On Re-Reading Ellen, Joan, Myrel…

Moyra Davey

---

The most deeply pleasurable, gratifying form of reading is the one undertaken with a view to writing; and by and large, most of what I’ve had occasion to write has taken root in and grown out of the soil of reading. It is now five years since I began editing Mother Reader: Essential Writings On Motherhood, an anthology of writings by thirty-six women on the themes of maternal ambivalence and the intersection of motherhood and creative life. Three of the artists in the Maternal Metaphors show—Myrel Chernick, Ellen McMahon and Mary Kelly contributed to Mother Reader, and many other authors from the collection including Jane Lazarre, Adrienne Rich and Tillie Olsen are profoundly important to artists and writers who are mothers. Clearly Mother Reader shares an intimacy of purpose and identification with the Maternal Metaphors project.

Asked to write for Myrel’s catalogue I decided to revisit Mother Reader, not in any systematic way, but selectively, motivated by the state of things in my life now. On the one hand I was guided by a desire to reconnect with some of the voices that prefigured a good deal of my experience of motherhood and kept me company, sometimes daily like a mantra—for instance Joan Snyder’s phrase from her poem to Molly: “There is the 57 yr old that needs to do Yoga faster than time to keep me strong to paint never mind a child”¹ is one such utterance forever lodged in my brain. On the other hand, I’ve read indulgently, haphazardly, following my nose. And so there was something of a “taking stock” at work as I returned to the texts that had imprinted themselves upon me, but also a sense of discovery and awe as I read again, this time not with an editor’s judgement, but with the true jouissance of the reader. Below are my notes (inspired by Susan Griffin) on that reading experience:

ELLEN McMAHON, Suckled IV, 1996-present
Charcoal on Rives BFK, 20 in. x 13 in.

Early February, 2004
Re-reading Myrel Chernick, Ellen McMahon, Mary Kelly, and the half dozen or so visual artists from the collection I am struck yet again by their brilliance and wit, and by the incisiveness of their revelations about motherhood. I laugh out loud at Ellen’s tragic-comic descriptions of the dramas enacted by her young daughters (now statuesque teenagers). And Joan Snyder’s send-off to Molly about to enter college makes me cry.

PURE joy upon reading Ursula Le Guin again. I have read her essay on numerous occasions…how can it be that THIS feels like the first time? Le Guin is unsurpassed. (Why did I gravitate to Le Guin again, now? Well, because she writes about Woolf, and women writing and reading, all subjects of limitless interest and fascination.)

Le Guin begins with a fraught, abject image: a women writing in the kitchen while the kids howl. And from this she spins and levitates into spectacular realms of lightness and erudition, but also, lucid, enabling pronouncement:

“The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper.”

Mid-February
A small mound of ultra-fine powdery grit has accumulated at the base of a heating pipe next to my desk (and threatens to disperse itself throughout my studio), but I refrain from getting the vacuum cleaner in here to deal with it because I know that once I do that I will spend the next two hours sucking up all the dust from my very dusty apartment, and not writing.

Woolf: “Writing the body.” Le Guin: “…pregnancy, birth, nursing, mothering, puberty, menstruation, menopause…housework, childwork, lifework…in losing the artist mother we lose where there’s a lot to gain.”

Look in the mirror and lift T-shirt to examine stomach.
Make a cup of tea (and think of Italo Calvino).
Eat an orange to stave off hunger.
Get rid of all toys on desk.
Wonder what happened to period, two weeks late.
…
together
we grow pale
doing dishes,
and answering the telephone.
—Susan Griffin

Sit in sunlight and take note of the sound of stiff notebook pages being turned and pressed down (and make a mental note of that sound to use in a video sound-track some day), and listen to the tiny rattle of my disposable yellow mechanical pencil leaving its soft lead mark on heavy-ish notebook paper. Erase using other end of pencil and forever be reminded of a child methodically
correcting a mistake.

Martha Wilson: “I’m glad to be an old lady with a baby, even though I sometimes get called ‘grandmother’ on the subway.”

B., age six, looks at the veins on my hands and asks if I’m old. I remember my own repulsion/fascination with my mother’s worm-like veins.

Myrel writes: “This I know for sure: the children grow up, and so quickly that time with them becomes an even more precious commodity.”

Like the ‘do yoga’ mantra by Joan I can type in the beginning of Myrel’s sentence from memory. A little later she spells out ‘TIME’ in caps, the time she knows will be hers again once her kids grow up (that would be now!) And then there is Käthe Kollwitz’s diary entry (from Tillie Olsen’s Silences) about working after her children have left home, wondering if:
“the ‘blessing’ isn’t missing from such work [now that time is not] so wretchedly limited… Potency, potency is diminishing.”

MARION WILSON, The Grand Thaumaturge, 2003 (left), The Artificer’s Twin, 2003
Bronze with patina, each 24 in. x 8 in. x 8 in., detail

End February
J. takes B. upstate for a few days so that I can meet my deadline, and I take measure of the small emptiness I feel, a hint of what Kollwitz is talking about.

Susan Griffin: “So that when a woman is finally free of her children’s needs, she wants to forget.”

I sit on the bed beside J. in brilliant sunlight, our room filled with a surfeit of warm air from hissing, banging radiator. My skin is dry and stings from a too-hot bath. Look down at the fine spidery lines criss-crossing my chest and breasts.

Dena Shottenkirk, reflecting on the value of private life and time spent with young children, writes: “People, in the final autumnal days of their lives, rarely delight in their recollection of a day well-worked.”

Perhaps, but in the here and now, it is creative work that redeems our days, and I agree with Vivian Gornick (not in Mother Reader) who says that it is work finally, not love, that will save women’s lives. That spoken, I recall a moment last summer coming after a stint of work, when I had the choice to stay home in the apartment and keep writing, or go to the country with J. and B. My whole body longed for the simple pleasure of being with them in the woods, and the idea of chaining myself once again to the computer seemed utterly stale and pointless. The clichéd contrast between the health and vigor of the social-outdoors, and solitary introspection in dim light was so physically palpable that I experienced a kind of revulsion for the latter. I chose to go with J. and B. and I did it not for them but for myself.

All italicized quotes are from Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, edited by Moyra Davey, published in 2001 by Seven Stories Press, New York.

Maternal Metaphors Home    Back to top

Updated: January 22, 2007 6:02 AM