I sometimes wrote out lengthy conversations I had with a nasty internal voice that kept whispering I wasn’t working hard enough at my writing. Isn’t this because you have no talent, the nasty voice asked in its insinuating way. But most of my feverishly scribbled entries described practical daily matters like going to Metro Services to talk about my daycare subsidy, or convincing my plucky two-year-old daughter to leave the slides outside her Toronto daycare and come home. Here’s a sample from those writerly congeries of self-doubt and domestic impasse.
June 8, 1975. Today I took Sam to daycare on the subway. She was in her stroller. Over 90 today. Apple juice spilled over her sweet little orange jumper. As we got off at the St. George subway station, I stopped and looked up at the stairs in amazement. They went on forever. My eyes filling with tears, I bent down and carried her up three levels.
I wish I could say I had written about how angry I was, or that I had asked why my culture made it so hard for me, a single parent, to get my daughter to school. Did I say, Here I am, a mother, doing an important job, and why doesn’t anyone know what I am going through? Or ask why my daughter and I should suffer because the architect who designed the station hadn’t given a thought to parents with small children? No, I was too tired. And don’t forget, I saw raising my daughter as an activity that I should take care of (with help from my kindly mother) secretly, quietly, effortlessly.
In those days, I was earning about $6,000 a year as a freelance journalist. How hard to believe that is now! I had declassed myself by leaving a prosperous marriage and taking my daughter with me to live in a co-op on Elgin Avenue in Toronto. It was an old, rundown mansion filled with choreographers and musicians. At least, I had babysitters if I went out at night because they all delighted in my daughter, the only baby. She used to sit in the kitchen in her high chair and offer her milk bottle to anyone who came in. That impressed the house members, who said they learned from her generosity.
My low income meant that her daycare space was subsidized. Every six months, I would go down to the Metro Services office at Shuter Street, and a counsellor would go over with me what I’d spent in the past six months. It was a humiliating experience to have a bureaucrat question my purchases as if I were a child. I felt like Bob Cratchit in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. If I’d kept my full-time job as a journalist, I would have brought in a higher income, but I was freelancing so that I could write fiction on the side. In those early years, my ex-husband was sharing childcare and not financial expenses. Tough as this was, my situation came out of personal choices I had made, and this gave me confidence.
Meanwhile, the attitudes of the officials in Metro Services to women like me were not welcoming. Women whose boyfriends occasionally stayed over in their apartments had daycare subsidies withdrawn. In a reform school atmosphere, we mothers sat in our seats, subdued, heads down, waiting to be told how poorly we were managing our finances, how lucky we were to be getting government assistance for daycare. If our incomes went up, our daycare subsidies dropped. It was possible to get a raise at work and grow still poorer because Metro Services decided the raise meant we should pay more for our child’s daycare spot. These government requirements keep us on an endless treadmill and do a lot to increase our sense of hopelessness.
During one visit, I gazed blearily at the other women in the room, wondering if they were single mothers too. No fathers were present, just one male counsellor and several female employees of the City of Toronto. The morning wore on; most of the mothers had been sitting for several hours with small babies on their laps, others with cranky toddlers playing about their feet. In an unexpected burst of energy, I jumped to my feet and shouted, “This is outrageous! We’re mothers! We shouldn’t be treated like this!”
To my surprise, the women around me stood up and began to echo my words: “That’s right! Why are we being treated so badly? You have no right to act like this toward us!”
The city employees put down their pencils and questionnaires and stared at us, shock and fear on their faces. “Let me speak to the head of the department,” I demanded. “I want to know the philosophy behind this kind of treatment.”
It was a wonderful moment. Someone exited and returned with the owl-faced assistant to the head of Metro Services. Suddenly exhausted, I sat back down, gaping as he explained that the government had done its best to accommodate us.
Later that day I told a friend of mine about the experience. It occurred to me I should organize a lobby of mothers on daycare subsidy. My friend said that sounded like too much work for a single parent with a small child. I thought about having a few of the women over to tea, but time slipped by and I didn’t do it—inviting them over required a political energy that was beyond me at that time.
