When I was seventeen, I portrayed a shepherd in my family’s annual nativity play. This was a landmark event, as it marked my first departure from the role of Mary. In girlhood, I relished the opportunity to don the blue sheet and stuff a baby-doll up my shirt, annually testing the role of mother. I took my role very seriously — the timing of the birth scene was crucial, but careful costuming made all the difference. There were only seven words in St. Luke’s script, six of them monosyllabic, in which to achieve the birth with minimal evidence of the baby’s incorrect passage from “womb” to life. Probably my earliest reenactments took more the form of Mary rather ostentatiously lifting her shirt and allowing Baby Jesus to simply drop free, but my later efforts were more successful. My task didn’t end here though; once born, the newborn had to be securely wrapped in a brown towel, and laid in the expectant wicker basket. In my childhood mind, there was a single correct way to wrap the baby, which I suppose I picked up from watching my mother wrap my baby brother — one of many performances I learned from her. In any case, “Mary brought forth her first born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger” is a lot for a girl of any age to act out with adequate degrees of dramatic timing, but I think I generally managed to pull it off.
But not on my seventeenth Christmas. Even then I didn’t question the logic dictating that I, the only daughter among six unruly sons, should play Mary. Yet I couldn’t help feeling I was missing out on the fun of our annual productions: playing different roles. Our male cast included, in varying years: Joseph, three wise men, the angel Gabriel, assorted concourses of heavenly hosts, the innkeeper, Zacharias, John the Baptist, Baby John the Baptist, an assortment of shepherds (including one year an Arab sheik) and, on one notable occasion, a wine-guzzling King Herod. My brothers seemed free to explore almost a new identity every year, while I was perpetually limited to a single role. Thus, at seventeen I rebelled against the type casting I had previously been complicit in and made my break as a shepherd. The following year I resumed the role of Mary.
* * * * *
In the early months of marriage I crochet the blanket begun in singledom, humming as I go, making of it a labor of love. I weave a mellifluous web of lullaby, cotton fiber, and preemptive affection for the as yet physically unconceived infant who might be a boy and might look like his father, and might become everything I hope as I fashion for him a blue baby blanket, intertwining in every stitch images, thoughts, suggestions of the man he might become, as though wrapping him in a blanket of my own design might transfer to him the roles I hope he will take up in life. If he ever comes.
* * * * *
Infertility is a reproductive disease. It is not necessarily permanent. It is not exclusively a woman’s condition. Infertility affects 7.3 million couples in the United States, roughly 12 percent of reproductive-age men and women. There are many causes, 85% of which are treatable if not curable, 20% of which are inexplicable though perhaps treatable. A couple is generally defined as infertile and admitted to a specialist for examination after one year of consistent fruitless attempts to conceive a child. Infertility is emotionally draining, conjuring feelings of failure, fear, isolation, loss, despair, relentless gnawing emptiness.
I first met an infertile woman when I was twelve. Her sorrow eclipsed my embryonic hopes for a future family, tainted them with fear. Of all the problems I might face in life, please not infertility, I prayed.
* * * * *
Isaac was his mother’s only child, conceived after years of bareness. As such, Sarah took great pains to secure a suitable wife for him. Rebekah proved her suitability by hauling gallons of water from a hole in the ground for a man and his camel. I don’t suppose a pretty face detracted any from her value though her primary worth was perhaps in supporting her husband, and she doubly established her worth by producing male twins who each fathered nations. Fortunately my husband is one of six children. His parents don’t expect nations. I make their son happy, most of the time. My suitability thus far is secure.
* * * * *
A wedding ring is a configuration of metal and rock, but mine is also an anchor to the past, an heirloom for the future, an eternal round of womanhood. My ring once embraced my mother’s finger but broke a few years into her marriage, before my parents had money to repair it. Later the money was accessible, but the ring no longer suited my mother’s finger, swollen with age, and she replaced it with a newer band. When she first detected the scent of love on my breath, she had the ring repaired with gold from my deceased grandmother’s simple wedding band, “just in case” I might find a use for it. Now it is truly mine, given by my mother to my brother who passed it to my husband who passed it, four days later, to me. The tiniest of accessories, it nonetheless becomes the only costume I never remove and never replace.
