On Studying the Classics: Mother Reader
In Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, Moyra Davey brings together writers of motherhood across genres, exploring why we have children and how we are with them. A photographer and filmmaker, Davey describes finding herself unable to continue that artistic work early after the birth of her child. She however found herself drawn to reading, and selected texts and themes echoing her own practice. A polyphony of voices from the 1940s to the 2000s, sometimes citing 19th century works, illuminate why we have children and how they shape our creative life.
Why do we have children? The voices ask. For experiencing our own bodies (Plath’s The Unabridged Journals). For how they attach us to others, despite knowing it can be hard (Lessing’s Under My Skin: Volume One). For having a chance of being the mothers we didn’t have (Griffin’s Feminism and Motherhood). Because they are the reason we work and finish the work important to us (Walker’s “A Writer Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children”). For Davey and many mothers before her, cleanliness appears as one of the guiding threads. It represents the impossibility of motherhood as an ideal, and the transcendence to be found even in its imperfections.
The span of time between the earliest and the latest essays, and the references mentioned within, also highlights a kinship among mothers. Adrienne Rich’s 1976 Of Woman Born, a core text of the Second Wave feminist movement, underlies most of the volume, ostensibly shaping her contemporaries and every mother and writer, writer and mother since. Margaret Mead, one of the rare voices about becoming a grandmother, echoes Anne Truitt, and wonders how to “be a resource but not an interference.” They are also brought together by the rare artworks about motherhood, encountered in many of our other book club picks - Mary Kelly’s Postpartum Document, Käthe Kollwitz’s paintings and drawings of mothers and children.
The book highlights the constantly renewed work to build community for and by mothers. This might be a political, feminist, community, or mothers brought together by material circumstances. Lazarre’s The Mother Knot shows the importance of urban density in emancipating mothers, a topic dear to feminist architecture. Women artists also found each other through various collective publications; Davey refers and includes texts from M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a journal of art criticism. MAD emerged in similar circumstances. The work will never be done, but we might be able to make it a little easier for the next generation.
In the spirit of the book, we leave you with voices on motherhood contained in the book that you may want to hear more from.
“I have been asked if I had the choice again, would I have a child? This is an absurd question. I am not the same person I was before I had a child. That young woman would not understand me.
What did you learn from having a child?
I learned vulnerability. So simple, really, the simplicity of it amazed me, tears, my daughter’s tears, her pain, her fears, and that I could comfort her, that her body relaxed against mine, that she learned to smile from me, that she was wholly unashamed of her hungers, her tempers, that there was no line of explanation between joy and sorrow but experience itself. The vulnerability and the clear logic of her flesh was a revelation to me. One morning, shortly after her birth, I lay on top of the bed crying because I realized one day I would have to explain death to her. Clearly in all her innocence, she did not deserve death.”
Excerpt from Feminism and Motherhood, from Momma, the newspaper for single mothers, by Susan Griffin, 1974
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“In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present. Looking at a loved child, one cannot say, “We must sacrifice this generation for the next. Many must die now so that later others may live.” This is the argument that generations of old men, cut off from children, have used in sending young men out to die in war. Nor can one say, “I want this child to live well no matter how we despoil the earth for later generations.” For seeing a child as one’s grandchild, one can visualize that same child as a grandparent, and with the eyes of another generation one can see other children, just as light-footed and vivid, as eager to learn and know and embrace the world, who must be taken into account—now. My friend Ralph Blum has defined the human unit of time as a space between a grandfather’s memory of his own childhood and a grandson’s knowledge of those memories as he heard about them. We speak a great deal about a human scale; we need also a human unit in which to think about time.”
Excerpt From “On Being a Grandmother” from Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years by Margaret Mead, 1972
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“Then my mother’s face filled my head, pushing everything else away. And it was with her hand that I patted Benjamin’s back until he was asleep and it was with her voice that I sang to him.”
Excerpt from The Mother Knot by Jane Lazarre, 1997
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“I began my most recent work on motherhood, The Mother/Child Papers, in 1970, when my third child and only son was born just after we invaded Cambodia and shot the four students at Kent State University. It was impossible at that time to avoid meditating on the meaning of having a boy child in time of war, or to avoid knowing that “time of war” means all of human history. Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born quotes a Frenchwoman declaring to her, when her son was born, “Madame, vous travaillez pour l’armée.” Lady, you’re working for the army. I had the despairing sense that this baby was born to be among the killed, or among the killers.”
Excerpt from “A Wild Surmise: Motherhood and Poetry” in Writing Like a Woman, Alicia Ostriker, 1983
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“What are the major themes? I see them clustered into two large groups: opposition and integration, motherhood as obstacle or source of conflict and motherhood as link, as source of connection to work and world. The oppositional themes—guilt vs. love, mother’s creative self vs. child’s needs, isolation vs. commitment—are the ones I emphasized in the above quotations. The daily conflict and self-doubt, the waste of creative energies these oppositions engender cannot be overestimated. What is involved here, furthermore, is not simply an institutional or social problem; alternate nurturers will not necessarily relieve it (although they may eventually help) because the conflicts are inside the mother, they are part of her most fundamental experience. One can always argue, as Rich and others have done, that the internal conflicts are the result of institutional forces, the result of women’s isolation, women’s victimization by the motherhood myth in patriarchal society. But while this argument can help us understand why the conflicts are internal, it does not eliminate them. At the present time, any mother of young children (and I don’t mean only infants, but children of school age and beyond) who wants to do serious creative work—with all that such work implies of the will to self-assertion, self-absorption, solitary grappling—must be prepared for the worst kind of struggle, which is the struggle against herself”
Excerpt from Writing and Motherhood, by Susan Rubin Suleiman, 1979
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“I’ve thought about the decision to have children as a calculated defense against the pain of loss; a way to prolong the possibility of getting the unconditional love and attention I missed as a child. The irony is that from the moment I gave birth, my motherhood has been a slow and constant process of letting go… a little bit of loss every day as my children become less a part of my body and more independent beings. As it turns out, motherhood has been a great catalyst in my uneven process of accepting the inevitability of loss and gradually letting go of my manic defenses against painful feelings. This process has allowed me to be more present to my children and has opened up the psychic space necessary for me to make my work.”
Excerpt from A Little Bit of Loss (1996-2000), by original essay for Mother Reader, by Ellen MacMahon