How did I get through the drastic dichotomies of mothering and writing? Slowly, I became aware that mothering was vital human work, deserving social support, instead of a side project done by private female labour. There were and are far too many cultural pressures that continue to deny mothers, and by extension all parents, the value of their jobs.
However, the demands of child raising made me better organized. I learned to say no and to structure my time so every minute counted. Knowing what mammoth undertakings I was managing without any public acknowledgment also made me proud and gave me an energizing moral fuel. One evening, after a day at the filming of a television program I had been hired to promote, I shared a cab home with some of the television producers. These men began blaming their families for keeping them from writing novels. There was a sudden uncomprehending silence when I told the men they were whining babies and asked the driver to stop. Slamming the door, I walked all the way home and wrote a chapter of my novel.
Making space in my life for the act of writing also helped my stress. Knowing that good fiction comes from a mentally relaxed place, I made myself sit at my desk every day for four hours and do nothing except write or think about writing. These hours spent in my inner world were a peaceful counterpoint to the rest of my life. Even if I had never published a book, my personal growth would have benefited from that meditative time.
Still, I didn’t write about my daughter’s presence in my life. Only a few poems and theatre pieces refer obliquely to our situation. In one performance, a choreographer and I imitated little girls talking about their Barbie dolls; in another, we mimed the act of swallowing earthworms. A photograph taken for this performance showed me posing with my head in my kitchen oven, evoking the tragedy of poet Sylvia Plath.
Why didn’t I write fiction about us? Did I want to protect my daughter’s privacy? Of course I did. But I also wanted to protect myself. Rereading my old journals, I realize one of my pervading feelings then was shame. Shame that I wasn’t doing a better job. Shame and fear that my daughter would be harmed. Shame and guilt that I was trying to accomplish too much because I wanted to combine motherhood with writing. Shame and dread that some terrible thing would befall my daughter as a result of my choices.
I felt like a failed mother. I didn’t know then that in some sense women with children are all failed mothers, done in by the unfair expectations placed on us by our culture, and by ourselves.
So, looking back, I don’t think I could have written about my experience if I’d tried. Video and performance art deal more easily with the recent past than fiction, which is easier to write when the writer has the perspective of greater distance. For me, the difficulties of mothering were immediate and overwhelming, and I had almost no perspective at all on what I was doing. And yet despite the veiled accusations and often misguided assumptions, which had nothing to do with my secret life as a mother, I loved my daughter no less for all that. In one of my old journals, I found this 1983 entry:
Sitting in my chair, in my red Chinese slippers, reading, Sam playing with Emily (cat) on the floor. Snow on the gables of the roofs across the street. Tulips in bloom by the window. Enjoying the peace of my apartment with my daughter. I am happy.
My fear of loo
king back at our struggles obscured this simple, powerful truth.
Nourishment
Double
Arc
Karen Houle
Tonight, no stars. Snow with a give to it, leaning into March. I walk to the mailbox down the long driveway lined with shivering trees nipping each other’s necks like horses. The sky, unbroken dark above, my house lit up like an eight o’clock pumpkin; inside, my two children, small as facecloths in the bath. Too dark to see into the mailbox. Yet it’s there, a thickness my fingers bump into. Too dark to read. It’s a weight in my mittened hand, a thing I carry back from the salted road to the house.
By porch light it will become what it is—a bill for furnace oil, or foreign postage, or the town council’s book drive. Or Kaetlen’s handwriting. She would have been waiting patiently in the mailbox all day. Then she’d be looking right at me, seeing my face break into a smile.
I loved Kaetlen the day I met her. I had had crushes on other girls and women, especially ones with kid gloves and lipstick, but I’d never loved. Loving a woman is like doing new math: sliding the red balls, all at once, to the other side of the abacus. A satisfying, clacking sound—the sound of emphasis falling differently.
