Writer, Interrupted

The year my first daughter was born, I wrote my dissertation. I had spent the previous nine months researching and then making an excruciatingly detailed outline of the project. The outline consisted of a complex system of index cards arranged by topics, sub-topics, and sub- sub-topics, each one bound by a rubber band and grouped with others in its category by a larger rubber band.

Having heard that babies could be time consuming, I figured that if I had just fifteen minutes to spare, I could remove the rubber band from a single sub-topic and write a paragraph or two before the next diaper change.

Besides the baby, I had a temporary part-time job teaching in a private school. Thanks to my rubber bands, I nevertheless managed to write all but the last chapter of my dissertation. Since by that point my daughter was no longer nursing every five minutes, my mother came up one weekend and babysat while I went to the library to finish the job.

I found a carrel in a quiet corner, took out the final batch of index cards, snapped off the rubber band and looked around. This being Saturday morning, the stacks were empty. There was no one, not even a mouse, to disturb me. I could concentrate to my heart's content....

Except I couldn't. Somehow I was unable to sustain mental effort for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch. Motherhood had worked a weird kind of interval training on my brain, so that I needed frequent interruptions in order to function.

Despite the weirdness of those two silent days, I did manage to sweat out the last chapter--but, ironically, it was the only one that my advisor asked me to rewrite.

In Silences, her heart-wrenching book about why writers don't write, Tillie Olsen says,"More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible." These days, fatherhood may in some cases get in the way of writing as well, but it's still mostly motherhood that keeps writers from writing.

No matter how talented the writer, it's hard to produce a masterpiece in fifteen-minute stretches. A middle-class mother may well have a physical room of her own, but where to escape the moral obligation, let alone the inborn desire to satisfy a child's endless need for food, company, stimulation, love?

The German poet Rilke was so leery of the drain that affections impose on a writer that he could not live in the same house with his wife and baby. He couldn't even bear to have a dog: "Anything alive that makes demands, arouses in me an infinite capacity to give it its due, the consequences of which completely use me up." (Rilke quoted by Olsen, in Silences.)

For me, the days of index cards and rubber bands were followed by decades of further interruptions, by growing children, work, and life in general. But my present schedule is one to make struggling would-be writers faint with envy: I could, if I wanted to, write uninterruptedly from dawn to dusk, every single day.

But not quite. For as soon as the opening fanfare of Windows announces that I've sat down to write, the cat Telemann comes rushing up to investigate. He sits on the desk, rearranges my papers, sniffs  my coffee, and reaches out his white paw to tap on the keyboard (he's been known to delete important stuff). Is he bored, I wonder? Hungry? In need of affection? Poor thing, he never gets to go outside--I should play with him a while.

My little red dog Bisou, less intrusive now than in her youth, is content to sleep in the room while I write--until she starts to wonder when we're going for our walk, or if it's almost dinnertime. She's been with me through thick and thin for the past decade, her entire tiny life. How can I deny her?

My two goldfish and my houseplants are less vocal in their demands, but I can't bear to see them languish. The fish must be fed breakfast and dinner, and the water in their tub changed regularly. The plants need water--not too much--and food and grooming, and carefully placed full-spectrum lights.

Clearly, my brain is still on its old schedule. After fifteen or twenty minutes of writing, it looks around for interruptions. What--no phone calls, no emails, no appointments, nobody at the door? It must be time to walk the dog.

Short of infants of my own, I have hobbled myself with a set of living beings that arouse in me that infinite capacity to give them their due.  Rilke would say I'm committing creative suicide.

And so I walk the dog, and play with the cat, and I try not to beat myself up about it. Fifteen or twenty minutes of writing is better than nothing, after all. Despite his richly emotive poetry, Rilke strikes me as a little cold. Besides, who's to say that a well-loved creature is less precious than a great poem?

Mother Bear

The ancient Greeks believed that bear cubs were born as formless blobs, and it was their mothers who, by diligent and careful use of their tongues, licked them into proper bear shape. As soon as the midwife put me in her arms, my mother got down to her version of the bear’s task: to shape me into the best possible specimen of humanity.

Like a bear cub with its mother, I was seldom out of her sight, or out of her arms. Even after I could sit up by myself and would normally have begun to crawl she held me, because setting me down on the floor even for a moment would have been dangerous and unhygienic, something that only “gypsies and peasant women” did. Inevitably, however, there came a day when my increasing weight and my desperation to get free of those loving arms became too much for my mother. But instead of putting me down and letting me figure things out on my own, she decided to teach me to walk. Bending over at the waist to support my hands and keep me upright, she matched her steps to mine as I tottered up and down the hallway of the apartment. Fueled by months of pent-up energy, I clamored to walk whenever I wasn’t sleeping, and after hours of “walking lessons” my mother’s back hurt almost as much as her cracked nipples had when I was first born (see preceding post).

Years later, when my sister was a toddler and my mother was in her forties, I would come home from high school to find my mother on the sofa, a hot water bottle under her sacrum. “I’m exhausted,” she would say. “I had to spend the whole afternoon teaching Nuria to walk. You can’t imagine what this does to my back!” From my sixteen-year-old vantage point, I wondered why she was always so tired, and whether caring for an infant need be such an all-consuming task. But my mother’s intensive approach to childrearing had more to do with the needs of her temperament than on the real needs of the child.

