Dropped Threads 2 (20 page)

My Secret Life
                              as a Mother

Susan Swan

“You’ll never write again,” my grandmother told me when I described the difficulties of combining mothering with writing. I remember the satisfaction in her voice when she said this. It was as if she were admitting me to a private club of non-doing.

In those days, I didn’t see raising children as an achievement. I gave birth to my daughter in 1974, at a time when some feminists were encouraging young women like me to avoid family life, declaring that marriage and heterosexual relationships had limited female potential historically, in virtually all areas of public life. So confusion abounded over the value of motherhood. Some of that confusion was coming from voices in the women’s movement, and I believed them. That is, I claimed I did. My grandmother’s warning came after she had given me a statue of a mother holding a small child against her breast. Vowing that she’d eat her words, I hid the statue away. I was rebelling against the notion that mothers should give up professional work for their children. But I felt too superstitious to throw out the statue; I worried that my grandmother was probably right, that I wouldn’t be able to write after my daughter was born, and although I vowed I’d do both, this warning hovered for years in the psychic air around my mothering.

My mother’s warning was more sophisticated and chilling. “Doctors shouldn’t have wives,” she liked to say, a phrase that evoked my country-doctor father who gave most of his life to his practice. As a child, I’d encountered first-hand what his dedication to his community meant: no time for me. In my mother’s view, it was better if dedicated professionals went it alone, without dragging in unsuspecting family members who didn’t sign on for the sacrifice of time that intense personal ambition demands. My mother’s generation came to adulthood around the time of
The Red Shoes
, a film about a dancer who threw herself under a train because she couldn’t square off the demands between art and love. Still, my mother’s perspective as a doctor’s wife was uniquely hers, and mine.

Seeing into my own nature, I knew I shared my father’s temperament and drive. Did this mean I shouldn’t have a child? Or personal relationships? These questions made me uneasy. As a woman, I wanted both, but in those days there were no voices, male or female, that said it was wise, or even possible, to be a mother and a writer. God knows, Virginia Woolf hadn’t raised children. And Elizabeth Smart, author of
By Grand Central Station, I Sat Down and Wept
, had issued a warning—very like my grandmother’s—in her poem “The Muse: His & Hers.”

Guilt drove him on
.
Guilt held her down
.
She hadn’t a wife
To lean upon

In the late seventies, I met Smart in her cottage in the dell near Flixton, Suffolk, and she told me that seeking “honourable discharge,” she had put off her writing until her children were raised. She said as long as she could keep her grammar and syntax, she felt she’d be all right. But she wasn’t. I saw an older woman suffering from a horrendous case of writer’s block, partly brought on by the forty-year separation from the publication of her first novel to her next book. During this time, Rose, the youngest of Smart’s children (she raised all four on her own by working in magazine publishing), came back to live with Elizabeth, bringing along a grandchild. When Rose died, Elizabeth blamed herself for failing as a mother.

Reconsidering my life as a single mother, I see that I was continuously trying to fit into one dogma or the other (and sometimes both at the same time) and never succeeding. The feminist dogma that personal relationships weren’t as important as a career didn’t accurately suit my life. Although I paid lip service to the notion that such things hampered my literary work, I was privately profligate with the hours spent on my child, my lover, and my friends. I was also doing my best to behave like a man publicly—at least the way I thought WASP men behaved, which was to be stoical, to deny my feelings, to get on with making a livelihood, to do well in my work and, God forbid, to never get caught short by my own femininity.

My journals reflect anxious days of writing fiction, working to meet deadlines as a professional journalist and struggling to be domestic and nurturing. When I picked up my daughter from daycare at the end of the day, I understood why my father wanted to hide behind his newspaper before supper, and I felt fresh respect for my mother’s patience.

I sometimes wrote out lengthy conversations I had with a nasty internal voice that kept whispering I wasn’t working hard enough at my writing. Isn’t this because you have no talent, the nasty voice asked in its insinuating way. But most of my feverishly scribbled entries described practical daily matters like going to Metro Services to talk about my daycare subsidy, or convincing my plucky two-year-old daughter to leave the slides outside her Toronto daycare and come home. Here’s a sample from those writerly congeries of self-doubt and domestic impasse.

June 8, 1975. Today I took Sam to daycare on the subway. She was in her stroller. Over 90 today. Apple juice spilled over her sweet little orange jumper. As we got off at the St. George subway station, I stopped and looked up at the stairs in amazement. They went on forever. My eyes filling with tears, I bent down and carried her up three levels
.

I wish I could say I had written about how angry I was, or that I had asked why my culture made it so hard for me, a single parent, to get my daughter to school. Did I say, Here I am, a mother, doing an important job, and why doesn’t anyone know what I am going through? Or ask why my daughter and I should suffer because the architect who designed the station hadn’t given a thought to parents with small children? No, I was too tired. And don’t forget, I saw raising my daughter as an activity that I should take care of (with help from my kindly mother) secretly, quietly, effortlessly.

In those days, I was earning about $6,000 a year as a freelance journalist. How hard to believe that is now! I had declassed myself by leaving a prosperous marriage and taking my daughter with me to live in a co-op on Elgin Avenue in Toronto. It was an old, rundown mansion filled with choreographers and musicians. At least, I had babysitters if I went out at night because they all delighted in my daughter, the only baby. She used to sit in the kitchen in her high chair and offer her milk bottle to anyone who came in. That impressed the house members, who said they learned from her generosity.

