This is part II in a series of essays about growing up as a Mormon girl and becoming a mother in America.
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” - C.G. Jung
I’m watching a documentary about an octopus with my oldest daughter, Lydia, who I call my water baby, even though she’s nine now, because she loves to swim and she loves oceans and waves and coral reefs and shells and seahorses and all kinds of sharks, but especially whale sharks. Lydia’s bedroom walls are painted a navy blue, her choice, to mimic the deepest parts of the ocean, of which, Lydia could tell you, we know less about than we do the surface of Mars. She sleeps under a sea creature patterned duvet near a sea turtle jewelry box and a homemade seashell lamp. Just the other day she asked me to help her purchase online with her own money a $23 bracelet from an organization that donates its resources to wildlife. The bracelet comes with a link to track one animal, so Lydia chose a shark whose name happens to be Eddie. Though Lydia does not like to bathe because she hates getting ready and unready, once she gets her body in the bath, she’s in there until you repeat her name ten times or drag her out. Time and urgency rarely exist for my water baby, especially while she is in the water. Her fingertips regularly wrinkle and shrivel after soaking far too long.1 Walk into her bathroom during her night bath and you’ll see her floating on her back with her ears under water, her hands paddling in circles like fins, her teal eyes staring off into somewhere I cannot access, though I have often tried.
Lydia and I watch and listen to the narrator of the documentary observe a female octopus over the course of a few years. The octopus lays her octopus eggs, then sits atop them, refusing to leave the clutch in order to keep the babies warm and oxygenated. Scientists have observed pregnant octopuses stay put without eating for up to four and a half years.
When the eggs finally hatch, the mother octopus blows the baby octopuses out into the open and unprotected ocean. After this, Lydia and I watch the mother octopus begin to wither away. Her tentacles and flesh disintegrate until her organs slow, then finally shut down. Then she dies. Small crabs and shrimps and other sea creatures come from all over the ocean floor, joining together to devour her body. This must be their Christmas morning, when all the neighbors and kin and loved ones gather to celebrate a feast of motherly flesh and miraculous abundance! I imagine the creatures singing Christmas songs amidst stuffed mouths. Her white entrails like leftover crumbs float up toward the surface while Lydia, burrowing into my side, cries.
Before my mother became a mother she was an actor. She went by Disa Joplin instead of Disa Brock, her now married name. In her home office now hangs a black and white photo of her on a stage, collapsed onto her knees in a tattered dress, her large brown eyes someone once told her looked like a cow’s, and her dark striking eyebrows desperately pleading while one hand grips the stage floor and the other holds a microphone. This photo must be from her college years, perhaps during her freshman year at San Francisco State, where her drama teacher remarked, “If you haven’t had sex, you can’t be in this play.” Disa, a virgin at the time, but who had experienced leading roles all throughout high school, walked to the front of the class as a freshman where she was given a partner to seduce and a prop: oysters, an aphrodisiac. She didn’t know then what an aphrodisiac was.
When I was a kid, when I asked my mom question after question about who she was before she was my mom, my mom told me the story of the first time she ever auditioned for a play. She was a freshman in high school, had previously been a gymnast, would later become a swimmer and a diver off high boards, but she had no prior experience with acting. She tried out for Abigail in The Crucible. When it was her turn to try out, my mom said she looked around at the circle of theater kids and decided right then and there not to care what they or anyone else thought of her. She let herself sink into the character’s body and mindset, and while she tells me this story again when I am no longer a child, but thirty-four years old and driving her to Salt Lake, she acts out the first time she ever acted. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, calms her body, sterns her face, curls her fingers and hands and shoulders, then opens her eyes as the character Abigail in the famous yellow bird scene. Abigail must appear as credible to the judges in the scene, who might hang her if they catch her in a lie, but also deceptive and delusional enough to the audience, a tricky thing to do as an actor. My mom does not rehearse her lines in the car with us, but instead laughs, immediately transforming back into herself like a bendable straw returning upright.
