Of cameos and female impotence - mother-daughter relationships - Column

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 1995 by Laura Bernell

We women who think our mothers mad and blame our own madness on them may in fact be daughters of women who had only one route to power: their impotence. Denied access to exterior conduits of control, even in their own domains, many of our mothers took tortuous, interior routes, bending themselves into contortions to turn impotence into power. We describe the behavior of our septuagenarian mothers variously: crazy-making, chronically victimized, bitchy. But I believe much of the seemingly irrational and indisputably exasperating behavior we testify to is the pathetic, valiant struggle of our mothers to exert influence over some, thing, to-fend off subjugation somehow, within the confines of the houses in which they were kept.

Thus our mothers schooled us intimately in female impotence, teaching us the inflections of its language, the insidiousness of its power.

My mother used to be beautiful, like a cameo carved in ivory and, at the same time, like a dark-eyed MGM movie star from the 1930s and 1940s - waves of lush dark hair lapping at fine, opalescent cheekbones. She conducted her best lessons on impotence in the bathroom.

From the far end of the hallway, I'd watch her, framed by the bathroom doorway, bent over in despair on the closed toilet seat, head lowered between her knees. She'd sit up and look toward me, mascara smudged beneath dark eyes, curls of black hair pasted by tears to her temples - a cameo crying.

She lured me down the hallway, through the doorway, into her privacy. Mistaking my egocentricity for omnipotence. as a child is apt to do, I always placed a tender hand upon her drooping shoulders.

"Don't cry, Mommy. Please don't cry. Stop crying, Mommy. Stop!" But the words stayed inside my head. Had I spoken them, had she heard them, my mother would neither have heeded my pleas nor obeyed my commands. To do so would have been to relinquish control. As it was, she was where she wanted to be, and I was where she wanted me to be. She moaned, then glanced out the doorway, anticipating my father's reappearance in the hall. But his storm had passed. She could come out, moonlight through clouds, but still she sat, bowed in despondency despite my arms around her.

Certain of my powers to console, I stood for a very long time beside her, she sitting on the closed toilet seat, me standing, puny, beside her. My slight arms encircled her, and every muted sob that shook her shoulders passed like jolts of electricity through my arms and into my chest. I felt her tears and phlegm drip onto my wrist; I tasted her hair in my mouth but resisted the urge to move my hand and scratch the itch of it above my lip for fear that, if I moved, she would collapse altogether, and I with her. While I believed I had the power to hold her together, I did not have the will to release myself from her.

Eventually she rose, astonishingly tall. She'd let my arms slip from around her and leave them flopping, like a Raggedy Ann doll's, at my sides while she walked to the sink and studied herself in the mirror, rinsed her face, and blew her nose. Then she'd retreat into her bedroom, closing the door and leaving me behind it to hold her pain in my gut like a rock.

"Come out!" I wanted to scream through the closed door. Come out and wrap your mother's arms around this child!" But the screams were trapped inside of me, tearing at my throat, held back by a child's mandate to believe in her mother. Mute, I raised my fists. They sliced air, and I evaporated, until next time, into the walls.

And there would be a next time. Over the years, this scene repeated itself again and again in our home. Yet my mother would not remove herself from the apparent cause of her anguish. She remained in my father's house and, for another 30 years, would lie in his bed, cook his meals, set his table, endure his insults, await his next assault, and leave the bathroom door open when she sat, bent over, on the toilet seat crying.

Long after I left my father's house, I would carry my mother's pain, believing we were both powerless against it and fearing that I would pass our impotence on to my children, and they to theirs. Then my father died.

After my father's death, my mother found new tormentors to be protected from, anxieties to bend her over, sorrows rows to set her moaning. Others tried to reassure her and, to my enlightenment, others failed. It is hard for my mother to unbend herself after so long. She is stiff. She doesn't trust her body's ability to support her erect. While she struggles out of her contortions, I remove myself from her enticements. With a wider view than from the end of the hallway into the bathroom, I have continued my female education.

Other mentors have tested my powers to console: a woman whose husband left her, a rape victim, a woman whose child died. I have felt their tears dampen my hair and wiped their tears from my cheeks. I've spoken, and their sobs softened. Even the woman whose child died stopped crying, if only for a little while, after weeping hard, held in my arms. I can comfort those who let me.