100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (10 page)

The woman combing is named after Moses’s wife, Tzipora. She’s twenty-two, has two children, and hopes to have as many as possible. Her mother-in-law has fifteen. I feel that Tzipora and I have a lot in common. Much more in common than most of the mothers I meet on the playground. For Tzipora and I both try to work from home. She combs with incredible patience and pragmatism while her baby cries in the other room. “Schlomo,” she yells to her husband, “give the baby a pacifier!” Schlomo is a Talmudic scholar. He also works from home. “I can’t find the pacifier!” he shouts.

“Look, I found four baby nits!” she says to me with some pride, showing me the paper towel, then shouts to Schlomo, “Go to the study! He probably dropped the pacifier in there!” Schlomo sighs, leaves the Talmud, and takes the baby into the study to look for the pacifier. Tzipora says, “My husband, he has to study forever, forever.” It is now my turn to submit to the treatment. I send the children to look at the fish in the living room aquarium. Tzipora starts combing my hair out. Her combing is gentler than my husband’s, and it makes me want to cry to think a stranger would be willing to do this for me (for a hundred dollars). It’s almost impossible to comb your own hair for lice when you have long hair. It reminds me that you can’t do everything for yourself, that we are in fact primates, that the social contract involves grooming each other. Perhaps that’s the metaphysical function of lice. To remind us of our mutual need.

An Irishwoman and her daughter Nora come in for a quick head check. “How do you like Brooklyn?” I ask the pretty brunette. “Sure as hell beats Belfast,” she says. Little Nora says, “I like Ireland better,” while her head gets checked. They are clear of lice and are thankful. They leave and Tzipora goes back to combing my hair out. “Ooh, I found two adult ones, big ones,” she says. “See?” showing me her kill. “Wow,” I say. “Thanks.”

“So you’re a writer,” she says, “that’s good, you get to work from home?” “Yes,” I say. Schlomo yells, “The pacifier’s not in the study! You
have to feed him
.” Tzipora yells back while combing, “I already fed him at six.
I’m not feeding him again!
” Then, to me, “So you work at home?” “I try to,” I say. I realize that the rhythm at Tzipora’s house feels familiar to me, the great systole and diastole of work and children, the revelation of finding a sentence in the midst of chaos not unlike the joy of finding a buried nit. My kids come back from the fish tank, claiming they’re starving. Tzipora gives each of them a spoonful of peanut butter and sprinkles some baking powder on my head.

And I think, as I’m surrounded by teeming life—parasites, fish, and children—I think, So, you thought you wanted to observe life? Motherhood shakes her head, clenches her fists, and demands, No, you must live it.

76. Mothers on stage

There have been many memorable mothers on stage: Medea, Phaedra, Amanda Wingfield, Mary Tyrone. All of these mothers are told from the points of view of their sons, written by sons. The first is a baby killer, the second a sexually voracious, semi-incestuous harpy, the third a suffocating, self-deluded belle, and the fourth a morphine addict. In short, they are all delightful. Seldom have we seen a mother’s point of view on stage.

More recently, we have begun to see a daughter’s view of a mother (Marsha Norman’s ’
night, Mother
, for example). But seldom do we see a mother’s view of a daughter. The obvious explanation is that we don’t have many playwrights who have also been mothers. The more creepy explanation is that the experience of motherhood is unstageable—beyond narrative and language. Or that the experience is tellable, but no one wants to see it. Mothers aren’t meant to have points of view. They are pages, ciphers for their sons and daughters to write their lives on.

But I chafe at this notion that motherhood is unwritable. Some French feminists have asserted that motherhood is unspeakable in our phallocentric language. I prefer to think that motherhood has until now been unspoken about. And that women are as fully in possession of language as men are. For example, Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
—an almost untellable story told from the point of view of a mother.
The Joys of Motherhood
by Buchi Emecheta. Sharon Olds’s poetry. But I often feel as though theater lags behind the other literary arts in terms of what can be told, because its medium is embodied, subject to all kinds of material concerns that make it slower to change.

