Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

from No Place Like Home

LEATHA KENDRICK 325 FROM No PLACE LIKE HOME The American Voice (1999) It's August now. Two months since I started this essay. My daughters are home, briefly, between summer commitments and school. I cook. I wash. I set my real work ofwriting aside. Devoured by the all-consuming work of "caring-for"-that gaping maw ofgiving, a mouth like those eager ones that once enclosed my breast-I know again both the peace ofself-forgetting and the waiting that lies within it. "Home" suddenly seems a frayed and frowzy imitation of its former self. "Home-making is no longer my number one occupation," I laughingly apologize to an old friend who stops by to stay overnight. She and I both remember other days when keeping house battled with our need to prove we were more than "just housewives," even when that was what we mainly were. Without those struggles and the friendships forged with women during my children's infancies, however, I might still be very much the arrogant woman I was as a graduate student, unable to embrace the mundane messiness of mothering without feeling diminished by it. During the weeks when the girls are home, I write in thirty-minute snatches and jot in the margins ofnewspapers or on the back ofenvelopes in the kitchen. I read a lot (as if I were more "available" when absorbed in a book!). I am reminded ofmy high school days and my mother's absence, her body going through the motions. Books, alcohol, sadness, sleeping-there are plenty of ways to leave without going anywhere. Plenty of ways to be alone and have no solitude. My mother lived in a kind ofvibrating stasiskeeping a grip on herself so tightly the strain told on all of us. She didn't allow herself to consider what kind of life she might really want to have. Adrienne Rich says in O/Woman Born, "The quality of the mother's life ... is her primary bequest to her daughter." It reminds me ofJung's statement that there is no more powerful influence on any ofus than the unlived life of our parents. Most of us daughters struggle under the weight of the unlived lives of our mothers and of their unacknowledged woman-hating (a form of self-hatred), which are their primary bequests to us. I remember another August and my "beanfield epiphany": the smoldering weight of damp air, the falling dusk in the garden that seemed like an encroaching blindness, the sense oflifting something with my back as I stood up between rows and declared, 'Tve got to do something! I want to get an MFA." My husband, Will, picking beans a few rows over, was puzzled by this outburst. "Why would you want to do that?" he asked. Though I don't think 326 LISTEN HERE I ever adequately wove together all the strands ofregret I felt for my mother's life, and the fears for our daughter's future (that weight of my unlived life which I did not want any of us to bear), he did eventually understand that for me, at least, this was a life-and-death decision-it was my very existence at stake. And so I started offto seek my fortune-which for women is too often characterized as running away from home. I managed to keep all the balls in the air, to live my double life (writer/mother) without breaking apart (at least on the outside) or breaking anyone else. The benefits? Though I have gained no certain answers as to "the self," for my daughters at least there was some freedom from the demand that they justifY my existence with their own. Each of them has ended up choosing to go away to boarding school to finish high school-partly because my leaving convinced us all that there were many possible opportunities which had seemed beyond our reach before . Perhaps they will have the freedom and the courage to find their real work, to find a self and love her more quickly than I have been able to. Meanwhile, when we are together I experience moments of real, unconstrained joy-all ofus around the table some nights, the imagined weight of them in their beds, and those few unexpected moments of talk at odd times through the day. Even the endless laundry comforts me and makes me laugh at its recalled dominance-a real weight to be lifted over and over. I know it...