* * * * *
If the world is a stage, my brothers have been among the most dedicated stage directors and costume designers I’ve ever had. Not content with Halloween costumes and my annual appearance as Mary, they undertook to create for me such roles as Chiquita Banana Queen, Mini-Me, Sock-Haired Lady, and Troll Baby. My parents expressed displeasure when they happened upon my eldest brother placing the last few blue banana stickers (acquired by my father in Panama on a two year religious mission) on my diaper clad body, but by the time I came staggering out of my bedroom one Sunday evening a couple years later appareled in an outlandish assortment of clothes with a pair of tights on my head, they didn’t bat an eyelash. They proved equally stalwart when my brothers dressed me in Dad’s work clothes, and they only took a small step back when I appeared on the front porch at the age of three, hair adorned with twigs and clad in nothing but leaves and mud.
The role of “sister” to many brothers thus proved so fully developed that I had no difficulty acting it out — apart from all five (eventually six) brothers neglecting to write me a script. This unfortunate lack evoked a deal of resentment in my young self, but somehow no one ever linked my reactionary nature to a frustration over not getting any good lines in the perpetual play sometimes referred to as life. I gradually, mostly, ceased my outbursts and fell into the incommunicative state sometimes referred to as shy. When I began preschool, I communicated with the teacher by way of my best friend who served as interpreter. I whispered my improvised lines in her ear and she relayed to the teacher.
I have since come to understand that many people besides myself are encouraged to supply their own lines in the perpetual play, and that a reasonable percentage become generally adept at doing so. I have never been among that percentage. I perhaps spent too much time in early years trying to write a script for myself such that I never learned how to perform it. Or perhaps the vital switchboard that links thoughts to speech was damaged from the start. I derive innumerable joys from stringing words together on a page, but if I alter the procedure to a form of speech, the thoughts, sound and whole when they departed the Central Nervous Station, inevitably arrive at the oral platform suffering from agoraphobia and mild schizophrenia. If writing initially perpetuated this condition, the condition now perpetuates my dependence on writing as the truest means of communication.
* * * * *
My mother was delighted when I began to demonstrate a leftist leaning — that is, a left-handed leaning. My mother is left-handed, as was her mother. We share a special bond, the three of us, linked by direct genetic inheritance of a relatively rare trait. My mother though is pure left-handed, while I am imperfectly so. I write left-handed, eat left-handed, chop and stir left-handed, crochet left-handed. Everything else I do right-handed — throwing a ball, brushing my hair, cutting with scissors — I can’t even operate left-handed scissors. Perhaps this is why I exhibit only half the creativity expected of right-brained people.
My mind is not a constant swirl of lovely creative thoughts. My days are not consumed with escaping the box in which so many think. I do however enjoy crafting beautiful sentences with my left hand, inventing recipes with my left hand, shaping webs of yarn with my left hand. My left hand, wearing the wedding band inherited from my mother and grandmother, is my instrument of choice as I identify my womanhood.
* * * * *
My left-handed grandmother was a great cook, before she got old and stopped cooking. She made dinner from scratch every night, timed the cooking perfectly so everything always came out hot and ready at the same time, and her pies were works of art. I know this because my mother told me so. My mother also told me how my grandmother didn’t teach her how to cook. The kitchen was off limits while her mother was cooking — she needed everything to come out perfectly in some part of her imperfect life, and my mother underfoot and trying to help cook would have meant sacrificing perfection. Perhaps my grandmother might have taught me to cook, if her mind had not succumbed so early to Alzheimer’s disease. My mother though took great pains to teach me and each of my brothers to cook, though it resulted in many a meal missing an ingredient or two, and once pies baked with salt-infested sugar. What my mother never told me is whether or not she struggled with wishing to copy her mother’s cooking, even as she feared copying her mother’s mothering, and if she struggled how she found resolution.
* * * * *
During my engagement, “it’s ruined” became my signature phrase, uttered at least once in the preparation and consumption of every meal I cooked for my fiancé. This phrase was among the handful of possessions I carried into marriage, much to the dismay of my husband who soon wearied of building me up after every “ruined” meal. Though I felt I was falling short of my own standards, I suppose I truly struggled to reach my mother’s culinary standards even as she struggled to achieve her mother’s.
In time, “it’s ruined” adapted itself for all aspects of married life – washing dishes, cleaning rooms, folding laundry, being a supportive wife, becoming a mother. “I’m a failure” was more the form by our third month of marriage. The problem, you see, was this: My husband’s copy of the script for “My Married Life” called for a wife who shared household responsibilities with him. Mine called for a martyr of a wife who agreeably took on 100% of all household duties. If I did everything, he felt slothful and superfluous. If he “had to” help out, I felt inadequate and failed. But at least I no longer proclaimed every meal “ruined,” finding instead delight in the creation process itself, even with its imperfections.
