I. The Writer As Daughter
When my kids were living with their father I used to ride the Long Island Railroad every other Friday to pick them up, and on Sunday night I took them home the same way. On one of my solo trips back into the city, I found myself sitting across the aisle from an exasperated mother and her two toddlers. They were being normal kids, restless and bored on a train, and she kept slapping them around and threatening to abandon them. I cringed inwardly, as I imagine most people do at child abuse, and tried to figure out a way to intervene, to bring the woman to her senses without pissing her off. God knows, I’ve had enough people, including strangers on trains, criticize my mothering for far less, and I didn’t want to do the same to her. I obsessed for nearly an hour, until she and her kids got off the train, but I never came up with anything to say to her.
The Other Mother
The other mother, children by her side
wears an angry scowl, my earlier face
If I look at her she’ll be ashamed.
See the woman, or the mother?
Passers-by glare and frown as she slaps
half-heartedly and throws small bodies down.
If she catches my stare she’ll be ashamed.
I see the woman. I see the mother.
Slap slap slap
Sit still or I’ll leave you
Slap sit still slap shut up
I swear I swear I’ll leave you.
When she notices me I see what she sees:
a single woman, unburdened, free.
Quickly I look away, ashamed.
She sees the woman, not the mother.
Alone I watch as the train rushes on.
She doesn’t know we share this in common:
a secret silent bond of shame.
We are both women. We are both mothers.
Slap slap slap
Sit still or I’ll leave you
Slap sit still slap shut up
I swear I swear I’ll leave you.
In 1978, four years after I wrote this poem, a feminist journal called The Wild Iris accepted it for publication. I had just begun submitting my poems to literary journals, and this was the first to be published. At this point I had rarely shown my work to my mother—I’d let her read a satire on ski resorts, or a humorous riff about the dentist, but nothing that made me feel too vulnerable. I was so proud of Page 8 in The Wild Iris, though, that I presented it for her scrutiny.
I have an image of myself handing my mother The Wild Iris open to Page 8 like a ring-bearer presenting two gold bands on a pillow to a groom. In actuality, we were in my Aunt Roslyn’s house for a family gathering, dumping our coats on the bed, when I whipped the book out of my purse and shakily gave it to her. I stared at her blood-red fingernails against the purple cover, inwardly trembling as she read my portrait of a stranger on a train. She, apparently, read something quite different, for she handed the book to Janice, declaring in that tone of voice, “It isn’t even true!”
Isn’t true? But it’s my experience! How can it not be true? Omigod—she thinks it’s about her!
Janice reads the poem, then nods and smiles dumbly: she doesn’t have a clue what it’s about and is embarrassed. Walking a fine line between loyalty to her sister and caring for me, she throws a hesitant bone my way. “Very good,” she murmurs, casting a sidelong glance at Rhoda. But my mother has already forgotten the poem; she is steeling herself to face my father’s family, whom she despises.
My mother was ambivalent about my writing. An avid reader, she placed a high value on the literary craft, and I often wondered if she had any writing aspirations of her own. As far as I know, she never wrote anything other than personal correspondence, and not very much of that. She judged me harshly for my perennial poverty, for refusing to take alimony from my ex-husband (a big mistake), and for not sticking with any secretarial job more than a year or two. My financial situation frustrated and angered her, and interfered with her ability to wholeheartedly support me as a writer. She did enjoy telling people I wrote, saying “She’s papering her walls with rejection letters,” a joke I stopped laughing at early on.
Over time, her attitude changed. As I painstakingly climbed the rickety rungs of what passes for a ladder of success in the publishing field, her respect rose accordingly. She began saving my published work, along with my sister’s occasional stories and my brother’s letters of promotion, in a box she called “The Archives.” Most of my stuff was journalism, articles published in newspapers and magazines. Although I didn’t offer to let her read my fiction for a long time, she continued to lament—as I did and still do—my failure to get my novels and short stories published. Unlike me, though, she didn’t regard publication in poetry journals as worthy of pride, or even something to pursue. If I told her I was giving a poetry reading she’d ask, “And then what?” Hers was, I suppose, a typical view of the writing life: if you haven’t made the best-seller list or national magazines, you’re considered second-rate. No wonder I’ve had to work so hard to feel good about every small victory.
She made a great leap forward when my story about battered women was published in Mother Jones. She didn’t realize MJ was a lefty publication; it was enough that the pages were glossy, its reach was national, and it paid more than an honorarium. She still nagged me from time to time to get a full-time job—I don’t know when she thought that I, a single mother, would write—but at least she finally saw me as a professional writer.
