I would like to tell you a story today with a happy ending about our cow friend named Halo.
Halo was a cow on a dairy farm. Like other dairy cows, she was forcibly impregnated every year so she could give milk. The treatment of Halo and all the other dairy cows like her was a big reason to go vegan. Dairy cows are routinely slaughtered for hamburger and other cuts of cheap meat when they are done having their milk taken from them. Usually, the cows are from four to six years old when they are done being milked. Their milk is used for humans and not for their baby calves, who are routinely taken from them. Humans are the only species to drink the milk of another species. Contrary to advertising from the dairy industry, cow milk consumption has been scientifically proven to be harmful to humans. Dairy cows are slaughtered when they are younger if they come down with a disease. It’s surprising more people haven’t gone vegan.
Here’s Halo at the place where she used to live.
Visiting Halo and the other cows made us very sad. Seeing her was a reason for us to stay vegan. There were lots of other reasons, but we also didn’t want to be part of the suffering around us.
But then one day early in the morning, Halo entered a vehicle and had trust in the universe and the people around her that she would be safe.
Finally, she arrived and sniffed the air and tentatively got out.
She liked what she saw and stood in some water and met some pigs.
Halo, who the vet said had arthritis, was so happy she decided to run! (She is fourteen, old for a former dairy cow.)
Finally, Halo is happy and safe at her forever home. My partner, who was instrumental in organizing the humans to free her, said that at the sanctuary she was like a new cow.
For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:
As part of a larger annual Unitarian Universalist service on Rosh Hashanah and mental health, I talked about how I have been taking care of my mental health lately. The talk is on YouTube and below the video is the text.
Lately, I’ve been consciously taking care of my mental health. Perhaps this is because we are increasingly living in a toxic society—so it seems to me.
Perhaps it is because I am a writer and the flip side of having the muse come to me and insisting that I write a novel in a few months, leaves a huge swirling void inside of me, where negative emotions can and do linger.
This past summer was a particularly good one (for my writing) and a bad one for me personally as the result of going so much deeper in my work was that I felt myself to be physically depleted when I was done, which was an unusual feeling for me. I felt empty, numb, and uncharacteristically angry. The lingering effects were that I felt myself being a bit depressed or more than a bit, also unusual for me. At this point, I felt myself as being outside of my life. I felt disconnected.
Fortunately, I was able to get back on track through my routine of self-care which includes a daily walk for at least twenty minutes, avoiding all animal products, and doing a regular yoga practice. Perhaps it was my new little cat Peanut who brought me back to myself. For who can stay depressed with a morning routine of a rapidly growing young adult cat pouncing onto your chest and licking your face?
In my mid-sixties, I have come to the conclusion that I must consciously work on myself not only to survive but to thrive. All of this caring for my physical body also helps my mental health because everything is connected. After a medical scare about four years ago, I am still thankful and relieved to be healthy and to be here.
The I Am affirmations are similar to Buddhist affirmations, such as “May I be peaceful.” Except that by using the words “I Am,” the speaker and the hearer are placing themselves in the present and using positive thoughts to create what is already in them.
Now, thanks to the I Am affirmations I have found on YouTube, I have also been able to consciously raise my vibration. I can feel myself getting lighter and happier as I listen to the words.
It is thought that the I Am philosophy dates back to teachings described in sacred texts. I learned that the first recorded use of the term “affirmation” was in 1843 by the philosopher, writer, and Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson wrote: “Every man is an affirmation of himself.”
In some of the I Am affirmations that I listen to, the announcer says, “I am patience; I am tolerance; I am good enough; I am pure love.”
I listen to the meditations some mornings; sometimes when I am doing my yoga practice; and several times I found I am meditations that lasted all night long. The words entered my subconscious and came back to me when I needed them.
Another meditation focuses on gratitude and says, “I am grateful for the air in my lungs.”
Would you all say that with me now?
“I am grateful for the air in my lungs” …
Thank you!
This is a good reminder that I am indeed grateful for the air in my lungs.
On this Jewish New Year – as always – I am also grateful to be here with you.
–Namaste–
For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:
I was reminded this week when the international radio syndicate This Way Out rebroadcast a piece on Emily Dickinson that I did some time ago as an example of the author of a banned book, about the important lesbian origins of Emily Dickinson. When I told my partner that the work of Audre Lorde was also being banned, she looked angry and said, “they are afraid of her.” You can click here and here for my recent writings on Audre Lorde.