I look up the script now and imagine my mom before she was ever my mom, when she was Disa Joplin as Abigail. I read the screenplay like I’ve uncovered some kind of secret about my mother. I’m reminded of the time I discovered her childhood yellow diary with gold-edged pages, as wide and small as a ten year old’s hand, and a gold lock.
As a child, I flipped through the pages trying to find some kind of answer to a question I could not yet articulate: who are you? Who are you besides my mother? Besides this role, this relationship? Underneath the lectures and modeled behaviors and disciplines, between booked appointments and drop offs and birthday parties, around the wrapping paper and dust bins and sack lunches, where are you?
My mother before she was a mother was there amidst all these places, showing up in the way she told us Old Testament stories and sang us songs and decorated the table with birthday flowers and matching napkins and candies and candles. My mother’s mothering was distinctly hers, and yet I suspected there was an essence and aliveness underneath and between all of this, which I could not access fully, as if my mere relationship to her barricaded me from truly finding her.
There was only one entry in the yellow diary. I can’t recall now if my mom was twelve or fourteen in the entry, but she wrote in such sparse detail about an outdoor picnic near water she attended with some friends and a crush. She described the way she and this crush interacted throughout the afternoon and then my memory of the diary entry and my imagination blur, and I can’t tell you what was actually written or what I imagined then as a kid while reading. A scene forms in my mind now, where I see my mother sitting at a grassy edge of water, her golden hair shining, her long tanned legs dangling. I think there is a kiss exchanged with this crush, but I’m not sure. Beyond that, there are no more entries of childhood Disa Joplin, evidence of her written in her own handwriting. And as a kid, I flipped the pages over and over, front to back and back to front hoping I had accidentally missed more clues to who my mother was.
ABIGAIL: Why…? Why do you come, yellow bird?
PROCTOR: Where’s a bird? I see no bird!
ABIGAIL: (To ceiling, in a genuine conversation with [an imagined] bird as though trying to talk it out of attacking her.) My face? My face?! But God made my face; you cannot want to tear my face. Envy is a deadly sin, Mary.
MARY: Abby!
ABIGAIL: (Unperturbed, continues to bird.) Oh, Mary, this is a black art to change your shape. No, I cannot, I cannot stop my mouth; it’s God’s work I do….
MARY: Abby, I’m here!
PROCTOR: They’re pretending, Mister Danforth!
ABIGAIL: (Now she takes a backward step, as though the bird would swoop down momentarily.) Oh, please, Mary!—Don’t come down….
ANN: Her claws, she’s stretching her claws!
PROCTOR: Lies—lies—
ABIGAIL: (Backing further, still fixed above.) Mary, please don’t hurt me!
MARY: (To Danforth.) I’m not hurting her!
DANFORTH: Why does she see this vision?!
MARY: (Rises.) She sees nothin’!
ABIGAIL: (As though hypnotized, mimicking the exact tone of Mary’s cry.) She sees nothin’!
MARY: Abby, you mustn’t!
ABIGAIL: (Now all girls join, transfixed.) Abby, you mustn’t!
MARY: (To all girls, frantically.) I’m here, I’m here!
GIRLS: I’m here, I’m here!
DANFORTH: Mary Warren!—Draw back your spirit out of them!
MARY: Mister Danforth…!
GIRLS: Mister Danforth!
DANFORTH: Have you compacted with the Devil? Have you?
MARY: Never, never!
GIRLS: Never, never!
DANFORTH: (Growing hysterical.) Why can they only repeat you?!
PROCTOR: Give me a whip—I’ll stop it!
MARY: They’re sporting…!
GIRLS: (Cutting her off.) They’re sporting!
MARY: (Turning on them all, hysterically and stamping her feet.) Abby, stop it!
GIRLS: (Stamping their feet.) Abby, stop it!
MARY: (Screaming it out at top of her lungs, and raising her fists.) Stop it!!
GIRLS: (All raising their fists.) Stop it!! (Mary, utterly confounded, and becoming overwhelmed by Abigail—and the girls’—utter conviction, starts to whimper, hands half raised, powerless—and all girls begin whimpering exactly as she does.)
DANFORTH: A little while ago you were afflicted. Now it seems you afflict others; where did you find this power?
