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 8th 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.
