The Ungluing (Chapter Four)
To recap, in Chapter Three, Phyllis, a Jewish mother of three talks about how she and my mother, Magi, Catholic mother of six, seemed destined to meet, based upon how each had begun questioning their role as a mother and how motherhood had perhaps robbed them of something precious they never had the chance to explore. This is the moment when Phyllis now begins to interview my mother, Magi, on her experience as a woman and mother.
"Are you contemplating a divorce?" I asked her curiously, based on a naivete that if one partner was no longer willing to perform role obligations, the end-result would be divorce.
"Psychologically, I'm divorced. I can't think married because, you see, thinking married, with all that internalizing. Married means being possessed. And nobody, under that kind of conditioning, can be autonomous. And is this what marriage is all about?"
P: But that's the way things have always been. Are you suggesting that people shouldn't be married?
"Marriage between two people is unrealistic, according to the way it's set up. It's like collusion. I know it's bad for women, and I don't think it's all that healthy for the man, either. But at least he can escape from it. He's not faced with marriage all day long. He can get up in the morning and go out to work. He's got work to escape from marriage and he's got marriage to escape from work!"
P: I think people go into marriage for security.
"Well, it sort of insures a buddy, huh?" She laughs. "Actually, it's a 'mooch' kind of situation for the male. It preserves the dominance, the male superiority. And I have to say that marriage ruins a lot of relationships. It almost ruined the relationship between Joe and me, but I think that I've grown above that. And he can do his thing and I can do mine. But to do that I had to go through a series of steps and stages, which are still going on. I'm not sure which direction I will take, but whatever, I must do it as magi. Mrs. M. has been in fading-poor health for a long time, but a year ago last March, she just up and died."
P: So now you are no longer taking care of your children?
In going out and seeking, questioning my ties with the biological family were loosened. I had to forcefully, in my mind, unhook myself and permit freedom for them from me, and for me from them. I had concerns over them which were unhealthy both ways.
In the first place, my influence, whatever it was, should have been laid down in the first five years (the formative years), so right or wrong, the die was cast.
Secondly, outside influences are much more sophisticated and credible to the opening mind, and most 'mothers' are too limited intellectually to be able to cope with young, exciting minds. The effect is disastrous.
I have heard famous men, with a penchant for giving credit, say, "All I have I owe to my sainted mother." I have a desire to say, "All I don't have I owe to my ridiculous brain-washed mother!"
P: Is she still living?
Is she still living! She wouldn't think of dying. Not while she can sit around and make everybody feel sorry for her with stories all about her aches and pains. When I think back, how she bullshitted us with her stories, I really saw the Ark like a little bowl on a huge sea of water, and I intended to be good because I wanted to be saved from all that water.
P: You must have had a very religious upbringing.
Very Catholic, structured, ritualized. My father's name was John, son of Mary and Joseph, and he was born a hundred years ago on Christmas day. Now that's symbolic, isn't it? My mother wanted to be a nun. She should have been, but her father wouldn't let her. And she feared her father. Instead, she married my father, hating men, but resigning herself to fulfillment by having little babies. Sex was dirty, unless you were making babies, and Mother made six of them (three sisters fifteen to twenty years older than me, a brother five years older and a sister five years younger).
Poor Father. He was a nice, easy-going man, but not terribly impressive. My mother was my god. Was she ever! I got all the feedings from her, and all I am I owe to my angel-mother. I can't imagine who else would want to take the credit!
P: What were the feedings?
She was supersaturated with the idea that the woman belongs in the home and that is exactly where she stayed. And today and yesterday and ever since I can remember she would tell me that since she gave up her life for her children, then anyone... any woman who has children, must know her place and take it because God would punish the rest of the world. "You make your bed, you lie in it."
The Ten Commandments had been deeply ingrained and the apple and snake story was so very real that I broke out in a cold sweat when I got exposed to apples.
My mother used to say that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." That was a bother to me because I just didn't want to wind up like the other apples, in a sauce. I felt the apple would roll right out of sight when the tree was on a hill. And I did. Out of sight! Funny how apples loom large in life. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Eve and the apple. One bad apple in a barrel. An apple for the teacher. Apples are supposed to be good for both diarrhea and constipation.