MARY: (Staring at Abigail.) I… have no power.
GIRLS: I have no power.
PROCTOR: They’re gulling you, Mister!
DANFORTH: Why did you turn about this past two weeks? You have seen the Devil, have you not? PROCTOR: (Seeing her weakening.) Mary, Mary, God damns all liars! (Mary utters something unintelligible, staring at Abigail who keeps watching the bird above.)
DANFORTH: I cannot hear you. What do you say? (Mary utters again unintelligibly.) You will confess yourself or you will hang!
PROCTOR: Mary, remember the angel Raphael… do that which is good and…
ABIGAIL: (Pointing upward.) The wings! Her wings are spreading! Mary, please, don’t, don’t…! She’s going to come down! She’s walking the beam! Look out! She’s coming down!
(All scream. Abigail dashes across the stage as though pursued, the other girls streak hysterically in and out between the men, all converging.—and as their screaming subsides only Mary Warren’s is left. All watch her, struck, even horrified by this evident fit.)
I imagine again the way my mom described the high school director walking slowly up to the stage in awe of Disa with his arms stretched out, as if ready to embrace or worship her. He puts his hands on Disa’s shoulders, she smiles, and I imagine this smile is a tad shy, perhaps crossing her arms over her abdomen like young teenagers sometimes do, when the director whispers, “Thank you! Thank you!”
He immediately gives her the part. And for the rest of Disa’s high school career, she will try out and earn leading roles.
This screenplay is proof of a previous life, of a Disa I never knew and will never know as her daughter because a Disa who is not a mother can never exist again. My mere existence as a growing fetus turned born child transformed my mother’s body and identity into a new creature, a mother.
One spring term, I auditioned for a high school musical as Cinderella. I did not get the part, and I don’t recall getting any part, but if I did, I ended up playing tennis instead. I knew I was scared to act, scared my voice wasn’t loud or bold or unshaky enough to reach the farthest corners of an auditorium. I had a hard time then focusing only on the acting because I was always imagining myself observing me from an audience chair, and what I imagined I was observing was that I was quiet and nervous and embarrassing. I had heard all these stories about my mother, stories she told and stories my dad and uncle and aunts told who had seen her when she was younger, before we were born. I had seen the pictures, and I wanted to be brave, carefree, regal like her. But acting felt more terrifying than exciting, more uncomfortable than alive.
Perhaps for this reason I became a writer instead. I could write the words, write the scene, write the sequence of ideas and emotions with flair and charisma and dramatic pauses, but without the blushing or shaking vibrato. A line in my high school essay about why I particularly write, a line which my friend plagiarized without my knowing until the teacher asked us to stay after class to confront us, read, “Writing does not blush or stutter or cry.”
Perhaps I became a writer because my mother was an actor and I could not be an actor, though I wanted to exist in some way like an actor, like her, and I loved her. Writing, I see, is trying to be like Disa, Disa the actor, the person she was before she became a mother.
Other creatures are known to reproduce once and then their children eat them. Some species of legless amphibians known as caecilians eat their mother’s top layer of skin as a first meal. Some species of spiders take this further, with offspring practicing matriphagy—a special word to describe the common-enough act of eating a female parent to death. Desert spider mothers feed their young on regurgitated smoothies made up of the last nutrients they’ll ever eat, and their own guts. One writer describes this process almost poetically in Cosmos:
“As liquid wells out on mom’s face, spiderlings jostle for position, swarming over her head like a face mask of caramel-colored beads. This will be her sole brood of hatchlings, [as] she regurgitates [. . .] her body mass to feed her spiderlings.”
Virgin, non-biological mothers in some spider species like the African social spider are known to care for the colony of seventy to eighty spiderlings just as biological mothers do, from tending the egg sac to becoming the babies’ breakfast. In a 2016 article, Fox News wondered if these particular mother spiders should receive the title “Mother of the Year” for their ultimate sacrifice. After attacking the mothers’ face and piercing the mothers’ abdomens to release fatty nutrients, the spiderlings leave behind only four percent of each mother’s body mass, of which, include the mothers’ hearts. “Thanks, kids!” the article teases.