It was previously published on Technodyke.com and aired on This Way Out, the Los Angeles-based lesbian and gay radio syndicate that airs across the U.S. and in 22 countries abroad.
Emily Dickinson and I did not hit it off on the first date. That is to say that on introduction to her work, I saw her–or rather was taught to see her–as a lady like poet writing of hearts and flowers, tendrils and vines, the stuff of which had absolutely nothing to do with my life. In junior high when I came across Dickinson’s work, I was already a hell on wheels hard drinking adolescent, a product of my 1970s working class environment that put me on a collision course headed toward disaster.
It was my love of language that got me through. I’ve often heard it said that poetry serves no purpose. Perhaps that is true if one takes a completely materialistic and emotionally bankrupt view of life. But the fact is that two lines of poetry saved my life: Shakespeare’s “Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow/ creeps through this petty pace from day to day.” I didn’t know it at the time, but that I could recite this part of Hamlet at will, even if I was on my way to being blasted or hung over from the night before, embedded in my mind that I would have a tomorrow. A tomorrow was not a petty thing to have: a few of my friends didn’t make it.
I wonder if things could have been different, for myself and for the close-knit gang of teenage girls I hung out with. I wonder if a Lesbian reading of Emily Dickinson could have halted our self-destruction and consequently saved a few young lives. It took a few more years for me to grow up, stop drinking and come out as a Lesbian. And when I did I found myself falling head over heels in love with poetry. Emily Dickinson was someone I returned to again and again. There was something clever, yet profound, in her verses that I memorized. The lines were deeply personal, as if they had been written just for me. I found her public personae intriguing. She was portrayed as a spinster, a recluse dressed in white, the eternal virgin who had nothing to do with men.
A few more years passed and I went to visit the Dickinson homestead in Amherst Massachusetts. I was there with a group of friends, some of whom lived in the area and were just visiting her home for the first time. It was ironic really– there we were a room full of Lesbian poets listening to the tour guide’s official wrap about the cloistered and asexual Emily Dickinson, trapped in her father’s house. There was something sinister about the house, foreboding. But behind the house, in the flower garden, was a beautiful wash of colors. And as I sat in the garden, on a white wrought iron bench, I peered through a shady grove to the neighboring house. I remember it being painted in the glowing hues of peach, at once golden and pink. There was something mysterious about this house, set back as it was from the road, directly approachable from the Dickinson homestead. If I were Emily I could not have resisted its magic lure.
I found out later that this house is where Susan Huntington Dickinson lived. She was Emily’s sister-in-law, married to Emily’s brother, Austin, and she was the love of Emily Dickinson’s life. She was Muse to Emily, her intended reader, thoughtful critic and, by more than a few accounts, she was Emily’s lover. In correspondence to Susan, Emily wrote that Susan was “imagination” itself. The two women were close friends for 40 years, and they lived next door to each other for 30 of those years.
In “Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson” (from Paris Press), the editors, Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, point out that over the course of their lifelong friendship and love affair, Emily sent countless numbers of letters, poems and a form of writing that Emily came to call the letter poem. And on many of these letters, placed for Susan to see when she unfolded them, Emily had written her careful instructions: “Open me carefully.”
Emily Dickinson lived at the end of the Victorian-era in New England from 1830 to 1886. After her death, any mention of Susan was carefully removed from her poetry and this essential body of correspondence was neglected. Still, even with this erasure of Susan’s name, which Emily had written at the top of so many of her poems, it is obvious that they are essentially Lesbian love poems. Consider, for example, the piece that begins with the line “Her breast is fit for pearls…”
“Susan, / Her breast is fit for pearls, / But I was not a “Diver”– / Her brow is fit for thrones / But I have not a crest, / Her heart is fit for home– / I–a Sparrow–build there / Sweet of twigs and twine / My perennial nest. / —Emily”
In Victorian New England, Emily Dickinson certainly could not mention her most intimate body parts. But she did a pretty good job of using the birds and bees as metaphor: “These days of heaven bring you nearer and nearer, and every bird that sings, and every bud that blooms, does but remind me more of that garden unseen, awaiting the hand that tills it. Dear Susie, when you come, how many boundless blossoms among the silent beds!”