She wouldn't even let me read the Bible. I think she was afraid I might interpret it differently than her. I used to sneak upstairs and read by the streetlight that would shine into my bedroom at night!
P: What were you like as a child?
I am told that I was a very neat child, I was just as clean in the evening as I was when I was first dressed. In fact, I didn't care much about studying, because I wasn't going to do much of anything but get married anyhow, according to the ritual, the doctor told me at age ten, "You're built for babies." And he'd pat me on the ass. I said I was fat. He said, "Oh no, you're built just right for babies." And you know every Christmas I got a doll because my mother kept Santa Claus alive. We were so poor we could hardly afford to eat, but Mama made sure I had a new doll every year!
I was always tall for my age, big and fat.
I don't think I ever really wanted to get married. I wanted to get away from my home, and my sisters had gone into marriage for that reason, but I was so much younger that I could look at them and see they weren't any better off. When I was old enough I moved out of the house and got an apartment.
P: You were always independent, then.
Yes, and always questioning. I considered myself intelligent even though it wasn't really permitted for a girl to think along those lines. I worked at a whole slew of jobs. I would get one job and I'd be bored after a while, so I'd move on to another, something different. And I was always going away from my mother. She was hanging on so tight. She would call me at night and plead with me to move back home.
I was trying to escape, but I always did it neatly, because I didn't want to hurt her feelings. So, I must have been 25, and I joined the WACs because that was the one place Mama couldn't follow me. I had heard wild stories about girls who join the Army. They were easy marks, but that didn't bother me. I went, and I joined the Medical Corps.
It added dignity to my stint in the Army. In fact, my experience in the Corps was what finally influenced me to become a nurse. And when I look back, why didn't I opt to be a doctor? The men went into doctoring and I went for nursing. I couldn't even think that far. I was insignificant, poor in my own eyes.
I graduated from Henry Ford Hospital. I was 29. The oldest one to enter nursing school at that time. In fact, the head of the nursing school... I had a hell of a time getting past her! She wasn't going to let me in. I had goofed off when I was in high school. I hadn't taken Latin, and that was a criterion. You had to have Latin to be admitted to this big mucky-muck hospital.
And this woman, she was like a tough major, she said, "Well, I don't know if I can take you in."
But I threatened her. I told her I was a veteran! I was in the service of this country, and she couldn't refuse to take me in.
So finally, she condescended. Well, she said, come and bring your picture. And I promised to be a good girl! Here I am, twenty-five years old and begging to go to school. At that time, if that woman was anything, she would have encouraged me.
Women are really rotten with other women.
P: She probably had her own instabilities. Women do not pull each other up by the bootstraps.
She was a brilliant woman. I couldn't help thinking she was brilliant, because she'd have a hundred girls she was directing at one time. And she could remember their names. She was sharp. And all she wound up as was Director of Nurses at the Hospital. She should have been the Administrator of the fucking thing, but she took out her frustration on me, another female.
P: Especially one who didn't fit into the mold, the pattern. You weren't part of the fanciful ideal.
I was a rebel. I didn't realize it until now, but I dressed peculiarly even then. I used to wear my brother's sweat shirts. I wore them to high school. I always stood off by myself because I was so big. In fact, when I was in school, in the eighth grade, the teacher told my mother I was provocative!
An eighth grader. I was built like a football player, except lumpier on top! So she went and told my mother to get something for me to hide it. Hide it! I didn't even know it! My mother had to tell me.
P: But you got into nursing school.
So I went to nursing school. And all I took was my toothbrush. My teeth were going to be clean if nothing else! All the other girls came with their suitcases, but I said to myself, shit, I'm not going to get stuck with a whole bunch of clothes over there if I can't pass.
P: You were getting down to basics even then, huh?
Yeah. I went there, and I took something in case I did sleep there, but I guess I wasn't really sure I would be accepted.
I always felt rejected. My whole life through I thought I was going to be rejected.
P: Why did you feel that?
Mama... and the church promulgated it, reinforced it. Put a cap on it. Women are vessels, the lesser vessel.
And I believed it!
