Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies 5-2009 The Cult of True Motherhood: A Narrative Jacoba Lynne Mendelkow Utah State University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Mendelkow, Jacoba Lynne, "The Cult of True Motherhood: A Narrative" (2009). All Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 383. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/383 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE CULT OF TRUE MOTHERHOOD: A NARRATIVE by Jacoba L. Mendelkow A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE in American Studies Approved: Evelyn Funda Melody Graulich Major Professor Committee Member Christopher Cokinos Byron Burnham Committee Member Dean of Graduate Studies UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY Logan, Utah 2009 ii Copyright © Jacoba L. Mendelkow 2009 All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT The Cult of True Motherhood: A Narrative by Jacoba L. Mendelkow, Master of Science Utah State University, 2009 Major Professor: Evelyn Funda Program: American Studies This thesis consists of five chapters including a traditional introduction and four chapters, which investigate cultural interpretations of motherhood within the genre of memoir and personal essay. In the introduction, I discuss my research as it relates to the larger collection and detail how this work is different from other works within the “mother memoir” genre. Chapters II thru V, then, are all essays which begin to explore the major themes of cultural motherhood: ambivalence, loss, legitimacy, morality, and sin. These chapters, especially chapter II, identify and detail the traits of true motherhood as patience, compassion, sacrifice, and strength. Chapter V, as the culminating chapter, places me, as writer, in a different position—as a reader—and I begin to understand my history as a parent and as a writer through these texts. Using literature as an area of personal research and recovery, I reconstruct my past as a child and a parent and begin to understand what it means to be a mother—or at least, to better understand the expectations of those who surround me. (97 pages) iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to thank my wonderful and supportive professors: Evelyn Funda, Chris Cokinos, and Melody Graulich who bravely allowed me to write and learn what it was I wasn’t sure I knew. I’d also like to thank the many professors at USU who did not sit on my committee but were in my corner and cheering me on each step of the way. Thank you all for your encouragement. My daughter and husband have become my backbone and my cheerleaders. I am grateful for their strength and love. It is because of them that I had the courage to attend graduate school, and, it is because of them that I’ve been able to finish. Thank you for eating microwave dinners and frozen pizzas for the past three years. And thank you for only complaining when carrying all of my weight became too heavy to handle. To my students who taught me so much and required of me so very little, thank you for changing my beliefs about the world. And to my friends who require of me very little and provide me with laughter and strength. Finally, I thank my mother for teaching me the complexity of heart and humanity, and for showing me that we aren’t so far away from the people we believed ourselves to be all along. Jacoba Mendelkow v CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ……………………………………………………………... iv CHAPTER I. PRELUDE ............................................................................................................. 1 II. PEARL .................................................................................................................. 4 III. THE CULT OF TRUE MOTHERHOOD ............................................................ 7 IV. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS ...................................................................... 31 GOAT’S MILK ...................................................................................... 31 FOR MY FATHER ................................................................................ 34 AMBIVALENCE ................................................................................... 40 SCARRED ............................................................................................. 46 SAGE ...................................................................................................... 59 V. (RE)READING LEGITIMACY ......................................................................... 71 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 92 CHAPTER I PRELUDE I categorize my life into three parts: before age 12 when my father moved out, until age 17 during the fallout, and age 17 when I gave birth a week after high school graduation. Everything else, as those “No Fear” t-shirts of the 1990s used to say, is just details. I used to teach creative writing to pregnant teenagers. They attended a school designed specifically for their needs as young mothers. A nursery took care of the babies, two teachers worked with each student to help her graduate in the shortest amount of time. Twenty students attended a school that was set up in the 1950s; I attended this school in 1999. And so I returned ten years later to teach these students the things that I’ve learned in all my years as a writer and a person—after all, I come from their experience, I have survived, and I believed that I could teach them all of this in ten weeks. These young women taught and influenced and humbled me—they asked me questions about being a mother, about raising a daughter on my own; they asked me about my relationship with my parents and about writing. They asked me about writing in my past—and I realized then that perhaps I dwell on yesterday’s experiences, perhaps I should write about the now. The essays that follow do not exist in a chronological space: I rarely see my life and experiences as chronological. However, the essays fit into categories of time, and like my own memories, these essays exist in both present and past tense. “Pearl” tells of a conversation with my mother eight years before the end of the story is written in the 2 present day. “The Cult of True Motherhood” is perhaps the most “past-based” of the essays collected here—but as we are creatures of experience—the past cannot exist without memory in the present, and the past is perhaps my biggest influence. That said, however, “Sage” and “Scarred” in the “Selected Readings” section are the most present- date of this collection. I have attempted to move beyond yesterday, but it seems that in moving forward and writing things down, I may be forgetting myself. I must work harder than others to make beauty from pain and misery and to build up from this place takes me a lot of time. Here are the things you need to know: when I am two years old, my family leaves Nebraska after losing our farm. This is 1983. My father had, by this point, already began and ended his first affair. When I am eight my father baptizes me as a member of the Mormon church—by this point he had begun sleeping with his secretary and had others have known this, he’d been unable to dunk me in the water to receive the gift of the holy ghost and all of God’s blessings. When I am eleven and ten months, my mother finds my father’s pick-up truck in his secretary’s garage—he moves out the next day. In June of that year, my parent’s divorce was final and my father married her. They’ve been married since. When I am seventeen I meet a boy with a loud pickup truck and green eyes. A week after we begin dating, we have sex in the bed of that blue pickup truck. He was high. In six weeks I am pregnant and six weeks later, I am married in a church gymnasium in a homemade dress. Five days later, my husband leaves for California and Marine Corps bootcamp. We will not live together for nine months and I will live with my mother in the interim. 3 My daughter is two when I leave her father. We have both had enough—enough of each other and the toxicity that we created. It is November when I drive from California to Utah. I live with my mother for two months. During this time she calls my daughter Pearl. I begin college in the spring of 2002. I graduate in 2006. I meet my new husband in December 2005; I marry him in September 2008. I do things right the second time around. I teach teenage mothers how to write in 2009; they teach me how to be a human being. They teach me to forget fear and exist. I teach them grammar. 4 CHAPTER II PEARL Pearl, age 2: My mother, the English teacher, tells me this baby is my “Pearl”—not a semi-precious stone, a symbol of virginity (my virginity), not an item of worth, not like the “Pearl of Great Price”: a name for Jesus, a book of scripture. This baby is Pearl, the girl in The Scarlet Letter, the naughty child who doesn’t fit, the daughter of the whore with the scarlet A on her breast. I remind myself to love this baby born in the month of pearls, this child born under another moon. My mother calls my daughter Pearl and so, without saying the word, calls me Whore: bride in ivory, pearls around my neck, neck and chest exposed, translucent in florescent light, blue veins visible through thin skin. Pearl, 7 months: A single stone in a clam in California—a Sea World shopping center: guaranteed a pearl in each one. My husband takes me there for a pearl, the birthstone of the baby growing inside me, under my sweatshirt, under my skin. The baby is growing bigger; my feet grow too wide for my heavy soled shoes.