As I said, my mother was an avid reader. Her favorite poet was Dorothy Parker, and she used to vehemently complain about the poems in The New Yorker. She’d call me up, in a state of high dudgeon, and ask if I’d read such-and-such on page so-and-so, ranting that it made no sense and was a ridiculous waste of space. Even if it was by a well-respected poet, if she couldn’t understand the poem, it sucked, period. Truth be told, I agreed with her much of the time. One day, unbeknownst to me until after the fact, she sent them my signature poem, I Write In The Laundromat, along with a note saying this was the kind of poetry they should be publishing, adding, “And I’m not just saying this because she’s my daughter.” I was simultaneously delighted and mortified: I could never submit anything to The New Yorker again. I have no idea what the editors thought of Rhoda’s “submission”–they never even sent a form rejection.
I Write in the Laundromat
I write in the laundromat.
I am a woman
and between wash & dry cycles
I write.
I write while the beans soak
and with children’s voices
in my ear. I spell out words
for scrabble while I am writing.
I write as I drive to the office
where I type a man’s letters
and when he goes to lunch
I write.
When the kids go out the door
on Saturday I write
and while the frozen dinners thaw
I write.
I write on the toilet
and in the bathtub
and when I appear
to be talking
I am often writing.
I write in the laundromat
while the kids soak
with scrabbled ears
and beans in the office
and frozen toilets
and in the car
between wash & dry.
And your words
and my words
and her words
and their words
and I am a woman
and I write in the laundromat.
By the time I started selling sexually explicit fiction, aka pornography, my mother was so supportive of my writing that I didn’t keep it a secret from her—after all, I wanted to brag, to tell her I was finally making money with my scribbling. Besides, while Penthouse isn’t exactly a respectable household paper, it’s second only to Playboy in name recognition among men’s magazines. She was predictably impressed by the money, and thought it was something of a hoot. A few years later, when I put my real name on my stories and then on the cover of erotica collections, she wanted to see them, but, knowing she’d be turned off, I refused to send her any. I didn’t tell her she could get Herotica from the Quality Paperback Book Club, and was glad she managed to miss that page in the club newsletter.
When On Our Backs, the lesbian magazine I edited for a few years, was mentioned in a feature on women’s erotica in Time, Rhoda was sufficiently impressed. She began hounding me to send her an issue of On Our Backs “for the Archives.” I knew my mother’s view of lesbianism, and that she’d be repelled by the extremely explicit On Our Backs, so I kept putting her off; she was relentless, though, and finally wore me down. With Robin, the magazine’s graphic designer, I pored over back issues until we found one we deemed mild enough for Rhoda. Its cover, graced by two pretty femmes in flowing dresses, was as innocuous as Cosmopolitan.
A week later Rhoda called with her verdict: “I have never seen anything so disgusting in my whole life!”
“I knew you’d hate it,” I said, regretting having sent it.
Otherwise, I was unfazed by her judgment, and realized I’d come a long way, in that my mother no longer held power over my self-esteem. Still, I resolved I would never again let her see anything I wrote that had sexual content. Unfortunately, she managed to do so all by herself—boldly she marched into a Florida Barnes and Noble and ordered a copy of Herotica 4. Her verdict this time?
“It’s just like the catalogs we used to get at BBC,” she said offhandedly.
She wasn’t disgusted, but neither did she think much of Herotica. What she said was similar to something a friend from way back had said about it—that it was “just like the stuff we used to read in the Navy.”
I have to admit I was insulted. Herotica 4 was the first collection I edited, and to this day it remains my favorite. The majority of the stories I chose to include are decidedly not “just like” porno catalogs, or the stuff read by horny teenage sailors. Most would be classified as literature in a culture that didn’t automatically downgrade and isolate fiction containing sexual imagery.
In the late 90s I wrote my fifth (still unpublished) novel. I purposely attempted to write something commercial this time—my previous novels were populated with hippies, artists, pornographers and other social outcasts, living lives with which most Americans couldn’t identify. This time, aiming for the mainstream, I found myself, as I wrote, imagining my mother as my audience. Since she read absolutely everything, including a good deal of commercially successful novels, she was the right audience, so when I finished Some Things Never Change I sent it to her. This time her verdict was unequivocal: she adored it, noting that it was far superior to many books in the same genre that succeeded in the marketplace.
It saddens me to think my mother will never again serve as my audience. I suppose I could still pretend she’ll be reading what I write, but it wouldn’t be the same. On the other hand, her death signaled a new kind of creative freedom for me. I would not be writing this memoir were she still alive.
II. The Writer as Mother
I understand now, Stacy
I understand now, Stacy
why you are how you are
about things–
why you mourn the loss
of each toy, rock,
picture, plant
tossed to the wind
by your jaded mother.
Each object
is a gentle reminder
of where you’ve been
and who you are
while to me they shriek
“J’accuse!”
Shrinking from the future
I throw away the past
and stand astounded
as you leap—oh, Stacy!—
with all your precious possessions
into the present.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
