This weekend in England is Mothering Sunday, when, traditionally, young women in service were allowed to return home to visit their mothers. To mark the day, a guest post from Bethel McGrew, about her mother’s mother.
It’s about finding out where - and who - you come from, and the sometimes agonising choices mothers make about how best to love their babies. It made me cry. If your mum is alive, give her a call this weekend.
The Mother’s Mother’s Tale
My mother’s mother always wanted to learn to dance. When she was a child, she begged and pleaded for ballet lessons. But she was refused. Dancing was immoral, she was told. It exposed a woman’s body to public view.
She grew up on an island, she would later say: Christian Island. It was the island her parents built, because they hoped to keep her unspotted. They hoped to keep her safe.
It was the most miserable of times. It was the most wonderful of times. School was the miserable times. School was where she was Different. “Remember,” her mother would say, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words…” But words hurt. They damn well hurt, and hurt like Hell.
But if she could only get alone, she could be happy. Curled up in the attic with a book, or tearing through the woods, shimmying up the tallest tree in the neighborhood to get close to a thunderstorm. These were the wonderful times.
Family Worship wasn’t so bad either. Particularly the part where her mother read aloud to her. They had a surprisingly wide selection on Christian Island—Beowulf, Dickens, Kipling, and more. It was here that she first learned what literature was, and what it meant to share it.
They called themselves “pre-tribulation Rapturists,” which sounded like some exotic bird of prey. They told her stories of the Hereafter. But she could never understand the appeal. It sounded like Christmas every day. And even at age ten, that sounded like a drag. Like being forced to eat chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It should have thrilled her soul. But as hard as she tried, her soul was not thrilled.
Then her father died. After that, she calls the rest of her growing-up years “The Fog Years.” She knows she was doing things in those years. This was when she learned how to sew, when she earned awards, when she won a scholarship. She just can’t remember them. They are lost to her.
Then, midway through her college education in San Diego, through a strange series of events, she found herself broke. And so she went to work.
“Work,” for a respectable woman in those days, was limited in scope. She squeaked by with secretarial jobs, at one point living in D.C. with three other girls and “4,327 cockroaches.” Then one day, with savings clutched in hand, she returned to California, determined to get that final blinkin’ year over with and get on with her life at long last, by God.
There was someone at the university she should look up, a D. C. friend told her. He was a visiting writer. An intriguing intellectual, they said. Someone who pushed the envelope. Someone who dared to say uncomfortable things out loud.
Not long after, she found herself invited to dinner, sizing up the man in the flesh—this eccentric character who could sometimes be spotted in late-50s Greenwich Village, glowering in a corner like a podgy Lenny Bruce. If she was honest, she was a little disappointed. He was already graying, old enough to be her father. But while she wouldn't call him handsome, he was, in some indefinable sense, attractive. He was as brilliant as they had said, and hyper-articulate. Words flowed out of him in a never-ending, outrageous stream of conversation. And he was a true believer. He believed he was one of the last fighters for the greatest cause in the world: free love. Free love, he swore, would set you free.
The more they talked, the more fascinated she became. He was Different. And he could tell that she was Different, too. But he didn’t push her away. He pulled her in. He made her feel welcome. He made her feel beautiful.
The signs were always there, she could say looking back. The verbal abuse. The megalomania. The Freudian obsessions. The way he was always a victim in his own story. At dinner parties, he would tell and retell the outrageous tale of how he was swindled out of a fortune on a new scientific method for determining the exact time of a woman’s ovulation, in partnership with Planned Parenthood’s Committee on Maternal Health. Something to do with PH strips and the acidity level of the cervix. The Indian government was looking into it, and their representative promised that it would make him filthy rich. But, so the story went, as soon as the representative realized the idea couldn’t be patented, the scoundrel stole it for free and disappeared. This was not the only story of its kind, but it was a favorite.
Soon, she realized two things. One, it was over. Two, she was pregnant.
