Oh, Mother, Where Art Thou?

                      "A mother is a woman who decorates her life with babies."
                                   - Stupid Old Joke

                      "A mother's patience is like a tube of toothpaste - it's never quite gone."
                                  - Really Really Stupid Old Joke

Mothers.  I had two of 'em, both in the same body.  One was funny, beautiful, festive and warm; the other was crazy, furious and dangerous.  The "nice" one stuck around until I was around ten or so, the other one took over after that.  As Mother's Day approaches, I've been thinking a lot about them both, those two, even looking up old publications in which I've described their various gifts, characteristics and foibles.

My mother's name was LaVern, and she was an odd sort of mother.  Not that she seemed so odd at the time, but now she seems very odd indeed, I wrote and published in THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW in a memoir piece titled "The Goodnight Piece".  Odd and endearing.  She tried to keep a firm grip on life by never succumbing to sleep.  Of course she did sleep, but she didn't believe in it, or rather, she did believe in it, but not in the way most people do.  Sleep was her enemy.
     My mother considered life to be a tragically tenuous situation.  Combine this with her philosophy that human beings are weak, that when we finally lay ourselves down to sleep we lie down very still with our eyes shut tight, and that sleep mimimcs  this state nearly to a tee, and - - well, you don't have to be very smart to make the connection.  I don't think I was particularly brilliant, but I made the connection right off the bat.  I identified strongly, as the doctors would say.  My mother's enemies became my enemies, and the most dangerous of them of all was sleep.
     
     And on and on and on.  For msot of my writing life, my mother was my Muse; indeed, I have published more words about her than I have about any other subject in my adult life.  She's been the skeleton in my closet, she's been the flag on my mast, she's been the heart on my sleeve, the lump in my throat, the sword in my belly.  Oh, what is it about mothers!  What a complicated lot we are, no matter whether we are well balanced or tipsy as all get out, we remain one of the most complex  figures in mythology and psychology. 
     For one thing, of course, we are the portal through which you all, we all, gain entrance into existence itself.  We just don't get here without us.  We be it.  It is said that anxiety and fear live at the heart of existence and it may be that anxiety and fear live in the hearts of anyone who has a mother about  their mother.  Freud's famous question, "What do women want?" might be properly turned around to ask, "What do men really want from women?" For if mother is the Powerful Gateway  and the Nurturer, how can she also be the prototype of the One Who is Physically Desired in another woman's body?  What an emotionally and psychologically complex setup this is for males and it leads, I believe, to so much male to female abuse, no matter how many times males shake their heads and snicker, "Oh, get outa here!". 

Yeah, Right.

     International anger against females is just too great to deny that something's going on with men and women and female sexuality, and it's got to be fear.  Great gobs of it. Men hate it, at least, some men that it....that females experience sexuality.   Fear and loathing.  Fear and anger. But I digress....I was talking about mothers, and my mother in particular, that woman who taught me to love language - -  so much I have dedicated article after article to a term she made up, called Bloodtalk.

  From one of my three published articles entitled BloodTalk, Day Pages of a Psychotherapist, this one which appeard in CREATIVE NONFICTION, (may I brag? Along with the work of Ellen Gilcest and John McPhee):

     Language walks around my office all day: all I need do is sti and whoosh it comes, and with it comes thoughts of my mother, the second most beautiful woman in Silverdale, and could she talk!
     Mostly she talked a talk called Blood Talk, a term she made up, a term based on her belief that blood was the source of everything important and she had names to prove it: blood food, blood looks, blood songs, blood people, blood roots, blood time, blood land, blood talk.
     Real talk comes from the inside, she'd say, you'll know it when you hear it so use it when you mean it, otherwise, don't.  I've only known one person who spoke it pretty much all the time and he was a pain in the ass. Your teachers won't use it, the Lutheran minister won't use it, President Eiwenhower doesn't use it, those Bible people tried and ended up sounding silly.  All I can say is, it matters, so watch out.

And my mother said this: How would you like to go to bed as Eleanor Roosevelt and wake up as Mamie Eisenhower? What a joke. They saw Eleanor's husband said, 'I've had war and I've had Eleanor. Give me war.'  Nobody'd claim any anti-wife shit from him, an old bald man like God.  Listen: Eleanor was not pretty. Talk and not-talk get important fast when you're not pretty. Men who write books, they're not pretty, right? See? Mean your talk like blood. Quiet, that's blood, too; it can be mean. I'd say you're not going to be the prettiest so you'd better get serious about this. And stay out of Famous, they'll have you saying words you'll swear you never even heard yourself think.

