AVALON Blog Post 8: FOR OUR MOTHERS

FOR OUR MOTHERS

On the Occasion of Mother's Day

When I was a baby, my mother made a painting for me. In the foreground of this painting, a marvelous tree rises, purple grooves in the bark blossoming into jubilant heart-shaped leaves of pink and red. Under the tree reposes a unicorn, peaceful, red and purple like the tree, an evident guardian of mysteries. Behind the tree, atop a marvelous little hill, sits a marvelous little castle, bright yellow and red, flags flying. In the grass in front of the castle are five bright red flowers. I think they’re flowers. They could be stars.

It hung on my wall throughout my childhood. It is the best painting of all time, obviously.

*****

When we arrived at Gatwick on the first morning of our trip to the UK, my Mother and I picked up our rental car and got on the road to Coventry, where we would stay for our first couple of nights. We drove on the left side of the road, because that is how it is done in the UK. We had an intellectual skirmish with a road sign, which, coincidentally or not, is in the color scheme of the beloved Unicorn painting. Here is a question, one my Mom and I asked ourselves many times, that first day of driving:

What do you think this sign means?

I’ll tell you what my guess was—and I will freely admit that “guessing” is not the ideal method for interpreting road signs—but listen, it turns out I did not take the ideal approach to this particular driving situation! So! I’m looking at this sign with a beginner mind. And to me, it strongly suggests, “don’t go here!” Or perhaps, “Think twice! There might be some problems this way!” Or even “this area inhabited by red ‘X’-es, yikes!”

None of these is the meaning of this sign. Apparently, it means, “keep going, don’t stop here.”

So, we had some trouble with road signs that first day. And when I say “we,” I mean me, because I did all the driving, and I should add that I am not very good at not being very good at things, and was cranky about this whole unintuitive signage situation, and my Mom was very patient, something she excels at, for which I am grateful, from the bottom of my heart.

*****

When I was in grade school, my Mom stayed up late into the night, helping me finish displays for my science projects, in which I grew radishes in the dark, or hatched salamanders, and kept notes on their daily progress (they ate their little translucent eggs on the third day, and the radishes in the closet were tall and spindly, with tiny leaves, ghost-white). She planted carrots and lettuce and tomatoes in the back yard, and they grew, and we could actually eat them. She took me to vote with her, and let me push the voting lever when she was done—back when we had levers, and paper trails, a simpler time. She took me to protests, and rallies, and taught me all the time about kindness and citizenship. She sewed outfits for me and my brothers, and hand-knit an Irish fisherman’s sweater for my Dad, learning the intricate patterns. She spoke French and Italian and German and studied Spanish and Portuguese and Japanese. She played guitar and sang songs from the Joan Baez songbook. She played the piano. She read music, and Baudelaire. She painted, and drew, and created art, all while maintaining a humble insistence that she was only okay at all these things. She could, as far as I could tell, do anything.

My Mom is the first artist I ever knew, and I had the good fortune to meet her while she was creating me, giving me life. Can you imagine! On this Mothers Day, I am thinking about the woman who gave me life.

Thank you, Mom.

Also, this is her looking impossibly gorgeous in a bikini.

(Sorry not sorry, Mom! Happy Mother’s Day!)

*****

When we were at Stonehenge, and Tintagel, and Orkney, and Skye, my Mom made sketches. They are deft, charming, full of grace, like her:

Neolithic Houses at Stonehenge, by Eloise Bates

Stone Wall at Tintagel, by Eloise Bates

Palm Trees in Skye, by Eloise Bates

Sheep in Orkney, by Eloise Bates

*****

When we came down from the mystical tor at Glastonbury, we had dinner at a little Italian restaurant in the town at the base of the hill. The staff was all Italian, older gentlemen in crisp white shirts. My Mom ordered in Italian, and they all lost their minds. Sei Italiana?! They asked, delighted. “No, no,” she demurred, “ma parlo un po.” What are the odds of a mother and daughter from America on an epic journey through the lands of King Arthur, encountering native Italian speakers at the base of Glastonbury Tor, and having a chat in their mother tongue?

I’m not an odds-maker. But the lasagna was delicious.

*****

When we made it to our hotel in Orkney, after magic and mysteries and ghosts in Wales and two-way one-lane dirt roads, after lochs and highlands and toasties in the ferry office, and a pitch-dark white-knuckle drive over tiny island causeways…when we made it to our wonderful hotel, the Storehouse Restaurant with Rooms in Kirkwall, which I quite simply cannot recommend highly enough…when we arrived, we were very, very, very, extremely content.

