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Notes For An Archaeology of the Mother by Diane McPherson Part Four of Five Parts Note about this essay
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Part IV: Mother as Hero Write at least one story in which you depict your mother as a hero. To do this, you will probably need to redefine your concept of heroism. Choose something you know she once did (something you have remembered, or something you find out about from one of her siblings, her parents, neighbors, best friend, etc.) Then imagine it from her point of view: What it must have felt like for her to do it. How difficult it must have been. What social forces were aligned against her being able to do it. Think about things like giving birth, leaving home and moving to another city or state, going away to college when no one in her family had ever done so, violating some social rule like marriage out of her race, or divorce, or going on welfare, or working out of the home when her husband could not, or against her husband's will. Think about the small acts, so ordinary-seeming to women of your generation, which because she did not believe she could do them required extraordinary courage. We live in a country in which, although we give medals for valor in war, there is no real public recognition that motherhood, too, takes courage. Where is my mother's purple heart for daring eleven times to bring a new human being into the world? Giving birth is a dangerous thing for a woman to do; women die in childbirth, or afterwards, of the effects of childbirth, every day. My mother gave birth to eleven healthy babies. Her labor for each of us lasted several hours, and its course was so predictable that my aunt, an obstetrical nurse, would smuggle sandwiches in to my mother, who often grew hungry and bored in the labor suite. Her twenty years of pregnancies and their aftermath took a heavy toll on her body; she lost her teeth before she was thirty. The muscles and skin of her abdomen were stretched beyond their capacity to be elastic; she developed painful varicose veins in her legs. Her needs, physical and mental, were superceded as one by one we made our demands of her, this one needing a hug, a bottle, clean diapers, these two having to be separated because they were squabbling, this one wanting music lessons, new sneakers for basketball, a haircut, a perm, a trip to the dentist, this one having to pee just when she sank into the tub for a quick bath, this one crying in the night, developing a fever, a runny nose, earache, a cough, bronchitis, asthma, five or six simultaneous cases of intestinal flu, boils, impetigo, week after week of chicken pox, measles, scarletina. When my second brother was born, she had three children under five at home; my mother used to tell me that at that time, she nearly lost her mind. After that she was already crazy, so what difference did one more child make? But this wasn't at all true; she remained absolutely sane and fully responsible, tired or not, for life after life. No privacy, little rest, going to work and then coming home after hours on her feet to sleep a few hours and begin her other job as mother. When did she sit, or soak her back in the tub, or curl up on the couch for a nap, or get lost in a book for an afternoon? There was only time for those things in those rare moments when we were all asleep, when my dad snored on the couch, when all of the million demands on her ceased; then, if she wasn't asleep herself, she sat in the kitchen with her feet in the oven of the woodstove, knitting and thinking of things she didn't have to tell anyone. My mother did have some other adventures, outside of childbearing and child care. When my father refused to teach her to drive the car, she stole it and taught herself. She defied him again by getting a job when, although the two jobs he was working didn't pay enough to support us, he insisted that women should stay at home with their children. To this day, I cannot imagine how, pregnant with her fourth or fifth child, without work experience, she persuaded someone to hire her as a waitress. But I know how convincing she can be. Her capacity for invention was endless. Once, when she left out an ingredient in a cookie recipe, she convinced us it was intentional, a new creation: cement cookies, hard to chew but perfect for dunking in cocoa. For years we begged her to make the recipe again. She made Christmas shopping lists that stretched to several pages, hid toys where no one could find them (where sometimes she couldn't find them). She shopped for shirts and blouses and sweaters and socks and pants and underpants in threes, in three different sizes, color-coding us all so that we could find and fold our own laundry. Then she taught us to do the wash ourselves, to make our own breakfasts because she worked late nights and had trouble getting us up for school in the mornings. Where is the medal of honor for that, for carrying trays for eight hours, getting home long after midnight, sitting for an hour with a cup of tea until the aspirin started to work and her back stopped aching, getting to sleep at two or three and then up again by seven, sometimes, when we couldn't find our boots, or lunch money, or a note had to be written excusing an absence from school, or the toaster caught fire when we dripped jam into it, or the smell of a forgotten scorching egg alarmed her out of a sound sleep, or someone's hair needed to be braided, someone's loose tooth pulled out, someone's hem mended, someone's shoelaces tied together, someone's forehead felt for a fever, someone's cut bandaged, nosebleed stopped, skin rash diagnosed. Where is the purple heart for teaching each one of her children to suck, to sleep through the night, to drink from a cup, to use the potty, to bathe, to brush, to button and tie, to sew, to cook, to care for others, to tell the truth, to try, to fail gracefully, to try again, to dream? ~~~~~~~~~ To other parts of "Archaeology of a Mother": 1-- 2-- 3-- 5 |
