What Do Women Want? (6 page)

I needed something to call my own. Writing belonged to me alone, as painting never could.

So I empathize with my mother’s struggle to enter her father’s profession. She never stopped painting, but she expressed her deep ambivalence by not promoting her work publicly. She was afraid to compete, afraid that she might in fact succeed and “kill” her father. As with so many women, her courtship of failure had a purpose: to please a man.

My daughter, Molly, may well be the bravest of our amazon clan. At nineteen, she is already writing her first novel. She reads me chapters every few nights, and in her fledgling book my role is clear: I am the mommy monster.

“Mommy, I hope you don’t mind,” my daughter mischievously says, “but I’ve made you a total narcissist and a hopeless alcoholic in my novel. . . .” She laughs provocatively, hoping to get me mad. I think for a minute, remembering what my friend Fay Weldon, the British novelist, says about teenagers: Never react to
anything
they say except with a neutral “I see” or “Hmm.” Teenagers exist to provoke their parents. Your only defense against them is not to be provoked.

It’s true that I don’t
recognize
myself in the character Molly calls “my mother” in her blisteringly funny first fiction. But who am I to censor her? If
I
don’t understand that fiction is not fact, who the hell will? I’ve been using
my
family as comic material for twenty-five years—how can I deny that basic right to my daughter?

“You’re sure you’re not insulted, Mommy?” Molly asks, hoping I am.

“I’ll laugh all the way to the bank with you,” I say, hugging her.

In a family of artists, you come to understand early that what you have at home is what you paint. That pumpkin may be intended for pie—but it’s fated first to pose for a painting. The tiny baby in the crib is simply the family’s newest model. My mother and grandfather both stand over the crib sketching, sketching, sketching. My sister is born with a golden frame around her face. In truth, we all were. And if your family is unavailable to pose? Well, then, you paint
yourself.
My grandfather kept a mirror opposite his easel so when he had no other model, he could always paint himself. He painted himself in every stage of life, and he did the same for us. There are dozens of portraits of me at all ages, in various costumes. In one portrait at age five, I wear a black velvet dress with an ivory lace collar and a floppy black velvet hat with black marabou pom-poms. I look as if I were sitting for Rembrandt— my grandfather’s favorite painter. In another portrait—done by my mother—I am seventeen and wearing a Japanese wedding kimono with an antique obi. My hair is rolled in stiff pompadours held with lacquer combs as if I were a blond geisha. My face is powdered white with rice powder. A crimson dot of lipstick makes a bull’s-eye of my lower lip. Whenever I look at the portrait I remember the summer of my seventeenth year, which we spent in Japan.

All these portraits have empowered me in various ways. Some may not be to my taste and some are hardly flattering, but I am certainly glad they
exist.
I exist more richly because they exist. My memories are captured by a wall of portraits in my mother’s dining room.

So throughout my childhood, I was the subject of works of art. I came to feel that making art was as natural a process as breathing.

But the process of art is also the process of metamorphosis. I may be an ogre in Molly’s first novel, but I am likely to be an angel in her last. My mother may have sharp edges in
Fear of Flying;
in
Fear of Fifty,
those edges are as soft as a scarf woven of cashmere and silk. I have many more mothers than one. And each of those mothers parallels a particular phase in my life. Each represents a change in
me
more than it represents a change in my mother. As I grow more confident of my identity, I fault my mother less and less. As I grow older, my mother grows mellower along with me.

There is no end to this story. As long as I live I will be redefining my daughterhood in the light of my motherhood. Because I am a writer, I will process these changes in words. Since writing is my principal way of staying sane, I need to write to know what I think. But there will never be a final incarnation of my mother, of my daughter, of me. We are all works in progress.

What is constant is the metamorphosis itself. Kurt Vonnegut said in one of his novels that people are like centipedes wearing different faces as they make the trek from infancy to old age. I have always loved that image: each of us as a centipede, marching through time.