My low income meant that her daycare space was subsidized. Every six months, I would go down to the Metro Services office at Shuter Street, and a counsellor would go over with me what I’d spent in the past six months. It was a humiliating experience to have a bureaucrat question my purchases as if I were a child. I felt like Bob Cratchit in Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
. If I’d kept my full-time job as a journalist, I would have brought in a higher income, but I was freelancing so that I could write fiction on the side. In those early years, my ex-husband was sharing childcare and not financial expenses. Tough as this was, my situation came out of personal choices I had made, and this gave me confidence.

Meanwhile, the attitudes of the officials in Metro Services to women like me were not welcoming. Women whose boyfriends occasionally stayed over in their apartments had daycare subsidies withdrawn. In a reform school atmosphere, we mothers sat in our seats, subdued, heads down, waiting to be told how poorly we were managing our finances, how lucky we were to be getting government assistance for daycare. If our incomes went up, our daycare subsidies dropped. It was possible to get a raise at work and grow still poorer because Metro Services decided the raise meant we should pay more for our child’s daycare spot. These government requirements keep us on an endless treadmill and do a lot to increase our sense of hopelessness.

During one visit, I gazed blearily at the other women in the room, wondering if they were single mothers too. No fathers were present, just one male counsellor and several female employees of the City of Toronto. The morning wore on; most of the mothers had been sitting for several hours with small babies on their laps, others with cranky toddlers playing about their feet. In an unexpected burst of energy, I jumped to my feet and shouted, “This is outrageous! We’re mothers! We shouldn’t be treated like this!”

To my surprise, the women around me stood up and began to echo my words: “That’s right! Why are we being treated so badly? You have no right to act like this toward us!”

The city employees put down their pencils and questionnaires and stared at us, shock and fear on their faces. “Let me speak to the head of the department,” I demanded. “I want to know the philosophy behind this kind of treatment.”

It was a wonderful moment. Someone exited and returned with the owl-faced assistant to the head of Metro Services. Suddenly exhausted, I sat back down, gaping as he explained that the government had done its best to accommodate us.

Later that day I told a friend of mine about the experience. It occurred to me I should organize a lobby of mothers on daycare subsidy. My friend said that sounded like too much work for a single parent with a small child. I thought about having a few of the women over to tea, but time slipped by and I didn’t do it—inviting them over required a political energy that was beyond me at that time.

How did I get through the drastic dichotomies of mothering and writing? Slowly, I became aware that mothering was vital human work, deserving social support, instead of a side project done by private female labour. There were and are far too many cultural pressures that continue to deny mothers, and by extension all parents, the value of their jobs.

However, the demands of child raising made me better organized. I learned to say no and to structure my time so every minute counted. Knowing what mammoth undertakings I was managing without any public acknowledgment also made me proud and gave me an energizing moral fuel. One evening, after a day at the filming of a television program I had been hired to promote, I shared a cab home with some of the television producers. These men began blaming their families for keeping them from writing novels. There was a sudden uncomprehending silence when I told the men they were whining babies and asked the driver to stop. Slamming the door, I walked all the way home and wrote a chapter of my novel.

Making space in my life for the act of writing also helped my stress. Knowing that good fiction comes from a mentally relaxed place, I made myself sit at my desk every day for four hours and do nothing except write or think about writing. These hours spent in my inner world were a peaceful counterpoint to the rest of my life. Even if I had never published a book, my personal growth would have benefited from that meditative time.

Still, I didn’t write about my daughter’s presence in my life. Only a few poems and theatre pieces refer obliquely to our situation. In one performance, a choreographer and I imitated little girls talking about their Barbie dolls; in another, we mimed the act of swallowing earthworms. A photograph taken for this performance showed me posing with my head in my kitchen oven, evoking the tragedy of poet Sylvia Plath.

Why didn’t I write fiction about us? Did I want to protect my daughter’s privacy? Of course I did. But I also wanted to protect myself. Rereading my old journals, I realize one of my pervading feelings then was shame. Shame that I wasn’t doing a better job. Shame and fear that my daughter would be harmed. Shame and guilt that I was trying to accomplish too much because I wanted to combine motherhood with writing. Shame and dread that some terrible thing would befall my daughter as a result of my choices.

I felt like a failed mother. I didn’t know then that in some sense women with children are all failed mothers, done in by the unfair expectations placed on us by our culture, and by ourselves.

So, looking back, I don’t think I could have written about my experience if I’d tried. Video and performance art deal more easily with the recent past than fiction, which is easier to write when the writer has the perspective of greater distance. For me, the difficulties of mothering were immediate and overwhelming, and I had almost no perspective at all on what I was doing. And yet despite the veiled accusations and often misguided assumptions, which had nothing to do with my secret life as a mother, I loved my daughter no less for all that. In one of my old journals, I found this 1983 entry:

Sitting in my chair, in my red Chinese slippers, reading, Sam playing with Emily (cat) on the floor. Snow on the gables of the roofs across the street. Tulips in bloom by the window. Enjoying the peace of my apartment with my daughter. I am happy
.

My fear of looking back at our struggles obscured this simple, powerful truth.

Nourishment

Double
                 Arc

Karen Houle