The playwright Caryl Churchill is a mother of three; Tina Howe, mother of two; Adrienne Kennedy, mother of two. This comforts me. Certainly many of my playwright friends are reproducing. Perhaps we are in a renaissance of mothers writing. What will the great roles for mothers be? Can motherhood be pressed into dramatic form? Do mothers wish to write about their experience of the little world of children, or when they are not in the little world, do they wish to think and write about other things?

77. On motherhood and stools (the furniture kind)

When I was twenty-six, I directed my own play under a pseudonym. I used whatever limited furniture I had in my own living room for the set, and I purchased a small velvet stool from a junk shop in Providence. I loved this stool because it spun, and on stage it could transform a psychiatrist’s office into a barbershop. I kept this stool all these years, and never did I imagine that one day my three-year-old son, William, would also love this stool. Only now, for William, it is a steering wheel. Every morning he goes to the velvet stool and becomes a captain, turning the wheel, sometimes a ship, sometimes a train, other times a rocket. He goes to his stool and says to his twin sister, Hope, “If you want to go to India, say ‘Acka Pimo!’” And she screams, “Acka Pimo!” and he turns the wheel, giddy with joy.

I do not know why this stool feels so important to me and why William’s game gives me so much pleasure. Perhaps because, often, the demands of motherhood seem divorced from the demands of writing, and I can see both imagination and motherhood in this dilapidated velvet stool. I appear to need to be alone in order to make things; it appears to be necessary to my survival. And yet my children appear to need me, always; it appears to be necessary for their survival. And yet for me to feel my sanity, these two practices, of motherhood and making things, so primary, need to feel as though they are compatriots.

Sometimes I think mothers and fathers need to “come out” as parents in the theater, to make the work of parenting visible in a line of work that has so much in common with parenting in terms of dealing with irrational people much of the day and night and so little in common with parenting in terms of its schedule. But both parenting and theater involve an embrace of impermanence, and both are embodied art forms.

When I had my first daughter, I took her with me to the theater so that I wouldn’t feel like a divided self. She took her first steps in a rehearsal room. She came every day with me to rehearsals at Lincoln Center for
The Clean House
, and I breast-fed her in her own little dressing room every two hours. At that time we had just moved to New York and, far from our families, didn’t know many babysitters. Unthinking, we brought our daughter, Anna, to a dinner party. Our hostess opened the door and said, “Oh! You brought the baby!” (I suddenly realized that babies might not be invited.) Still, we were made to feel very welcome. We sat down to eat, Tom Stoppard to my left, John Guare to my right. I was mortified. The baby started crying. I began to feed her. Tom Stoppard raised his glass and said, “A toast, to the only person here who is working!”

When I had twins, I brought them one at a time to rehearsals of
Orlando
when I was still breast-feeding because it was too much to bring both. The costume designer didn’t realize I had twins and thought I was dressing my boy in girl’s clothes every other day. More and more, it made less practical sense to bring all the children to the theater with me. With my first child, I was able to perpetuate some strange midwestern fantasy that I was a stay-at-home mom while working fairly constantly. Now I had a new reality, a divide that seemed more difficult to bridge.

And so back to this stool, this prop that I love. It is now being used for the state of play by my son, and it reminds me that at times motherhood has everything in common with theater. Both are primary. Both require improvisation. And both require the ability to make junk—garbage, discarded milk cartons, discarded stools—into something joyful.

78. Must one enjoy one’s children?

I have a clear memory of my mother saying when I was a child (on the subject of women who worked all the time), “Why bother having children if you don’t spend any time with them?”

After I had children, her words haunted me, and often when I leave the house, I have the insistent thought “Why bother having children if you don’t spend any time with them?” My mother acted in plays when my sister and I were little and taught English at a Catholic high school to help pay our college tuition. But she didn’t work full-time when we were little.