* * * * *
In the twilight of childhood, I try yet again to copy my mother, my every nerve spellbound by her hands, performing impossible feats. They weave a seeming enchanted web as her left index finger and thumb flex, as though propelling pen across paper, catching another loop of yarn on the tiny crook of the crochet hook and drawing it through the latest in a row of similar loops supported by her right hand, simple in themselves, yet part of an intricate network of delicate lacey blanket. I’m quite certain web-weaver is one role I’ll never successfully take on. She assures me it’s perfectly acceptable and even expected that I need to rip out rows of stitching to correct a dropped stitch. But she never drops stitches, never makes mistakes.
“Not like that, Annette, let your left hand do the work,” she corrects for the umpteenth time.
I long ago surpassed my average ten-year-old attention span, so eager am I to learn the subtle art of crocheting, believing it “what women do.” None of my friends do it. Their mothers don’t do it. Their grandmothers might do it — I’ve never met them. My grandmother does it. My great aunt does it. My mother does it; therefore, “women” crochet. Ten is really too young to want to be a woman, but I am too young to realize this.
* * * * *
Five years earlier, the air rushes past my face, hands, chest as I leap superhumanly through the air, my skintight star-spangled blue and red leotard providing minimal wind resistance – crucial in my haste to save the puppy from the incarnation of evil undertaking to kidnap it… Dressed in a USA print swimsuit, my five-year-old self lands on all fours having flung herself from her wild-rocking-horse — which she rode at maximum speed — in order to mimic the leap of Wonder Woman. I don’t suppose that little girl had any notion of the gendering in which she was participating, recognizing only an admirable female super hero, but she later grew up to be a bigger girl, even daring to take on the title “woman” at which time the notion of being a “wonder woman” became troubling. Her mother seemed a wonder woman, but her mother stayed home with seven children while the real Wonder Woman had a career. Could she manage both, children and a career? Surely this was the real definition of a wonder woman? Eventually she determined “wonder woman” a mere cultural construction (refusing to acknowledge the influence of such in her life) and decided she didn’t need to be one after all, didn’t even want to be one if it meant short-changing her greatest dream – motherhood.
* * * * *
Mother Eve was instructed to “be fruitful and multiply” and she complied, seemingly capable of willing a condition of fruitfulness and recurring pregnancy in her eagerness to fulfill her primary role as mother of the race of men. Her costuming for this role — a coat of skins — was incidentally rather different than that of her first role of disgraced co-inhabiter of paradise, which comprised the scanty coverage of fig leaves. For some reason the fallen woman attired in fig leaves is the more popularly perpetuated image, though the vast majority of her life was spent in animal skins bearing and rearing children.
* * * * *
In eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a writer, a mother, and a wife. I hoped I could start liking boys, thought I mostly loved babies, and knew I absolutely adored stringing words together. English teachers along the way suggested I might not be entirely lacking in talent in the word-stringing area, and I found myself six years later with a husband and no baby enrolled in my first creative writing class midway through my English major. I cried a lot, fumed a lot, despaired a lot, nearly threw my notebook at the professor once, and came away more devoted than ever to the sacred art of writing.
* * * * *
There is something innate in every little girl which desperately wants to assert itself in regards to babies and small animals, or any manufactured depiction thereof. It asserted itself in me with gusto when I first beheld the wrinkly ten pound bundle destined to become my exasperating six-foot-plus little brother. I was barely halfway through kindergarten and already battling emotions beyond my comprehension and control. No matter how many times Mom remonstrated, “the poor boy doesn’t need two mothers” — no matter how many times I agreed with her — I continued to mother my baby brother. He seemed in such desperate need of love and help and I needed so desperately to love and help someone, desired perhaps to have a say in how he would turn out, to engage early in the greatest creation process by which a reproductive cell splits and becomes a man, but a man defined by influences, one of which I might undertake to be.
