The Ungluing (Chapter Five)
To recap, Phyllis, a Jewish mother of three, and my mother, Magi, Catholic mother of six, seemed destined to meet (in 1974), 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. Phyllis has decided to help my mother write a book on Magi’s experience as a woman and mother.
P: Let's start at the beginning, magi. People will have to know what you came from before they can understand your present way of thinking.
Okay. I was the second youngest daughter born to John and Salome. Now that's symbolic, isn't it! John and Salome, and my father was born on Christmas day a hundred years ago. My mother wanted to be a nun. She should have been, but her father wouldn't let her. Instead, she married my father, hating men, but resigning herself to fulfillment by having little babies. Sex was dirty, unless you were making babies. Mother made six of them.
I have three older sisters. Then came my brother. I was born five years after him. I guess she wanted another baby to hold in her arms, and so she had me, an accident of birth. My younger sister was born when I was five and by the time I was six I had ulcers!
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! So, it is true that our mothers influence more than they should, but what choice did I have as a baby?
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 had 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.' Well, I got news, I did not make my bed alone. In fact, I feel like I was pushed into it!
I got teased a lot when I was a little kid. I got put down by my sister's boyfriend and now, when I recall it, I couldn't have been more than two years old. He used to put his fingers in my face and say, "How I wish I had wings of an angel," and he would make me cry.
P: Did your sister marry this guy?
Yes, at nineteen, and so I was about four at the wedding. I remember a big party and then there wasn't another wedding for about ten years. Then my other sister got married. But my sisters got married because life for them, at home, was impossible. My mother never permitted free thought. We always had the ten commandments thrown at us. She knew them by heart, and she used to pride herself on it. She could out-talk pastors and priests because she knew the word of the Lord better than they did.
P: She was outspoken like you, but she kept it within her home.
Within the church confines, and she was as big a bitch as I am where I am now. She was convinced she was right. She'd had six weeks of school, so everything the Father said was okay if it met up with her approval, if he'd suffered enough, you know.
She was a sack-cloth-and-ashes Christian.
And the Lenten season. We really got crucified, because that was a time of the year we couldn't even laugh, out loud. We had to go through his forty days of fasting and penance. It was really miserable. Can you imagine anybody as powerful as I, adhering to those values? She got those values and laid them on the kids a thousand-fold, because we were just loaned out to her and she had to give us back the way she got us. Now that kind of thinking... she screwed us up. It took me almost fifty years to escape those values and only because I have more of her in me than the others. Right now I am diametrically opposed to anything she stood for!
P: You have a strong mind.
Well, I had my father's respect, though. Somehow my father and I hooked up a relationship, and I think that was when my younger sister, who's five years younger than I, came... and got very sick as an infant. And so my mother laid me off and my father must have had to kind of identify with me or kind of support me.
P: Were they all girls?
Five girls and one boy. He's five years older than I am. I was between the boy and the baby. Hey! That's got to be something. I got hooked between the boy and the sick baby and I had ulcers by the time I was six years old!
P: Through the years, you probably identified more with the brother. The older sisters were too old and the younger one was sick.
I tried to. I had to hide it, though. What is that expression, "Whistling girls and cackling hens come to know bad ends." There were a lot of those homelies thrown at me. I thought God wrote those down on the tablet that Moses picked up. "Shame on you, that's not lady-like!"
P: So mama was feeding the lines to the kids, and mama's do this.
And she was a powerful mama, and that's all she had to do was watch her girls and be zapped in, because, you see, the only sin that could be committed by a girl is to lose her hymen, and that's the most exciting thing for a married woman and the most horrible thing for a girl. Mama used that analogy, "For a married woman it was nothing. For a girl it was the worst sin." And that was to lose your cherry.
P: Didn't she know that a lot of girls break the hymen in other ways, like horse-back riding?
No. She wasn't involved in that kind of thinking. (we laughed.) No way. Because that would be protected. The Lord would protect it. Well, that hymen got in the way with so much. It's such a laughable thing except that it's so tragic. Here's the thing that she was obsessed with, sex, because this is the only thing that she could claim fame through was to be one woman whose daughters didn't go wrong. Really. And she said that this is a sin that will go on. Not just for my generation, but for seven generations! And you know I finally found out why she got so obsessed with this. Because her mother had to get married! And that made her feel rotten and she knew her kids. One of her daughters was going to go wrong and she was watching so industriously.
(To be continued…..)