You might not have thought it possible to give birth to others before giving birth to oneself, but I assure you, it is quite possible; it has been done; I offer myself in evidence as Exhibit A.
— Sheila Ballantyne (1936-2007) American author
In the hospital just after Kate was born (November 1982)
Many women share a seldom-expressed yearning to be comforted. To be mothered. Coddled. Pampered. To be tucked in and softly reassured that we are safe, and everything will be alright. This voracious need, no matter what our age, is deep and palpable—and for most women, often unrequited. If J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is the little boy who never grew up, we are forever Wendy, eternally mending everyone’s shadows except our threadbare own. We are the ones who provide the tender, loving care to others: our children, their little ones, our elderly parents, our partners, our siblings, our friends, even, Tinker Bell.
I never really knew my mother, who died as I was finishing Simple Abundance. She was a complete enigma. A southern sphinx. But during my last visit with her, a few weeks before she died, although we did not know that at the time, she began telling me astonishing stories from her past. They were colorful tales of passion, risk, sacrifice, but above all, romance—the kind of stories I imagined the Danish writer Isak Dinesen might have told to entertain her soulmate Denys Finch Hatton, around an African safari campfire.
My mother, Drusilla Donnelly Crean, a nurse during WWII
….and the next morning, they were found in the room above the Blue Lantern, the dead child and the warlord…with Cheng Huan’s love gift coiled around his neck.
Exactly.
I found these stories so impossible to reconcile with the woman I called my mother that I seriously wondered if she wasn’t delusional rather than remembering, with an uncharacteristic candor and vividness.
Although I knew my mother had been an army nurse during World War II, stationed in England, I was now hearing recollections of courage and adventure, two qualities I had never associated with the woman who raised me—from driving makeshift ambulances in a night convoy during a bombing raid (I never saw her driving our car out of the driveway), to stowing away on a reconnaissance mission from England to France, so that she could be with her RAF pilot lover.
“Good Lord, Mother,” I admonished her. “You could have been killed or court-martialed. What were you thinking?
“I wasn’t thinking,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was feeling my way through life in those days.”
Because the woman I had known for more than four decades discounted, dismissed, or denied her feelings (and taught her daughters to do exactly the same), she suffered a crippling depression throughout her life. Left untreated, except with five o’clock cocktails, her despair eventually turned on her and then her family, until she became the incredible shrinking woman, her world reduced to a reclining chair in her living room. The patio, a distance of perhaps ten feet, became a journey too far to travel.
This did not mean that on the surface of her daily round my mother’s life seemed empty, at least not in the years when her family was young. She was one of the most creative women I’ve ever known, and when we were growing up, our warm, cozy, inviting home was a magnet for her husband, children and friends. Mother was a consummate decorator, wonderful cook, and marvelous hostess. She excelled at many handicrafts, from sewing to woodworking; her Halloween costumes were legendary and living up to the birthday parties she orchestrated for her four children, daunts me even in the remembrance. From my mother I first learned how a woman performs practical magic, turning lack into abundance with moxie and gratitude. She taught me how to spin straw into gold, what to do with a few loaves and fishes, and how rising to any occasion was a feminine art form.
Despite her inherent ability to create everyday enchantment, there was a boundary that my Mother never crossed physically or emotionally, and I, too, was taught not to cross it. A well-padded psychic perimeter surrounded what was possible in life and what was permissible even to dream of, and this dark kingdom of diminished expectations was guarded by the harpies of fear and intimidation. When I was in my twenties, I defiantly ran away from home for three years; first to London, then Paris and Ireland. I remember those adventurous days as learning how to “feel” my way through life, anybody’s life but my own.
Now that I’m able to finally reclaim my stories, with wonder, wistfulness and blessed relief that I lived to tell the tales, I finally know the answer to a question that has vexed me for twenty-five years.
Why did you write Simple Abundance?
Because I never knew my mother.
Because I wanted my girl to be able to know hers and be able to find me—any time she needed me— hiding in plain sight or in between the lines.
Simple Abundance is the longitude and latitude of a woman’s passion and desire, a daily compass point on the page. We can all pick up the tale, once we know how it begins. Here’s Isak Dinesen’s prompt:
“Cheng Huan lived alone, in a room on Formosa Street, above the Blue Lantern. He sat at the window and in his poor, listening heart, strange echoes of his home and country would rebound…”
Happy Mother’s Day, in memory or macaroni necklaces.
Dearest love to all the mothers out there, to those that have been and to those that will be.
Dearest blessings on our health workers and their families.
And blessings on our courage.
XO SBB