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For our final performance we decided to include an aspect of storytelling and share personal narratives of our mothers in order to try to relay the kind of intergenerational dialogue we'd experienced with regard to questions of gender and identity.

I wrote a poem about my mother as well as a narrative re-telling a particular story she'd relayed to me.

Mother, in Seven Parts 

I.

“Where did you dig him up?”

my mother asks me

as if he were a fresh sack of potatoes. 

II.

The first time I saw my mother

cry, she said she had just jammed her finger

in the door. She stood there, red,

holding her own hand furiously. 

III.

My mother and I stopped talking

the summer after I turned fifteen.

(My father and I had stopped talking

the summer after I turned nine.)

The house was pleasantly quiet. 

IV.

One winter, my mother told me

she was going to Thailand

on a business trip.

She saw the monks and

      rode an elephant.

I never forgave her for that. 

V.

I have my mother’s eyes.

I have my mother’s cheeks.

I have my mother’s breasts.

I do not have her hands, bones. 

VI.

My mother wanted to be

a pianist and an astronomer. 

VII.

The day I left for school

my mother took a road trip to Montreal.

She pledged to drive north until

she and her friend found good coffee

or bilingualism

or both.

She called to say goodbye (I love you);

I was still asleep. 
 

      I’d never really asked my mother what feminism means to her. She’d never witnessed it as the colorful spectacle of a movement it must have been here in the States. She doesn’t deem women’s studies – or gender and sexuality studies – to be subjects particularly worthy of her attention. She’d never been a vocal advocate of women’s rights because to her they are simply not a point of contention. She accepts what she perceives as “old-fashioned” sexism or misogyny that is inherent in the Russian culture with a wordless wave of dismissal. Whereas I view this as cowardice, a lack of a backbone, an infuriating silence on her part, she maintains that it is a battle better not fought, or rather, not worth the effort on her part. She knows better than to waste her time, she says.

      Practically all of her advice comes in the form of a cautionary tale. This irritates me because I find the method helplessly biased and inadequate, but mostly because it appears to be the only form of advice that gets through and stays with me.

      The last story she told me was about her friend Rita. Rita was her best friend in high school. She graduated at the top of her class and went to the most prestigious and impossible to get into University at the time: some scientific institute in Moscow, to study mathematical theory or something more obscure. Unsurprisingly, Rita was on the shy and quiet side and had little experience with men. Like many Soviet women, she suffered from the most debilitating of anxieties: ending up unmarried and childless – in a word, alone. The only difference between there and the States was that women were always expected to excel both professionally and in marriage. The concept of a “stay-at-home” mother didn’t really exist.

      Rita married the first man with whom she fell in love with and who, luckily for her, seemed to have fallen in love with her, too. The degree to which Rita was attached to this man, my mother says, was frightening and easily bordering on pathetic. He was a Romantic; he had very long hair, hanging down past his shoulders. He played the banjo for a living and lived in what must have been a maddeningly irregular manner. He would stay up late writing and composing. Then, his mood would change almost literally with the weather. He would brood and drink and disappear for days. He would cheat on her without even attempting to cover his tracks. But Rita continued to stay with him. They had one child – a daughter named Alexandra, who was exceptionally bright, no doubt taking after her mother. Rita continued to work long hours, flying from one foreign conference to another. But because she was the only breadwinner, they continued to live on just barely enough to get by.

      My mother visited her on Christmas one winter. She said that the one thing she remembers most clearly is the pained look of shame in her eyes. She said that her hands trembled as she served the few holiday-themed delicacies she’d bought, laid out on the appropriately fragile China. Her husband didn’t come home that night, but the next morning my mother walked into the kitchen to find him sitting in his bathrobe silently with a cup of coffee that Rita had no doubt prepared upon his return. Rita herself was standing behind him, lovingly brushing long hair and weaving it into a long braid. My mother said she’d never felt sadder or more disgusted in her life. She said she could feel her insides just shaking with anger.

      She said she hoped to God I would never end up like that. Her tone made it sound more like a threat than loving counsel, but in that moment I understood precisely what she meant and didn’t question it.

      I wonder now why it is that my mother didn’t explain to me Rita’s reasoning for staying with this man. She made it clear that Rita was not only miserable but blamed herself mercilessly for her senseless infatuation with this man when she was younger and her self-proclaimed “stupidity” for not leaving him when she could. But that was all I got in terms of an explanation. My mother also never once mentioned his name.

      There’s a poster in the Women’s Center that tells a story of a woman who was visited by Life herself in a dream. In one hand she held out Love and in the other Freedom. The woman chose Freedom and Life smiled and told her that she chose wisely because one day she will return to offer her both. The woman smiled back in her sleep.

      There are some lessons in feminism that transcend the boundaries of language and generation. There are things one can only properly enunciate in the form of stories, at once distant and eerily familiar, rather than through didactic utterances. These are the things my mother taught me.