Well, that was my mother, folks, I can't remember if those words came from her friendly years or......no, it sounds like they came from her furious years.   It's a strange thing, though, those furious years....even though her savage screaming and pounding, which set my autonimic nervous system on a life course of head ducking and tremoring, even so, I would still choose for myself an openly "Mad Mother' rather than the self-sacrificing "Saint Mother", that is, the mother who is overly self-sacrificing towards others, the mother who is so self-effacing towards life itself so that the daughter ends up living in an unconscious state of never feeling "good enough"as if if she were just a little more responsible, a little more dutiful behaving (not actually "feeling", but behaving), a little bit "nicer seeming"......then maybe she might be worthy of somebody's love.  Because, see,  at least you can fight with the Mad Mother.  At least you can develop a Self.  You can hit back, even, if you dare. In fact, sometimes, if you want to live badly enough, you'd better hit back. You'd better dare hit and yell to high heaven.  But the daughter of the Saint Mother of the mother who plays at being the Saint Mother has no tools at her disposal.  All she can do is watch, look and listen and make inner vows to be just like her mother.

Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy.

The daughter of the Mad Woman knows she will do anything, anything NOT to become "mad".  She may become lots of things other people may not admire or want to strive for, she may develop gaps (as I have) that would put the Grand Canyon to shame, she may follow her senses from here to Cheyenne, but she will not kill herself or others out of shame.

                                       I stand in the ring
                                        in the dead city      
                                     and tie on the red shoes.......

                                       They are not mine,
                                    They are my mother's,
                                       Her mother's before,
                                     handed down in Life as heirloom,
                                but hidden like shameful letters.
                                                               - Anne Sexton

And Sexton, of course, sexually used and abused her daughter Linda, and then, years later, of course, she killed herself.  Between mothers and daughters, madness becomes entangled inside a web of feelings --personal and generational feelings.  And there are many types of mothers and many types of daughters and the mothers know exactly what kind of daughters they want and the daughters know exactly what kind of mothers they want and the rule of thumb is, natch, stop it.  Stop it right now.  Give up your expectations.  Give up your demands.  Please.  Because they will not, I repeat - they will not be met.  Because, see, it's not all up to you.  Mothers!  Please!  It's not all up to you!

Remember in the sixties?  That guy, Dr. Bruno Bettleheim?  The doctor who coined the term "Refrigerator Mothers", that dumb bastard, about the mothers of all children who happened to be autistic?  And it turned out later that he was screwing around with his research?  And he was an anti-Semite?  Plus he was all kinds of other kinds of a jerk?   Well, listen, DON'T LET ANYBODY EVER DO ANYTHING LIKE THAT TO YOU EVER EVER EVER AGAIN! 

Because, it takes more than a mother to make a person.  It takes a peer group,  that's REALLY important.  It takes a a neighborhood, that's fairly important.  It makes genetics, ok, that's quite important.  It takes a culture, that's a big deal, too.  And who knows what else!  Actually, everything's pretty much all up for grabs, right now, because none of us can explain what really happens.......take a kid from the slums who gets shot at day after day and the kid grows up and becomes a good person, a well functioning person, a good enough parent, a law abiding person, and more than that, somebody with a sense of humor and an ability to connect with other people and be intimate.....and then take a kid from a so-called "good" family, even maybe a Bainbridge Island family, with the soccer and the ballet and the professional parents and the introduction to the arts and families who barbecue salmon and maybe even ship in soft shell crabs every once in awhile and......oopsie daisy!.....there goes Betsy!

There went Betsy!
Why?
We don't know why.
But where'd she go?
Uh - - we can't answer that.
Will she be back?
Maybe.....we hope so.
No guarantees?
No guarantees.
But we're a good family. We've saved money for college.
Yeah. We know that.
So..where did we go wrong?
Who said you did?
We read it in a book in the sixties.
You read the wrong book.
Oh.

"In Anne Lamott's latest book "SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED", she is talking to her paster and she writes, "Do you think God was terrified for Jesus?"
"Well, at least concerned."
"And what do you do in the face of this powerlessness? As a parent?"
"You get to be obsessed and angry.  And they get to be the age they are, and act like teenagers if they want to.  There is a zer-percent chance you will change them.  So we breathe in, and out, talk to friends, as needed. We show up, wear clean underwear, say hello to strangers. We plant bulbs, and pick up litter, knowing there will be more in twenty minutes. We pray that we might cooperate with any flicker of light we can find in the world."

Obviously Anne was having trouble with her kid at this point in the book. He was nearly a grown-up and he'd gotten a young -- and wonderful, as it turned out - - girl pregnant - - and she'd had the baby - - and he kind of jumped ship and Anne, his mom, was hurt and pissed and - - hurt and pissed.  Because, see, mothers have these expectations of their kids.  Hell, I had Enormous Expectations of my biological son.  Gynormous, as my dear friend Christine would say. I thought he was going to become the most famous Russian Pianist in all of history.

