Key to My Heart

Today I offer thanks for my son David, who has the key to my heart. My current gratitude is for his always being there for my website maintenance crises as well as other tech-related quandaries. He helps, he fixes, he researches, he teaches; and in the face of Mom windstorms, he soothes with his calming air of patience. Without David and his confidence in me, I would often have run screaming from the world wide web, and not have been able to be present and connected as I am.

From my newest to my oldest gratitude, I must skip back a few score years. I thank the boychild he was for saving me from my 1970’s inclination toward separatism, the stance that feminist uprooting of patriarchy must be achieved in women-only groups that can seek greater autonomy no other way. Though separatism contributed so much that is positive to the women’s movement, my belief would have led me to an either-or form of it that narrowed my vision—if it weren’t for my even more ferocious belief in my child.

Yesterday something wonderful reminded me of this. I received a request from the literary estate of one of my all-time heros, Adrienne Rich, to reprint some of my work. W.W. Norton will reprint an excerpt from an essay published in 1974 in Women A Journal of Liberation as well as lines of a poem from my 1973 book, Excavations. Here are the lines of poetry and the prose passages that will appear in the newest edition of Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, first published in 1976 by Adrienne Rich:

My deep preference for women made mothering a male seem contradictory. But it is my very preference which now generates insight into the motherbond. The bond so easily blurred by everyday role-tasks. . . . What comes clear is the passion—the series of love-poems that poured from me while I carried him . . . the strength that let me defy all those who called him illegitimate … the moment of holding him to my breast in the hospital room and looking up to see my own mother at the foot of the bed with tears in her eyes … the feeling that when I am right with him, my life is lucid, but when our relationship is muddled, clouds cover my days. It is when I use this kind of perspective that his gender pales into insignificance. . . . Resentment gone, I can love him freely. I am more important to myself than is anyone else, I need not sacrifice my integrity, but neither must I sacrifice my son’s. The passion of the motherbond demands whole persons.

But this mother also acknowledges, in her poem, “To a Boy-Child,” the possibility of a time of confusion and separation:

I tremble to see your temptations.
How clear for me what losing would mean,
how confusing for you,
little man. Already
you’re lured by what passes for power,
and is, by half.
What do I do with your guns?
Outlaws, you’re playing, and I think
it is I who am out of the law,
it is you within it,
approved,
who grows blind to its bars .

For those of us who had children, and later came to recognize and act upon the breadth and depth of our feelings for women, a complex new bond with our mothers is possible. The poet Susa (previously Sue) Silvermarie writes:

I find now, instead of a contradiction between lesbian and mother, there is an overlapping. What is the same between my lover and me, my mother and me, and my son and me is the motherbond— primitive, all-encompassing, and paramount.

In loving another woman I discovered the deep urge to both be a mother to and find a mother in my lover. At first I feared the discovery. Everything around me told me it was evil. Popular Freudianism cursed it as a fixation, a sign of immaturity. But gradually I came to have faith in my own needs and desires. . . . Now I treasure and trust the drama between two loving women, in which each can become mother and each become child.

It is most clear during lovemaking, when the separation of everyday life lifts for awhile, when I too return to the mystery of the mother, and of the world as it must have been wh en the motherbond was exalted. Now I am ready to go back and understand the one whose body actually carried me. Now I can begin to learn about her, forgive her for the rejection I felt, yearn for her, ache for her. I could never want her until I myself had been wanted. By a woman. Now I know what it is to feel exposed as a newborn, to be pared down to my innocence. To lie with a woman and give her the power of my utter fragility. To have that power be cherished. Now that I know, I can return to her who could not cherish me as I needed. I can return without blame, and I can hope that she is ready for me.

In between the current gratitude to my son for his patient tech help, and the earliest gratitude for his very being, are myriad gratitudes I have experienced for his presence in my life.What can I say, David, except Gracias. Gracias for gracing my life.