December 7, 2010
Tuesday

I have never wanted to be better at anything than motherhood. And I’ve never found anything harder to be good at. Motherhood is physically and mentally humbling.
                       — Megan Mayhew Bergman, b.(c.) 1980, American fiction writer
                            from an interview in One Story magazine about “Housewifely Arts”

In a piece published today at She Writes, Tayari Jones gives some advice for not losing focus on your writing during the holidays. The key, she says, is to set reasonable goals. She recalls some wisdom she heard in a weight loss group, undoubtedly Weight Watchers, because I’ve heard it there too: it is okay to merely maintain during The Holidays, rather than lose weight. In terms of writing, one might say that it is okay to maintain during this season rather than gain or move forward very much. Scale back the time you spend on your work to 50-75% of what you do when you are completely focused. For Jones, who teaches full time, this means three hours a week on new work.

I had a scattered, unproductive day, but I began it well, with reading fiction during C&C. I’d already made a decision to stick with short pieces until the new year, rather than commit myself to the relationship that one must form with the world of a novel and its characters. I chose the most recent offering from One Story. A subscription to this magazine arrives in the form of one slim booklet every three weeks. Each story is easy to hold, easy to carry.

Megan Mayhew Bergman’s “Housewifely Arts” was a good choice for me this morning. At around 6000 words (Bread Loaf length — Bergman was a scholar at Bread Loaf last year), it was short enough to read in about the time it takes me to drink my required two cups of coffee and let the caffeine rev me up.

I’m developing the capacity to read like a reader (you read to enjoy the story) and like a writer (you look at structure and technique) at the same time. The story gives us a single mother and her seven-year-old son who are on a long drive — a quest, this is a quest story — to find the parrot that the central character believes still remembers and thus can speak in her mother’s voice. The parrot had been given away when the older woman entered a nursing home, and now that she has died, the daughter wants to find the parrot. The story alternates first person narration of the present action with first person recollection of the past which brought these two characters to this moment. It’s a structure I use a lot, less successfully. I wrote the title of the story on a sticky note and placed it in my folder of revision strategies, for when I get back to serious new work.

One of the things I like most about One Story is the interview with each author that they post on their website. The spot almost always contains the author’s statements about where the story came from and what some of the challenging aspects of the writing of it were. That’s where I found the statement about motherhood that I used to introduce this piece. Motherhood, Bergman says, quoting a friend, is the ultimate act of hope.

I’ve long believed that becoming a mother was the most selfish thing I ever did. When my daughter was five or so, I gave her a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit and inscribed it “For Lynn, who helped me become real.” Bergman said in the interview that after she became a mother, she went back and revised the mothers in her earlier work, because she hadn’t understood fully then what it meant to be a mother.

I would say that she might understand it better now, but she can’t understand it fully. Not yet. Her daughter is very young. Mine is twenty-five, living on her own and supporting herself. I had dinner with her last night in the town where she lives. I was on my way to a literary soiree there, and we met up at a nice restaurant as she was on her way from work to getting her hair cut. I looked at this adult woman, poised and articulate, recommending the beers she likes best among those brewed on the premises, talking about a new project at work, her growing friendship with her cousin who now lives in the same city as she, and thought, this is what I worked for in raising her. It is the only thing I ever did right the first time.

Maybe that’s why I had a scattered day today. I’d looked forward to last night, to the dinner with Lynn and to seeing the friend whose play was being given a reading. I guess I had post-holiday letdown, the thud that sometimes ensues after a much-anticipated event has run its course. I miss Lynn. Ron and I were married only two years when she was born, and she became the heart of this house, the core around which all of our traditions and family rituals were built. Her absence, her relocation into her own adult life, is never more apparent than at Christmas.

“Housewifely Arts” is about change. The central character has her house on the market, but she doesn’t really want to move. In the course of the story she recalls her complicated relationship with her own mother, one that was marked by the small fissures and regrets that any long relationship builds up. Her quest to find the parrot and make it speak gives way later in the story to her decision to break into the now-abandoned home of her childhood and remove some tangible reminders of the life she had there.

In the One Story interview, Bergman confesses that her central character reflects the sometimes silly, obsessive, and messy behavior she finds herself engaging in from time to time as a mother, the worry over worst-case scenarios, the guilt over bringing a child into this troubled world. “What I wanted to produce in this story is the realization that, in most cases, love is at the heart of the mess,” she says.

Yes, oh yes it is. Bergman reports in her blog post from last week that she hit herself on the head with the lid of the diaper pail. Her title graphic shows a blond toddler, pigtails flying, running away from the viewer into a Vermont autumn landscape. I have a collection of pictures of Lynn that I took over the years from behind as she walked away from me. I hope that over the next twenty or so years, as Bergman comes to more fully understand what it means to be a mother, that she has the same joy I have known.

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