Never mind that he had no Russian in him.
Never mind that I couldn't afford piano lessons.
Never mind that his Dad (not Jim, this was a different man, to whom I was married for one year) was a drug addict and I lived inside one gigantic panic attack and it was the nineteen-sixties and my mother was at her craziest and one evening managed to single-handedly tip the entire ward of women in the Lakewood Hospital Maternity Ward over onto it's (their) knees, me included, until the hospital's security guards ran in, grabbed my mother by both arms and bodily (bodily!) dragged her out of the hospital but not before several of our breasts (our breasts!) had dried up rendering us unable to breast feed our babies and my husband (ha!) got drunk and fainted and then woke up and wrecked the car although I'm not sure it was in that order and the next thing I knew I was sterilizing bottles like crazy and feeding formula to this baby I had wanted with all my heart to breastfeed and the washing machine I had counted on to work had developed a kind of quirk and the wringer part had stopped working and there were no paper diapers yet and even if there were I was probably too much of a purist to say "yes" to them so that I was washing diapers all day and wringing them out with my bare hands and sterilizing bottles and battling my panic disorder all the while trying to deal with the fact that my mother (my mother!) had come to stay with me for five days but she said she had forgotten how to bathe a baby that small and so although he was perfectly healthy (but he fainted every time he took in enough air to begin to cry) and his weight was good and we had the bath temperature just right (although it became cooler and cooler because neither of us could bare to lower him into the water), there we were, passing this baby back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, to each other, "Here, you do it,"  "No, here, YOU do it,"  .....in the big, beautiful house we rented, Tom and I, from the PostMaster General of Tacoma, Washington, with it's ornate furniture, it's beautiful carved oak dining table for the many, may dinner parties we never gave, the fabulous sitting room we never sat in, the magnificent huge bear-claw bathtub I would have loved to have taken a bath in but was so afraid I wouldn't be able to hear my baby cry if I really let go and relaxed in that tub, that I took small, quick spitz baths instead........

     Of course it must be true that, any time a woman begins to write about her own mother, she must end up writing about her own self as a mother; that is, if she has been a mother.  Surely it is inevitable. What else can one do?  Where else, on paper, can one go?  My mother died when she was forty-seven.  I am sixty-six. The only memories I truly trust reside inside my nervous system, which will never be healed.  The rest of me has done a fine job of healing, and I give thanks to my mother for her great gifts she has given me, along the way. Humor. Creativity. Warmth. Music. Language.  A certain topsy-turvy outlook on life which grew as much out of her Canadian Indian background as the poor North Dakota soil my mother and her siblings emerged out of.

                                                           The Uses of Sorrow
                                               (In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
                                          Someone I loved once gave me a box
                                                            of darkness.
                                                     It took me years to understand
                                                        that this, too, was a gift.
                                                                 - Mary Oliver

My mother was a gift, often a terrible gift, but a gift.  Often a magnificent gift.  Sometimes, when I think of the "things" she gave me, I can not imagine how fortunate I was, as a child.  Her voice! Her shine!  Her imagination (how many children have a mother who says, "Okay, we'll pretend this cardboard box is a TV camera and we'll set it here, on top of the fridge, and we'll pretend we're doing a daily soap opera called 'The Mildred and Mildred Show" and you be Mildred and I'll be the other Mildred, and we'll both be married to two brothers named Joe and Joe, and we'll just make it up as we go along!")  She was a lover and she was a terror and she was a gift.  She made herself a part of me.  I was a part of her. For many years, we loved each other. We nagged at each other. We harmonized with each other. We read to each other. I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" to her. She read "Peyton Place" (!!!) to me. 

                                             "Child, born of joy and mirth,
                                                    Go live, without the help
                                                     of anything on earth."
                                                                -William Blake


    But I had it.  I had it all.  I have it all. I am the blessed, blessed one. Thank you, Charles D., I've had the best of times and the worst of times.  And I grew up to unoffically adopt two daughters who have given me some of the absolutly greatest yearsof my life.  Not to mention the grandchildren.  Not to mention Angela, who has given me her and my son's son, Aleister.  So, whatever I said at the beginning of this blog (it's late, and I'm fading fast), Happy Mother's Day everybody, and thank you for reading this big fat probably-filled-with-at-least-one-hundred-typos-blog.  It was meant, somehow, to be solely about my mother when I began, but, like all my writing, which is not for "Publication-publication", and is not for academe, I sniff my way through several paths simultaneously and always  for my own pleasure, not your's.  Sorry about that.

Never-the-less, Happy Mother's Day to all you Beautiful Mother's out there, and you know who you are, but I'll name you: Mel, Kelly, Christine, Erin, Angela, Kathy, Susan F., Susan W. , Ruth, Robin, Sherry, Jane, Jennifer, Bonnie, Brooke, Mary, Fran, a different Kelly (not my daughter),  Alys.....ALL OF YOU!  It's HARD!  It's TOUGH!  LOVE YOURSELVES!  YOU DESERVE IT  THE EPISTIMOTOMIES (sp) ALONE WERE ****AWFUL!****  I LOVE YOU ALL!