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Letter from Joyce Archives
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April 24, 2007
Dear Friends,
Once again, this week, I’m
sending you an essay from my archives, about mothers. This one was first
published in the spring of 1979, in the New York Times “Hers”
column, and later included (with an introduction) in my collection of
columns, Domestic Affairs.
It’s a piece I wrote when my daughter Audrey was just one year old,
and I was twenty five, a few days before the death of my grandmother.
Audrey’s twenty nine now; I’m fifty three, and my own mother
has been dead for eighteen years now. The Fiesta-ware china mentioned
in this essay, that my grandmother had passed down to my mother, sits
in my cabinets now. And in fact, that’s what this piece is about:
the way we pass down not only possessions, but attitudes, ways of raising
our children, for good or ill. I recognized this when I was twenty five,
but now -- more than twice that age, with almost thirty more years of
parenthood to meditate on, the truth of that is plainer to me than ever.
I am only a mother now myself -- no longer a daughter. (Not a grandmother,
either. A fact I refrain bringing up to my children, which is evidence
of extraordinary and highly uncharacteristic self restraint.)
In the years since this essay was written, I have tried mightily to break
certain patterns in my own mothering, that weren’t so healthy, in
the generations that came before me. Others have come back to haunt me.
In the end, the best I can hope for is that my children forgive those
failings, as I forgive my mother hers, and as she forgave her mother hers.
Retyping this story just now, I was struck by a fact about my family lineage
I hadn’t fully grasped, I think, when I took it in as a child: namely,
the information that my grandmother’s mother had been prepared to
leave her own youngest child to die without her in Russia, rather than
bring her along on the ship.
So, certain patterns do change, after all. Because if there is one failing
no mother in my mother’s line, whom I ever met, could be accused
of, it was not loving her children enough. Too much, perhaps. Or too possessively.
Or with insufficient awareness of where the mother ended and the child
began. (This was my mother’s big issue I think. And the one I had
to address most vigilantly, when I had a daughter of my own.)
One thing was for sure, however. None of us was setting sail on any ocean
journeys, leaving a child behind.
So here is this week’s offering in my series on mothers. (Along with
my reminder, that I’d love to hear from you about your mothers, and
will hope I receive enough response to share it with this group.)
And
finally, I want to remind those of you who live in California (or simply,
those of you who might like to make a little trip out here) that a few
places still remain in my day-long workshop on memoir writing and personal
narrative, to be held at my home in Mill Valley, May 26. Details of the
workshop (as well as my weeklong workshops at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala,
this November and February) can be found on the Writing
Workshops page of this website. Email
me if you’d like to join us. It’s going to be a terrific
and inspiring day, I know.
With friendship,
PS from Myrna: For various reasons, we've realized that two mailing lists was one too many, so we've consolidated the Website Updates and Writing Workshops emails lists. Our subscribers will now receive an identical mailing (which has been the case recently for those of you signed up to both lists), and we have upgraded our system to include the opportunity to register your names (making it easier to manage your list information), and your locations (simply to satisfy our curiosity about how far afield our readers are).
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Thanks to you all, Myrna
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