June 29, 2011

I recently read some work written by Adrienne Rich. I was totally blown away by her words.

“A natural mother is a person without further identity, one who can find her chief gratification in being all day with small children, living at a pace turned to theirs….should be quite literally selfless….”

As a mother, have I become totally lost in that particular world? Are we nothing more than breeding factories, or someone's wife? I have been on those paths of self discovery, like what Rich wrote about.

At 51, I am in school, again -- just this time finishing. I am planning on law school.

I have reinvented myself again. This is the life of the average american mother -- a series of reinventions. In some cases finding our true self, other than the self of being a Mommy!

Oh, but please forgive me I am not complaining. Like Rich contends in her writing, “This is what women have always done.”   We have lived in a male sponsored society and I have so often thought that I was not important. But, I am not sure whether this is true in our different sub-cultures. I do not know how women are treated in New York City or San Francisco or any other major city other than the cities among the Gulf Coast.

I do know that life as a mother was very lonely to me until I started become friends with myself and started to understand that I could make some of my mother tasks into hobbies – like gourmet cooking,  embroidery,  the love of history into genealogy research, and so forth.

So this trek is a blog of self discovery. Which I will share, starting out with Rich’s literary work.  Why would I want to do that? I started researching her and WOW! Her work and life is something to be shared.

Adrienne Rich is my father’s age. Her youngest son is my age.  She is a fantastic writer. She had three children (boys) about the same time my mother had her three children (2 boys and a girl.) She had to get permission to have a tubal ligation. A nurse told her after the procedure, “Had yourself spayed, did you?” according to Rich.  What was she a type of non-human primate? But when discovering about her life I kept thinking about the Donna Reed “motherism.”  What is interesting, I had to get permission in 1992 for my tubal ligation. I was living in Mississippi at the time and there were legal guidelines that need to be met.

But the Donna Reed “motherism” was just a television induced myth. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. But the real Donna Reeds and the Adrienne Richs are much more than just mothers.  They were also anti-war activists during the Vietnam Era.  They were and are major contributors to our society – contributors who were classified in a patriarchal society as someone’s wife or mother. Their contributions came from a very powerful tool, their brain and their that has been reinvented time and time again.