Mother and daughter in Orkney after a thousand mile journey

*****

When we were in Scotland, somewhere—might have been Skye--my Mom told me that her friends back home in Portland, Oregon were wistfully jealous that she was going on this epic trip with her daughter. And almost in the same breath would come a caution—“but, you know, mothers and daughters…” The dread ellipsis. Mothers and daughters don’t really get along, do they?

Women don’t really get along, do they?

Is there some part of you that nods its head at that?

It's Mother's Day! Let's. Un. Pack.

Our culture takes for granted that women are competitive and naturally jealous of each other. Catty is the name, cat fights is the game. But why do we think so? Where does this insistent, pernicious idea come from? Is it just a fact, as many seem to believe? Or is it a symptom of something we might hope to cure? Writing about the witch trials of Europe in her devastating historical essay “This Is How They Broke our Grandmothers,” Natasha Chart writes:

To survive, women under the Inquisition submitted to isolating themselves away from the friendships of other women...They taught their daughters to do the same.

For hundreds of years, any woman could be taken away to jail to be tortured and sexually assaulted. Any women could be pornographically tortured in public before her execution, in front of her family if she had any.

Why didn’t she speak up? That’s why. Why didn’t she stand up for other women? That’s why. European men ritually abused women for expressing any social solidarity with each other, or independence for themselves, for generations.

Men forced women to testify against other women, even their own mothers, to live. Yet they still mock women as jealous and spiteful of each other, still joke about “cat fights.”

Deep breath.

In the highlands of Scotland, my Mom and I talked about mothers and daughters. "It doesn't need to be like that," she said. “I know!" I said. "We inherit this cultural legacy of strife, generations and generations of it,” I said. “So the work is hard. Let’s keep doing it!”

I learned how to do that from my Mom.

 

Mother and daughter in the highlands of Scotland

*****

When we were at John O’Groats, the northernmost point of mainland Scotland, we sat in a wee café and talked about Goddesses.

We talked about Mother Earth. About how strange it is, actually, for any religion to exclude the female from the divine. About how the early male archaeologists who found goddess figurines like the Venus of Willendorf concluded, absurdly, that they were “prehistoric porn”—so unimaginable to them was a spiritual system that deified the female, or that anyone but a heterosexual man might have been the artist who made the figure. But! Modern scholarship offers overwhelming proof, as Riane Eisler writes in The Chalice and the Blade, that throughout the ancient world there existed “a complex religion centering on the worship of a Mother Goddess as the source and regeneratrix of all forms of life.” 

tbh that sounds nice.

Making pilgrimage to ancient sacred site after ancient sacred site, my Mom and I talked about how the spiritual systems that existed in the time of Arthur and Morgan LeFay and Merlin—and had existed for millennia in the lands we were traveling—those systems honored goddesses as well as gods. Those systems gave mortal men and women equal access to the divine.

In AVALON, there is a moment in the heart of the play when the Holy Grail appears. The Player Queen takes us through the vision, and she asks:

This vision, that we all seek, what is it?

A hidden thing, guarded by wintry gate-keepers in its sealed case

Never to be touched, barely to be seen, locked away because we don’t deserve it, we dirty we

Or is it

What we call it

The cup of plenty

The cup of peace

Our shared loving cup, from which all drink equally

The gift, dare I say, of the mother

Of the fertile, abundant earth

Who brings forth the oak from the acorn, the flower from the seed, the child from the womb, spring from winter, bird from egg, butterfly from chrysalis?

Whose cup is it? Who cares?

Who

Cares.

In John O’Groats, it was Shrove Tuesday and they were serving pancakes. We didn’t have any, but we drank our espresso and looked out at the sea, and took a picture at the famous sign.

*****

Yesterday my Mom and I were texting back and forth about the Unicorn painting. I was less than a year old when she made it. How could she have known it would be so perfect for me? She texted, “Well you were a magical child and you made me think of fairies and their realm.”

All I care to say about that is that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Mother and Rainbow on the Ferry in Orkney

For my Mom, and all the moms, and the earth our Mother on this day, blessings! and thanks, and love, and a wish: may the gifts you’ve given return to you a thousandfold. Happy Mother’s Day!

AVALON will have its world premiere in August 2019, produced by Opera House Arts and staged in a site specific production at Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies on Deer Isle. All text and photos ©2019 Melody Bates. Learn more and support her work here.