands are so compelling, so clearly important, and also so profoundly satisfying.

Who can explain this to the childless? You give up your self, and finally you don't even mind. You become your child's guide to life at the expense of that swollen ego you thought so immutable. I wouldn't have missed this for anything. It humbled my ego and stretched my soul. It awakened me to eternity. It made me know my own humanity, my own mortality, my own limits. It gave me whatever crumbs of wisdom I possess today.

What do I wish for Molly? The same. Work she loves and a child to lead her to herself. Why should any of us settle for less? We know why: because the world has deliberately made things difficult for women, so that they could not have motherhood and also the life of the mind. Mine may be the first generation in which being a writer and a mother is not utterly impossible. Margaret Mead says somewhere that when she finally had her only daughter in 1939, at the age of thirty-eight, she looked at the brief biographies of famous women and discovered that most of them had no children—or only one. This has only recently begun to change.

But it is still hard. And the battles are far from over: The abortion battle, the “family values” battle, the “should mothers work outside the home?” battle—all are symptoms of an incomplete revolution. And incomplete revolutions produce passionate and angry feelings.

Those women who have given up work, art, literature, the life of the mind, for nurturance naturally resent those women who have not had to. The privilege to create is so new for women. And the privilege to create and also nurture is newer still. Those women who have given up nurturance feel resentful too. Perhaps they could have done things differently, they feel, when it is already too late. Is it possible they blame
Roe υ. Wade
for the newness of choices their mothers did not have to make?

Motherhood is an awesome choice. Who would make it lightly, knowing all that it entails? Perhaps some women still feel it would be better to make a slip and not be able to undo it. Perhaps they would prefer to reach the state of motherhood by accident.

Choice is terrifying. What if you make the wrong choice? Compulsion and resentment have been the lot of women for so long that if nothing else, we are used to them. Freedom is too hard. Freedom puts responsibility squarely on our own shoulders.

And it is true that women's control of their own fertility has led men to disclaim some of their ancient responsibilities. Choice also gives men choice. Choice demystifies motherhood and takes away some of the ancient female power. For a woman who has other power, that may be wonderful, but for a woman who has only the awesome motherpower, surely there is a sense of loss. After all, it's less than a hundred years since women's lives have been transformed by aseptic childbirth and reliable control of fertility. Those two things have changed the world beyond recognition. Those two things, not merely feminist ideology, have brought a revolution in women's lives. And some women apparently still long for the past.

Is this really so strange? The past may have been bondage, yet it was familiar bondage. The equation of woman with her maternity at least gave women an unambivalent identity. As feminists we ought to understand those feelings of loss instead of mocking them. We ought to acknowledge the huge power of the motherknot and the great importance it once conferred on women. Having honored that feeling of loss, we might then insist on everybody's right to embrace motherpower or else let it go unused. Renunciation, after all, is also a form of power.

When I see angry hordes storming abortion clinics, or meditative ones standing in silent prayer-circles outside pro-choice rallies, I think we are seeing the last generation to have nostalgia for the old chthonic imperatives of human life. Why else would they shoot doctors in the name of “life”? They want to kill the very concept of choice. They want to kill it first within themselves, then within us. Our embracing freedom of choice somehow negates their lives. They are ready to kill for “life.” They want to go back to a time when women could not make choices and thus would not feel eternally in the wrong. (At least this applies to some of the women who embrace that misnomer “the right to life.”)

The men are another story. They want control over women. And the evangelical leaders who fan the flames of the right-to-life movement want political control. They are simply exploiting tax-free church money to lobby for political ends. We should tax their organizations as we do professional lobbyists.

Still, motherhood is not light, optional, and free of ambivalence; it is a dark, compelling force that overrides many human preferences. We ought to understand that some women (and many men) fear any diminution of motherhood. Maybe if we open our minds to understanding this, we can combat the right-to-lifers' ideas more effectively. I suspect I understand this because of my mother, my mother who was torn always between motherhood and art, my mother who never resolved that ambivalence but passed it along, instead, to me.

 

What I would most like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation. Freedom is a loose leash, a license to be different from your mother and still be loved. Freedom is not binding your daughter's feet, not performing a symbolic clitoridectomy, not insisting that your daughter share your own limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.

 

You need my acceptance, but you may need my resistance more. I promise to stand firm while you come and go. I promise unwavering love while you experiment with hate. Hate is energy too—sometimes brighter-burning
energy
than love. Hate is often the precondition
for
freedom.

If one is not permitted to express anger or even to recognize it within oneself, one is, by simple extension, refused both power and control.

—Carolyn Heilbrun,
Writing a Woman's Life

 

 

As I write this, my aunt, my mother's only sister, is in a straitjacket in the locked psycho ward of Lenox Hill Hospital. She is there not only because she has senile dementia and probably Alzheimer's, but because she is a woman alone, a lesbian displaced homemaker, dumped by her lover of thirty years when she started acting strange, and nobody else wants her as a full-time commitment. She has no children (except the lover's child she helped raise). She and my mother have not spoken for years and years. The origins of the feud are as murky as the origins of all family feuds. But the result remains: My mother does not want her, my sisters do not want her, I do not want her, the stepson she raised does not want her, and her lover has long since moved on to younger pastures.