* * * * *
My first-year-of-college roommates may have thought me odd, perhaps merely naïve. Certainly they must have known the impracticality of crocheting, though I ostensibly did not. I knew only that none of them crocheted – one more trait to add to the many qualities of “woman” lacking or differing in them from the model I’d constructed for myself in lieu of a proper script. Even if I had recognized the excessive cost of endless skeins of yarn, I doubt I could have relinquished the ecstasy of creation, coming as close to making something of nothing as is ever possible under Physics’ illustrious regime. The first loop of yarn, a blanket in embryo, became two, then four, doubling and tripling at a speed at once painfully slow and dizzyingly swift, growing miraculously into a fully matured and functional baby blanket. I suppose a scarf or hat would have been quicker to crochet, an adult sized afghan more pragmatic, but always I crocheted baby blankets. The first was ostensibly meant for a niece, the second for a nephew — her brother — but neither made it to their intended recipients. Somehow I always miscalculated the rate at which babies and blankets grow: the former always too fast, the latter too slow in the confines of procrastination. I can’t recall now where or how the first blanket left my company (though I know from its present absence from my life that it did), but the second followed me through the remaining semesters of college — through courtship, engagement, and on into marriage.
I can see it now as I write, piled, somewhat haphazardly, on the single shelf in the closet I share with my husband. The mass of baby blue yarn (you’ll recall it was meant for a nephew) drapes over the edge in some places, as though longing to escape its discarded fate. Bits are less pristine than in happier times, times when this web of baby blue yarn had a clear purpose in life, when there was an impending newborn definitely waiting to fill its intricate knots. I suppose even as I crocheted it in my apartment of singlehood I knew the blanket would never go to my nephew, sensed perhaps — or merely wondered whether — it might someday find its way to a child of my own making, a literal piece of myself.
* * * * *
The program cover for “My Married Life” features a photo of my mother and father on their first wedding anniversary. My mother’s hair is the improbable shade of crayola burnt orange, her entire face exhausted but beaming. My father stands to her left, drawing her close with his arm wrapped around her shoulder, his hair an inverted jagged-edged black bowl from which a wedge is entirely missing above the right eye (the best free haircut my mother could procure at that point). He too is smiling, and both are clearly in love as they face the camera lens head-on. Nestled securely between them, a month old dazed and slack-jawed baby boy — my brother — demands acknowledgement of his place in my parents’ young marriage. The image becomes my model for married life, the ideal I naively expect to achieve as I sign the marriage contract.
* * * * *
In the stifling humidity of our Pennsylvania kitchen, my next eldest brother and I stand balanced precariously on the seat of a kitchen chair – not quite fitting, but each determined not to risk the other getting to dump two consecutive ingredients into the mixing bowl while he or I drag a second chair from the table to the counter at which our mother mixes a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough. At eight, he is three years older than I, yet we are mutually entranced by the magic of food creation, our young imaginations captivated by the process which allows raw ingredients to coalesce into anything as divine as a warm gooey cookie. He wears a chef’s hat of which I am undeniably jealous; however, I console myself with the knowledge that I will grow to be a woman, and women don’t need chef’s hats because cooking is part of their job description.
* * * * *
My life consists of a variety of metaphoric dramatic roles, some of which are thrust upon me, others of which I read through, consider, and — if fortunate enough to be cast in the part — either adopt or discard, and a very few of which I create for myself. Of the roles for which I’ve read, my favorite to act is my husband’s wife. It is of all the roles the one in which I had at once the most and least say in contracting — choosing to commit to marriage but subject to his mutual commitment; choosing to accept his love for me but helpless before the sway of mine for him. Love is one of those tricky abstract concepts that refuses to surrender to mere words. Words are the indelible strands of crystalline yarn with which we weave intricate patterns of narrative, communication, information, essays. The entire world of economics, politics, diplomacy, society, runs on words. They capture the whirling of the cosmos and the churning of the bowels of Mother Earth. Words perpetually loop back on themselves, forging connections and expanding at once ever outward and ever inward. Words capture meaning, shatter prejudices, confine the laws of physics. Love eats words for breakfast.
It might eat them for lunch and dinner too, according to one ubiquitous avowal of poetry, if it didn’t prefer a more delectable source of nourishment: human relationships in all their delicious complexities, at once sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, savory, and every possible variant among, between, within, or beyond these. This complexity and more shone out from my husband’s eyes when he first beheld the fruits of my long labors to procure the perfect bridal costume, suitable to convey me between the stages of girlhood and wifehood.
