Coming Home to an Unknown Land

I feel a bit as if I’m finding a new family I didn’t know I had. 

In preparation for a week’s R&R and a bit of post-semester, professional development, I downloaded Susan Gubar’s edited compilation of essays entitled True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011) into the Kindle I rarely use. Except when travelling, when it becomes a portable library of companionable authors. I knew of Susan Gubar’s work because of a recent New York Times Book Review that caught my eye, but this volume drew me in with the proposition of listening in to women professor’s autobiographical musings about their lives before, during and after careers in higher education. I recognized several names in the Table of Contents, but not very many, truth be told. I became a feminist myself mostly out of self-defense in my years of theological education. While sympathetic, even a quiet advocate and servant of women, I’ve not been well-versed in the literatures of feminism. I was therefore completely unprepared for the overwhelming resonance and recognitions of myself, events in my life, directions in my work as a poet-scholar in higher education. I devoured essay after essay on the plane-ride, amazed at “coming home” to an unknown land in the lives of women I’ve never met. And now I have so much correspondence and nesting to do!

Shirley Geok-lin Lim gave me words I’ve yearned to say myself. She calls herself “a mongrel academic-creative writer, between and in between the two institutionally-differentiated identities of scholar and poet.” I need to look up the etymology of “mongrel” now. She describes a guiding force in her life--and in my life right now--which is “other forms of community…peers, older women who offer an alternative and new form of gyno-love (a woman-based, woman-centric homosociability separate from lesbian love).” Was she in my head or just connected in that web of interdependence we all talk about but so often forget?

The essay by Patricia Yeager, “Labial Politics,” reflected on the first time her mother taught her to use a tampon and gasped, “Oh, they’re so big, so…you’ll have no trouble having babies.” She stared, Yaeger observes, finding herself then in a paroxysm of insecurity: what was the matter? Was I malformed? I was myself returned to something my mother observed to me, probably in 8^th grade or so, when I bemoaned how large I was and how dainty other girls seemd to be, including my own sister. She said to me, “Lisa, you’re so lucky: you have child-bearing hips.” The irony of that observation hit me today with full-force. What is a woman not interested or called to child-bearing to do with “child-bearing hips”?

Nancy Chodorow’s essay, “The Psychoanalysit, the Sociologist, and the Femnist: a Retrospect,” drew me into some wonderings for the learning of the week as well. She confirms her established sense that “meaning comes from within as much as from without,” in contradistinction to much of the sociology of knowledge that was prevalent in her early scholarly formation. She mused on being “accused of writing like a man,” which reminded me of a church member once attempting to encourage me by saying, “Someday, you’ll preach like a man.” 

But in her The Power of Feelings, which I’ve not read, Chodorow shares her more recent thinking about the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship for a woman’s sense of her female self and femininity. She evolves her earlier work to re-focus (if I’m understanding correctly) renewed attention on the “internal and external relation to the mother” as developmentally central for this sense of self and sense of femininity. The distinction here being the internalized self-in-relation as well as the actual or external relation to one’s mother. She then reclaims something she had earlier rejected. In her earlier work, she observes that she’d historically given “the body quite short shrift” in her theorizing. “In my more recent thinking,” she writes, “I reclaim the reproductive body and drives. Even if these are not biologically enacted in an actual pregnancy, I suggest that this biology demands psychic representation.” A wave of curiosity and energy...but what does that mean?

I’ve not thought about the relationship with my mother in any critical or re-listening sense in years. In my late twenties, during my own clinical training, the reclamation of my femininity paralleled a re-engagement of reflection on the quiet or implicit relationship I seemed to have with my mother, in contrast to the quite overt and intense relationship I had with my father and two of his brothers. It was a lively time for both Mom and me, I think, as she grew surprised at my interest in her early life and I grew more and more insistent that these years were important to me, even if they didn’t seem to be for her. 

As I read Chodorow’s words, I was also startled to remember something a rather wounded woman said to me two years ago. She’s a psychotherapist with whom I worked for two separate and brief periods of time—the first to explore the potentially destructive energies around childbearing (or not) I was having, the second (ultimately) to complete that narrative with a “thank-you” reflective-session or two. The last visit with this therapist did not end well, when I came in to express my thanksgiving and be intentional about closure. She responded with a systematic attack on any areas of insecurity she had perceived in me, concluding with some barb about the relationship with my mother. “You’ve never addressed the serious work you need to do on the relationship with your mother,” or some such quip. I had been steeping in lectures on nonviolent communication, so I (deftly, when I think about it now) eased my way out of the door with minimal retaliation or offense. I processed her violation of her oath to me to “do no harm,” implicit in her professional ethic. A professional colleague and a circle of healthy friends affirmed my sense of violation and injustice. I considered sending the drafted letter to the psychological association ethics board, but did not. In this instance, I don’t believe she saw something for me to work on that I did not see, though perhaps something spoke through her for me to hear in the future. Her words struck me as a last-ditch attempt to get me to stay in a dependent relationship with her as a therapist. Perhaps she’s got work to do about motherhood and abandonment?

Upon the memory surfacing today, I do wonder whether there will be a richness of life ahead were I to reconsider the depth and breadth of my relationship to Mom, a reclamation of my own reproductive body and drives, a psychic representation of this reproductive body which appears never to actualize in a biological pregnancy. It seems probable, as I am preparing to steep in teachings with a Jungian “cantadora” whose recent work professes devotion to Holy Mother. The gathering conference participants seem to be largely (and some quite large!) women who do seem this speaker's niche of audience or market. How interesting to be in a center devoted to Divine Light, surrounded by more and more women, anticipating listening to Dr. E who many call “Mother Clarissa.”

Coming home to an unknown land, indeed. Blessed be.