My mother is a centipede, and so is my daughter. Sometimes our paths intersect as we trudge along on our three hundred feet. But we have already marked each other in millions of ways. We share the same DNA, the same dreams, the same daring. If Molly is destined to be the most daring of all, it’s no less than I expect. So many generations of women have empowered her. So many mothers and grandmothers have gone into her making. May she dare to follow her dreams
wherever
they lead! Without daring, what use are dreams? Without daring, what use are all the struggles of your mother, your grandmother, your great-grandmother? Make no mistake, these ancestors are watching you. If you disappoint them, you disappoint yourself.

“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” Virginia Woolf said. And through us, our mothers think forward into the future.

—ALICE HAWTHORNE

 

 

 

Mommy guiltiest?
So reads the headline in the New York
Daily News
’s rehash of the “Nanny Case,” which has riveted the media’s public since everybody overdosed on treacly elegies to Diana, Princess of Wales. The
Daily News
has proved once again the old saying “Vox populi is, in the main, a grunt.” The
News
is supposed to cater to the downmarket crowd that doesn’t read the
New York Times
or the
Wall Street Journal,
but in truth most people in the word biz read
all three,
as well as the
New York Post
and the
New York Observer.
But without the
News,
you can’t possibly know all that’s
not
fit to print. And, of course, that’s what tells you about the vacillations of the zeitgeist. And the zeitgeist is currently into blaming mommies for the deaths of their kids.

For
this
is the lesson of the nanny trial: Louise Woodward may have been nineteen, inexperienced, drowsy in the mornings and moonfaced at night, but Dr. Deborah Eappen was
really the one at fault,
because she worked three days a week as an ophthalmologist rather than staying at home full-time with her baby. Never mind that she came home at lunch to breast-feed on the days she worked. Never mind that she pumped out breast milk on the
other
days. Never mind that she was an M.D. working a drastically reduced schedule—a schedule no intern or resident would be
permitted
to work.
She
is the one to blame for the heinous crime of baby murder.

In an age when most mothers work because they
have
to, it is nothing short of astounding that this case resulted in raving callers to talk shows who scream that Dr. Deborah Eappen
deserved
to have her baby die because she left him with a nineteen-year-old nanny.

So much for twenty-five years of feminism. So much for smug commentators who say we live in a “post-feminist age.” The primitive cry is still “Kill the mommy!” She deserves to be stoned to death for hiring a nanny.

Of course, we Americans already knew that
welfare
mothers were monsters. Dear Bill Clinton, champion of women and children, signed the most disgusting welfare bill in American history—a bill more appropriate to Dickensian England, a bill basically reinstating the workhouse in millennial America. But, of course, we
know
the American poor deserve nothing. Poverty is, after all, un-American. America has abolished any definition of the worthy poor (children, mothers, the blind, the lame) and decided that
they
alone shall pay for the budget deficit run up by male politicians. After all, children have no votes—unlike savings-and-loan officers. Besides, the latter have lobbyists, and poor children naturally can’t afford them. So we have no worthy poor in the country I so lavishly fund with my taxes, but neither have we any child-care initiatives—let alone child care.

Even some
reactionary
countries—La Belle France, for example—have mother care, crèches, kindergartens, but in America we rely on nature red in tooth and claw, so crèches are seen as “creeping socialism,” and nobody’s allowed to have creeping socialism except the army and the nontaxpaying superrich.

Okay—welfare mommies are monsters, but what about
entrepreneurial M.D.
mommies? What about women who
delayed
childbearing to finish school, had babies in their thirties and forties, and work part-time? Well, now we learn that they, also, are monsters. Why? Because they don’t
stay home
full-time. Apparently
all
mommies are monsters—the indigent
and
the highly educated both deserve to watch their babies die.

Wait a minute. What happened here? Is this 1898 or 1998? It doesn’t seem to matter. Where motherhood is concerned we might as well be in Dickens’s England or Ibsen’s Norway or Hammurabi’s Persia. Mothers are, by definition, monsters. They’re either monsters because they’re poor or monsters because they’re rich. Where mothers are concerned,
everything
is a no-win situation.

