Born Breech into Covenant: the Experience of Mother

By Carol Bosworth

Each of us has a lifetime in which to discover our way to belong within our particular experience of times and events. Instead of an operating manual, our families and cultures give us expectations for who we are and what is our place in the world.

This is the story of my journey into the calling of motherhood that I did not understand and struggled to reject. Conscientious wrestling with the experiences of motherhood eventually taught me how entangled love and anger can be and how suffering is inseparable from both. Finally a deeper call to love confronted me.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 23, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462806911

Carol Bosworth

Carol Bosworth. From girlhood in the mid-twentieth century through to retirement in a new millennium, the author has moved through dilemmas of living as a working scientist struggling with marriage and child-rearing, as a lesbian in a straight world, and as a Quaker seeking God in a male-storied culture.

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Copyright © 2009 by Carol Bosworth.

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Contents

Preface to Memoir

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

This book is dedicated to Jeff and John, my two sons, whose lives have made me human and have taught me so much of what I know. They likely see all this differently than I have. All I can say is, Hi Guys! I love you!

Preface to Memoir

Each of us has a lifetime, short or long, in which to discover our way to belong within the particular times and events of our experiences. Instead of an operating manual, our families and cultures give us expectations for who we are and what is our role, our place in the world. In this writing I express my experiences as I discovered how these roles and givens were untenable for my life. Although I rejected my female role in mid-twentieth century American culture, my conscientious wrestling with the experiences of being a mother eventually taught me how entangled love and anger can be, and how suffering is inseparable from both.

This is the story of my journey into a calling that I did not understand and that I struggled to reject. Hunger for truth and personal wholeness helped me to persist and endure through the experiences into transformation.

This could be anyone’s journey.

Chapter 1

Honor the mystery that we encounter in the act of writing. This is a place where poetry and prayer meet. It takes faith to write the words you know are true, words you are certain that you mean, even when you have to admit that you do not know exactly what they mean, let alone whether they are literally true.

From Kathleen Norris,

Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith.

When I undertook this writing, I was surprised to learn how much it is a process of truth-seeking and truth-telling. Always, I had a powerful need to believe that truth about my life existed and that I had only to uncover the details and to explain connections, and there would be truth, clear and solid. I would know it and others could see, understand, and agree that this was the truth we knew out of our shared lives.

Writing family stories showed me the kaleidoscope that is my own truth. Details of memory are like glass shards that have many colors, emotional tones and meanings that shift about from one person’s view to another’s, from one time in my own life to another time. As I wrote, I had many unexpectedly heated discussions with family members over what was true or untrue about our lives, which had overlapped in time and place. We each thought we knew where we had been, what had happened, who we were; we discovered we did not have the same knowing. When such differences first became clear to me, I felt a strange terror as if waking from a dream into an unfamiliar world. If those things I thought had happened had not, was I still the person I thought I was? Over time, driven harder by my hunger for truth than by my fear of loss, I came to an inner place where these clashes barely scarred my sense of myself. I began to think I was finally secure enough to know who I was even while the facts danced around on mirrors, their images warping and fading into the unknowable. I thought I was finally safe enough and strong enough to rely on myself and to be a writer, a truth-seeker, and a teller of stories that are valid for my life.

My family stories flowed out onto my paper, startling me with their bravery, hopes, strengths, fears. The stories taught me about truths we live by, truths we think we have always known, truths we barely know, and truths I had lost all hope of knowing with any certainty though they had left their trail in my bones and heartbeats.

Then, after nearly a year of steady writing I ran into stubborn unproductive weeks. Day after day I thrashed at my desk and papers, seeking a way forward. On one particular day I began as usual at my cleared writing desk in the quiet morning hours. Shuffling pages I had written weeks ago, I reread to catch the thread to begin again, but nothing appeared to me. My mind was blank. My imagination was motionless, silent. Earlier, memories and perceptions of my life had flowed freely. Now only empty space lay here. Empty page. Empty spirit. Nothing.

How could something as full as my life suddenly feel so empty? The raw material of my life of over sixty years, as a woman in an age of so many social, physical, and spiritual revolutions, is surely enough grist for any writer’s mill. Nevertheless, my life’s meaning now had disappeared beyond my reach. I faced an inner emptiness, a desert place.

Such deserts had confronted me many times earlier in my life. Since I am a person who experiences God’s presence as silence and dark Nothingness, my mystic self recognizes deserts as a place where I usually begin a wrestling match within my being, much like Jacob wrestling in the wilderness with his midnight opponent. This wrestling always strips away my securities of old beliefs and limited viewpoint, and so I resist, hard. There, in the silence, I lose my bearings and my daily reasonable knowings, and in the darkness I lose my footing and fall away into a chasm. There God seizes me by the naked human material of my being, as if by the nape of my neck, and pulls me into a new knowing of reality, from God’s perspective. God’s truth then shifts my dimensions of self and spirit as if I have stepped from the desert edge into a different universe.

I am tired of deserts, my spirit whispered in my ear that one remembered day. I shuffled a few more pages, trying to step into a flow of story that could rescue me from this nothingness. I held my pencil and stared into the room around me. With my eyes set into blurred-focus daydream mode, I searched my imagination again for a starting place, to let flowing words carry my work forward and rescue me. I waited in vain. There is no escaping Nothingness when it chooses to present itself in your life.

I clutched my pencil for a shred of security as I faced this looming emptiness within me. So, God, I said in a voice trembling with unwillingness, what are you wanting me to know this time? Nothingness sat there, unmoving.

