Like so many things I read, O’Rourke’s article simultaneously screamed in my ear and whispered offstage to an audience of which I was never a part. Her portrayal of a book-obsessed child scribbling down her thoughts rang strongly in my memory and my own self-identity. The image of her mother left me with the same empty feeling I had as a child when I saw other children whose parents actually gave a damn about them.
Ultimately, I think the consumption of all literature is basically a selfish act. Our eyes race over the written page and our enjoyment is proportional to the degree to which we can imagine ourselves written into those pages. How would my life be different, my psyche posits, if my mother actually made a positive comment or took an interest in my ill-formed adolescent self? At this point, of course, that’s unthinkable to me. So why did this article instill in me the desire to write about it despite the yawning distance between the childhood portrayed and the childhood of reality…?
Leaving behind the Topic Maternal for a moment, and hopefully forever, it has become increasingly clear to me that writing is a process more akin to digestion than it is spontaneous generation. Part of me thought that if I simply sat down three hours a night to write that I would consistently pump out prose with greater efficiency and alacrity with every passing evening. After having spent several months now producing only fitfully and reading almost nothing, I’ve found the folly of my thinking clear before me. While it is tempting to concretize the digestion analogy to the point of disgust, let it merely be said that to write, one must read or failing that, have a life interesting enough in and of itself to inspire the issuance of something interesting enough for anyone else to read. Sadly, we cannot all be Joseph Conrad so we must rely on the re-digested tidbits of others. In a way this is a tragedy because each writer who writes in this way is not so much a generator of new material but a mill producing finer or coarser material from what has come before. My babblings are a pale shadow of the quality of the original article yet I continue to turn and turn and turn the stone. What results bears only a passing resemblance to the original.
Stepping back to society at large, the article made me ponder the stereotypical relationship between mother and daughter. It is interesting to note that in all my rather narrow experiences I’ve yet to come across a woman who actually got along with her mother. In fact, most typically the daughter universally categorizes her elder as one who is in need of intense psychological scrutiny. It is bizarre and somewhat unthinkable to me that it should be such a consistent experience that a woman is reared by another, literally suckling at their bosom, and finds herself at complete odds after adulthood is reached. As unlikely as it seems, it appears that the schism between mother and daughter is a consistent one and one that is largely irreconcilable until the promise of death should hang over one or the other.
To take this widely-roaming diatribe to an unsettling conclusion, we can ponder why exactly this might be the case biologically. What advantage or disadvantage is it for members of a species, of the same gender and shared genetic background to bicker so endlessly? Why should daughters hate mothers and mothers compete with daughters? If I were forced to guess, which I am not but will indulge myself nonetheless, it seems to come down to simple sexual competition. While today’s society dictates somewhat strongly that mothers and daughters should not compete for the same group of males, this would not have necessarily been the case earlier in mankind’s evolution. In this cesspool of potential incest, if adjoining generations inherently got along and cooperated at first they certainly wouldn’t do so for long. As any long-time fan of Jerry Springer will no doubt be able to confirm, the quickest and most certain way to lose your seat at the Thanksgiving dinner table is to father a child with your mother’s boyfriend. Alternately, if we abandon the purely biological line of reasoning, is the divide between generations merely a necessary mechanism for separation to establish independence? Mothers, fiercely and devotedly nurturing (hopefully) ultimately fall afoul of the daughter’s need to fly free from the nest and make her own way in the world? It is not lost on me that no doubt entire books have been written on this topic but these are my initial thoughts on the topic.
Turning to the other side, what of boys and their mothers? It is fairly seldom that one hears of a man who has reacted so violently and negatively to the attentions of the daintier parent. Clearly there are those who have been ruined by too attentive a maternal influence from Oedipus to Norman Bates but usually there is no extreme in the opposite direction. The typical mother is more than willing to nurture and help their male progeny as they enter the world and most men are more than willing to be nurtured. It is often the wife of those sons who must throw the bucket of water on their new husbands to introduce them to the cold, hard truth that not ALL the women in their life are going to be as undyingly obsequious as their own dear mamas. It seems to be a very typical part of the male growth process to go from devotion to mother to devotion to wife to devotion to children. Often these transitions are difficult for the male as they represent a break in the priorities and the routine but they are of paramount importance. If the transition is not made properly then the result is doubtlessly and swiftly negative. Again, I am fully aware that there are stacks of treatises on this topic but I merely submit my most humble thoughts on the topic as called fourth by Ms. O’Rourke’s submission to my reading queue.
In closing, as I look back on the last words, I realize that my topic, if it can be said I have only one, is scattered and largely inconsequential. I began in one place, tripped to the side briefly for something largely unrelated and then settled out into an area about which my efforts serve only to demonstrate my own ignorance of the subject at hand. While this submission does not have the impact of many of my previous works (each time I write or think that I realize that my best work lies further and further back in my history) I compel myself to write merely because even the most inane drivel is a means to an end. To write well, one must first write. So now is the time on the Tattered Thread when we write. Perhaps later, if our attempts are sincere and properly assiduous, we will write well. But for now, we merely write.
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