Momma Tried

 Today I got my author's copy of a new anthology, The Maternal is Political.

My story in the collection, "First Grade Values," is about the year when my daughter turned six, and shocked me with her innocent recitations of playground politics:

"I'm going to clean up after the boys today, so that we can get ice cream," Aretha said, when I dropped her off at school.

“Miss Rogers says if we don't clean up our snack, then we won’t get ice cream—and the boys never do it, so I'm going to clean up theirs, too."

"I'll give you a double dip of anything you like if you promise me you'll never clean up after a boy again," I said, in my first spontaneous bribe. "You start now and it never stops."

It was fun to read my story again, now that Aretha is turning EIGHTEEN tomorrow. She still comes home and sets my hair on fire with her trenchant observations.

I sat down with my copy of MIP, and read the whole book in one sitting, searching for inspiration. Here's a few that caught my attention:

Marion Winik wants to know why if "Mothers Against Drunk Drivers," is so relevant, why there isn't an even greater need for "Mothers Against Religion and Ideology." What a beautiful writer she is... Speaking of 9-11, she says,

"Faith moves mountains.That may well be true. It certainly knocks over buildings. Wonder, I think, might be a gentler way to live."

Ona Gritz is a physically-disabled mom who has a son with her husband, Dan, who is blind. Strangers are always "congratulating" their family on the street.  One day their kid asks, "Why do they do that?" and Mom cracks back, "Because I'm not dead." This is the best-written story in the book, and the one I learned the most from.

Mary Akers: A stepmom who did "everything right," is furious that her 18-year-old stepdaughter, single and flipping burgers, has decided to have a baby. The teenager's birth mom is a born-again who's cheering her on.

I disagreed with Akers' hopelessness assessment, but I appreciated that she didn't mince words. It was good to hear the raw parts. I wonder if she had the same epiphany I had after reading her rant: her stepdaughter is following her birth mother's footsteps, as much as she criticized them all the previous years. The urge to reproductively "make it right," seems to be the greatest force in the world.

Marrit Ingman:

Well, this is what happens when you have a serious mental break after childbirth, realize you'll be dancing with a bi-polar diagnosis for the rest of your life, and you want to explain to your kids, "what happened to mom." Her candor is gutsy, and eyeopening.

Cindy Sheehan:

Cindy has the best titled-chapter in the book: "Good Riddance, Attention Whore." She is sarcastically quoting her enemies and doubters, unconsciously echoing Nixon's famous press conference in '62 where he told the press they wouldn't have old Dickie to kick around any more.

In this statement, written a year ago, Sheehan announces her resignation as the bruised "face" of the American anti-war movement, and bitterly concludes that after what she's seen, she believes that her son Casey did indeed, "die for nothing."

Since she wrote this, Cindy got some of her mojo back, and mounted her own senatorial campaign, against Nancy Pelosi, who also has a story in this book. (Nancy is every bit as circumspect as Sheehan is transparent).

Cindy didn't have a chance of winning, but she wanted to highlight the spinelessness of the Democratic Party for their failure to initiate impeachment proceedings against W. The Dems found out Sheehan wasn't some cute little putty-pacifist housewife eager to play ball. And because she was such one-woman show, it was easy to attack her personally, to make sport of her convictions, and act like her private failings made her... politically suspect.

This is a typical sexist shithole that so many female activists get trapped in. We might be bad in bed, rude housewives, fight with our kids, slobs who pull out the TV dinner and say "Fuck it." But, you know what?  Cindy is right— Bush should be impeached. The Dems are culpable for their war-enabling. "Patriotism" is insufferable.

There is no graceful way to talk about being a martyr when you really are one, and that's why I like Sheehan's painful talk. Ego involvement goes along with the job of jumping into fires. You have to believe something beyond reason to take the risks, and make the sacrifices. The next time someone holds a gun to your belly— be prepared for others to call you "self-centered" if you go public with it. For men, it's normal to be outraged— for women, you might as well put on your Whore Paint right now. 

