Stuff I've Been Putting Off

I hesitate to begin this post.  Kind of a “don’t go there” thing.  In our household, there is a legend of the time my husband and I made the to do list to end all lists.  I was eight months pregnant and on bed rest with pregnancy-induced hypertension.  I was already living with a teenager and a two-year-old, not to mention a young, battle-scarred Labrador I’d snatched from the clutches of the humane society.  My dissertation was on hold.  My husband had just finished his.  Unhappy stepchildren circled the scene.  Stress was the air I breathed.

For some crazy reason, we thought it would be a good idea to put down in writing all the things we needed to take care of.  The list began innocuously enough, with some item of the magnitude of “Clean the kitchen.”  And then it grew.  And grew.  Like a tumor.  Like the enchanted tree-character in my children’s old favorite My Neighbor Totoro, but not in a good way.  It grew into a menacing thing.  It became satanic in proportion and tone. 

Within three days of making The List, I had flunked my weekly medical monitoring and been hospitalized.  Induction of labor followed an attempt to stabilize my soaring blood pressure.  My last baby arrived, two-and-a-half weeks early and small enough for doll clothes.  Chaos took root.  My new family was off and running, sans training or proper shoes.

Obviously, fate was not largely altered by these events.  I was clearly going to give birth to this child sooner or later.  I already had medical issues.  And the somewhat atypical  number and character of stressors swirling around us were surely having their own effects.  But I have always harbored the belief that it was The List that brought the drama.  It took me awhile after that difficult summer to screw up the courage to make even the more pedestrian daily to do lists with which I had littered most of my adult life before. 

As I write this, I’m not pregnant, and can’t be, and finally don’t have even the ghost of a wish to be.  So I can’t precipitate an obstetrical emergency.  But some little voice within me hisses a warning as I contemplate an itemizing of some things I need to get to. 

In the face of this fear, and in the spirit of this blog and the changes it stems from, I have identified  a number of postponed tasks and issues which I (dare I say it?) l-l-l-list here.  I am thinking of this more in the way of an assessment than as a charge.  The list is in no particular order, and makes no promises.  I just need to look at it, to see where I am.   A benchmark of sorts.  In propitiation of the list-gods, I have limited myself to fifteen items—the first that come to mind.

Some Stuff I’ve Been Putting Off

1. Painting the treehouse
2. Grieving my dad's death 
3. Finishing the refinishing of my kitchen cabinets
4. Staining the fence we built before Katrina
5. Casting off the scarf I knitted my son for Christmas
6. Digitizing my poetry
7. Working on the novel I started three years ago
8. Cleaning the basement
9. Making room for our cars in the garage
10. Dealing with my blood pressure phobia
11. Recovering the lawn
12. Laying my dissertation to rest somehow
13. Calling my brother
14. Getting a life
15. Painting the bathroom I primed nine years ago (after removing the mildew that has set in since)

Now all that remains is to sit and wait for the drama.  And maybe start therapy for an apparent paint brush phobia.

What am I Doing in the 19th Century?

In an earlier post, I wrote about my years of grappling with Tillie Olsen’s Silences.  Since finally finishing the book, I have been thinking about Olsen’s accounts of mothers who were writers, herself included.   I think back to images I have held since reading Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, mentioned in passing by Olsen.  And to the story of A.S. Byatt’s character Stephanie Potter, whose freakish accidental death in Still Life cuts short her halting attempts to resurrect her intellectual work, in the midst of young motherhood.

Adrienne Rich wrote memorably of herself as a mother of young children in the 1950s, and the strong emotions that tore at her as she fought to maintain something of herself and her work.  The fictional Stephanie Potter existed in this same time period, an ocean away.  Olsen was raising her children, as she said, “without household help,” in the 1940s and 1950s. 

Among the essays that make up Silences is Olsen’s treatment of Rebecca Harding Davis, who published Life in the Iron Mills in 1861.  Her early promise was, in Olsen’s view, buried under the domestic demands of her relatively late marriage and ultimate motherhood.  Olsen tells us, too, of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s trials, quoting from a letter to her husband, who was apparently sympathetic.

      

Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts. They are delicate in health, and nervous and excitable and need a mother’s whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts?  (Silences, p. 204)

Stowe’s history-changing Uncle Tom’s Cabin would wait another ten years, until she was thirty-nine.  She

wrote it in magazine serial installments—in between—when weary with teaching the children and tending the baby and buying provisions and mending and darning; much of it on the kitchen table as the younger Harriet Beecher Stowe had, when trying to get writing done fourteen years before.  The firm, flawless style of her girlhood letters was gone.  (Silences, p. 206)

My three children were born between 1977 and 1993.  Two are still at home.  I have known Rich’s torment, followed Stephanie’s regimen, mirrored Olsen’s episodic pattern.  I have written, nearly to the word, Stowe’s lament.  Why am I seemingly mired in a time before my time?  What am I doing in the nineteen century, with my Subaru, my laptop, a dishwasher and central heating?  Why has technology not freed me to write?

I was born on the cusp of the changes many thought would bring relief, would allow women to “have it all.”  And yet, prior to the recent economic declines, many who could afford it were putting work on hold for motherhood, working part-time, changing careers to accommodate the kind of mothering we wanted to engage in.  We talked about “sequencing,” bumped our heads on glass ceilings, and some of us seemed determined to limit ourselves.   Add to this a new and powerful ideology of “natural” mothering, and in my case the “going native” phenomenon that lured me into the meaningful realities of my midwife dissertation subjects.  A perfect storm.

