IS THE WORLD A PYRAMID THAT'S BEEN FLIPPED UPSIDE DOWN?
thoughts for today + a date for your calendar
I went to boarding school when I was 15 and my mom called me a lot. Maybe because I never answered. From a young age she had a lot of ideas about how best to become me and I felt that my worth was determined on how closely I followed this directive. In a conversation recently with a man I didn’t know at Thanksgiving, I was reminded about how much people - especially men - rely on this narrative about mothers — the nag, the worrier, the anxious attacher - while simultaneously holding resentments about that dependency.
You’ve done a good job with your daughter, he was saying to me, from the head of the table where he’d just taken a seat—as if this was something one could judge in an instant. She seems well adjusted, he said. (she was under the table). I think you can relax, he said. Feed her all the sugar she wants.
I started laughing. I was surprised at how loud I laughed. It was loud and spontaneous and people looked around to see who it was. It was a hearty laugh I’ve never heard from myself. Are infinite screenings of Harry Potter the same as allowing unlimited sugar? I asked, because that was my plan to get through winter break. He gave me the thumbs up.
His casual attitude and ability to be familiar without knowing me made me feel relaxed as if I was entering a terrain where anything might happen. I like that terrain. Ok, so that’s the solution then, I said, playing along. O is in third grade. She is doing pretty well. I, too, wanted to stop being vigilant. But as we talked it became clear that he was really talking about things he felt about HIS mother. That she had held on too tight.
Why, I wonder, are women always encouraged to LET GO of things. Of bad men, or bad jobs or bad relationships? Of weight, of responsibilities, of fixing or solving. Why, I wonder, is this powerful resource not harnessed instead? Basically I’m asking why have we not made a world run by women?
Do you ever feel like the big secret is that we are Gods? asks Amy Adams’ character in the new film adaptation of the book Nightbitch: about a woman whose journey with motherhood makes her turn feral. The other women in the conversation look back at her kind of confused when she asks this but I do not feel confused. I know exactly what she means.
I remember the moment I had the same thought. It wasn't clear or verbalized, it was more just a feeling that the world was upside down and that the people with the most knowledge were least in the position to use it for good. It was a few days postpartum and I was sitting in my nursing chair in the room where my daughter never slept. I was on the phone with another friend and I was trying to capture words for this understanding that had grazed past me while giving birth. It was as if I had suddenly crossed into a world that was flipped over — like I absolutely saw that things were turned upside down. My friend, a mom of two girls, knew just what I was talking about.
YES, I say now back to the little screen in my hand that holds the film still, YES I DO.
I’m thinking about 2007 when the banks all collapsed and there was a financial crisis. My friend Bob was the first to tell me how in Iceland people had reorganized and made the financial systems all run by women. Women it seemed were sure that were they to have been in charge this never would have happened. Why? What made them so sure this was a man made catastrophe? But I feel that too. It’s like of course the men had run things into the ground. What with their big ideas and poor follow through, their scheming, their secrets and ultimately their hatred of qualities under the umbrella of “woman.”
This can become tricky territory to venture into—suggesting that women should be in charge of things just by nature of their own biology. Women are not biologically any one thing so the argument that women have some kind of essential knowledge based on their own bodies is another kind of trap. Sometimes I fall for this trap. I loved some of the essentialist women made art works of the 70s and 80s that suggested that art made by woman had the potential to be radical, more interesting, more controversial and ultimately more exciting then current work done by men. I think a lot about the artist Ana Mendieta and how she fell out of the window to her death and how her boyfriend Carl Andre, also a artist, was subsequently charged with her murder. Women have died when the only difference between them and a man who was doing the same thing was that she did it better.
So I know that it’s an impossible and even dangerous argument to say that I think mothers, and people who mother and people who have the capacity to mother, have a quality that rises high in the pyramid of social values and yet again and again we push this role down to the very bottom of the ladder.
Nobody becomes magical the second they give birth. People who have not given birth can be much better mothers than people that have had babies themselves. People who never had kids can harness their creativity as much or much better. But I wasn’t one of those people. I was someone who had to give birth to understand the idea that there are some things that are imperfect that make perfect sense. Parenting feels like a uphill battle to stake claim on that moment and the exhaustion less about carpooling than about insisting over and over that it means something for it to be mine.
*WINTER CALENDAR ALERT*
For those in LA please consider joining homeLA for next weekend’s discussion exploring how modern architectural settings influence artistic expression in video and film.
What: Framing the Narrative: The Interplay of Architecture, Art, and Movement in Film
Who: homeLA in partnership with Lena Daly of the Wolford House
When: Saturday, January 25, 2025 from 3:30-5:30p with sunset reception
Where: Mt Washington (Parking instructions and address provided to ticket holders)
Tickets: FREE with RSVP. Capacity is limited.
RVSP: https://tinyurl.com/framingthenarrative