My first conflict between work and children was my determination to go to the closing night of my play
The Clean House
at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. I was then living in California, and my first daughter, Anna, was only a month old. To assuage my guilt, for the first month of her life, I pumped breast milk in addition to breast-feeding so that I’d have a stockpile and she would be spared the horrors of formula for the thirty-six hours I would be away.

This notion of trying to double up the time you are with your child to make up for when you are away becomes, I think, the strange psychological equivalent of pumping while breast-feeding. Trying to always be there even when you are not. Leaving your milk behind as a proxy for you. Trying to double the effort when you are present to make up for the time you are away. Thinking they will be damaged by any time away from you. And this particular knot seems to be one for the peculiar class demographic of Betty Friedan’s
Feminine Mystique
—that is to say, women who have some choice about working or staying home.

Recently, I asked my mom, “Remember how you used to say, ‘Why bother having children if you don’t spend any time with them?’” She said yes, then went on to say, “I guess I mainly felt, why bother having children if you didn’t spend time
enjoying
them.” I told her that this phrase haunted me often when I left the house to write or traveled to rehearsals out of town. “Oh, no,” she said. “How awful.”

I said, “So what did you mean by it? Did you mean that working mothers really shouldn’t have bothered to have children?” “Oh, no,” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought that.” “Because you worked?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “but only part-time. I was thinking of the mothers who worked all the time.” “So women who work full-time shouldn’t have children?” I asked. She took a moment to think, then she said, “Probably I was just jealous of the mothers who worked full-time.”

When I was a child, on the nights when my mother went to act in plays, I would hold on to her legs and scream as she went out the door. Then I would happily settle down to stories that my father told me about his childhood. “Tell me a story of when you were little,” my sister and I would say. They were some of my favorite nights with my father. But I suppose all my mother heard were the screams as she went out the door.

How many hours spent with children is enough? How much must we enjoy them? How much attention is enough? When I am not paying attention to my children, they appear to desperately need it. When I am giving them my full attention, they seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their own games and ignore me. My son has a way, when I’m not looking at him while he’s talking, of taking my chin with his hand and turning my face directly toward his.
Give me your full attention
, he says with his hands.

79. The meaning of twins on stage

After I had twins, I got to thinking about the meaning of twins on stage. They are often a plot device: fraternal twins separated at birth and reunited. Identical twins are convenient for mistaken identity, or for the virtuosity of one actor playing two parts.

Often, they are a symbolic device, more curiosity than real people, standing in for surprise, excess, the world upside down when the twins are separated, the world ordered when they are reunited. The coming together of that which belongs together. The hybrid nature of identity. The doubleness of two plots coming together. Undoing the status quo. The Shakespearean image of twins separated in a storm, separated at birth … Does the image reflect the primordial feeling that we have been separated from our other, true self at birth, or during another great storm in our lives?

Shakespeare himself had real twins. One assumes, then, that he wasn’t interested in twins as a purely literary conceit. After he had the twins, there were apparently seven years, called the Lost Years, in which he did not write. One cannot imagine him changing diapers in Stratford-Upon-Avon—what, then, was he doing?

At any rate, now that I have real twins, I find that I am leery of twin-as-symbol. My twins were a great surprise to me. They bowled me over with the strange audacity and unpredictability of the natural world. (Perhaps in the future twins will come instead to signify the strange audacity and controlled nature of the medical world, now that twins are becoming more common with IVF.) But my twins were a surprise (perhaps genetically bequeathed to me by my great-aunt Laura, whose twins were stillborn). My pregnancy was difficult and Victorian. I went on bed rest for three months. My friends brought me books to read, and for some reason I kept finding casual mentions of a dead twin.
Little Dorrit
. Dead twin. Out it went. I was terrified. Why were there so many literary dead twins? In the Elizabethan era or the nineteenth century, I’m sure it was a fact of life. But on the symbolic level, why all the dead twins? Because two was an impossibility, symbolically? Or because it was a symbol of double loss? We come into the world alone, and we die alone. Not so for twins.