Five-foot-nine, my mother stands almost 6-feet tall in heeled
shoes. In 1975, she graduated -- at the actual and literal --
top of her class at Providence College, with a degree in hospital
administration. My father had graduated a year earlier. In fact,
they had met in Spanish class, when my father and his football
friends rigged the back door of the classroom so it would open,
seemingly at random, and encourage Marita Ford to walk the length
of the classroom to close it.
If my mother's miniskirts encouraged the football team's attendance
of Spanish class that semester, they also started the romantic
story of my parents' marriage and the wild adventure of raising
four children. But in 1979, children weren't yet in the picture.
My mother, following her marriage to this high-school English
teacher in Massachusetts, resigned from her research job with
the Hospital Association of Rhode Island -- where she ventured
into state hospitals and prisons to investigate the treatment
of suicide survivors and gunshot wound victims -- to take a position
at Harvard University. Working with two public policy professors,
she would investigate townships' decisions to add fluoride to
their drinking water.
Although my mother was raised in a comfortable, 17-room house
in the suburbs under the protective gaze of four older brothers,
she had, from an early age, what might be called a social conscience.
In looking at the photos of her in high heels and suede jackets,
I like to think that she had all the seriousness of a hippie but
with much better taste in clothes. I can remember her writing
strong letters to our aldermen when the telephone company tried
to put microwave towers (often linked to high cancer rates) near
our elementary school. At family gatherings, she was attentive
to the shy and cranky kids, to the geriatric and hard-of-hearing.
So her new job at Harvard seemed a well-earned move. For starters,
it would not require any contact with convicted criminals.
From her own, humble version of the story, it seems that my
mother dove into the politics of the Massachusetts water system
and swam in it. And I imagine she was proud to be making good
money: more, in fact, than her schoolteacher husband.
After three months on the job, she came up for review. The two
public policy professors gave her the highest possible marks.
They excitedly discussed the next phase of their research, which
implemented a survey my mother had designed. In the glow of their
congratulations, my mother mentioned that she had a doctor's appointment
later that day. She might, she confided, be pregnant.
The following morning, my mother found a pink slip in her mailbox.
When she asked, her supervisor assured her that she was indeed
doing a wonderful job. But he couldn't risk my mother . . . becoming
my mother.
It was 1979. I was not yet a mewling, insomniac infant, but
I had already cost Marita Treseler her research career.
Stay-at-home mom
My mom, who had always wanted to stay at home when she had children,
didn't seek legal recourse. Nor did she ever return to academia
or policy work. Instead, she opened an informal schoolhouse in
her kitchen, teaching her four kids and our friends just about
anything that struck our fancy. The appearance of cicadas in the
summertime; how to find Burkina Faso on the map of Africa; the
explosive properties of baking soda; the lyrics of Bob Dylan,
Neil Diamond and the Talking Heads; and the steady, reliable enchantment
of books and stories.
Indeed, my warmest childhood memories are of long afternoons
when my mom folded laundry, my siblings napped and we told tales
about two characters of our own invention. Myrtle the Box Turtle
and Guthrie the Invincible Mouse ran a hospital for their fellow,
forest-dwelling creatures. They also practiced socialized medicine,
offering free ambulance service to whichever creature needed it.
If my mother was no longer advocating large-scale healthcare policy
changes, her concerns -- and her flair for storytelling -- were
being practiced on me.
When my father opened his own business, we moved to a three-floor
Victorian on the top of Heartbreak Hill in Newton. The front door
was never locked. And it quickly became the after-school and summer
hangout for all those five-feet-and-under. Our frequent visitors
included the latch-key kids of a busy biologist, a French-Canadian
kid with exotically shaggy bangs and swear words, and an industrious
toddler who liked to dig up our front lawn with his Tonka trucks.
All were welcome.
There are no tangible measures for a personality's largesse
or for how the generous vitality of a parent is communicated,
daily and tenderly, in the best of families. If my mother dreaded
that question "What do you do for a living" at cocktail parties,
I think we were all glad she had no easy answer. She was there
for all of us -- a practical and spiritual ombudsman -- encouraging
our adventures and bandaging our mishaps.
Two years ago, after I got a graduate fellowship that would
take me far from friends, family and familiar geography, I finally
asked her. Did she ever miss working?
No, she said. She didn't. She didn't have any regrets. (My mother
could not tell a white lie to save the soles of her shoes.) And
I would have believed her completely if I weren't making, at the
same age, a very different decision. At age 24, I was enrolling
in a doctoral program at Notre Dame, far from my Bostonian life
and friends. And while I half-expected the dramatic change of
scene, I hadn't anticipated the difference in marital norms.
I was surprised -- stunned even -- in my first months of living
in the Midwest to be regularly asked if I "had a husband." Back
east, the question is usually phrased differently. The two versions
I knew were: "Are you single?" and "Do you have a partner?"