Olsen, again:

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptable, responsive, responsible. Children need one now (and remember, in our society, the family must often try to be the center for love and health the outside world is not). The very fact that these are real needs, that one feels them as one's own (love, not duty); that there is no one else responsible for these needs, gives them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.... Work interrupted, deferred, relinquished, makes blockage--at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be.” (Silences 18-19)

And yet, in the nineteenth century, before washers and dryers and daycare, atrophy notwithstanding, a beleaguered mother of six surviving children changed the course of debate concerning slavery.  Who am I to sit in mourning for my weakened muse? 

Burning Off: Communing in Flame

Fire has been presenting itself to me as metaphor, solution and ritual of late.  This past Sunday, I attended a “Fire Communion” at my Unitarian church.  Having been born into Catholicism, I’m a sucker for communions of all sorts, and this denomination of religious refugees provides several—flower communion, water communion, bread communion.  This was my first fire communion.

The artfully organized service contained several elements that provoked, quieted and inspired me.  But the centerpiece was the opportunity to write words on a small piece of flash paper representing a story I wished to let go of, and to add this story to those of others being released into the fire.

I have been moving into a time of sorting, assessing, reclaiming, and discarding over the last few months.  I’m not sure where this is coming from, but I suspect that my impending empty nest, the significant birthday this year will bring, and the continuing process of trying to come to terms with the death of someone I loved all my life are acting together to fuel this consuming process.  So I was more than ready to consign any one of several outgrown stories to the flames.  But I had been told to use one piece of paper.  Being generally compliant—see Catholic background reference above—I didn’t think of violating this instruction.  And even if I had, it was hard enough to scribble a few words on one square of what turned out to be quite fragile paper in the time allowed.  I was forced, therefore, to settle on one story to relinquish.

I was taking this exercise seriously, and felt the compunction to identify the most important story to leave behind.  Or the story that subsumed the others.  The ultimate old story.  My ultimate old story, at this moment. 

As I moved to the front of our sanctuary to claim my piece of paper, I considered my choice, and struggled with language.  When I gripped my pencil, the words came to me.  I wrote “the wind beneath everyone else’s wings,” with no little difficulty, primarily because of the tendency of the sharp lead to puncture the paper fragment, but also because I wanted the words to be perfect—perfectionism another story I might have chosen to incinerate.

What did these words mean?  What story did they stand in for?  And what will it mean to move on from it?  What story will take its place?

Despite the cheesy Bette Midler throwback, I meant to convey my readiness to claim more of my energy for my own.  I have been immersed in nurturing others for more than three decades, and it feels like time to shift the balance.  My children, who have been the chief “beneficiaries” of my absorption, my husband, my aging mother, and my sister who has the major responsibility for Mom’s on-site support, hold the largest liens on my life.  And I am not planning to abandon any of them.  I intend to continue as the main caregiver for my two-year-old grandchild, nurse practitioner for my much-loved dog, underpaid nonprofit employee, and social justice activist in my church and other contexts. 

But I have depleted myself too much in all this caretaking, caregiving, and just plain caring.  I have allowed my nurturing self to devour equally important parts of my identity.  And I need to let go of the idea that any or all of these beings and causes will plummet to earth without my constant attention.  I can, and have to, begin to live more in my own life.

When my turn came, I dropped my words into the makeshift cauldron, savored the satisfying pfffft as the fire caught, and returned to my seat, leaving behind the carbon residue of my tired narrative.  I am eager to see, as the smoke clears, what emerges.

Silences Revisited

Yesterday's Done list began with the item "Finished Tillie Olsen's Silences, after a mere twenty years of aborted attempts." Twenty years was no exaggeration, though the margin of error is a year or two in either direction. Why did I continue to try to read this book, and to fail? Two questions. Two sets of answers, with some overlap.

I was initially led to this book in the course of reading for my dissertation. My research dealt broadly with how work fits—or doesn’t—into women’s lives, and specifically with trying to untangle the stories of two different groups of midwives, with two separate “career” paths. But I was especially intrigued because Olsen’s work is concerned with writers whose work has been punctuated, or truncated, or prevented altogether by long periods when they couldn’t write.

As my own silences grew in number and duration, I would periodically hunt down this book (which grew increasingly difficult to find as years passed), check it out of one library or another, and begin to read. My attempts were met with varying levels of “success,” measured by number of pages read. Progress was not linear. Sometimes, I didn’t make it past the first section. At least once, I reached the halfway mark.

Over the two decades in question, I have finished hundreds, perhaps thousands of books. Some were read for distraction, some were serious literature. Not a few were nearly impenetrable academic tomes, through which I slogged my way and came out the other side, if not wiser, at least momentarily victorious. I am not a book weenie.

So why did Silences so stubbornly resist my efforts to add its notch to my book belt? Looking back, I see that I generally sought this book in desperation, when circumstances seemed to conspire to enforce my muteness. Those same circumstances made it difficult to read seriously at such times, and to confront intellectually this painful reality.

I came to Tillie Olsen for absolution, if not excuse, but I was too angry with myself to accept such a grace. I was looking, too, for a way out of the wilderness. But Olsen provides no map. In painstaking detail, she documents the suffering of writers whose voices were stilled. She includes devastating quotes from writers, well-known and not, whose work was bounded by barriers of gender, class, and/or race. And she reminds us of the majority of humans for whom written expression was and is impossible.

I should say, too, that another, lesser barrier to my finishing her book was its style, strangely structured, almost haphazardly organized. Added to its oppressive subject, this presentation hardly welcomed curling up with this particular book. I am of the opinion that Olsen’s own enforced silences, over most of what might have been her writing life, have something to do with this.

And what of my silences, on the other side of this book at last? I guess I am finally ready for the mercy of my own forgiveness, buttressed by Olsen’s arguments and data. And to make my own map. It remains to be seen how far this will take me.