Rebecca Walker:

I might not have jumped in to read this chapter, except that Rebecca recently made Tabloid Headlines in the Daily Mail of London. She described her mother, Alice Walker— an icon of American literature and feminism—  as an incompetent, narcissistic, bitch, who abandoned her daughter for celebrity and the chance to live as a "feminist," i.e, a woman unencumbered by motherhood.

Yowza!

According to Daughter Walker, she was abandoned as a child, and when she called her mother to celebrate her own first pregnancy, Mumsie hung up the phone and hasn't spoken to her since, let alone seen her only grandchild.

My question was, "What are the family-of-origin issues in play here?"

Rebecca, however, chalked the whole thing up to "mother's feminism," which is what made me drop my shot glass. I'm sure it's not Alice Walker's POLITICS that caused this rift with her only child. It never is.

Rebecca's story in this anthology seems written by a different person than the one in the right-wing Daily Mail. The Rebecca in MIP is one of those dutiful progressive parents who worries how to feed her kid pure organics and teach him to be a good environmentalist. She also mentions fighting sexual slavery. It's on the "twee PC" side. I wouldn't have raked it over with a fine tooth comb if it wasn't for the back story!

I can't feature why Rebecca would wash her dirty laundry in public... unless she were desperate for money. Or losing her mind. Or both. And even then— how are you suppose to reconcile with your family after this? I guess you pretend they're dead. But they're... not.  R. says A. has cut her out of the will, which is presumably worth millions. For having a baby? Does money really drive people this batshit? You feel like calling each member of the Walker family into the room, and interviewing them separately. What a tragedy.

I fought a lot with my mom from puberty on, when I first began to critique the human condition. I thought I had her all figured out by the time I was 14. My best friend and I would sit around and hash out how screwed-up our parents were, every detail. We were forensic psychologists.

And yet around strangers, or anyone my mother came up against, I would ferociously defend her. I still do. Nowadays I have the pleasure of my own daughter giving me scalding analysis when I behave badly, and this very cycle makes me forgive my own mommy a tiny bit more.

For family high drama, all you can do is dedicate a song. Let's send this one out to the Walker Women, and to every mommy and baby who can't always get it right. My favorite version is Joan Baez, singing with Jeffrey Shurtleff:

I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole.
No-one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried.
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied.
That leaves only me to blame 'cause Mama tried.

Comments

[karina]

Wow, mother stories are such great material. After all, we all have or had one. These moms are really out there! Thanks for the recommendations. Now I'll have to get a copy.

[Jean Roberta]

Thank you for summarizing the whole book. I've read about the feud between the Walker women elsewhere, and it is disturbing. Luckily, my own grown daughter has expressed a very mature, loving attitude toward me since having her own baby, although, as she once said, we've had "a rough go." I'm touching wood!

[Natty Soltesz]

Whore Paint! Bravo!

[Calichef]

First, Happy Birthday Aretha!

Second, I'm glad my only child turned out to be a boy. I was kind of sad that I didn't get a daughter for a long time. This is not to say he wasn't completely loved his whole life. It's just that I was raised by my mother and her mother. I wanted a daughter to join in the complex multi-generational mother-daughter dance. But it was not to be.

Now that he is grown I'm glad that he wasn't born a girl. He and I didn't have to go through all the painful, complicated, competitive bullshit that my mother and I went through when I was growing up. Hell, I'm 45 now and sometimes the mother-daughter bullshit STILL flies. But my son and I? We went through some teenage growing pains, sure, but now we are positively devoted to one another and I can't imagine it being any different!

[C,S. Lewiston]

I'm sure glad you taught Aretha not to clean up after a bunch of irresponsible boys. Irresponsible boys making messes seems to be the basic plot-line of the early years of the 21st century. If we still have something similar to, but not entirely unlike a free society 50 years from now, people are going to look back at us and wonder how things were allowed to get so far out of hand.