So when people asked me if I had a "husband," it seemed comic.
Not only could I not picture "having a husband" anytime soon,
but the whole phrase seemed to suggest a measure of contented
"lifestyle-ness" that I could not imagine attached to me. It was
as if I had arrived on a Caribbean island wearing a snowsuit.
The question came up with enough frequency that I actually thought
of buying a goldfish and naming it Husband so I could say to the
inevitable question: "Yes, I do have a 'Husband.' He has gills."
When I graduated from Brown University four years ago, only
one of my friends had vague plans to get married. But none of
my other pre-professional friends seemed to be thinking about
it. Indeed, it was assumed, especially among the women, that marriage
wasn't something to consider until after one's career was up and
running, or at least well on track.
Our consensus seemed to be: Who would want the responsibilities
of marriage while struggling through the stress of graduate, law
or medical school, investment banking or a first entrepreneurial
venture? Success, in one's 20s, seems to require high-wire yoga:
a willingness to work long hours, to travel to distant places
for competitive employment or schooling, and to keep interpersonal
"overhead" low so that one can find and take advantage of new
and necessary opportunities. Is the trend of marrying later a
product of women's new "selfishness"? Or, our historically arrived
expectation that we too can have professional identities and ones
that need not brook compromises?
Many of the young, professional women of my generation had well-educated
mothers who chose to barter between the joys and trials of a professional
career, marriage and motherhood. Studies have shown, however,
that while most married women had jobs outside the home in the
late 1980s and early '90s, they were often saddled with twice
or three times as much household work and childcare as their husbands.
If career options have opened widely for women, domestic gender
roles have changed more slowly.
Though my mom had the leisure of the decision to stay at home
(most middle-class families need two incomes), many of her peers
were trying to make it "all" work. And it often seemed, from the
baby-sitting I did in our neighborhood as a teenager, that the
professional women who had several children had to do daily acrobatics
to fulfill the demands of their careers and familial responsibilities.
Some seemed to feel guilty about not spending more time with their
children, though they would quickly tout their children's "resumes":
a daunting list of after-school soccer, chess, tai chi, Spanish,
math tutoring, ballroom dancing and astronomy classes that would
exhaust most adults' sensibilities.
Yet these same kids, my baby-sitting charges, often didn't know
how to play in their backyards or entertain themselves singly
with books and paint, sock-puppets and a bunk-bed stage. I wanted
somehow to tell their anxious parents that though I spent a good
portion of my childhood hanging upside down from oak trees and
mucking around a sandbox, it had not hurt my SAT score.
In reality, these kids' highly scheduled afternoons were as
much about surrogate parent-ship as intellectual cultivation.
I was unusually lucky to have my mom there, on the other side
of my school day, to celebrate my spelling test or re-bandage
my kneecaps, which were the victims of my prolonged tomboyhood.
I also got to know my mom as a person. Growing up, I knew about
the books she was reading, the world events that concerned her,
her interpretations of my siblings' antics. It's impossible for
me to quantify what this time, what this connection, what my mom's
smarts and humor meant to me.
Relationships in general, familial and romantic, suffer in our
tight economy of time-and-money. It was during my generation that
those telling phrases "quality time," "multitasking" and "focused
attention" became part of the vocabulary of childcare. I wonder
if some of the more successful, 20-something women I know have
sidestepped serious romantic commitments partly because they grew
up keenly aware of their own mothers' sacrifices and stress levels.
Most of the women I knew at Brown University believed, with
good reason, that they were going places. With hard work and single-minded
attention, some have indeed risen to high places already: to the
staff of The Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker,
to Rhodes and Fulbright travels, to research in Antarctica, to
a ground-breaking study in Cancer Research. Not all of
these accomplished women were (or are) committed singletons. No,
most of us would like some version of romance and abiding emotional
connection in our lives. But there is also a healthy level of
skepticism about tying down too early, before we've earned our
professional stripes.
Does all this "becoming" necessarily have to take place alone?
Or in a zone of low commitment? I don't think so, although spates
of singularity can, like mountaintop monasticism, help one see
clearly. With a plethora of opportunities on the horizon, I don't
think it's unwise to have monocular time in which to view the
possibilities. But I didn't always think this way.
The marriage issue
The issue of marriage came into sharp and early focus when I
was 17 years old and dating someone four years my senior. It was
springtime in Paris. Brian, my childhood sweetheart, was taking
courses at the Sorbonne to top off his training for a career in
high finance. In five months, he would be a Boston banker and
I would start my freshman year at Brown.