The next morning, as I waited in the silence of my morning prayer to clear myself for writing, the answer came. (I have learned not to be startled when answers come, though I have learned not to expect them on any schedule of mine.) The answer came in the form of instructions, a spoken order actually, that sounded within my head as if someone were speaking to me but not through my ears. Her voice, one I’d never heard before, said, You must know me as your mother. You must stop twisting away, pulling away from me. You must experience me as Mother, or you will never know how I love you—and that is what you need to know.

You must stop twisting away, pulling away from me. These words gave me a cold shiver. Among the few stories my mother told me about my early childhood was that I never, as a baby or a toddler, let her hold me or cuddle; she experienced me as one who pushed her away, from my earliest moments.

Now, having heard this same truth from God as Mother, I staggered inwardly as I saw that the path to the truth I needed lay in my difficult memories of being mothered by my earthly mother and in my conflicted experiences as mother to my own children. These experiences occurred long ago. To enter the truth of my self and all I have become, by this path of Mother, I knew I would have to return to memories, details of life history, and emotions that nothing on earth could make me wish to relive. But I looked at my blank writing desk, which had become for me a gateway to nothing, and I recognized why I had been so thoroughly stopped in my efforts to write.

It was clear to me also that my growing relationship with God was tangled up in my resistance to this work.

Slowly, with many questions and huge fears, I began the task before me. I turned first to search for the person who became my mother.

p.9. (1) Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith. p. 377 (Riverhead Books, New York, NY. 1999, paper.)

Chapter 2

SEARCHING FOR RUTH, MY MOTHER

There was a time when you were not a slave. Remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied . . . You say there are no words that describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent. (1)

—Monique Wittig

Ruth, my mother, was an invisible person to me, her first child and daughter. She filled her role as my mother right out in front of me every day for my first eighteen years of life—but the person she was, her loves and griefs and passions, she hid well. She hid them from herself too, probably, so that she could be an acceptable well-behaved wife and mother. The person I needed as my mother was never there when I needed her, though my physical needs were met with patience, grace, and kindness.

For me, that was never enough.

In my need for a mother I felt cut off from, I hurt deep within me and curled up my inner self into a tight ball of pain and fear and terror at my life. From my earliest memories until I was about thirty-five, I did this in silence because distress was not a permissible self-expression. Then I entered therapy seriously and discovered that I would never have from her what I most needed: she was unable to give it to me or to anyone. After that for ten years I grieved, deeply and with rage at the events of my life. Through those years, my mother and I tried to talk about our lives and what had happened to us. As a mother by then to my own two sons, I pulled her stories out of her over and over, seeking clues. We talked through the last years as she aged and was willing to share more memories finally. In her eighties she entered senile confusions; then my parents moved thousands of miles away where I could no longer visit easily, and her death finally cut off the flow of stories and any way to verify them.

My own mothering years have changed since then too. I am now an elder to my grown sons well into their own separate lives with their chosen partners. These lives I have lived—as daughter-child and as mother of sons—are now long past, and my earlier rage and grief are largely spent, burned out. I say this carefully. Deep issues can circle back, bringing surprises. The questions, however, remain: for my mother and me, what were our lives like and what happened to us?

I must sift old stories for clues. In my sifting, I have found the story of another Ruth, the Ruth of the Bible, for comparison to the stories of the Ruth who was my mother. In each of these two stories, I have sought the person and her life that were hidden in the words I was given.

Ruth 1-4. This is my interpretation of the story of Ruth in the biblical Old, or First, Testament.

In the countries of the Middle East after the return of the Hebrews from exile in Egypt, people lived in mostly rural tribal groups in a seminomadic and settled agricultural economy. Society was patriarchal, with men the owners of all property, including cattle, women, and children. Value of cattle and women depended upon productivity, measured by fertility and physical labor.

When Ruth (of the biblical story) had been married for ten years, her husband died. She had been his wife faithfully, though without children, and after his death and the death of his brother also, Ruth faced a time of decision: she could remain among her own tribesmen, or move to Bethlehem, in Judah, with Naomi her husband’s mother, then also a widow.

Naomi, returning to her kinsmen as a widow, could labor for her keep until death released her. Ruth might have chosen to stay among her kinsmen, but as a childless widow she would have been of no, or little, value, and her place would have been marginal and poor. Neither of Ruth’s two choices (stay with her kin, or follow Naomi to hers, in a strange place) were clearly easy.

Naomi at first tried to persuade Ruth to find a home among her own tribesmen in Moab, but Ruth persisted in her decision to come with Naomi, speaking these recorded words: Entreat me not to leave you nor to return from following you: for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. (Ruth 1: 16-17) In a patriarchal culture, where women were property and owned nothing of their own and had few choices they could freely make, this promise was made woman to woman, with only the human heart and a true spirit of love to seal the bond. This was Ruth’s free choice. All other measures of her life’s value were economic ones, related to the patriarchal customs and rules of kinship, which she had no power to affect or to choose among.

And so Ruth accompanied Naomi to Judah where they made their home among Naomi’s kin in Bethlehem. There, Ruth followed Naomi’s instructions for gathering food for them during the harvest of the village crops, and eventually Ruth came to the notice of a wealthy kinsman of her husband’s, named Boaz. By direction from Naomi, Ruth offered herself to him, and he then took her as one of his wives through a public purchase of a plot of land belonging to Naomi’s husband. By the rules of the time, the owner of the land also owned Ruth (the remaining woman of childbearing age. Sons born to Ruth then would inherit the land in the name of the former kinsman.) Ruth, though childless by her former husband, bore a son to Boaz. She was no longer without value by the standards of patriarchy. By her act of faithfulness to Naomi, she also secured a home for both of them in the land of Judah.

(End of biblical story.)

The