Limitation
I was born with ink in my veins instead of blood. Coal black, pulsating and vibrant, it coursed through my body and filled my mind, making me scream with agony as an infant. Everyone mistook it for colic and treated me accordingly. Really, what I needed was darkness and quiet, so that I could think, and later so that I could write.
The passion to write is an ancestral legacy bestowed upon me by my great-grandmother, Georgia, and her daughter, Dorothea. Both writers, but neither associated with the fame or recognition that might have graced their lives or justified their actions. The literary road they traversed was badly overgrown, and strewn with the remains of despair, loss and failure. Their words haunt me and beg me to take heed:
Life, I was given.
I made of it what I could;
not what you would have made,
nor or even what I would;
only what I could,
what I could.
This is the first stanza of a poem called, “Limitation”, written over sixty years ago by Georgia. They are the words of a woman who lost two of her sons, one to death by drowning, the other to suicide; they are the words of a woman whose husband took a mistress, gave her all his love and in the end all his money; they are the words of a woman who frequently feigned ill, retreating to her bedroom for days on end with “spells”.
Georgia’s poetry is stuffed into an old brown suitcase next to my desk, a reminder of someone close to me who traveled the literary road before me. Though her work was published here and there, it is clear from her poetry that she was a frustrated writer. In 1932 she wrote,
Life is an unsolved riddle, so it seems,
Where one is often robbed of sweetest dreams.
Is it to prove the metal tried by fire
That one must lose where one did most aspire?
Within that poem, called “Life’s Riddle” she states,
we no longer wish
For what has proved impossible. We strove in vain.
Was all denied for good of others?
This dilemma, so common to women then and now, drove my grandmother into her room. How else could she have survived and maintained her sanity but to cull out a place to write and grieve and reflect upon her life’s limitations. I imagine it took tremendous courage for her in the midst of infidelity and death to find her own voice. Or perhaps writing was what spared her from severing her own life cord. The power and magic of words charmed her and held total despair at bay. Each word transforming her pain into something hopeful and full of meaning.
“Artists require firstly space,” wrote Georgia’s daughter, and my grandmother, Dorothea. She too, wrote poems. Hundreds of them. She also painted and sculpted. But like her mother, she was destined to fall short of her goals as an artist. In her case, it was her love of a Polish composer, eighteen years her senior and the birth of their son, that caused her to detour. In spite of years of training, and work, she put her career second, her needs third, her life at the bottom of her family’s list. There simply was no space for her.
“In love and in motherhood, woman is acted upon by others,” Dorothea wrote. Not much different from her mother; their similarities in fact, eerily alike. In her case, her husband did not take up a mistress, instead, after the birth of his son, he took up residence in a separate bedroom. To her, an act, that must have felt like total abandonment. It is important to note that her husband, Felix, was a virgin at forty when they married. Sex, snuggling up with a loved one in bed, passion between two souls, was not in his repertoire.
Society dictated that Georgia and Dorothea choose their family over their art, resulting in intense frustration and half-baked attempts at creative expression. Their self-denial and poor marriages open the door for endless questions: Must one make a choice between creating art and nurturing a family? Are artists bad candidates for marriage? Does having a good marriage necessitate trading one’s creative passion for random mediocrity?
It is a recurring theme in my life, this balance of writing and family. For my own parents, each represents the opposite choice. My father chose his song writing and music over his family. He died young, drug addicted, and full of grief over his self-inflicted estrangement. My mother, on the other hand, gave up a bright future in dance, when she became pregnant at twenty-two, after eighteen years of lessons and hard work. While she mourned the loss of her art, she eventually accepted her choice, and now she celebrates her children’s and grandchildren’s lives.
My dilemma is to find a happy medium, to take the road that exists between my parent’s extremes. I search through Georgia’s and Dorothea’s words, gathering up the clues of lives unfulfilled and seldom rewarded. I ingest their poetry until it becomes part of me; its fibrous mass courses through me, a rough reminder of the need for a balanced diet. I gain fuel for my vision of myself as a writer. I give voice to their enforced silence. I strive to become the writer they were never allowed to be.
Dark, silent rooms still soothe me and quiet my ink-stained heart. So does the softness and honey-sweet smell of my son’s flesh. It’s hard to make a choice. I often stand at the fork in the road, in limbo, wishing I had a better map. I long to write; I need to mother. Common sense prevails mostly. The rest of the time I resort to gambling, and toss a coin.