To separate Emily Dickinson from her Lesbian passions is a cruel and unnecessary act. Not only does it do a disservice to Emily’s poetic genius, but it also deprives her readers of a deeper comprehension of Emily and therefore of a deeper understanding of themselves. That’s what literature, at its best, does. It leads us home.
It really doesn’t matter if Emily Dickinson ever made love with a woman. (Although my guess is that she did and most likely did so rather skillfully.) What matters is that she experienced deep rending passion, that must at times, under the circumstances, have been painful.
A Lesbian reading of Emily Dickinson places her firmly in the center of her own page. When I think back on my visit to her house, I can see her clearly now, sitting down at her desk after her daily chores were done, as she smoothed the white folds of her skirt and picks up her quilled pen. As she writes, her cheeks are ablaze with longing and desire, that essential Lesbian desire.
For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:
The Ally, a novel by the celebrated Spanish author Ivan Repila, translated by Mara Fage Lethem, and published in 2022 by Other Press, influenced the way I thought about many things, particularly about gender. Below is my review which I posted on Book Tube. Under the video is the text of the review. I hope you enjoy it.
Being a second-generation feminist born of a feisty-feminist-ahead-of-her-time mother, I am, in many ways, a product of the feminist revolution. As a lesbian, I’ve been able to live comfortably on the margins. I say comfortably because I’ve been able to avoid a lot of things (in particular, much sexist behavior).
When I received a copy of The Ally, by the celebrated Spanish author Ivan Repila, translated by Mara Fage Lethem, and published in 2022 by Other Press, I read the synopsis on the back of the book and was intrigued. It is billed as a book that uses “humor, clever story-telling, and hard-core feminist theory to lampoon the macho superiority complex of our modern gender wars.”
There is a fair amount of humor in the book. I was particularly struck by the band of macho men’s distaste for women with short hair who wore baggy clothes prompting me to think, these kinds of guys must love me. The story begins when the protagonist meets his girlfriend, a prominent feminist named Najwa at a lecture that prompts him to enter the world of feminist thought. He goes through a period of what many would call consciousness-raising. But the protagonist takes it upon himself to explain to the women (including his mother) that they are oppressed and sees that they are going about their activism in the wrong way.
The author creates a very flawed protagonist and it’s hard to understand which side he is on—that of the band of macho men or of the women who at one time he purports to want to help. At one point the feminist hero, Najwa, recounts the victories that have been won including the fact that, “People have begun to understand that gender-based violence is not a consequence of inequality, but a structural pillar of a world we’d created.”
As I neared the end of The Ally by Ivan Repila, published by Other Press, I found myself immersed in a thought-provoking novel that placed me in the center of history where feminism is giving way to gender studies and is changing the nature of discourse. I started out reading fiction and ended up thinking about the nature of reality and where it is going.
This is Janet Mason with reviews for Book Tube and Spotify.
For more information on my most recent published novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:
In honor of my book Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters being featured on the I Heart Sapph Books website and also in honor of Labor Day, I am posting excerpt from the first chapter below for you. The excerpts are on You Tube and are written on my blog under that. Tea Leaves is an especially special book for me. I hope you enjoy it!
In honor of my book Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters being featured on the I Heart Sapph Books website, I am reading excerpts from the first chapter.
“Your grandmother read tea leaves.”
Startled, I looked up at my mother, sitting in her gold velour chair next to the end table scattered with a few library books. From my mother’s lips, this statement was a bad omen. My atheist, Bible-burning, skeptical-of-anything-less-than-scientific mother had long been a woman who believed in nothing.
Superstition—even applied to a previous generation—was not admissible.
“What did she see?”
“Her own face, probably.” My mother shrugged. “I made fun of her and told her she was old-fashioned and superstitious. Eventually, she stopped talking about it.”
I stopped to ponder this sliver passed to me about my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who died when I was twelve. I was thirty-four years old, and this was the first time my mother told me that my grandmother had read tea leaves.
“Did she read them often?”
“I don’t know. Often enough, I guess. She used to read cards, too—ordinary playing cards. She would take them from the deck and lay them out on the wooden table we had in the kitchen. An ace of hearts good luck, an ace of spades death.”
My mother’s shudder punctuated the end of her sentence.
