Swallowed by the ovum.
On mothers on Mother's Day.
Mother’s Day is not my favorite holiday, as you might imagine. I’ve never had a person to celebrate. Not the person. My sisters, sure. Maybe a few older women who’ve mothered me along the way. But it’s not the same.
One thing mothers inspire is a lot of writing. People write about mothers all the time. They sing about them. Make films about them. The good ones. The bad ones. The mothers somewhere in between. And I think that’s because mothers are simultaneously one of society’s most powerful and vulnerable forces. They give life and we owe so much to them, but in order to find ourselves and assert our independence, we have to dissolve our bond. To be that connected to someone – physically through a cord of pulsing, life-giving blood, and then psychologically throughout the rest of your life – is to be in a very vulnerable, powerless place indeed.
On this Mother’s Day, Will was in Cle Elum with Friedrich, visiting his sister. So I took myself out to Mother’s Day breakfast at Terra Plata, dining alone on the rooftop deck, reading in the sun, with olive trees, lemon balm, rosemary, and mint in planters behind me. I sat at a four-top, divided by a plastic barrier which turned the table into two tables for two. A woman, whose wrinkles made her eyes look tired and her mouth look sad, sat next to me. She wore a slim gold watch and diamonds on fingers. Across the table sat what I assumed was her son, since it was Mother’s Day. He had a full head of dark hair, a three-day old beard, a button-down shirt with a collar and a pimple on the tip of his nose which made me want to look away. His long fingers with nails neat and trim rested on his coffee cup. I could feel the tension through the barrier. They didn’t talk much, but when he spoke, his face contorted in contempt. His eyes flashed and his mouth twisted. She just sat there, looking resigned and exhausted. Because that’s what being a mother makes you feel like much of the time: resigned and exhausted. Especially after you’ve been one for 30+ years.
For both girls and boys, the relationship we have with our mothers is among the most significant in our lives. It is impossible to overstate just how foundational this relationship is and how it impacts our well-being well into our adulthood. In the first weeks and months of our lives, mother is food, mother is world, mother is body, and mother is self.
– Adrienne Rich
This book I’m writing – this book I’m trying to write – is absolutely about my mother. About the void she left and the ways that void was filled.1 The ways that void was never filled. Because that’s the other thing about mothers. They are like black holes.2 The holes they leave via the ways they don’t show up and meet our expectations defy physics. The holes they leave are massive. Unknowable. Inescapable. Unmanageable. Uncontrollable. And with a gravitational pull so strong that we are constantly pulled back toward the singularity which is the womb which is the place of our origin where we were biologically one with our mother. And it is as adults that we skirt the perimeter of the event horizon, wanting to be close to our mothers – our powerful, magical mothers – but not too close. Not so close that her gravity swallows us up again, pulling us back into a world of her making.
It’s astonishing to think that I am this same black hole to my children. That I possess such power through the simple yet so complex act of motherhood. Power that, until just recently, in this post-hashtag metoo, soon-to-be post-Roe v. Wade America, I wasn’t fully aware that I had.
It is important to remember that motherhood is the result of a powerful ability: the power to give life. Could that be one of the foundations of patriarchy? Did the oppression of women throughout history stem, among other things, from the fear this power arouses among men? Professor Bar On says that the power to give life comes with sexuality. “Men feel dwarfed next to the image of a great woman, inside whom the man is swallowed, like the sperm is swallowed by the ovum,” she says. According to her, the fear, envy and self-effacement that men feel next to the image of a great woman is nothing but a mythology whose purpose was to achieve one thing: control. “It’s all rationalizations to explain why they oppressed women and gave them inferior status,” she says. “Why is women's role as mother deified? It's an attempt to push woman into a place where she will not keep us from running the world. They said: You must devote yourself to motherhood, and that ensures that she will not keep us from doing more important things. And she will ask: Why is there no place for me? Then they will tell her: You frighten us and make us jealous.”
– Tsafi Saar, Did Fear of Women’s Power Strike the Rise of the Patriarchy?
Things That Nourished My Writing: May 1-May 9
ACTIVISM
White Supremacy can’t continue without White babies.
LITERARY
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades
FOOD
Fried egg sandwiches for lunch
MUSIC
PLACES
The Montlake Cut where we watched a regatta this weekend.
Sylvan Grove on the UW Campus.
So beautiful and heartbreaking, Callie. The most joy I’ve ever had had been from being a parent, yet the most grief and pain has come from the same endeavor. I understand the weariness of the woman who sat next you at Terra Plata.