Incidentally, “stage” refers here to the theatrical variant, though it might just as easily and accurately signify a stretch of life. Perhaps the many metaphors preceding my own that link theater to life informed the use of the word “stage” to describe transient steps in our progression from child to adult, or perhaps the life terminology informed the naming of the theatrical platform. Then again, perhaps the apt dual applications of the single arrangement of letters are essentially unrelated and are yet another fortuitous offering from the obliging universe that has so mercifully aligned itself to my essay in an attempt to elevate it, not unlike a mother aligning herself to the needs of her child in order to elevate and shape him.
* * * * *
My grandmother supplied the money that bought my very first baby-doll, gifted to me on my first birthday. The doll cost ten dollars, and her prepackaged name was Love Doll. Incredibly, the name stuck — possibly due to my relative lack of comprehensible say in the matter — and Love Doll (incidentally the very doll annually cast as Baby Jesus) became the bedraggled companion of all my childhood adventures until I was no longer a child and my mother and I packed her up in the attic. On the whole, I think I was a good mother to my hybrid plastic and plush infant, mimicking feeding, bathing, diaper changing, and of course rocking to sleep. In one respect, however, I proved a woeful mother. I adored my five big brothers and trusted them implicitly — a bit too much as it happened. When one of them taught me to body slam my doll, I took it as a wise parenting procedure which he had the courtesy to pass on to me. Never mind that my parents certainly did not practice such on myself (though I was certainly deserving at times) nor on any of my (perhaps deserving) siblings: beloved brother spoke, and I, ever obedient to the will of my stage director, performed – zealously.
* * * * *
A few weeks before entering high school, I browse the endless rows of book spines in the local library, wondering again as I have so many times before what my name will look like in print. Will my mother and grandmother beam with pride at the sight? Will my brothers refer to me as “their sister, the writer”? And my beloved English teachers – will they read my book and connect the printed name beneath the title (and perhaps a certain familiarity in the writing) to their former student? Like so many times before, I can almost picture the spine of my book peeping out between its fellows on the shelf until, unlike any time previous, I link my plans for marriage and authorship and realize I’ve no idea where my book will sit — I’ve no idea what my name will be. I’ve yet to encounter a woman who kept her “maiden name” in marriage, thus the identity crisis crashes upon me as two intended roles inexorably, needlessly, clash. In coming years I learn to consider both surname options in context of publication (and wifehood), but remain conflicted in which created identity to perpetuate in print.
* * * * *
“Is it ready now?”
“I think — I’m not sure — maybe?”
“We don’t want to burn it…”
“Okay, go for it.”
Without further ado I hoist the stockpot off the burner and upside down over the well greased cookie sheet, letting the amber gloop ripple and ooze into its polygonal mold. My husband applies force where necessary, driving the last of the viscous toffee from its refuge at the bottom of the pot. As I spread it into the corners of the pan I know something is wrong — it’s not malleable enough, tearing apart in multiple places. The creation process hasn’t come full circle after all, and we apparently have some version of brittle caramel instead of the toffee we anticipated. Yet the time invested pays off in other ways — for almost the first time in our marriage, my husband and I cooked together, our separate roles and diverse wife expectations reconciling themselves into a cohesive scene in “My Married Life.” The candy is odd, but we eat it in complementary silence, wearing complimentary smiles.
* * * * *
Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel struggled to find fulfillment as a woman without children — a wife without children. The children of other women perhaps dredged up bitterness in her soul, perhaps anger, perhaps sorrow, or a toxic potion of all three. She ultimately produced two sons, though the birth of the latter abruptly ended her life. I suppose in a sense, her longing for children literally sealed her fate, yet she found joy in Joseph before dying in childbirth with Benjamin. For Joseph, she wove a “coat of many colors,” and in so enrobing her son, cast on him a heritage, an identity, and a prophetic destiny not unlike that of Joseph’s descendent, Moses. Moses’ mother, Jochebed, wrapped him in a blanket imbued with properties of destiny, identity, and protection by virtue of a mother’s love – the selfsame love that might someday enable me to wrap my son in similar inheritances if only I am cast in that role.
Jacob’s less beloved wife Leah produced many children but perhaps struggled all the same to find fulfillment as a woman, desiring greater love from Jacob who would always harbor greater affection for her younger sister. Her situation, though undesirable, offers a modicum of sanity to my beleaguered soul as I recognize the full felicity of a devoted husband, even in the face of impending infertility which is not, after all, exclusively a woman’s condition, and might prove treatable if we reach the year mark and meet with a specialist. Cool logic cuts through my desperate fears of unfulfilled potential and interminable longing and restores a partial belief in me as an independent capable woman shaped by more than motherhood, elevated by multiple forms of creation. I continue to struggle establishing my own role as wife, but my husband and I gradually abandon our stubborn readings of incompatible scripts for wife gleaned from a variety of (ir)reputable sources and turn increasingly to adlibbing which proves by far best suited to negotiating our unique complexities.