She was seventy-four, the same age as my grandmother when she died.
…
My mother’s matter-of-fact tone and my diversion into my grandmother’s tea leaf reading traditions did nothing to alleviate the direness of my visit. It was a Sunday afternoon in early June. Earlier in the day, my partner, Barbara, and I had been clearing out cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling of the house that we had just bought and moved into, when I had the sudden urge to call my mother. My instincts were right. My mother told me in an uncharacteristically faint voice that she had woken up a few days ago with a crushing pain in her sternum.
“I felt like I was having a massive coronary,” she told me.
My mother—who never believed in doctors—went to one immediately. He ordered some X-rays, told her it was arthritis, and sent her home with some extra strength Tylenol. When she told me this, my mind reeled. This was my mother—someone who walked four miles every day.
“Why didn’t you call?” I had asked her on the phone.
“I just did,” she replied.
I didn’t argue, but the fact was that I had called her.
….
On the forty-five-minute drive over, through the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood and onto the Pennsylvania turnpike, I was in a panic about the conversation with my mother. There was something in her voice I had never heard before. A dead-end tone. A giving up. Illness or not, I couldn’t conceive of her coming to a standstill. My mind raced.
The bottom of my world began to drop away.
…..
“Everything is fine,” she said, noticing my concern. “The extra-strength Tylenol isn’t working yet but it will.”
She shifted in her chair and winced.
“I can make us some lunch,” I said.
“I can do it,” she replied and struggled to stand up.
“Sit down,” I said, as I got up and went to the kitchen where I made a simple meal of miso soup and warmed up brown rice. She joined me at the dining room table.
“The soup is good. You did a good job, Janet.”
“Thank you.”
We ate in silence for several minutes.
“What did the doctor say,” I asked finally.
Her lips pressed into an obstinate straight line.
When I asked again, she told me the HMO primary physician she went to, a man whose office was in a house on the corner of the section where my parents’ lived, refused to give her a referral. The rheumatologist, who my mother wanted to see, was a woman doctor who she saw once before and liked. “I wrote a letter to her,” said my mother, “but I didn’t hear from her.”
“Maybe we can call her,” I replied. “A letter is easy to overlook.”
The stony look on my mother’s face told me that what was going on with her body was her business, and I simply could not drop in on her life and interfere.
….
As my mother and I sat in the living room, the only sound was the ticking of my father’s retirement clock on a high shelf, his reward for thirty-five years of working swing shift at the plant. There was more to my mother’s silence than the privacy she wrapped around herself like a woolen shawl. By not telling me about her problems, she was protecting me. She was the kind of mother who didn’t want her problems to become her daughter’s problems. Through the years, my mother’s auburn hair had faded to reddish beige. Now, as if it had happened overnight, her hair had turned white. She stared at me with her green yellow eyes, cocking her head at me in an owlish curiosity.
I, in turn, searched her face for clues.
Was she reading her own tea leaves?
….
In my twenties, having older parents meant that I began to worry about their well-being. Even when I didn’t say anything, my mother would read my thoughts. “It’s hard watching your parents get old,” she once told me gently.
When we went for a walk at the shopping mall, she’d comment on the older couples she saw. “One’s in worse shape than the other,” she said, “and they’re holding each other up. What happens when one of them falls over?”
There was no answer to her question. How could I reassure my mother about a future of which I also lived in mortal fear?
My mother had always been active—walking, eating healthy foods, reading widely, taking an interest in life. But over the past several years there were signs that she was withdrawing—what the medical professionals call “shutting down” which can happen before the final stage of life. The first to go were her women’s liberation marches. There weren’t as many of them as in the early seventies when I was a pre-teen and my mother took me with her and, later, in the early 1980s, when I encouraged my mother to come with me. But when smaller demonstrations did turn up, here and there, my mother refused to go.
“Oh, Janet,” she would say, “you know I hate crowds.” The flat, almost sullen tone that crept into my mother’s voice told me that she couldn’t possibly even stand the thought of marching around with a placard, gleefully chanting hey, ho, patriarchy’s gotta go.
Then one year she decided not to plant her garden.
“It’s too much work,” she said, that same tone of resignation pressing down her voice.
