The Mother-Artist

"Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me."

—Emily, in Our Town, by Thornton Wilder

Theoretical constructs occasionally spring to life in unexpected venues. Take Winnicott's notion of True and False Self . . .

The intense, much loved, and widely celebrated New York painter, Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007), was once welcomed onstage at a conference. Upon arriving at the podium, Murray told her audience how alienated she felt on occasions when she was publicly introduced. She always experienced difficulty recognizing herself, she confessed, in the strange pictures that formed in her mind while she stitched together the patches of information furnished by strangers' recitals of her accomplishments.

As I sat in the dim hall listening to her words, I began to re-envision my mother—of years ago—and uncanny sensations returned.

She was a mother-artist. I do not mean to imply by this that she painted or played the piano (although she did both) but rather that she spent her days creating her children. My mother did so in part by focusing her attention on the details of our appearance. Not a speck escaped her gaze. She carefully dressed us—my younger sister Connie and me—in pastels, plaids, and pleats, in neatly ironed dresses and pinafores, with evenly turned-down socks and freshly polished shoes to go with them. After brushing and braiding my long brown hair and tying the plaits with ribbons, she twirled my sister's blond locks into corkscrew curls. She taught us to sit with our legs close together, crossed at the ankles, and our backs straight, elbows off the table. I was admonished to move my soup spoon in an "away" rather than a "forward" motion and never to stare. I was meant to be polite to strangers and forbidden to use an entire roster of "bad" words.

The little girl my mother saw before her when she studied me critically each morning before I left for school was a different child from the one I really was. I knew and recognized the perfect little stranger who existed in my mother's mind, but to me she seemed a phantom—an enemy or a guest. I did not even want to be her except once in a while when the stakes were high (as when there seemed to be the chance of sitting next to a favorite uncle at dinner or of receiving an elaborate gift). Inside the envelope of skin scrubbed pink by my mother resided a lumpish child—messy, willful, errant, forlorn, and passionate—who felt rebellious, hectored, and wishful all at once, and also fiercely stubborn.

Somehow, listening to the artist describe her discomfort at being introduced in public helped me to formulate a new idea about why I was often naughty and disobedient, hellbent on provoking my mother. What Elizabeth Murray taught me by her avowal before the audience, I realized suddenly, was that the child I was inside must have been trying desperately to get my mother's attention and make her see through the camouflage of ribbons, lace, and starch. I wanted her to notice and to find me as I really was in my own head—feisty, insolent, unlovable, messy, but clever too—and to love me just the same. To love me for my imperfections, not in spite of them or while denying their existence. But children's misbehavior produces disastrous results. In the grief-filled moments that inevitably follow disobedience, one does get seen, at least momentarily. But not seen with the unconditional love that is craved.

By the time adulthood came in sight, my mother-artist had succeeded. She had molded me so thoroughly that I actually wanted to be seen in costume. Sophisticated adult equivalents of patent leather mary-janes, crinolines, and saddle shoes were indispensable. By then, I was convinced that actresses are loved

Figure 1.

"Gerda and the Little Robber Girl," by Arthur Rackham, 1932. Courtesy of the Mt. Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.

only when they are on stage. Eventually...