* * * * *
At nineteen and in my first year of college, my experience with young children is somewhat limited. My eighteen-month-old niece starts crying, again, when I presumptuously attempt to transition her from playing to eating, giving me a look of such scathing indignation that I cannot fail to realize I’m really quite inept with children. She is my first experience with a real live toddler since my younger brother exited the terrible twos when I was only seven years old, and continually resists my efforts to charm her with my doll-gained mothering expertise. Children, you see, don’t believe in scripts — or rather, they want a new script and a new role for themselves every five minutes, complete with an entire new cast of characters, all of which are to be played by their caretaker — in this case, me. I ought to be adept by now at filling twelve roles at once, but I struggle all the same at filling one.
* * * * *
My first year of marriage is six months gone, fruitful in so many ways but not in the way I most desire: we still haven’t conceived a child. The almost-finished blanket still sits on the shelf, taunting me. I long to rip out rows and rows of stitching, unraveling the past of unfulfilled desires, obliterating the tormenting hope that “this month might be the one, the one when he finally comes.” But somehow I can’t. Somehow, it would be too much like unraveling myself, and my mother, who wove so much of herself into me even as I once undertook to weave myself into my longed-for-son. My mother never taught me the secret destructive art of unraveling self; nevertheless, I innately sense the cost of doing so and know I cannot undertake such a procedure — cannot risk unraveling m mother in me, nor bear losing my only present link to my son. Tormenting, relentless as the hope is, I cannot relinquish it. Tears accomplish quite a bit: aching head, swollen nose, burning eyes, blotchy face, externalizing of mucus, hiccups. Unfortunately none of these are particularly productive beyond the age of six. I’m left feeling empty, defeated, betrayed by my own body. But I don’t unravel the blanket.
* * * * *
Kneading is infinitely cathartic. Each press of the palm expels a little more anger, a little more heartache, a little more joy, a little more love from a tumultuous soul into the semi-live mass of flour and water and tiny “fertile” organisms. The continual expansion of a mound of rising dough, the work of metabolizing yeast, perhaps suggests to the mind the expansion of a woman’s womb as fertile cells divide and grow within, both types of swelling domes beautiful representations of the creation process, dwelling securely within the domain of womanhood.
* * * * *
Women compromise half of their school days identity when they adopt their husbands’ last name, and relinquish the remaining half when their firstborn baby utters “ma-ma.” Nevertheless, I wait with mounting impatience in the plastic seat of dubious sanitation in the social security office for the chance to finally take on my husband’s name and thus entwine our lives linguistically together — the final and greatest push to oneness. With greater impatience I await the day I can call my husband “daddy” and thus impress upon him impending parenthood. These identities, wife and mother, are two of the only three roles I have desired since eighth grade. The first I have eagerly adopted, the second stubbornly denies itself to me, and the third — the third is the role I wrote for myself, the role I literally write for myself even as I compose this essay.
* * * * *
If my husband’s wife is my favorite role to play, caretaker certainly follows closely behind — perhaps at once the most trying and most rewarding role I’ve ever filled and one I long to resume with motherhood. My grandmother lived in my parents’ converted garage for five long years in which time I undertook every Saturday to temporarily relieve my mother of the burden of caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s. I delivered dentures to, prepared bran cereal for, administered medicine to, and bathed in hot water, and dressed in fresh clothes the woman who often forgot my name and sometimes forgot she was my grandma. Every evening I again brought her pills, helped her dress for bed, and hoped she wouldn’t fight me when I requested the return of her dentures for the purpose of soaking them in mysterious blue foam. It’s not the avenue I would ever have chosen by which to learn compassion, patience, a soft voice, and a gentle touch, but once traveled I cannot imagine a more beautiful road to the same end than one in which a granddaughter nurtures her grandmother. Even in the midst of perpetually overcast memories, my grandmother’s experiential wisdom shone through my stained glass eyes into the cathedral of my soul, revealing networks of unexplored passages, chambers, and chapels in which my un-costumed self might freely exist, in sanctuary from the demands of stage directors, script writers, costume and set designers, and the ever critical audience.