For as long as I could remember, after every meal we sorted the garbage from the trash, the mulch-able from the non mulch-able, to make topsoil for next year’s organic garden from the steaming pile of compost in the backyard. My parents liked to joke that they were going to be buried in the compost pile when the time came. Each summer and fall we ate the greens, the tomatoes, the endless dishes of orange squash. The garden was my mother’s all consuming passion, providing her with the company of other gardeners in the organic gardening club.
Several times my mother canceled her plans at the last minute to come and see me. All she said was that she decided she didn’t feel like coming—and then hung up. The thought of her not being able to endure anymore—of her simply laying down and not getting up—was inconceivable.
….
I would miss her. Terribly.
My mother’s death was unimaginable because she was more than my mother. She was the earth that I sprang from. She was my genesis. My creation story. Like everyone else who had not yet lost a parent, I had no idea what was in store for me as I looked at her sitting in her gold velour chair, her face drawn in at once contemplative and indifferent. Occasionally, she was still likened to Katherine Hepburn: the inquisitive eyes, high cheekbones, candid manner. But, with age, she looked less like a glamorous young woman and more like the tomboy that she had been as a child, in the pictures I stared into growing up: bowl-cut hair, watchful eyes, stubborn chin. Her features in the photo reflected my own, yet I studied them like the pieces of a puzzle.
Increasingly, as my mother aged, I heard the wavering strains of my grandmother’s voice in hers. As we talked, I recognized that under our conversation was another conversation and under that, yet another. The cadences went back at least three generations. My understanding of my mother and myself had begun with my grandmother. It had taken the better part of a century for their lives to fuse into mine—often in the form of pent-up rage gusting through me.
My grandmother died when I was twelve. She was a spinner in the textile mills of Philadelphia, in the Kensington section where the old warehouses were now old hulls, broken down, abandoned. My mother grew up in this neighborhood of bustling industry—lace factories, Brussels rugs, textile mills, the Stetson hat factory, slaughterhouses full of bloody entrails and squealing animals. Devastating scenes of poverty replaced it—abandoned and crumbling houses, a tent city, homelessness, a child prostitution strip that was one of the largest in the nation. When my mother spoke of this place of her childhood, tears came to her eyes.
My grandmother, Ethel, a devout Episcopalian, life-long Republican, and wearer of white gloves, gave birth to my mother, Jane (Plain Jane, her childhood nickname), who became an equally devout atheist (burning her Bibles in the backyard) and a Democrat. My mother identified with the “silent majority,” but was a feminist ahead of her time, and when the women’s liberation movement caught up with her, she joined it. When I was old enough, she sometimes took me with her, the two of us marching and attending rallies, waving our matching mother/daughter coat hangers at pro-choice events. I was the less adventurous one—hanging back and watching with something bordering on amazement as my mother heckled the hecklers and squeezed the balloon testicles of a Ronald Reagan cardboard cutout.
My mother tossed away conventions with every year that she aged. Heels were replaced with comfortable walking shoes; skirts were exchanged for trousers. Eventually she discarded her bras for the skinny-strapped men’s undershirts that she wore under her cotton blouses and short-sleeved shirts that looked tailored on her slender frame. When referring to her mother’s insistence that she be more of a lady, my mother always said, “Who the hell did she want me to be? Jackie Onassis?”
My mother married my father when she was twenty-five years old—the story was that they met on a blind date outside the “Nut House”—and then they lived in the city for nearly another twenty years. Then, when my mother was forty-four and I was four, we moved to Levittown, a suburban tract house community built in the 1950s, one part industrial village, the other part American Dream. With a hundred-dollar down payment, the houses were affordable enough, and my father worked nearby at the chemical plant, one of the two major employers in the area along with the steel mill.
We lived on Quiet Road in Quincy Hollow (the street names in Levittown all began with the first letter of the section name) where my mother took her daily four-mile walk. “Every day I go around and around these streets like a hamster on a treadmill,” my mother would say. As an adolescent, I fanned my mother’s frustrations into the flames of my own self-destruction. I was drinking and drugging at fourteen. Driving at sixteen. The streets looped around my neck like a noose tightening. For me, drinking and drugging was a form of running away. When I was five I had stored pilfered Cheerios (food for the road) in the bottom drawer of my bureau until a parade of ants sabotaged my plans.