Biologists have observed that these spiders undergo a gradual degradation process that maximizes the nutritional potential of the female’s body, a possible explanation for the evolutionary process that leads mother spiders to invest all their resources, including their lives, into a single reproductive event. Mor Salomon, a biologist who led the first study on the mechanical process of maternal suicide in arthropods, commented: “I know it looks ‘disgusting’ for someone who is not familiar, but it shows the amazing way evolution and natural selection work.” The findings don’t specify why non-biological mothers also participate in this maternal suicide, but nonetheless, Salomon remarks: “It is amazing to think that this behavior has evolved as the best way (evolutionarily) for a female to reach a high reproductive success by giving herself to her young. It really shows how the natural world is remarkable.”
Remarkable as in worthy of attention? Yes. As in amazing, wonderful? The positive connotations of these words make my pelvic floor tingle and squirm.2
Why? I don’t know, but I can’t stop thinking about this destiny that plays out over and over again, not in all species, thank god, but in some. I find myself humanizing and allying with the mother spider, the mother octopus. Allying not against the babies swarming their faces or blasting away into the open water, I love them too, they’re so cute–ticky ticky ticky *cue my toddler’s tickly fingers and laugh*–but against the whole program, the evolutionary or other force that leads some mothers, males and fathers, too, but more often mothers, to this particular end.
I recently heard a neuroscientist classify humans as the unique animal species that tells stories about who we are.3 Our human cells change on a regular, even daily basis, as do our thoughts and emotions and beliefs and knowledge, but we are an exceptional species that creates and adopts stories of identity, as if our identities are something constant, distinct, separate from the ever evolving and changing that occurs at these cellular and emotional and cognitive levels.
The stories Mormonism, American Christianity, American White Patriarchy taught me about who I was was that my identity was a mother because I had a uterus. When I went through the Mormon temple for the first time with my soon-to-be husband, he and my father sat on the right side of the room along with the other men. Me and my mother, who sat next to me, sat on the left side among the other women during the entire ceremony. A screen played a two and a half hour video that told the story of who we were as children of God. Who I was as a woman was less a story than it was a lack of one. With the exception of Eve, who essentially defies God in a few lines to become a mother, only fathers and brothers on the film created the earth and directed a church on that earth. The divine was a Heavenly Father who had a male child Jesus who would die to save the rest of us from the choice the woman Eve made even though in Mormonism, Eve made the better choice to become a mother. Heavenly Father had only ordained men with the sex-based and worthiness-based power to create things from scratch, including human bodies like Adam and Eve, and octopuses and spiders and plants.
I thought I would learn about a Heavenly Mother in the Mormon temple because I had always been taught that our goal as humans was to become like God himself, or God herself, though “she” was never mentioned, only implied. Mormon women in private settings, settings I often sought out in secret, whispered about a Mother Goddess who created and reared spirit babies like me before we came to earth in our bodies. Mormons, usually women, who talked or researched or speculated publicly about this Heavenly Mother, Mormons who prayed to her instead of to Heavenly Father, Mormons who wrote about her would sometimes be chastised or excommunicated by local or general leaders. When I taught in classes what little our institution had approved of to talk about this Heavenly Mother, a Mormon mother and friend of mine in the class raised her hand to censor me, saying we shouldn’t talk about her. Others remarked that Heavenly Father didn’t want anyone to talk bad about his wife, which is why we didn’t know anything about her from the prophets. This mother was too sacred to utter, to know, to connect with. My fate, then, as a girl meant to become an earthly and then heavenly mother, it seemed, was procreation and silence and disappearance. My children wouldn’t be allowed to know me, to talk about me, to talk to me, though everything I did was for them.
The glorious edge of the sea toward which my Mormon mothers launched me, was eternal erasure, a type of death. I was told if I were righteous and humble and devout enough, I would rejoice in this symbolic death because good women wanted what God called good, and what God called good was our deaths.