To be old and alone can happen to anyone—and for women the statistical possibilities are overwhelming. But in the case of my Aunt Kitty, other factors also played a part. My aunt is an artist, a lesbian of a certain age, a homemaker and nurturer. Those are not qualities that earn you a pension or a nest egg, those are not qualities our society rewards. My aunt also has Alzheimer's complicated by alcoholism—and being sick in America is still only for the rich. All these things play a part in her fate. And her fate, for reasons I will presently explain, has fallen into my lap. Meanwhile, Kitty waits at Lenox Hill, where she was taken by a stranger (who also apparently took her wallet and used her credit cards when she collapsed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art several weeks ago).

As I deliberate about what to do—not wanting the responsibility, yet knowing that it is mine by default whether I want it or not—I am taken prisoner by some old family photographs. I have three pictures of my mother and aunt at the ages of not-yet-one and not-yet-two, seven and eight, seventeen and eighteen.

The first, stamped on the back “U.S.A. Postcard, U.S.A. Studios, London and provinces” shows two little girls—one nine months old, one a year and a half old—sitting on a Victorian settee and looking at the camera. The baby on the left is my mother: round, brown eyes (with a startlingly strong gaze), a tonsure of brownish hair, curled toes, fat fingers ; and the one on the right is my Aunt Kitty, big round eyes just as blank and innocent as those she has today, a rosebud mouth, and little hands clutching a doll. The photo was not prophetic. My mother had three daughters, my aunt had no biological children. But the relationship is clear. Two little girls close as twins, inseparable growing up, are destined to become mirror images of each other and mirror enemies.

In the next photograph, they are perhaps seven and eight and wearing middy dresses, high-button shoes, and floppy hair bows. They hold hands. Eda looks straight ahead; Kitty inclines her head toward Eda's. Again this is a studio portrait, on a French-style settee, taken in England. My mother-to-be is the more assertive of the two girls, my aunt the more “feminine”—if feminine is defined (as it was for most of her life) as pliable and complaisant. It was this temperament that brought her where she is today.

The third and last photo, taken in New York before a trip to Paris (I was once told), shows two teenagers of the twenties, seventeen and eighteen years old, with bobbed hair, silk stockings, strappy silk shoes, and low-waisted, short-skirted dresses. Again the four round brown eyes, my mother's stubby fingers and my aunt's slim ones, my mother's boldness of expression and my aunt's soft diffidence. Eda touches Kitty's shoulder with one fingertip; Kitty rests her silken elbow in Eda's lap and leans toward her in warmth and closeness, the older sister seeming almost like the younger one, the younger one almost like the older.

What happened between this sequence of photographs and today? That is the mystery delivered into my hands by Kitty's crisis. It may be insoluble, but I am going to try to solve it nevertheless. Why? It's in my nature never to let a tangled skein pass through my fingers without trying to untangle it. It may untangle some part of my tangled self.

Autobiography, I am learning, is much more difficult than fiction. In fiction, the writer can impose order, if not moral meaning, on events. Of course the characters do not all obey the writer's bidding like puppets, but they certainly can be coaxed into dances that are pleasingly symmetrical and seem to have beginnings, middles, and ends, a sense of purpose, plot, motivation.

Not so with life. And especially the lives of relatives. Sometimes people go to their graves without our learning their mysteries, and certainly without any sense of purpose, plot, motivation. Fiction writer that I am, I want to give shape and symmetry to this story, but I am stuck with the facts—in all their crudeness and disorder.

The facts unfold backward, as facts often do. Tomorrow, I will meet my aunt in court to try to get the legal power to become her caretaker. Then I will try to find a place for her. Tonight, I promise myself to visit her at Lenox Hill, but I do not. I stay instead at my desk, sifting through old family photographs and wondering what they mean.

 

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is
really
why I am committing an autobiography. And it cannot be an accident that smack in the middle of my beginning it, my aunt's loss of memory claims center stage in my life.

We meet in court, a somber columned building on Centre Street. The cast of characters are: my Aunt Kitty, who looks dazed, her dyed brown hair gone gray at the roots, a puzzled expression on her childlike old face; her former partner, Maxine (an imposing presence in frizzed red hair, orange lipstick, a coral suit, and large jewelry); a bossy young woman lawyer, who is advocating Kitty's civil rights for the City of New York; a fortyish, florid-faced, red-bow-tied male lawyer, appointed by the city to be Kitty's guardian
ad litem;
a young friend of Kitty's called Frank, who is not yet thirty and wears at least that many hoop earrings in his left ear; my father; my husband, who is acting as the family's lawyer; a Haitian nursing aide from a private agency, who is minding Kitty; and a Chinese-American judge, who takes a rather dim view of any petitioners who attempt to put their older relatives anywhere but in their own homes. (Since I was once married to a Chinese-American, I realize we have not been lucky in drawing this particular judge. The Chinese do not warehouse the old. Instead, they honor them.)