…
I was always intending to be on my way to somewhere else. But the drinking and drugging of my adolescent years just dug me in deeper. Eventually my mother gave me a few not-so-gentle shoves and I ended up being the first in my family and the only one in my peer group to go to college. I lived at home and attended Temple University, in Philadelphia, an hour’s commute away. After graduation, I moved back to the city my parents had fled from but, as a college graduate in a community of intellectuals and artists, I was worlds removed from my origins.
Despite my need to escape, I kept going back. Along with the practical reason of visiting my aging parents—the landscape where I grew up was embedded in me. There are many things that invade the lives of working-class people—chief among them poverty, or in my case, the constant threat of it. There is resignation and frustration, a foreboding sense that things will never change. Then there is the internalized self-hatred, the futility of it all.
The air I grew up breathing in Levittown was chemical-laden. On clear days the fumes were invisible. Overcast days, the air was a dirty glove clasped around our nostrils. When we drove past the marsh-lined road alongside the plant, where the stench was the worst, my mother and I would hold our noses, and my father would call it “the smell of money.”
It was my father’s union job, and my mother’s skill at managing money, that pulled my parents out of the poverty they had grown up in. Perhaps it was because of this belief in the American Dream, be it reality or myth, that I was visited with a vague shimmering presence that eventually I came to call hope.
Economic security can be a breeding ground for denial. My mother, feisty enough to have become mythic in the minds of my father and me, had always lived in mortal fear of losing my father. Her own father had abandoned her family when she was seven, and this no doubt foreshadowed her fear. But her concerns were practical ones. My father worked swing shift in the plant’s boiler room. Accidents happened. Growing up in the industrial northeast, I watched the plant explosions on the nightly news. Then there were the killers that were slow to strike. More than a few of my father’s co-workers were felled by cancer of all types and early heart attacks. The summer I worked at the plant when I was in college, a man fell over dead in the guardhouse before punching out his timecard for the day—at the time, it all seemed so unfair and futile to me.
A spot of asbestos showed up on my father’s lung X-ray. When my mother got the news, her face paled. My mother had always been the strong one. She was traditional in her role of housewife—revolving her schedule around my father’s shiftwork hours, washing his work clothes for the thirty-five years he worked at the plant—but this didn’t stop her from being the one who called the shots.
We never expected that the hand that fed us would come out of the sky to strike her down.
***
Today, my mother and I sat in her living room. It was cool in the house. My mother’s feet rested on an ottoman covered with a thread-worn tapestry. It was a mosaic of earth-toned flowers: rust red, silvery green, dusty blue. Thin black lines outlined heart-shaped petals against a faded ocher background. As my eyes traveled along the lines, I saw my grandmother standing with the other women in the long straight aisles between machines in the textile mill, on tiptoe as she dropped the spindles on their spikes, crouching to check the weave, the warp, the weft. Close to half a century later my mother had taken the discards her mother was allowed to take home from the mill and carefully stitched them into a square cover for the iron-legged ottoman.
….
My mother felt diminished by her lack of a college education. As far back as I could remember, she always told me, “It’s what’s inside your head that matters,” followed by, “No one can ever take an education away from you.” In graduating from college, I fulfilled my mother’s ambitions. But at the same time, in achieving what she could not, I betrayed her.
She wanted me to have a better life than hers. But the opportunities in my life had been underscored with my mother’s resentments. To gain a better understanding of my life, I went back to research the labor movement, to read its history, its literature. Now my mother was telling me she was white collar, that she felt herself to be “better” than people in unions.
I took a deep breath. My mother was just trying to lend a dignity to her life. She was brainwashed into thinking of herself as white collar and, therefore, better than people in unions. Divide and conquer is how the powers that be have kept people in their places. But our conversation was not about white collar or blue collar. It was not about work even—or the fact that I went to college and my mother did not. We were pressed up against opposite sides of the glass divide in our mother-daughter relationship.
My mother and I were close. We saw eye to eye on most things that mattered. We read the same books, lending them to each other, sometimes even going to the bookstore together and deciding jointly what we wanted to read. There were moments between us when she seemed more like my friend than my mother.
At the same time, there was almost always an unspoken tension between us. The things that cut through us most deeply were also the things that divided us. There was—at least temporarily—my sexuality. When I came out to my parents in my early twenties, I was telling my mother, in particular, that my life would be vastly different than hers. At the same time, my lesbianism was a natural outgrowth of my mother’s feminism that most definitely shaped my early sense of self.
