I wrote the following essay in response to this assignment that I gave to my Fibre Arts seminar: “After reading Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” due for today – write an essay in which you consider the vehicle(s) through which your mother expressed her creativity, and how this is important to you and your own development.”

“In Search of YOUR Mother’s Garden”

2 October 2007

By the time my mother died, at 61, her garden had also shriveled up, withered, and died.  A vital, warm, outgoing, unusual, dramatic woman, a remarkable teacher, a memorable character even, by the time of her death, her ability, desire, her will to create, to engage with life creatively, had headed south.  She had become so suffused with bitterness that I believe that she had lost the path to her garden – to her source of creativity, the psychic spring that fed her soul.  In fact – one could suggest that along with her inconceivably high blood pressure, and her alienation from her daily life as represented by the opposing forces of her mother and her husband – it was the loss of that garden that led to her death.

I have never had another strong female mentor because the presence of my mother was so strongly felt in my life. In Faith Ringgold’s story quilt “Harlem Renaissance Party,” Celia the daughter of CeeCee, an original who gave vivid performances during dinner parties, is mortified by her mother’s displays.  To me too, my mother’s passion, her efflorescence was also often an embarrassment. Her wild hats. Her insistence on having conversations with strangers. Her habit of breaking into stanzas of poetry at the dinner table.  The time she barged into a hotel kitchen because she believed they were serving instant coffee, rather than brewed, as they claimed. These were not traits displayed by “normal’ mothers of my compatriots.

I also found her physical body hard to take. Perhaps she aspired to a certain stylish look, predicated on her professional persona – but this was not evident to me. Her bulging belly. Her clunky underwear. Her closet full of dowdy suits. Her unusual collection of hats, one described by a student of hers as “an upside down flower pot.” Her non-hairstyle – and the fact that she insisted that I emulate her look.  These were certainly not endearing to me, especially as I tried to find my own way as an embodied female.

But I think that these traits related to the fact that she privileged the inner over the outer, mind over matter.  She was shrewd, verbal, articulate. She loved books. She loved to read. She had almost earned a Ph.D. in medieval English literature.  Perhaps she only sporadically wrote poetry, but she had the soul of a poet. And she was passionate about life. She didn’t do it half way. She embraced people, food, theatre, literature. She was a sucker for life.

But then she stopped.  It stopped. “”My way of life has fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf” she wrote to me, quoting MacBeth, only two weeks before she died.

Of course it’s that thirst for life that I’ve inherited. No matter how down, how whiny I get, in the end, the allure of the actual pulls me through. The flit of a butterfly. The smell of a roasting apple. The call of a chickadee. The rich orange of afternoon light. All that, and the irresistible urge to find out what happens next.