We were both at a reception for university entrance scholarship winners. I felt underdressed and hung back, nervous in small talk. We clapped as one by one our names were called. We climbed the stairs, crossed the stage, shook hands with the president, took envelopes containing $4,200 in our left hands and descended the stairs behind the president to our spots. The name Martha Kaetlen Wilson rang out. I saw a boyish young woman with a shock of red hair like a rooster comb, one triangular piece falling down in front, jeans, a worn leather satchel over her shoulder stride across the stage with a quizzical lopsided smile, her hand, confident, stretched out ahead of her. As she neared him, we heard her call out, in a friendly, reassuring sort of voice, “It’s Kaetlen, sir, not Martha.” And then she shook his hand. He looked confused, hesitated. She repeated, “My name is Kaetlen Wilson, not Martha Wilson.” And beamed at him. He cleared his throat and called out again, his manly bell of a voice, to us, to the room; this time not calling to her but rather for her, introducing her to us, since she stood, rooted and beautiful, right beside him: Kaetlen Wilson. And she nodded, took the envelope, thanked him and skipped down the well-worn stairs.
I had never seen a woman do that, never imagined a woman could do that, let alone one with long legs and dyed hair, insist on it being just as she wanted and needed it to be: hers. Not letting the moment pass a little crookedly because to straighten it would be bold, inhospitable. Not honing the skill of letting it be right for him and right for the ones clapping blandly but not for her.
We were twenty-year-old women with chemistry labs to do. She lived with her boyfriend, Dave, and her dog, Pete, studying for medical school entrance exams. They had a sunny, shabby apartment with a claw-foot bathtub in the kitchen. We were pure potential, equal parts dance and argument. I didn’t know how to dance; she taught me, putting her hands on my hips and swivelling them as if she were prying a tire off a rim. With this swivel I found a boyfriend at the club. He lived with five women and had a mouldy shower. He slept over once in a while. She wasn’t impressed with him, but on we danced. Then I got pregnant.
Your eyes fall on the lab report. The doctor’s finger taps lightly on the facts: 98,000 units of hCG, human chorionic gonadotropin—the hormones a living human leaks into a woman’s bloodstream. The loneliness starts at that moment: there’s someone making a beginning far inside you, news of accompaniment, just when you are learning how to do it on your own. Nothing can reverse this news. No pounding on the pubis with a closed fist, no screaming at the street lamps, no guzzled vodka unhooking the muffled, velvet intactness. It cannot be accidentally undone, not in the time you have. It is unlike any other juncture: To end a relationship now or later? To start the letter or finish the pruning? Those choices have back doors, hidden compartments, loose ends. When you are pregnant you have only two. And both will pass entirely through your body: you have an abortion or you have a baby.
I was in my third year of university. My boyfriend—a superb dancer—wasn’t yet parent material. Nor would he be in the time we had, something I was only required to think about and admit at that moment.
I knocked on his screen door. When he opened it, I told him right away, standing among the scuffed basketball shoes. He hugged me. I didn’t know if that hug meant, Wow, we’re going to be parents! or Poor you! or Poor me! or How could you? We went upstairs and sat on the edge of his twin bed, facing his Grade 13 girlfriends’ pictures pinned up on the crumbling corkboard, and I told him I wasn’t going to have a baby with him.
Undergraduate summer research assistants in the physiology department, Kaetlen and I ate lunch on the university lawn each day. She had to shave legs bald and apply electrodes to test muscle conductivity for A.L.S. data. Bic razors clicked in her lab coat pockets. I drugged rabbits and extracted aortas. I ground these up in a coffee-bean-grinder thing, grew the cells again in glass tubes and tested heart medicine on them. Vasoconstriction and vasodilation—silent killers, aging processes. We ate our tuna sandwiches and stretched our legs out in front of us, tilted our faces to the sun or read the newspaper. Her dog, Pete, watched. I can’t remember how or where I told her I was pregnant or what she said. I take that lapse in memory as a good thing, a sign that she must have been gentle, must not have rung out words like a bell that would resonate, even now. I do remember that huge tears rolled down her face.