If spiders, if octopuses, if chimpanzees, if seagulls could tell themselves stories about who they are, what stories would they tell about mothers? Would these creatures have their own signifiers for something like the concept of a mother? Do octopuses beepy boopy then wiggle a middle leg as a sign for “I, MOTHER”? Or is there no such signifier as I? No such signifier as mother, but instead we, or us, or our species, our ecosystem? Do octopuses use their most graceful or strongest or [insert adjective] leg movements to signify the mothering experience as beautiful, amazing, wonderful, utterly remarkable in all the positive connotations of these words kinda way? Do virgin and biological mothers make distinctions between themselves? Like pitter patter once if you’re a biological mother, pitter patter twice if you’re a non-biological mother? Or pitter patter thrice for “Whatevs, our inevitable death by breakfast is in the morning! HOLLA!”
Creatures or animals who have languages of their own, even dialects the way orcas do4, are their stories of mothers more nuanced or less? Do they ever use a symbol, a signifier that remotely comes close to the verb to have as in to have a mother?
Would spiders and octopuses tell stories that revere dead mothers, that describe them like saviors and redeemers, like yummy breads of life? Would dead mother octopuses be described as the holiest of all the octopuses because they died for all the children octopuses? Do these stories inspire the itsy bitsy spider babies to live holy lives in such a way as to remember the holy mother they ate? Do they ritualize her, revere her each week or month or year? Or do they tell stories that accuse their mommies of being the worst? That their mommies abandoned them, their mommies neglected them unlike the jellyfish mommies, their mommies were selfish bitches, poisonous, even, and it’s a good thing their mommies died? Or do their stories not include superlatives? Are there no betters or worsts or bests but simply what is and whatever is is just is’ing?
Do some creatures refuse to believe these stories, refuse to live these stories, and instead refuse to be impregnated, refuse to eat the impregnator, do they sometimes hide, set traps, run away? Is choice, refusal, a concept, a possibility? Would this possibility create in them something like hope? Or choice paralysis? Are the stories the babies tell about these creatures is that the ones who got away are cool rebels, kinda like cowboys, kinda like spinsters not how humans used to mean spinster, but how humans mean it now, which is free?
Do the stories they tell about mothers evoke something in these creatures or animals? If spiders and octopuses could grieve like dolphins wailing, like elephants groaning on their sides, like humans sobbing or crumbling to their knees or staring blankly at a TV screen for the fifth hour, fifth day in a row, would they grieve for the dead mother they consumed?
Or in other words, are some dead mothers simply incomprehensible and therefore ungrievable?
The story my mother told me about mothers, about her identity as a mother, was that the mothers lived happily ever after because of their babies. My mother loved and still loves being a mother and mothering. She bore and raised six of us children. As a child I believed we were her story, her identity, her reason for getting up, for being. What joy I brought my mother! What power I had to encapsulate her whole reason for living! I did not believe I was this for my dad. Somehow I could tell Dad lived for other things too, like his music, his passions and scholarly interests, his spirituality and religious beliefs. My mom had passions and interests too, spirituality and religious convictions too. But my mom seemed less distracted or devoted to those things, as if they were merely distractions from us. Only after having children did I realize that by centering us, herself an afterthought or no thought at all, she unintentionally burdened us with her life’s meaning and joy, and had set us kids with uteruses up for a possible similar fate. If we were to become mothers ourselves, this was the way we saw how to do it.
“I think of motherhood as creating a whole world for your kids," my mom described to me once in our kitchen where she made meals for eight and more often than not, washed the dishes too. My mother, the expressive, charismatic actor and later artist, had and still has a remarkable ability to frame what is or what must be done into something desirable. It is the actor and artist in her that imagines a new way to see, to envision, to pastel a life with all its boundaried circumstances and resources into a work of art not unlike the fantastical lands she used to sketch for my bedroom walls. Bug-eyed and full-bellied toadstool creatures danced under pink and purple flowers, while butterflies and clouds meandered along a blue sky, the grass and distant trees brightened by sunlight. This quality of hers is what also made her an exceptional church speaker, church leader, seminary teacher, house realtor, and sports coach, the few times she chose to coach a youth church volleyball team, or my younger siblings’ basketball teams. She never played these sports herself, she wasn’t offered these options as a girl growing up in the 1960s and 70s, but she could strike up a vision, and ignite inspiration and longing with her words.
