LIII
MY MOTHER left me her journals, and all her journals were blank.
My mother’s journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth. Without a shadow there is no substance. If we have no shadow, it means we are invisible.
As long as I have a shadow, I am alive.
The Woman Without a Shadow whose name is the Empress is not a human being, but a prisoner in the Realm of the Spirits held captive by her husband. We are all held captive by something.
My mother’s prison was her prescribed role.
My mother played a role.
Many roles.
Mother has a name, Diane Dixon Tempest. I will speak her name. She did not write in her journals, but she did write letters to her family and kept all her talks that she gave in church.
During the push for the Equal Rights Amendment, which she supported, she delivered these words to her community of women within the Relief Society:
It is important for women to be educated. I think it takes more know-how and courage to be a proper woman these days as never before. There is no excuse for an LDS woman not to know and understand the issues involved in the ERA…One of the good things to come out of Women’s Rights Movements around the world over the years is the intellectual awakening that has come to women themselves. The degree of our aliveness depends on the degree of our awareness…
In the just living of life, in the rush of days, it is so easy to get our priorities mixed. How do we find time through our busy schedule of being a mother and a wife to find self development for ourselves…
Do you ever wonder sometimes if your family thinks of you as a series of functions rather than a person…I go through phases where I stop and ask myself who really am I? Do I have my own identity besides being someone’s wife and someone’s mother? What should I become? What should I be doing now at this time of my life?…
“There are two important days in a woman’s life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.”
She then recounted the story of Mary and Martha:
Mary and Martha were good friends of Jesus. After Jesus entered their home, Mary sat at His feet and listened to His words, but Martha busied herself with preparations for their guest.
Martha, troubled about many things, had let her priorities become mixed. Preparation for the house had come before the more important priority: the visit of the guest himself.
I folded my mother’s talk and placed it in one of her journals she refused to write in. Through the years, she kept buying one after another, but just couldn’t write a word in them and remain true to herself. My mother’s journals are her shadow. They hold her depth and substance and her refusal to be known.
My mother refused her roles.
“I will not,” cried the Empress in the full power of her voice. She refused to drink from the golden fountain bubbling with the Water of Life, because it would have been at someone else’s expense. If my mother had written the truth of her life, she both believed and feared it would be at someone else’s expense. She did not want to hurt those she loved if her journals were read. And we are raised to believe our journals will be read by the future.
The future was a luxury Mother never had. She lived in the white-hot flame of each day. At thirty-eight, she faced her own mortality and lived until Hank, her last-born son, turned twenty. She finished raising her children, a vow she had made to herself.
The will of women is the will of Life.
The last lines of Strauss’s opera Die Frau Ohne Schatten are sung by the unborn children: “Mother…the trouble that perplexed you…Would there ever be a feast if we were not, secretly, at once the guests and also the hosts!”
The nature of living and loving is the act of reciprocity. As women, we are told that to be the guest is to receive. We are told that to be the host is to give. But what if it is the reverse? What if it is the guest who gives to the host and it is the host who receives from the guest each time she sets her table to welcome and feed those she loves? To be the guest and the host simultaneously is to imagine a mutual exchange of gifts predicated on respect and joy. If we could adopt this truth, perhaps we as women would be less likely to become martyrs.
Setting the table.
What are we setting the table for?
Mother and Mimi are in conversation.
Mimi speaks: “Transformation, Diane.”