More Ocean Than Firm Land
More Ocean Than Firm Land
The art of mothering teenage daughters
Dear Reader
Are you raising a daughter in this complicated time? What is this time like for you? Is it harder than you imagined it might be? Are you less equipped for it than you hoped to be?
This newsletter goes out to you.
Moment
Clear moments are so short.
There is much more darkness. More
ocean than firm land. More
shadow than form.
- Adam Zagajewski
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Taming of the Shrew
Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. I write semi-regularly for other publications, including The Guardian and I enjoy that very much, but whenever I see the comments section, and I try not to, I am reminded how difficult it is to write for a wider audience who may not get you1..or more specifically, may not want to get you. How liberating it is to write for people who choose to specifically read you. So, thank you. I appreciate it.
Here’s my latest article for The Guardian. It’s about the awe of travel and how that helps you see how small you are, and that your family is not the only way of doing things.
Speaking of personal writing and audiences, this interview with Tedra Osell (feminist mother writer hero of mine) is particularly interesting for what she goes on to say about why blogging died - the end of the Google Feed Reader and the monetising of blogging, but also the taming of raw writing. If you want to skip to that bit it’s at the 51 minute mark. Listen to Tedra talk about the emergence of genre conventions in personal essays (largely written by women) and how that effected raw, open writing, as well as the importance of being a good, sympathetic reader.
So, here’s to newsletter and the opportunities they present for preserving raw writing and sympathetic reading.
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Amidst It’s Perils
I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into it’s expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it’s perils.
- Jane Eyre2.
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Most of My Mistakes with Parenting Teenagers
In reflection, most of my mistakes parenting teenagers happen when I try to move them from their positions towards compromise and, I don’t go slowly enough.
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Mothers With Power
The Rape of Proserpina (1595) by Joseph Heintz
I have been drawing strength lately from the Goddess of Demeter. She is one of the few mythological women who gets the opportunity to use real power. And she wields it against men who are treating her teenage daughter like a play thing.
It has been more difficult than I expected to be the mother of a teenage girl, particularly in a time like this. We are a generation of feminist mothers who had to fight to become feminists. Most of us did not grow up in an era when our mothers yet identified with the term. We raised our children in feminist practices. We held a lot of hope. And so, to find ourselves releasing daughters to a world where they turn out to be just as vulnerable to manipulative boyfriends or predatory older men as we were, to find some of them grappling with a place where abortion is once again illegal? It’s not sad, it is rage-inducing!
There aren’t enough stories of mothers with power who get to fight back.
I love this painting by Heintz of the abduction of Demeter’s daughter, Persephone/Proserpina because all hell has broken loose. You might think it is fear of Hades, the god of the dead that has everyone cowering. But it is Demeter’s fury. Her wrath threatened to destroy the world. It was an incredibly symbolic victory - maternal vengeance too strong for Zeus, literally the god of thunder and lightning and the father of men.
Adrienne Rich3 in Of Woman Born said of the Demeter/Persephone myth that it signifies every daughter’s “longing for a mother whose love for her and whose power were so great as to undo rape and bring her back from death” as well as “every mother’s [longing] for the power of Demeter [and] the efficacy of her anger”.
Look at the anguish in Demeter in the 1906 painting by Evelyn De Morgan .
Despair has knocked Demeter to her knees. She is experiencing the horror of grief - there is life before this moment and now there is life, forever altered, after it. I can’t look at this picture without tearing up at that mother’s overwhelming sense of loss.
But remember, she would not go quietly. Her rage was heard.
And Persephone is returned to her mother.
Look how weak and pale the daughter is after her ordeal. In Frederic Leighton’s painting from 1890 you can see how big this victory is for mother and daughter. This moment is a huge relief for us, too, after the agony of the ‘lost child’ story4.
The myth of Demeter and Persephone also celebrates the significance of the mother-daughter relationship in its transition to mother and adult child. There’s lots of tender depictions of this reunion in art…
But, you just know it was more complicated than that.
Below is a very similar scene, only this time it is At the First Touch of Winter, Summer Fades Away (1897) by Valentine Cameron Prinsep. I prefer this as a depiction of Demeter and Persephone in the days after their reunion.