For my mother, motherhood was power and influence. Carrying babies was creating more humans to love and be loved by. Rearing children was an opportunity to shape minds and spirits into powerful, influential citizens and followers of God. Morning, afternoon, and evening drop offs and pick ups became opportunities to read or listen to scriptures or books. Laundry, ever overflowing, could become soft wrappings to drape our precious bodies in, and homemade dinners could become manna for our tired, hungry bodies.
When my mother cleaned the house, she could describe housekeeping and homemaking as creating a sanctuary, a nest for us little birdies to come home to. She decorated the walls in art she had created or chosen, vibrant shapely images. Lamps bloomed on end tables to provide a cozy evening glow. You could often find a splash of green or orange accenting a hall or a bathroom wall, and tiled flooring she herself had cut and grouted. Mirrors often littered our living spaces, expanding images of ourselves far and wide beyond our confines. Finnish glass candlesticks sparkled all over glass tables and shimmered during dinner parties, and especially on Christmas Eve. Her ability to beautify a home was not unlike her ability to beautify a theology or a gender role. Even now, decades later as a practicing psychiatric nurse practitioner, a career she ended up pursuing reluctantly only after she and my dad lost their home and life savings after the economic crash in 2008, she tells me about her struggling patients and the way she coaches them to reframe in order to tap into something like hope or determination for a better way of life.
I admire and resent this ability of hers. On the one hand, my mom gifted me with the power of individual perspective. On the other hand, little could be taken at face value. There was always a better way to see if you only had the gumption and faith to shift your viewpoint. Systems of power, abuse, sexism, injustice seemingly cowered in response to my mother’s vision. Sure, LDS and conservative women were taught to stay at home to nurture children, a teaching that would be impossible for most women, and would disadvantage her personally and her family when no sustainable income was available solely through my dad, but being at home with kids when she could was more meaningful to her, more rewarding, and because of it, she didn’t hold a grudge at all. There, no harm done. Perhaps this was the only way my mother could flourish and accomplish what she did, let alone survive as a child of an immigrant and disabled father living in poverty. Yes, revolution may not have been possible with my mom’s perspective, but neither were despair or defeat.
In response to my mother’s rose-colored magic, I developed a magic of my own: the ability to make elixir look like sewer water. This skill was an attempt at compensation, an attempt to balance the scales, to drown out her fire, the yin to her yang. Only together, it seemed, could we articulate the truth of sewer water or elixir, both of which are code words for motherhood.
But my mother had also seen me enough to reflect me back to myself, so it was her love for me that caused me to question motherhood altogether once I became an actual mother. She loved so much worth into me that I was able to question the role and experience of motherhood that required so much self-sacrifice and annihilation.
I struggled with self-sacrifice, something I thought would be automatic, inevitable, as if my spiritual and physical destiny meant I would also be equipped enough to enjoy it. What seemed so natural for my mom and other mothers, mothers often used to not being particularly loved by their own mothers, I wondered if I wasn’t worthy because I wasn’t experiencing what everyone told me a mother was supposed to. Either that or every mother I knew, including my mom, was lying about loving the slow disintegration and death of herself as she once was. My life and body no longer only mine, seemed to have simply become a response to the needs and desires and actions of my children. I was no longer the writer of my own play, but an editor.
My life seemed to exist in between and around theirs. I wanted so adamantly to still write and to still assert instead of merely react, but in a culture where kids’ worth and happiness are always prioritized over a mother’s, it also seemed wrong, and for so long I felt guilt. I still will sometimes, even though now I tell myself I am showing my girls how to still matter when they grow up.
At what moment, in what context, did I evolve from a child worth sacrificing for into a sacrificial mother? When, how did I qualify for disappearance, annihilation? Was it when I started my period? Was it when I married? Was it when I first had sex, my wedding night in a Hilton in downtown Salt Lake City? Or when I first conceived? Was it at the precise moment when I first held my newborn Lydia on my naked chest and like an earthquake in my bones, I felt her whole being as ancient and distinct, holy, holy, holy?