There was the predictable intense unpleasantness, followed by the predictable charming apology. There were promises to send money from Paris, where he suddenly decided he needed to be with his dying ex-wife. But she knew better, by now.
She panicked, at first, like so many mothers before and after her. She considered her options. She lived a hop and a skip from the Mexican border. But when she dug further, she heard horror stories, from women who met her firsthand and said Don’t. Do not. So she made her choice: There was no way out but through. In calmer moments, she would come to feel a deep sense of peace, a sense that what she had done, she had to do.
Still, she knew her remaining options were limited. She knew she would struggle to find work as a pregnant woman. She recoiled from her mother’s first suggestion that she contact an adoption agency in L. A., which matched unwed mothers with wealthy families who needed a live-in maid. Eventually, she took the only slightly more palatable option of moving back to the Midwest with some of her own family. But it soon became clear that this wasn’t going to be a successful permanent arrangement. And so she moved on, drifting from temp job to temp job, cleaning, cooking, babysitting. Eventually, she landed with another single mother, living hand-to-mouth, but content in her own simple way.
All the while, her family assumed that of course she couldn’t raise the child herself. And all the while, he wrote her letters from Paris, demanding that she had to. She must not “sell our baby to ignorant strangers,” he insisted. “Any child of ours would have to be extraordinary. No ordinary family would know what to make of him, or her.”
She was told the baby would come in December. Five months into the pregnancy, she woke up abruptly and said to herself, “It’s a girl. And she will be born on the 9th.”
Through summer and fall she worked and waited, tossed and turned. She calmed herself with knitting and sewing. A little hat and sweater. A little dress in white batiste, smocked around the neck and cuffs in yellow and green.
One night, early in December, she had a dream, a dream so terrible she never told anyone what it was. When she woke up, she was grieving. But she was at peace.
She wrote a letter to Paris. The reply came back with a verse reference on the envelope. It was John 2:4, from the miracle of the wine at Cana, when Jesus turns to Mary and says, “Woman, what have I to do with you? Mine hour is not yet come.”
On December 8th, she went into labor. Slowly and manageably at first, until someone gave her a too-high dose of a strong drug that stopped labor. Then things happened very quickly.
The next few days are a blur in her memory. Figures in gowns came and went and talked amongst themselves in tones of hushed concern. Sometimes they stooped close to study her face. She couldn’t figure out why, or what it had to do with her baby.
Later, she would learn there had been some concern about the shape of the child’s skull. A genetic anomaly, they suspected. It left a dent in the forehead, which they took as a possible sign of mental handicap. “Are you sure?” they would ask the young blue-collar, red-letter Baptist couple in Chicago, before the papers were signed. “Yes,” the couple would say. “We are sure.”
By now, she could get up and walk a little. She asked the social worker if she could see the child. The social worker cleared her throat delicately. The received wisdom of the time was that a clean break was kindest for the poor girl. That way she could put the whole thing out of her mind as quickly as possible and move on.
My mother’s mother had never been one to accept received wisdom, and she would not begin now. So she asked again. Gently, the social worker refused again.
At this point in the correspondence, my mother’s mother writes succinctly, in a paragraph unto itself, “I raised hell.” Which, on reflection, she feels is the best thing that could have happened to her in that moment. She was awake again. She had something to fight for.
In the end, she won. She tasted victory on shaky feet, in a hallway full of Christmas decorations. She looked down into the odd little face for the first time, and the last. As she gazed, the baby began to stir and fuss a little. She touched her finger to the little hand. It curled around instinctively, holding tight. And as she bent closer, she whispered the first thing that came to mind.
“Be good.”
***
If you enjoy Bethel’s work, you can find more of it here, and she’s on X at @BMcGrewvy.
Thanks so much Mary! Also, a brilliantly chosen painting!
I’m glad she said good-bye to her baby. And said it by saying, “Be good.” I think my elders used to frequently exhort us children thus, back then. In reaction to the current advice I hear constantly, to Have Fun, and/or Be Safe, I have started telling my grandchildren to Have Courage and Be Good.
Thank you for a Good Story ❤️