[Mary Branscombe]

Don't take the Daily Mule as a primary source, it is the most reactionary and fact-free tabloid here, aimed at middle class middle-englanders. I have avoided it for 20 years for the sake of my blood pressure because every article I've ever read in it has had me frothing at the mouth over inaccuracies and mis-representations. It may be that this is the feature as Rebecca wrote it, but it has all the marks of house style and re-writing to fit the Mule's audience. Does it have anything of the same voice as her chapter?

I remember believing I heard in 70s and 80s feminism a condemnation of women who liked things that could be framed as patriarchal; where the emphasis might have been meant to be on a range of sexual practice, I found I was feeling that I was supposed to be ashamed of enjoying penetration (when I noticed the feeling I felt it was deliberately produced by the movement, looking back it could have been my own projection so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt). And Alice Walker's writing has never spoke enough to be to read any of it, so this is conjecture. But if you're a child and you hear your mother say that the way society expects child-rearing to just be the responsibility of the mother and to be her goal, her yardstick and the thing she surrenders all her other ambitions to, I suspect you hear her call you a slave collar rather than hear her criticising society.

It's like the Sex & The City movie, which my husband and i went to with my half sister (who I never knew as a person until our mother got sick and now like deeply). Sister saw a weak story that went on for too long, husband saw a fairytale of New York, I saw a film that said it was celebrating women but built in fatal flaws to them to set them up so they couldn't succeed. We were perfectly happy the way we were, says one man at the happy conclusion, before we tried to make it better. No, actually, you weren't; the female character was so insecure that the comment of a stranger could make her feel hr life was built on sand. And as this is the real world with real physics where no-one has unlimited time, money, resources and ability, of course having a career, relationship, family and life means some compromises. Why were so many of the women characters shown to feel that that was failure? So many decades after Having It All, why are we still being told that one facet of your life is supposed to have primacy and made to feel guilty if we choose a different facet from the one society approves? Dammit, why are women always still shown as having any damn thing to prove at all?

[Martha]

Wow, Susie, now I have to read this book. And I am a devoted dog mom, and pretty allergic to most mom-marketed books. Marion Winik and Cindy Sheehan and YOU in the same book? Delish.

[T]

Does Alice's daughter also hate/ blame/ publically ridicule her father? Or is it all Momma's fault once again?
Ho hum, an ungrateful daughter- nothing new there.

[DJ Poptart]

Then there's "The Only Hell My Momma Ever Raised"

Excellent version: Catherine Irwin, Cut Yourself A Switch
Listen http://www.thrilljockey.com/catalog/?id=100157

As for Team Walker, one thing I have learned for sure it that literature has not a little in common with pro wrestling.

[Katie]

I just read Rebecca Walker's memoir, *Black, White, and Jewish* about her experiences growing up. Some of the tension between her and her mom came from that book. I was afraid it was going to be spiteful and self-pitying, but it wasn't either. I thought it was just honest and that she did a good job explaining what her life had been like. The love, admiration and respect she had for both her parents was made quite clear. It's true that she was frustrated at the situation- her mom and dad had agreed to share custody by shuttling her across the country every two years, so she was uprooted too frequently. She did critize her mom a bit for wanting to be more like a sister to her instead of the mother she longed for, but Alice herself was saying things like "it's it great, we're more like sisters than mother-daughter," in interviews at the time. She critized her dad more than she criticized Alice, because of his not listening to her and not being aware of what was going on in her life. Her dad praised her for the book, but Alice was mad.

Alice Walker is one of my favorite authors, but I know she's a flawed human being like anyone else. It was a little unreasonable for her to be upset about that book because she had written very personal things about her own life (and Rebecca), so she should not have begrudged Rebecca the right to do so as well. I'm very sad and confused about this recent shitstorm, but unfortunately they have bothed talked and written publicly about it, so really both of them are responsible for it being the public ugliness that it has become. Hopefully in the future they will both cool down, agree to keep it private and reconcile somehow.