…
My life was too entangled with my mother’s for comfort. An only child, I absorbed her like a sponge, losing a sense of where she left off and I began.
The irony, perhaps, inherent in the tensions and difficulties between us, was that we were both so much alike. Despite her increasing resignation, I wanted her to talk about her life, including her hopes and dreams that didn’t come true. She refused and in the face of her obstinacy, I became more insistent. Deep down, I felt my mother slipping away from me. My reaction to this was despair and, beyond despair, desperation. I wanted, needed, to know about the missing pieces of my mother’s life—the puzzle that created me. The catch was that my mother wanted the same thing from me and I, too, could not deliver.
Each of us had, what my mother called selective memory. We only remembered what we wanted to, and fought like hell to forget the rest.
In my teens and twenties I often reacted to my mother’s mixed messages with knee-jerk defensiveness, sometimes outrage. In my thirties, I found it easier to join her than to fight. Since my mother didn’t want to talk about her health during my visit, I turned to inquiring about my grandmother’s life.
….
My mother was a woman who rejected the traditions that bound her mother’s life. Before I was born, she burned her Bibles in the backyard, disgusted with the hypocrisies, the contradictions, and, most of all, the misogyny inherent in the pages that curled into ash. My mother was a woman who tried to invent her own religion and failed. A Transcendental Meditation dropout (“I tried and tried to levitate—to bounce myself off the floor by flexing my butt muscles”), she joined the American Atheists for a few years only to leave in disillusionment (“They served coffee and doughnuts and passed the plate just like all the other idiots!”). She was a woman whose ambitions had been thwarted by circumstance, gender and class. She was a woman who absorbed her mother’s pain, made it her own, and passed it along to her daughter. When I tried to tell my mother that my grandmother’s life was worthwhile, important, I was trying to convince myself that my life, too, was important.
“Without Grandmom, the spinners, the weavers, the dyers, without the patterns the designers thought up could never have been made into anything,” I said. But my words were weak, unconvincing. How could they be anything else, when I was not sure of myself?
My mother couldn’t give me what she herself never received. “Whatever I did was never good enough,” she said to me as we sat in the living room. “I never wore the right kind of hat, and even if I did I couldn’t keep it on my head.”
I laughed and went into the kitchen to fix myself a cup of chamomile tea. As I poured the water into the cup, I noticed a tear in the corner of the bag. A few tea leaves, crushed yellow flowers, seeped into the water and swirled around. I stared into the white porcelain tea-cup, wondering. What kind of life would I have if knowledge and wisdom were passed uninterrupted and uncensored, from my great-grandmothers down to my grandmother, mother and then to me? This world shimmered up at me for a fleeting moment. Then I saw the reflection of my mother’s face in mine. The lines of resignation, her disappointments and her fears stared up at me.
I shuddered, then skimmed the floating leaves away with a spoon and went back into the living room. Like my mother, I was a hopeless realist and at the same time I was deep in denial. I didn’t want to get the stray tea leaves on my tongue. Even if I could have divined the future by reading the tea leaf shapes of dark clouds and crosses, I would not have wanted to. I was wary of astrologists and fortune-tellers. It was more than a healthy dose of skepticism. It was superstition. I was afraid that if someone told me my future, I would have no choice other than to create that destiny for myself.
The only omens I could read were the memories of my past. When I was a child I brought home report cards saying I was an underachiever. In elementary school I came home with bit parts in plays in which my mother thought I should star. In junior high, my grades didn’t measure up to study the foreign languages in which she expected fluency.
When I reminded her of this, she denied it.
She accused me of wanting her to be better.
I, in turn, denied that I wanted my mother to be anyone except who she was.
Neither of us were as sure in our denials as we would have liked to be.
Only one thing was certain: whichever way we turned the mirror, the reflection came up wanting. My mother was more stubborn than me. Her mind was made up. Their lives, her mother’s and her own, were wasted, good for nothing but survival. No amount of arguing or cajoling could have changed that. But she nodded her head to appease me, and by so doing acknowledged that her life was linked with mine.
You can get copies of Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters (from Bella Books) at your local library, your local bookstore or wherever books are sold online.
Janet Mason, author 