Motherhood: humor, sadness, artistry, magic & grace

May 6-7, 1975 no books listed.

May 7, 2005 finished reading:

Life Among the Savages, Shirley Jackson

Reading this book brought up a raft of memories. Particularly reading it around Mother's Day--which falls on my own mother's birthday this year.

First of all--let me get this out of the way. Shirley Jackson is arguably a better writer than my favorite domestic goddess essayist, Betty MacDonald who wrote: The Egg and I, The Plague and I, Onions in the Stew, Anybody Can Do Anything, and um, a bunch of children's books concerning the adventures of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. But I don't find Jackson so funny, and I think I'm picking up echoes of the great sadness under her elegant prose (she died at 49).

MacDonald was more of a comic genius. (She created the unforgettable Ma and Pa Kettle, based on farming neighbors in Washington state.)

Jackson and MacDonald both address what someone has called "the visceral shock of motherhood" and the disillusionment of the drudgery of family life from a woman's point of view. I lent out my copy of The Egg and I, so I can't quote you the passage where McDonald describes the shock of her swift descent from bride to wife. She made it funny, but you could see why her first marriage ended in divorce as she detailed her transition between being a sought-after bride to living with a husband who considered her a "bad sport" or inept because she didn't share his knack for and joy in the drudgery of farm life. I remember reading it at 12 or so, and thinking, hmmm . . . men, marriage, maybe there's something there that the romantic stories don't mention.

When I think of my own mother, lately I've not been remembering the sadness of her later life, dying at 56--but thinking back to 1963, the summer when I was 14.

My mother drove me about an hour into Los Angeles to the Shrine Auditorium to see The Royal Ballet with Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in Giselle. This was not her idea, but I asked, and she loved music so she was glad to go. Neither of us had ever been to a ballet before, or to the Shrine Auditorium. We had seats just a few rows from the stage on the left. Those may not be good seats for seeing the whole spectacle of a stage full of dancers, but they were so incredibly close that I could see small details.

The dancers didn't look like they were floating from that vantage point. The seats sloped back up toward the rear of the theater from where we sat, but the stage was above us. We could hear the dancers hit the stage with tremendous thumps. The memory I took away was of Rudolph Nureyev rocketing toward the us as if he would fly off into the audience. Then landing gorgeously, perfectly, near the edge of the stage to stand, panting and pouring sweat. Amazing. Thrilling. Nureyev, about 25 and exotically beautiful more than handsome, seemed to wear more make-up than anybody--very bold when you saw it from a few yards away. He was so charismatic that you couldn't take your eyes off him. I am sure I remember it through a fog of 14-year-old hormones, so that even though Margot Fonteyn was perfection in every detail, it was more like "Um, she was great too."

We went back to the Shrine several times that summer (I remember seeing Swan Lake, Le Corsair, and Marguerite and Armand). I must be one of the few people who tune in to awards shows to renew my acquaintance with the Shrine Auditorium.

My mother totally "got" how much I enjoyed it. Good Midwestern Methodist that she was, the very things that intrigued me probably dismayed her--men in make up and whoa! major muscles in white tights, for example.

But not long after we saw Swan Lake, she woke me up one morning by playing a recording of Act II of the Tchaikovsky score. I played that again the other day and remembered what an amazing, magical experience it was to wake up hearing it. I don't know anyone else who would have thought of such a thing.

Strangely, one of the last times I spoke to my mother face-to-face she mentioned that she had run into a woman in the store whose mother had died, and who asked her, "When do you get over it?" She said, "My own mother has been dead for 25 years and you never get over it." On some deep level, she knew, and she told me what I needed to know.

Now I'm 56, 25 years later. I don't smoke or drink. The same poisons that got Shirley Jackson also got my mother. I do what I can to elude them. I'm not a mother myself, which would have made her sad. But she wouldn't have been able to live to see grandchildren, and there was not even close to enough time before she died to untangle that karmic knot of sadness. Still working on it.

You never get over it. But you do go on. And oddly, when I see my mother in myself, nowadays it doesn't bother me the way it once would have.