We had a rather sweet romance, as first loves go. While Brian
was at Williams College, we saw each other about every other weekend
and exchanged just under 200 letters. We discovered that we both
loved books and the beach; museums and little Cambridge jazz clubs
(the ones that didn't card); long hikes through the New Hampshire
woods and driving fast, in his dad's German car, down desolate
stretches of highway. Brian was from Wellesley Hills, a 6-figure
zip code, which meant that he knew three European languages, had
competence in piano, tennis and golf, French dining and Italian
opera. As a middle-class kid raised on Saturday cartoons and pizza
on Fridays, I found him a gentle ambassador to another world --
and other ways of thinking.
After an accident caused me to miss a year of school, my parents
had allowed me to visit Brian "unchaperoned" in Paris. We were
staying in his parents' get-away apartment. To this day, I don't
know how I managed to convince my parents, who had been reluctant
to let me visit Brian at Williams College, that this situation
would not be a case of "living in sin." Or, as my grandmother
would put it, "without benefit of clergy."
You learn a lot about someone when you share domestic space.
Brian, for example, was incapable of not burning the toast. And
his penchant for punctuality was extreme. Sometimes he forgot
that I, having had back surgery, could not keep up with the foot
traffic on an urban sidewalk. But we calibrated: I made the toast;
he set the clocks 5-10 minutes fast. Our strides, literal and
metaphoric, found a common pace. After my small tantrum, he let
me have two sacrosanct hours every morning in which I could, undisturbed,
work in the study: reading, writing or simply breathing in my
own mental space, without interruption.
We were having lunch in a café on the Left Bank when
the question came up. A bottle of wine cast a pink shadow on the
tablecloth like a tell-tale blush. Brian was tracing a rivulet
on my water glass with his index finger, and it made me think
of Adam's hand extended on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel --
waiting for the divine spark to set him in motion.
On the brink of a high-speed life in international finance,
Brian was approaching his own moment of profound self-creation.
Maybe he wanted all the spark plugs firing at once.
"We could get married," he said suddenly. I nodded and blushed
hotly. To buy a few seconds of time, I turned to look at the Parisians,
who, like college kids, were taking advantage of the 10-degree
weather spike to show off their new summer clothes.
And I remember thinking, as the waiter arrived with our salads,
that Susan Sontag got married at 17, and it hadn't seemed to retard
her development. But I was no Sontag. I didn't know what I wanted.
I just felt a hollow, negative space inside me -- inarticulate,
hungry -- and for something other than this miniature Parisian
faux-salad in front of me.
Brian's blue eyes caught my hesitation. He knew my answer without
my having speak it.
I think, in retrospect, I was quite in love. But I also wanted
what the poet Sterling Brown calls "running space." Now, having
spelunked my way (backwards, sideways and Midwesternly) into academe,
into the halls of print and some literary awards, I wonder if
I couldn't have taken up my current direction while married to
a financier. Would living half the year in Paris, half the year
in the Back Bay of Boston really have been that distracting? Would
sharing a life with someone whose professional credentials and
earning power so dwarfed my own have prevented me from going to
graduate school? From pursuing my own, legitimate career?
These days, I burn my own toast. I alternately enjoy -- or endure
-- the other, curious perks of single-dom: sleeping alone, reading
alone, sometimes running alone, and seeing friends when there
is time. It means greeting the world -- its rash of exciting and
disappointing turns -- with comparatively fewer defenses, though
with the background cheer of friends and family.
It is a snide truism that academics often teach and write about
the things they cannot do or understand. In my graduate school
travels, I have met an unethical Augustinian, a neurotic theorist
of intimacy, a misogynist feminist and a peaceful scholar of the
Great War. So it's probably no accident that three of the four
poets I'd like to write about in my dissertation -- Emily Dickinson,
Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop -- avoided marriage. I don't
think it's a coincidence that they are also the three strongest
women poets in America before 1950. Not being subsumed into another's
identity is critical for a literary artist struggling to speak
in his or her own voice.
But it's no longer 1950. I'd like to believe that high levels
of accomplishment can come from jouissance as much as
sublimation, that sharing one's life needn't limit it. Who knows,
maybe that daydream of some novelists and academics -- that someone
will read our books and fall head-over-footnotes in love with
us -- is not unlikely.
In a marvelous poem called "The Student," Moore argues against
the stereotype of the scholar as an unemotional technician of
knowledge. They're lines that I have by heart:
he renders service when there is
no reward, and is too reclusive for
some things to seem to touch
him; not because he
has no feeling but because he has so much.
I think Marianne Moore, though she never met my mother, would
have understood and admired her bookish, map-covered kitchen.
And I'd like to think that Moore and my mother might both understand
why, for now, I live with a goldfish.
* * *
Heather Treseler is a doctoral student at Notre Dame. Her
novel, Boo Running, won the Mason Prize from Brown University.
Her poems have appeared or will be forthcoming in Timbuktu,
Clerestory and Sow's Ear Poetry Review.
(April 2006)