Poor Louise was nice but somewhat incompetent. Maybe she
did
shake poor little Matty—the medical evidence is inconclusive. After all, she was a Brit, and Brits
love
caning kids; shaking is
nothing
to them. But Deborah was even
worse
than Louise. She was a doctor’s wife (and a doctor, but who cares?) who chose to work.

Both women have been thoroughly trashed. Nobody inveighs against the
other
Dr. Eappen—the one with a penis—and nobody screams that
his
baby deserves to die. Nobody talks about Matty, either. He’s just a dead baby. Dead babies have no votes and no lobbyists. No—what everyone carries on about is which
woman
is at fault.

The mommy or the nanny? The lady or the tiger? Women, by definition, are
always
guilty. Either they’re guilty of neglect or they’re guilty of abuse. Nobody asks about the father’s role or the grandparents’ role. If it takes a village to raise a child, as Hillary Clinton’s bestseller alleges, then that village consists of only
two
people: monster mother and monster au pair. Everyone else is off the hook. (Including a government that penalizes working moms in its tax policies, its immigration policies, and its lack of day care.)

How must Dr. Deborah Eappen feel, first losing her son and then facing this chorus of harpies (for the women-haters are often women)? Imagine the trauma of losing your baby, the trauma of reliving the pain at the trial, only to face the further trauma of trial by tabloid. Dr. Deborah
chose
her job because it allowed flexible hours. So did her husband, Dr. Sunil Eappen. But nobody’s blaming
him.
If we have come so far toward the ideal egalitarian marriage, then why does nobody discuss the
couple
? Only the women are implicated. Both nanny and mommy face death by tabloid firing squad.

If the nanny trial is used as a litmus test for social change, then we must conclude that very little change has occurred. No wonder generation Y is full of young women who want to stay home with their babies! They saw what happened to their weary boomer mothers, and they don’t
like
what they saw. If all feminist progress is dependent on the mother-daughter dialectic (as I believe it is), then we are in for a new generation of stay-at-home moms, whose problems will be closer to our grandmothers’ than our own. Betty Friedan’s
Feminine Mystique
will be as relevant in 2013 as it was in 1963—and our granddaughters will have to regroup and start feminist reforms all over again.

No wonder feminism has been ebbing and flowing ever since Mary Wollstonecraft’s day. We
have never
solved the basic problem that afflicts us all—who will help to raise the children?

—SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

 

 

 

When I was researching
my book
Witches,
fifteen years ago, it was considered rather kinky to talk about female aspects of divinity or to attempt to rehabilitate witches from the libels perpetrated on them by their inquisitors. Witchcraft was a bog of myth, misinformation, and Halloween gear. There were people who called themselves contemporary witches, or Wiccans—and I met plenty of them—but they seemed as confused about their origins as anyone else. Some called themselves goddess-worshipers or contemporary pagans. Some were feminists rediscovering the female roots of divinity, and their rituals were as muddled as they were sincere. Nobody could quite decide whether to be a white witch and do good with herbs or—more exciting—to be a bad witch and go to bed with devils.

The popular image of the witch reflected this confusion. There were both good and bad witches in picaresque movies like
The Wizard of Oz,
and only bad witches in scary movies like
Rosemary’s Baby.
Did witches worship Satan, or did they worship a benevolent mother goddess? Hardly anyone would have posed the question that way. It fell to my book on witches to put the question to a popular readership for the first time—and that has been a large part of its appeal.

The truth is that the witch is a descendant of ancient goddesses who embodied both birth and death, nurturing and destruction, so it is not surprising that she possesses both aspects. But when religions decay and gods are replaced, there is a consistent dynamic: The gods of the old religion inevitably become the devils of the new. If serpents were once worshiped as symbols of magic power, they will later be despised as symbols of evil. If women were once seen as all-powerful, they will be relegated to pain in childbirth and obedience to men. The symbols remain, but their values are reversed. The snake sacred to the goddesses of ancient Crete becomes the incarnation of the devil in Genesis. The first female, Eve, goes from being a life-giver to a death-bringer. Good and evil are reversed. This is the way the politics of religion works.