Mother

The Empress and The Eight of Swords

The first paragraph of my mother’s 1976 book, Joan McElroy's Doll's Hose Furniture Book is telling and reminds me so much of her voice and ability to tell stories:

“I never had a doll’s house. None of my friends had dolls’ houses either, and I don’t think I saw one until I was in my teens. When I was a child it was wartime in London, and toys for children were very low on the list of priorities. Houses were being bombed, and I played out my fantasies, with my friends, in the ruins of abandoned houses.”

In some ways her whole life could be looked at as playing out her fantasies in abandoned houses. Maybe that is a good metaphor for all of us. We make do with what we have, and sometimes we get magic.

My mother was creative. In the back room of our apartment in New York, she had a giant table where she sat to work, whether it was designing crochet projects for Woman’s Day magazine, or sculpting heads for dolls in the image of Harry and Leona Helmsley for Harry’s birthday party she was mostly busy, freelancing and mothering me, with the ABC soaps line up on in the background, with a constant Kent III cigarette burning in the ash tray on her table. I usually got home from school in time for General Hospital

During the time my mother was working on her book, she was the most focused in her life, completely obsessed with getting every last detail right. Her work was absolutely impeccable. If there was a rug to make, she wove it, a book to make she bound it. Everything was created as it would be in real size, only miniature.

She came to me once and confessed she had cut up one of my baby blankets because she knew it would be perfect for the baby’s crib. Many of the items that ended up in the doll’s house were reminiscent of our lives in our apartment. But many were also from her imagination, a kind of fantasy family and fantasy domesticity—what would it look like to have the perfect family and the perfect home?

I am an only child. I have a half brother more than twenty years my junior, but we didn’t grow up together. My mother always said she would have loved to have another child, but that didn’t happen. In fact, I am the only child of two only children. As I reread the introduction to my mother’s book yesterday, I realized she was telling so many truths about her life in what was essentially a how-to crafts book. She says “I am a compulsive eater. I am a compulsive dieter.” She says this to describe two dolls sitting around a table laden with all kinds of food. They can sit and eat all day and don’t gain an ounce. That was certainly one of her burdens, attending Overeaters Anonymous, keeping detailed logs of her food and weight, judging each day’s success or failure by the number on the scale.

When I think of my Mum, these two cards pop into my head. The beauty, creativity, and power of The Empress, with the powerless Eight of Swords, who thinks her choices have run out, though her bindings are loose and may be escaped from easily. My mother embodied both of these cards. Her friends, which were many, saw her as The Empress, whether she was hosting a dinner party for Quentin Crisp because she thought it would be fun to write him a letter and invite him and he came. Or renting a house out on Fire Island every summer with all her gay male friends. She was the life of the party. And yet, and still, she was bound, trapped by her past, playing in bombed out houses in London, the daughter of Orthodox Jewish parents with little money and even less joy. She tried so hard to release that past, but as Bessel Van der Kolk wisely said, The Body Keeps The Score. She went back and forth to therapy throughout her life, but I think the a lot of the trauma of her past remained.

She was a good mother, all we mothers can ever hope to be. And she was a complicated person. And I really loved her a lot.

xoHanna