Her thirst for adventure and her impatience with the ordinary, combined with her parents’ progressive views, had given my mother an education very different from that of her peers, who were expected to learn little more than fancy embroidery and perhaps the piano. At a time when girls were kept close to their mother’s skirts until they married, my mother went away to school in Valencia, Pamplona and Barcelona, places that in the early 1930s seemed as strange and far away from her village as Tibet. She studied law, and then Greek and Latin. She was attending university in Barcelona when, on a whim, she decided to learn to play the violin and met my father, who was her teacher. And when they married, the consensus of an entire culture about the role of women, the advice of the two families, and her own unconquerable dread of examinations led my mother to give up her studies.

After her marriage, despite the five flights of stairs that she had to manage daily on her way to and from the stores, the need to watch every peseta, and the Spartan conditions of the apartment, my mother’s life became less demanding.  My father adored her, and expected little more than that she have lunch ready when he dashed home between rehearsals. And she had a maid to scrub the tile floors and do the dishes and wash clothes by hand in the little laundry room next to the kitchen.

While my father careened—by metro and streetcar but mostly on foot--from rehearsals to performances all over the city, she read books, prepared my layette, went to lectures and art openings with her sisters. But the days seemed long, and she was afflicted with an inner demon that gave her no rest. There had to be more to life, more meaning, more urgency, more work. She had dreamed of becoming a trial lawyer, defending the innocent from barbarous injustice, and now here she was, ironing pillowcases....

I was born a year after the wedding, and at my first cry the demon was banished: my mother now had a project, a life-or-death task at which she had the chance to excel, a job more exalted than any career in the courts, and one requiring utmost vigilance, willpower and self-sacrifice. Here in her hands, in the guise of a baby to lick into perfect shape, was the challenge she had waited for. And she rushed to meet it with all the force of her young body and her restless mind. (To be continued)

Mozarts Of Maternity

Back from a long string of days wandering in the deserts of CFS, I read an article in last week's New Yorker about the French intellectual and feminist, Elisabeth Badinter.

Talking about the dilemmas faced by mothers, Badinter says,

"If you're a mother, you are either too present or too absent;  you can't win.  You have to be a Mozart of maternity to reach the right absence-presence balance."

Ah yes, Mozart--that feather-light touch, that depth of sentiment, that endless inventiveness, that total  mastery--that's what a mother should be.

My own mother's style was more along Wagnerian lines:  persistently present and passionate, rich in color and drama.  In reaction, my own mothering was minimalist, sort of in the style of Philip Glass.  For example, my mother chose my wedding dress for me.  As a consequence, by the time they were three, my daughters were deciding what to wear to pre-school.  Often the outfits were less than becoming, but I fervently believed that as long as they were protected from the weather, it was my duty to stay out of their way.  I also believed that a major justification for a woman to have a career was to protect her children from becoming the sole focus of her energies.

Of course what you're getting here is my version.  I'm sure that my daughters found me way too present in some ways and too absent in others.  And I know that my mother's oppressive hovering, in her view, was only the expression of her ideas about love and duty. 

In my family, mothering styles seem to skip a generation:  my mother's mother allowed her to leave the village for high school and then university.  After age fourteen, my mother never lived at home again. 

Surely my family is not the only one where mothers lurch from pole to pole of the maternal dialectic.  If so, somewhere out there must exist that perfect synthesis:  a Mozart of maternity, with that lightness of touch, that depth of feeling.... 

If you know one, please let us hear about her.

Maternal Angst

It's been snowing all day. In a little while, our younger daughter will be landing at the airport in Albany, NY, an hour and a half from here, and we will not be there to meet her. And it will be my fault. We checked the radar maps, and we checked the roads online. There were three accidents between here and Albany, and dire predictions of bad road conditions.

Still, had it been up to my husband, we'd be on our way to the airport right now. He feels a strong imperative to meet people at the airport, to be there at the gate when they land, or just beyond security if the gates are out of bounds. When one's near and dear alight from the skies, he believes, one needs to be there to meet them. No matter what.

My view is more nuanced. One is there to meet them if at all possible. When it came time to decide whether to go or stay, the snow was coming down implacably, and someone who'd been here had called after she left to say the roads were bad, and besides, there are hotels right near the airport, so I said, no, we'd better not go. And my husband said, whatever you say.

We tried calling our daughter's cell phone when she was between flights but she didn't answer, so we left a message. We will page her at the airport when her flight gets in. She is a grown woman who will know what to do. In fact, she will probably enjoy a quiet room and an early night after a day of flying. And tomorrow morning we will go to pick her up.

So why do I feel so bad? Because, though mostly retired these days, I'm a mother, and I want to be there to greet my child and cluck over her stories of narrowly-missed flights. I want to get her home and give her something to eat and put her to bed safely. And instead I'm in bed safely while she's in the wilds of Albany, NY all by herself. All because I didn't think it was safe to drive to Albany in the middle of a snowstorm. What kind of mother am I?