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| The Anger of a Child |
| 作者Author / Adrienne Rich 雅德里安．瑞奇 |
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The Anger of a Child
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| 1.
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It is hard to
write about my mother. Whatever I do write, it is my story I am
telling, my version of the past. If she were to tell her own story
other landscapes would be revealed. But in my landscape or hers, there
would be old, smoldering
patches of deep-burning anger. Before her marriage, she had trained
seriously for years both as a concert pianist and a composer. Born in a
southern town, mothered by a strong, frustrated woman, she had won a
scholarship to study with the director at the Peabody Conservatory in
Baltimore, and by teaching at girls' schools had earned her way to
further study in New York, Paris, and Vienna. From the age of sixteen,
she had been a young belle,
who could have married at any time, but she also possessed unusual
talent, determination, and independence for her time and place. She
read -- and reads -- widely and wrote -- as her journals from my
childhood and her letters of today reveal -- with grace and pungency. |
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| 2.
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She married my father
after a ten years' engagement during which he finished his medical
training and began to establish himself in academic medicine. Once
married, she gave up the possibility of a concert career, though for
some years she went on composing, and she is still a skilled and
dedicated pianist. My father, brilliant, ambitious, possessed by his
own drive, assumed that she would give her life over to the enhancement of his. She would
manage his household with the formality and grace becoming to a medical
professor's wife, though on a limited budget;
she would "keep up" her music, though there was no question of letting
her composing and practice conflict with her duties as a wife and
mother. She was supposed to bear him two children, a boy and a girl.
She had to keep her household books to the last penny -- I still can
see the big blue-gray ledgers,
inscribed in her
clear, strong hand; she marketed by streetcar, and later, when they
could afford a car, she drove my father to and from his laboratory or
lectures, often awaiting him for hours. She raised two children, and
taught us all our lessons, including music. (Neither of us was sent to
school until the fourth grade.) I am sure that she was made to feel
responsible for all our imperfections. |
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| 3.
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My father, like the transcendentalist Bronson
Alcott, believed that he (Or rather, his wife) could raise children
according to his unique moral and intellectual plan, thus proving to
the world the values of enlightened, unorthodox
child-rearing. I believe that my mother, like Abigail Alcott, at first genuinely and enthusiastically
embraced the experiment, and only later found that in carrying out my
father's intense, perfectionist program, she was in conflict with her
deep instincts as a mother. Like Abigail Alcott, too, she must have
found that while ideas might be unfolded by her husband, their daily,
hourly practice was going to be up to her. ("'Mr. A. aids me in general
principles, but nobody can aid me in the detail,' she mourned. . . .
Moreover her husband's views kept her constantly wondering if she were
doing a good job. 'Am I doing what is right? Am I doing enough? Am I
doing too much?'" the appearance of "temper" and "will" in Louisa, the
second Alcott daughter, was blamed by her father on her inheritance from her mother.)
Under the institution of motherhood, the mother is the first to blame
if theory proves unworkable in practice, or if anything whatsoever goes
wrong. But even earlier, my mother had failed at one part of the plan:
she had not produced a son. |
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| 4.
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For years, I felt my
mother had chosen my father over me, had sacrificed me to his needs and
theories. When my first child was born, I was barely in communication
with my parents. I had been fighting my father for my right to an
emotional life and a selfhood beyond his needs and theories. We were
all at a draw.
Emerging from the fear, exhaustion, and alienation
of my first childbirth, I could not admit even to myself that I wanted
my mother, let alone tell her how much I wanted her. When she visited
me in the hospital neither of us could uncoil
the obscure lashings
of felling that darkened the room, the tangled thread running backward
to where she had labored for three days to give birth to me, and I was
not a son. Now, twenty-six years later, I lay in a contagious hospital with my
allergy, my skin covered with a mysterious rash, my lips and eyelids
swollen, my body bruised
and sutured, and, in a
cot beside my
bed, slept the perfect, golden, male child I had brought forth. How
could I have interpreted her feelings when I could not begin to decipher my own? My body had
spoken all too eloquently, but it was, medically, just my body. I
wanted her to mother me again, to hold my baby in her arms as she had
once held me; but that baby was also a gauntlet
flung down: my son. Part of me longed to offer
him for her blessing; part of me wanted to hold him up as a badge of
victory in our tragic, unnecessary rivalry as women. |
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| 5.
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But I was only at the
beginning. I know now as I could not possibly know then, that among the
tangle of feelings between us, in that crucial
yet unreal meeting, was her guilt. Soon I would begin to understand the
full weight and burden of maternal guilt, that daily, nightly, hourly, Am
I doing what is right? Am I doing enough? Am I doing too much?
The institution of motherhood finds all mothers more or less guilty of
having failed their children; and my mother, in particular, had been
expected to help create, according to my father's plan, a perfect
daughter. This "perfect" daughter, though gratifyingly precocious, had early been
given to tics and tantrums, had become permanently lame from arthritis at twenty two; she
had finally resisted her father's Victorian paternalism,
his seductive charm
and controlling cruelty, had married a divorced graduate student, had
begun to write "modern," "obscure,"
"pessimistic," poetry,
lacking the fluent sweetness of Tennyson, had had the final temerity to get pregnant and
bring a living baby into the world. She had ceased to be the demure and precocious child or
the poetic, seducible
adolescent. Something, in my father's view, had gone terribly wrong. I
can imagine that whatever else my mother felt (and I know that part of
her was mutely on my side) she also was made to
feel blame. Beneath the "numbness"
that she has since told me she experienced at that time, I can imagine
the guilt of Everymother, because I have known it myself. |
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| 6.
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But I did not know it
yet. And it is difficult for me to write of my mother now, because I
have known it too well. I struggle to describe what it felt like to be
her daughters, but I find myself divided, slipping under her skin; a
part of me identified too much with her. I know deep reservoirs of
anger toward her still exists: the anger of a four-year-old locked in
the closet (my father's orders, but my mother carried them out) for
childish misbehavior; the anger of a six-year-old kept too long at
piano practice (again, at his insistence, but it was she who gave the
lessons) till I developed a series of facial tics. (As a mother I know
what a child's facial tic is -- a lancet
of guilt and pain running through one's own body.) And I still feel the
anger of a daughter, pregnant, wanting my mother desperately and
feeling she had gone over to the enemy. |
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| 7.
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And I know there must
be deep reservoirs of anger in her; every mother has known
overwhelming, unacceptable anger at her children. When I think of the
conditions under which my mother became a mother, the impossible
expectations, my father's distaste for pregnant women, his hatred of
all that he could not control, my anger at her dissolves into grief and
anger for her, and then dissolves back again into
anger at her: the ancient, unpurged
anger of the child. |
| 8. |
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My mother lives today
as an independent woman, which she was always meant to be. She is a
much-loved, much-admired grandmother, an explorer in new realms; she lives in the
present and future, not the past. I no longer have fantasies -- they
are the unhealed child's fantasies, I think -- of some infinitely
healing conversation with her, in which we could show all our wounds, transcend the pain we have
shared as mother and daughter, say everything at last. But in writing
these pages, I am admitting, at least, how important her existence is
and has been for me. |
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