People act like parenting without giving up so much of who you are is possible. And yet it’s not, really. While you have children at home or if you have children with special needs who will need your caretaking longer or forever, the only way for a child to live, to hopefully grow, to act, to contribute, to assert their own glorious self, so often requires the surrender of your needs, rage, energy, desire, will, patience, attention, and/or time.
How to explain other mothers who genuinely seemed to love and only joke about motherhood and its accompanying mandatory identity death, life schedule crisis, often body and brain crisis, always reassuring themselves that having children was “worth it”? Worth what? They all seemed to know what “it” meant, yet none of them articulated it fully, and if they could, they wouldn’t. Only later did I realize that “it” meant a large portion of a life, a day, a week, an hour spent in response or reaction rather than deliberate assertion. In so many ways, my life as a mother has not felt like my own. Motherhood, to be tolerated or enjoyed, seems to require so much passivity, and selective apathy, and patience with frustration, qualities I feel incapable of developing, neither do I necessarily want to.
After the mom octopus dies and is devoured by the Christmas village in the documentary, Lydia and I watch the baby orphan octopuses float away, taken by the current to the ends of the sea. Their translucent skin shines in the sun penetrating the water. Most of them won’t make it much longer on their own, but the ones who do will share their mother or father’s fate. (Male octopuses will be eaten by their mates, or die on their own soon after mating. Yay for all parents!)
When Lydia continues to cry, I wonder who or what she is crying for.
I do not cry at the documentary. Instead, I feel my abdomen clench inward like a sink hole in the center of my gut. So much I am unable to articulate slithers and coils around my uterus, which has so often been used as a synonym for fate.
I put my arm around my daughter, rub her long slender arm that reminds me of her namesake, her great-great grandmother, and remind her that her tenderness is a gift the way my mother still compliments me in little moments between passing a dish across the table or passing each other in the hall. I wouldn’t recognize how often my mother saw me so tenderly and compassionately until I married a man who did not see me or articulate me in the same way.
Mother octopuses in captivity sometimes try to end their lives earlier after their babies hatch, banging into the corners and sides of the tank, ripping off pieces of their own skin or eating away the tips of their tentacles. Scientists have discovered that this self-destruction is biological. Secretions inactivate the digestive and salivary glands, causing the female octopus to shut down energy production, and starve to death.
One their energy production dies, they change color, usually taking on a white pallor, fading into dehydrated ghosts.
On the drive to Salt Lake to see a National Theatre Live broadcast of The Crucible, my mom chats non-stop, my husband and I listening. We had offered her and my dad front seats, but they insist on the silliness of that and sit in the back instead, so I turn sideways in my seat so I can see my mom while she talks. When my dad says my mom was an incredible actress, how she captured everyone’s attention, my mom says Abigail isn’t a major role. My dad says of course she is. At that point, I had never seen the play.
When we arrive at the theater, my mom pays for our snacks and drinks and insists on buying us lunch after the play as if she owes us for choosing to spend time with her. We will decline lunch after the play because the play ends up being much longer than we realized, and our babysitter was expecting us an hour ago.
We arrive late to our seats, after the pitch black engulfs the aisle and chairs, after I try to squeeze past a woman who loudly exhales, “Ughhhhh!” out of annoyance for me, after my husband spills his bottled soda and we hear the cream soda fizz and the bottle roll and clink clink clink down the stadium slanted cement floor, I lean over to my husband and whisper, “We don’t belong here.” We hold in our laughs.
Then we watch. I fixate on Abigail every time she enters a scene. I think my mom described Abigail’s part as not a major role because she’s not as prominent in as many scenes as, say, John Proctor. But I notice the way Abigail is the reason this story is told. She tells the first stories, she sets off the rumors, she tells the lies and comes up with the schemes. The younger girls follow her lead. They might die if they don’t. They accuse others who die as a result instead. The girls follow Abigail’s feigned hysteria cues. Abigail influences the behaviors and reactions of all the other characters and she’s awful, and yet. Everyone is responding to her actions and assertions. And when Abigails appears again on stage, her sweaty, frantic face captivates me again and again. I keep thinking, my mother played her.