* * * * *
My husband understands for the first time, as I don his mother’s apron at his family’s home in the golden days of our courtship, that if he proceeds with his plans to marry me, I will come to fill the same role in our home that his mother plays in the home of his childhood — understands, perhaps, that I will make of our sons something akin to what his mother made of him. The costume pleases him, and he proposes a month later, in my childhood home.
* * * * *
In my ninth month of marriage, I listen to my mother’s voice distorted by the phone, not wanting to understand the implications of what she tells me.
“It says on this clinic’s website that women are considered infertile after one year of unsuccessfully trying to conceive.” Nine months. I could have a child now, if I’d conceived early on, if we’d conceived early on – infertility is not exclusively a woman’s condition. Three months more and I’ll – we’ll – be infertile, by medical definition.
“You know, you might have inherited a condition that sometimes causes infertility. I never had trouble with infertility, but I had complications with my pregnancies. And your grandmother was barren eight years between having my brothers and me. It was a very easy fix once they diagnosed it.” Inherited. Left-handed, a wedding ring, my deepest fear, all through the same line of womanhood. But this trait is one I don’t want.
I reflect on the sorrows, pains, barrenness of Sarah, Hannah, Rachel, Elisabeth, Rebekah, wonder if they ever fell prey to stage fright before an excessively critical audience, ever questioned their decision to set foot on a stage at once visibly public and perpetually doomed to privacy by the constraints of societal taboos. I wonder too how they persevered, how they overcame their circumstances — whether they were ever able to do so prior to the miraculous conceptions and births of their longed-for children. Did they ever rebel against the title “barren”?
I realize I must find fulfillment in myself beyond motherhood, must allow writing, cooking, crocheting, all varied forms of creation to fill my unfulfilled womanhood. For the first time, I allow myself to link “infertile” to me – not surrendering, merely trying it on as another of the many roles I’ve explored in the perpetual play – and as I do so, a tremendous burden of fear is lifted.
* * * * *
I can’t identify the precise occasion on which I first explored “woman” in application to myself. Perhaps it was the first time I applied sharp metal to the hairs on my legs, or when I punctured my ears at twelve for the sake of beauty, or perhaps my tenth day living in a college apartment, perhaps the day I married my husband. Or, perhaps it started as far back as the time I smeared lipstick across my mouth for Halloween or the time the kindergarten bus stop moms witnessed me land a kiss on the boy who lived across the street, or the time I donned a swimsuit and jumped off a galloping rocking horse. This is one script that no one ever even attempted to write for me, leaving me instead to glean what I could from social, religious, historical, and familial cultures and mostly forge my own way — a difficult feat for one adept at crafting but perpetually unable to deliver her own dramatic lines.
* * * * *
Understanding is not fully healing, but it takes the edge off uncertainty, longing, pain. Of the creative processes in which I engage, writing is perhaps the one that affords the most understanding. Writing — essaying — comes down in so many ways to discovering identity, to allowing refreshing candid sunlight drive feared unknowns to the forefront of the consciousness where the “I” may freely explore misguided conceits, long-buried prejudices, and among them deeply buried refined gems of inspired thought, slowly metamorphosed under extreme conditions in the tumultuous recesses of the mind. As the cathedrals are again flooded with light, the un-costumed self awakes and finds she has purpose after all.
Today I work again on the blanket, after a four month hiatus. The ring that is my mother, grandmother, husband, me, molten and shaped into one dances and sparkles, tracing — or perhaps directing — the motions of my left hand as it fights to keep the loops just the right size, the yarn perfectly balanced between taughtness and slackness. Perhaps my mother played out a similar struggle, weaving identity for her sixth child, loving her boys but wondering all the same, as she had with all the rest, if this next baby — this fabric identity which she now alters based on her own experience to suit the baby destined to be me. Perhaps as I reenact this scene of years long past, I will discover with certitude those traits which she wove into me, discover the secret of a woman’s creator identity refined by men and passed through generations from mother to daughter. Perhaps my son will be a daughter and I will sagely pass these secrets to her, and she to her daughter, and on. Or perhaps I will finally understand as I fail to bequeath them that the secrets of a creator are never passed on because she alone can ever comprehend them, can ever understand that the vital core of woman’s identity cannot be inherited but only defined — created — by herself.
ISSUE:
S U M M E R
2012
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