One late August afternoon I walked to the clinic past staring hollyhocks and had my cervix packed with a seaweed expander. Later I lay on my back in the night heat, flicking earwigs off the coverlet, waiting for the morning, when the cab would come with my boyfriend in it, pale and earnest and irrelevant. Then I would lift my hand half-heartedly to him, opened flat out, as I went backward through the double doors of the O.R. I would meet him later, on the other side, in the recovery room. Recovering my own life—smoothed out, emptied, quieted.
As I watched for the cab, the expansion in me unbearable, she came up the walk, that same sure stride, and without knocking came into my room, flowers in the hand outstretched in front of her. I remember them, salmon alstroemerias, their throats filled with bursting exclamation marks of red. Not with stems in the wet earth, not in Chile or Holland or Hamilton, but alive enough to be as beautiful as they ever were.
After graduation, Kaetlen got married and opened a practice in another part of the province. She rented a farmhouse with many bedrooms and a long walk to and from the mailbox. Her dog, Pete, was buried on a ridge to the south of the property. We went there and sat on the grave, eating apples, talking about my twin girls and about her wanting to be a mother. She was with someone she loved, as superb “parent material” as any. They had already been trying to have children for three or four years by then.
An announcement and then a miscarriage. One is like a solar eclipse. It’s rare and frightening, and you feel you mustn’t look. Talk is indirect, like light seeping out from the edges of the corona. Then, eight months after the first eclipse, a second announcement. Her hopeful voice, lifting slightly. I cradle the phone to my ear, gesturing to my daughters to start eating without me, that I have to take the call. They would have been five by then, able to carry full plates from the kitchen to the garden. Her voice hits notes like bright chimes above her words, the metallic fear partly masked by the sweetness of them: “I’m pregnant. We’re pregnant again!” A swell of relief, and we turn again to expecting. A few more months and then a second eclipse. Blood, steady drops in the toilet. Years set the repeating sequence: first, a phone call with the news of pregnancy, and we lean in, hoping. Then the shadowy double, the news that the third and fourth intactnesses have each come unmoored, bumping like slow barges out of her. She, the one with words coming out in dumb muddy clots. I, the one who must hear it said and not flinch, must let the joy and the sadness be pure and new eac
h time. Even when I am pregnant again. An accident, sheer stupidity. As if I could outwit eggs and sperm by ignoring them.
For her, tests upon tests, each charting her unmapped insides. Talking was hard, not wanting to ask her how much of what was shoved where at what degrees Fahrenheit and at what angles—this absurd, necessary scientific project, as if a baby might be launched toward, like the moon, with the right starter kit. We couldn’t not talk about it either. We laughed until tea came out our noses when she showed me the syringe with jelly that must be squirted up “just before ejaculation.” And yet, we watched the cindery arc with unbroken attention, wanting it to stay in the sky. How did she keep the quick step, the bold love for herself? Six solid years trying to achieve in her womb what I didn’t seem able to stop. Where to speak from? My own tongue split up the centre from two abortions, and then there were my children, running through the sprinkler with their summer noise funnelling into the telephone receiver, toward her.
We spoke our way across. One word at a time. An ice bridge can be built using its own weight. I found myself saying I would bear them a child. They found themselves gently saying no. They were thinking of adoption. If not for her, I didn’t want to bear any more children. I only wanted her to have children. I decided to be sterilized, to say no—for me. I painted Kaetlen and her husband a banner on white cotton. On it, the words “She is patient. He is patient. We are patient for this child.” How delicately I had to proceed, telling her about closing off my womb permanently, deliberately. We moved like caged finches, from the principles of reproductive autonomy to the absurdity of us, and back to a swaying perch. She sat in the green wicker chair, perfect ambiguity. She brought me flowers then too, to celebrate the end of my fertility. And she kissed me, and kissed my children, and waved, backing down the driveway in her blue Toyota.