I cannot see my mother’s face in the theater, and she is sitting away from us because we could not find seats together, so I imagine her face. And on the way home, we talk and talk. My mom says this Abigail played a more obviously sinister part. I think about that. I have not done something simply fun with my mother in years. We’ve had dinner at her house. Or she comes to my kids’ soccer or basketball games or school programs. We spend holidays together. We have grown apart since I got married, but more so after I began having children and began to understand her parenting less. I’ve missed being close to her, enjoying time with her.
But I am no longer a child, even if I sometimes (often) act childish, especially around her, so we end up fighting about politics the last fifteen minutes of the car ride and later I will confess to my therapist how the conversation ended in my cruelty toward my mom again. I feel again the sorrow at the real differences that now exist between my mother and me, the frustration, the communication patterns we both have–interrupting, reacting, forgetting, repeating, missing. I feel sorrow often for what I now recognize as not appreciating her sacrifices enough, and in some ways resenting them, sacrifices which she has never asked that I appreciate.
But I do not want her self-sacrifice to be a waste, let alone to be a wound of mine. I find myself reaching toward the empty places of my childhood where I wish my mother could have been as Disa, or at least someone more like Disa, asserting herself rather than only on behalf of us, acting for herself instead of more often reacting to us. She was all over my childhood and also nowhere.
After dropping my mom and dad off, I arrive home unhappy, rattled, and crawl into bed in the afternoon. Time with my mother has exasperated me the way I already see Lydia beginning to be exacerbated by me. Lydia prefers her quiet, reserved dad who burdens her with less emotional energy, less questions, less comments, less requirements.
When I was a few years older than Lydia, I used to dream dreams about looking for my mother: Skidding across ocean waves on a speed boat; waiting for her long after school at the pickup place, sirens whirring in the distance; searching jungle caves filled with tigers; driving on a bus on a dock running forever over a stormy ocean in the rain. I remember these dreams even now. In these dreams, I never found her.
But after that afternoon, after crawling into bed after fighting with my mom, after days and weeks pass, I think about her as Abigail. Not the character, that complicated, fascinating bitch. But the actor. I imagine my mom on stage. Not Disa Joplin. My mom. I imagine her in the spotlight. I see her eyes, her curled fingers around a microphone. She sings the way she used to sing “Landslide” in her low, sonorous voice. And I listen. I only listen. I watch her, tears in my eyes. There she is.
For Lydia, esp: Have you ever thought about why your fingers wrinkle in the water? Why your toes do too? Or why only your toes and fingers wrinkle, but not the skin on your legs or tummy? In another life, do you think Lydia was a fish?
Sometimes when I see someone fall or get hurt in real life or on film, my butt and pelvic floor tingle and contract. Apparently, this is a common enough thing in humans. I listened to a whole podcast episode (Thanks for sending, Courtney!) investigating people who also have their butts or other body parts tingle when they see pain. I can’t remember what this podcast ultimately concluded, but I remember these takeaways: (1) butt tingling people aren’t necessarily more empathetic than non-butt tingling people; (2) we don’t know why this occurs in some people, though I think the episode describes how, but I can’t remember the technicalities or specific brain language; (3) butt tingling and other body tinglings happen more commonly than you’d think! Drop a comment if you’re a butt tingling subspecies of human because this matters more than anything else said in this essay! (I’m still looking for the link!)
Your identity is a story you tell yourself. The Gray Area with Sean Illing.
See “Bitch: On the Female of the Species” by Lucy Cooke and then read it because it is AWESOME
I have always wondered what “worth it” meant! I love my children and I like them and want them, but I can’t tell you if they were worth it. I can’t quantify my children’s worth like that. I don’t know exactly what they are “worth.” Not my sanity, which I did give up for a time. Two things can be true at once: I love them, and I suffered greatly after giving birth to them.
Oof. This is immaculate.