Womanrite. I have never written about Womanrite—not one poem, short story, essay or memory. Not a word. I wondered about it through the years, wondered why I was never moved to write about what was a significant experience in my life, one that lasted almost two years, but I just figured I was waiting for the perspective of time. Now it’s been 35 years—my god, I can hardly believe it! And I still haven’t written a word. You’d think there’d be enough distance by now.
When I first put Womanrite into my outline, I thought it would be a good opportunity to finally and fully explore it, and was actually eager to sit down and write the story, starting from the night I entered the church on the Upper West Side, relishing the rare opportunity to present myself in any way I chose to a group of unknown women, and ending in a lawsuit between two factions of the collective. Now that the time to write it has arrived, I find myself filled with fear. My solar plexus is shaking, swimming with that sick sense of terror. Of what? I suppose it’s fear of the unknown, since it’s a place I’ve never been. I know there has to be a lot of sadness here: for one thing, Womanrite and my relationship with Stephanie coincided. For another, WR disappointed me bitterly. When I talk about my disappointment in the women’s movement, the theater group is a large part of it.
Then there are practical, or structural, considerations: I began the chapter some time ago, with the night I took Rhoda to see The Cinderella Project. I wrote about the bus ride downtown and my fear of integrating her into this part my life, but then the writing veered off into my realization that Rhoda had never been an adult daughter—a revelation I had that night, way before the really juicy stuff happened. I ended up writing about the issue of motherless daughters and how it affected Rhoda as a mother, not about Womanrite.
It’s a good opening for a chapter—visual, immediate, connected to the main themes of the memoir—but there’s no need to use it the way I did; I’ve gone into the subject of motherless daughters in other places, and even if I hadn’t, there are a million doors into that terrain. Better to use the bus ride as the way into Womanrite—but…? I’ve also envisioned just beginning at the beginning, and writing what it was like to be the only mother working on a play about daughterhood with 20 women who did not have children, not to mention at a time when my kids didn’t live with me. Any mother reading this will know instinctively what I’m talking about.
So I’m faced with a conundrum, one of structure—my, how convenient! I can use this structural problem to avoid getting into painful material. How odd, though, that I should be so frightened to face the pain of WR when I’ve faced much deeper, older, more personal situations in the course of writing the memoir, in the course of my life as a writer actually. Certainly Womanrite cannot carry more pain than my situation with Daryl, my relationship with my mother and sister, or the one with Stacy (which I haven’t explored much yet either, oy vey!)
How strange that I’ve never written about Womanrite. Is it less important, in the long view, than my family situations? Well, of course it must be. And yet…whenever I see Stephanie I end up on the verge of tears, ostensibly about my present life situation. It’s no secret, we both acknowledge what’s happening, but attribute it to being close, i.e., we’re so close that I feel safe feeling my feelings around her. But maybe that’s not all there is to it…maybe it’s the pain I feel about Stephanie, period. Once, sitting across from Karen, the woman she’s shared her life with for some quarter of a century, I saw how much alike Karen and I are, and thought, Why not me?
I know why not me: timing, all timing. When I was with Stephanie I had to resolve the situation of my kids, on my own, with her support but without her. Years later she resolved her intense desire to have children by adopting two of them. She was already with Karen, and at that time I thought, Better you than me, kiddo. I never would have agreed to take on two small kids just as my own were getting ready to leave. Ironically, Karen, who has one daughter, felt the same—but somehow they worked it out. I would not have even tried. So there you go: the better woman won.
Jesus. The things that happen to us in life. The way circumstances conspire to bring us all this pain and loss.
My fear of approaching this material isn’t just about Stephanie, though: her I have written about; that is a pain I have faced. Womanrite itself—the pain of the betrayal that came, following the pain I’d hidden the whole time I’d worked with them: that’s new territory. That’s where I need to go. Again, this cannot possibly be more difficult than other parts of my life. I need to stop procrastinating…or maybe not. Stephanie—who is still creating and performing original theater in New York—once said, laughingly, that we should just expect and plan time for this little dance we have to do before we can get down to creative work.
Full Moon in August
(for Stephanie, c. 1977)
The moon and I had syncopated rhythm:
monthly in her fullness I bled.
You arrived on my doorstep
a wild mare traveling west
in your camper with your dog
and your cocktail party music.
Women aren’t supposed to live like this
I thought, my eyes widening
to encompass your vision.
It was a full moon in August.
You were on your way somewhere
coming from somewhere else.
When I saw you in your camper
I thought
Women do not live like this.
The night waxed and waned
and we drank of the moon.
Remember, you coaxed,
delving into hidden spaces.
Yes, I had forgotten
the tales that fingers tell
forgotten to remember
and forgot that I forgot
that women do live
like this.
