Listen! I am not anxious. I am angry, resentful, spiteful, plagued with self-pity, frightened by death, but I am not anxious; not plagued by the worm Anxiety, which gnaws away at the foundations of female experience, so that the patterns of magnificence fail, time and time again, to emerge.
Don’t pity me, down here in my basement. Don’t blame yourselves for your neglect of me. Old woman and a nuisance. I am all right, I tell you. The worm is gone. I am everything disagreeable, but I am not anxious.
I feel no anxiety because I have no one to love. Parents, spouse, or children; above all, I have no children any more. They have grown up now. I have disowned them and they have disowned me. We are free of each other: I should be, and am, proud of that. We do not need each other any more.
There comes a time, when the Alaskan brown bear gets fed up with her young. She leads her brood to the top of a tall pine tree and leaves them there. She knows how to get down, but they don’t. By the time they’ve found out, she’s off and away, the other side of the mountain; and they do without her, well enough. They have to.
And she can live without the thought – are they all right? Where are they now? Altogether free from the instinctive anxiety that plagues the maternal life, animal or human. It starts before the child is born – will it have arms, legs, a brain? Will it be birth-marked, deformed, monstrous? Where are their teeth? Why don’t they talk? Why do they steal/lie? Why can’t they read? Why do they fight, why don’t they fight? Are they happy? Why can’t I make them happy?
There is no end to it.
Do you think I could be happy with my mother in the loony bin? Waking every morning knowing she was there? Myself part of her, never grown out of her, away from her, as I left my children free to grow away from me?
My children are ungrateful: they don’t care. That is my great reward. They are free.
Anxiety, I think, is part of women’s lives more than it is men’s. Men shake it off more easily: whether it is in their natures or the mere product of their lives today, how can I tell? I do know that the worm Anxiety snips some nerve in the minds of women, and keeps their heads bowed.