So there I was, poor dumb-shit Margie! Becoming a nurse was a big thing in my life. I had never really expected that I could do anything so important. I did feel very important for the first time. I was earning good money. I went into industrial nursing, and got my jollies by dancing.
Every night I'd go dancing at the CYO dances. In fact, that's where I met Joe. I just loved to dance. I loved to be with people, talk with people. But even in a crowded ballroom, I was still kind of alone with my thoughts. I always felt like I was so much more intelligent than what was going on around me. I could never meet anybody who I could relate to on the level I was on.
And when I met Joe, he was such a nice guy and very intelligent. He was going someplace. He was with this corporation and he was very serious about life. And he could talk, really talk. And he had come to this time in his life when he wanted to bond with somebody, and he seemed to be taken with me. So he asked me if I'd share his life with him, and I felt, well, why not?
When I think back to how no one but nobody really encouraged me for much of anything through most of my life, I looked for something to keep myself busy with until Mr. Right. I just knew that someday my prince would come. I also knew that he would find me. He did. One night at a CYO dance, I stood and he said, "May I have this dance?" And I said yes and when three years and a half dozen dates later he asked me to waltz through life with him, after some due consideration I said I would and we became engaged for the new year and planned a June wedding, doesn't everybody?
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I remember sitting in the bathtub, I do a lot of my thinking in the bathtub (so does Sylvia Plath -- I've read her work. She can tell you about every ceiling in every hotel she's been in). And there I was thinking, "Do I want to spend the rest of my life til death do us part, but Joe was going places. He was going to Chicago! And I did so want to travel. When I think back, I could have gone along for about $20! But no, we consented to get married. I was all for a trip to the rectory, at that time I would never have dreamed of packing a bag and entering into an intimate relationship with a male. I did live with other women, in the Army, in nursing school for a while after graduation from nursing. I had many comfortable friends and some are still OK, but now that we have all married, we have all conformed.
P: What were you thinking when you were getting married?
When I was getting married, I thought, gee whiz, I'm going to travel now. I don't have to live in this rotten city. We were going to go either to Cleveland or Chicago. I gave up a good job, I was making $350 a month. But I thought, well, everybody was getting married, and I really thought that I was tired of going out and... searching.
P: Was your mother happy about your getting married?
Mama was happy. In fact, Joe came from such a good Christian family -- his mother had more holy pictures on the wall than Salome did! She was really impressed! And we had to go and see the priest. And he asked, why are you getting married? And Joe said, "For procreation." And my mother came along to confirm that with the priest.
Imagine the priest, at my age (33) asking my mother why we were getting married. And he wouldn't have witnessed our marriage if we didn't say we wanted to have kids! I can't believe the naivete. And we swallowed the whole goddamned thing. And so, there we were promising to do what was expected.
P: Did you have a big wedding?
I wanted to get married quietly, elope or something, but my mother wanted a church wedding. I got talked into a wedding for the sake of the relatives. I hated to disappoint my mama. She had her heart set on a wedding with all the trappings. I had an insurance policy that I turned in to buy food because, although my family wanted the fun of a wedding, they really couldn't afford it. So I gave in, up to a point. I was not going to have an all-day affair and I was not putting out for a brand new dress and veil that I could only wear once. I borrowed all that from my younger sister who had married the year before, and she didn't mind. It wasn't traditional white, it was blue. So I had something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Doesn't every bride?
In retrospect, I can see where weddings can be good things. They bring a bunch of people together who will never see each other again until the next wedding or funeral. They keep the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker from going out of business. What will happen when women no longer feel a need to groom each other for nuptial bliss?
Be aware that the thought process at that time was one of social security. I wasn't getting any younger. You see, I had a good job in industrial nursing, but Joe had an exciting career. He was with a company that was sending him on his first trip. I wouldn't even have to live in Detroit!
It was not emotionality. No, it was practicality. For all practical purposes, we would hit it off because we were two intelligent people. He showed me a lot of class. He had a lot of potential. So I knew he would be a good provider.
And when his mother asked, "Is she Catholic?" he says, "Her mother's got more holy pictures on the wall than you have!"
(To be continued…..)