Mothers and daughters reconnected, but still doing all that work of teenage individuating and mother-redefining in their relationship!
So much letting go. So much.
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Daughters Fighting with Mothers
Did you see Everything Everywhere All at Once? It’s an absurdist martial arts multiverse story, but it is also middle aged motherhood on film. Could a mother and teenage daughter’s fury with one another destroy us all? But also, is a mother’s love enough to save a daughter?
I sobbed through parts of this film, even though it is broadly comedic. I had to cry in this very awkward, silent way because I took my teenage daughter to see the film with me, and nothing makes teenagers more angry than their parents being too sentimental about them.
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Daughters Avoiding Fighting with Their Fathers
The land of Sussex runs through my veins and so, I have an affinity for our patron saint of family estrangement5, and I am always looking out for nice finds for those of you who have also experienced family estrangement. So, with that, I recommend the latest Joachim Trier film, The Worst Person in the World. It’s a nuanced Norwegian film exploring themes of young adulthood through the eyes of a young woman flip-flopping her way through career paths and relationships. Why might she be flip flopping so much? Mostly because life is messy. But also, could she have a daddy issue or two going on? Why yes. The scene in this film with her spectacularly under-performing, semi-estranged father on her 30th birthday is perfect!
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I Don’t Know What to Tell the Kids About Why You’re Not Coming Home
It’s just magical to see art referencing your own familiar places, particularly when it doesn’t happen often, which is the case for me. Here’s the gorgeous, queer alternative country band, Suicide Country Hour with a song set in the Darling Downs, a farming district not so very far from my city. They’re about to launch a new record.
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As I Was Saying
On her seventeenth birthday I tossed my tarot deck down and a single card fell out upright. It was an incredibly auspicious card for my daughter’s final year of childhood. The death card. A time of transformation and letting go of the past to welcome possibilities of the future.
Six months later she drew a card from my tarot deck and turned it over. The upside down death card. Ah, resistance to change, I said.
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Disappear Into a World of Abstractions
Bless my friend, Antonella Gambotto-Burke for writing about the awkwardness of falling in love in middle age and contending with resentful teenagers at the same time. And full marks for bravery in also giving her sixteen year old daughter right of reply in the article.
Mum has always been an enthusiast — at her best she’s a carnival, impossibly happy — but it can feel like she’s shoving Gavin down my throat to make me like him, rather than allowing our friendship to evolve naturally.
I like that he has more progressive views and is clearly more grounded than my mother, who can disappear into a world of abstractions.
The thing that weirds me out is how fast they’re moving. I get that they’re old, but shouldn’t she wait a year or two before getting so serious?
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Recommended to Train
I really rate Beckman’s Dog Training videos on YouTube. He’s great!
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Recommended to Join
Did you know Brisbane has a film society? You can join it and help ensure interesting and important films get screenings. Membership gives you entry to all their screenings, and films are shown roughly fortnightly across the year. Container: Brisbane Film Society.
Please don’t ever tell me about the comments on my articles. I honestly prefer to write without the noise in my head.
I saw the shake & stir theatre production of this book recently, and it was such a pleasure to watch.
Adrienne Rich and Andrea O’Reilly are two of my biggest feminist mother heroes. Proud to count Andrea as a friend these days, too.
Question about pop culture. Why are so many of the big popular stores these days ‘lost child’ themes? I could barely watch the first season of Stranger Things and Dark because I get too upset and yet I can tell the stories are not intended to be that weighty.
Hi to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Thank you for this perspective on Demeter! I found your blog so helpful in finding my own identity as a parent of small children, so I’m glad to see you tackling teenagers as it’s certainly a period of all kinds of letting go. You seemed to advocate for not holding on too tightly in the first place when children are small, so I look forward to reading more of your writing.
I regularly go back to this poem by Irish poet Eavan Boland on the same theme:
The Pomegranate
The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.
I couldn't even breathe I was crying so hard through the last 45 minutes of Everything, Everywhere. It's a miracle I still have operational tear ducts.