English teachers in Australia like to assign the most depressing poem of all time to their students. The poem is “In the Park” by Gwen Harwood, and while it has a sharp edge and is nice and compact, I think you’ll agree that the main question around studying it as an eighth grader is: why now?
In The Park
by Gwen Harwood
She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.
Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt.
A third draws aimless patterns in the dirt
Someone she loved once passed by – too late
to feign indifference to that casual nod.
“How nice” et cetera. “Time holds great surprises.”
From his neat head unquestionably rises
a small balloon…”but for the grace of God…”
They stand a while in flickering light, rehearsing
the children’s names and birthdays. “It’s so sweet
to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive, ”
she says to his departing smile. Then, nursing
the youngest child, sits staring at her feet.
To the wind she says, “They have eaten me alive.”
I mean, wow. It’s open to interpretation, but this is not a poem that is wholly excited about the prospect of motherhood.
Harwood initially published under a male pseudonym because as a Tasmanian housewife in the 50s, she didn’t think she’d get published. That’s how “In the Park” first made it into the ~discourse~.
Author Edwina Preston tosses a nod to Gwen Harwood’s frustrated artistic life at the back of her Stella prize-shortlisted novel Bad Art Mother, which is told by the son of the bad art mother, Owen.
Owen’s mother Veda Grey is a poet frustrated by the lack of time to do her work who accepts an offer from a wealthier couple, Mr. and Mrs. Parrish, to mind her son so she can create. That agreement has its costs, but all the women in the novel have their own clouds of ambivalence: Mrs. Parrish can’t have kids, and is into ikebana in a big way, going all the way to Japan to show her arrangements. There’s also an employee at Owen’s father’s restaurant who paints murals but has trouble seeing herself as a proper artist.
Owen’s father spends much of his time at the restaurant without suffering the pain over this choice that his mother does, and Owen occupies a curious place in the novel: part of him wants to be a poet like his mother, but he’s also keenly aware of how hard it is for her, and for women generally. He’s the rare child of the bad art mother that we hear from.
Owen realizes that being unable to produce a baby is different for Mrs. Parrish than it is for her husband.
‘It’s hard for a man too, not having children!’ said Kitten. ‘Think of your dad, if he didn’t have you!’
I tried to think of this, but it didn’t seem at all real or worth thinking about. I imagined he would just go on doing what he normally did, but a little more sadly.
We’ve had a lot of pieces, books, and online ephemera about bad mothers, art monsters, bad art mothers, and the like, with Lauren Elkin’s promising Art Monsters coming this November. Claire Dederer’s book Monsters came out earlier this year and, for me, was most interesting in the sections turned to her own ambivalence around motherhood—her need to flee, like the art monsters (a guilty self-diagnosis) before her (Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath etc.)—and the double standard by which she held herself and other women against the fathers of the art world.
On the second page of Lorrie Moore’s Terrific Mother, a character fatally drops a baby, pegging out the terrain of the bad mother rather dramatically (if it’s too soon for you to read this kind of story, I would also avoid States of Wonder, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, The Gap of Time, Bedwetter, and Trainspotting—won’t someone put together the list for this??). She is a bad mother before she even has a chance to have her own child.
Very few of us are actually bad mothers—I have never had this particular hangup, but I do worry about my career. I need to feel like I’ve made something, whether or not anyone sees it, to feel satisfied. So I’m interested in how these characters use art to feel better. That seems a piece of the conversation I haven’t seen.
*
I am sometimes sucked in by royals stuff, and have to say that Kate playing the piano during Eurovision did catch my eye, it was so Victorian somehow—the talented young miss playing pianoforte in the drawing room in a crazy ballgown before the eligible young men of 10,000 pounds per year.
I’m sure she is bored as a figurehead, and if I had the means I suppose I’d love to take up piano lessons again, or dabble in a coffee table book of my photography, but the picture reads to me as almost a defense of her as a mum of three and royal body, as Hilary Mantel put it. It’s very “Georgiana plays very well.” Maybe it’s how narrowly proscribed her art has to be that rankles me. The family-presets filter on the photos, the studied plunking on the keys. Can we get Kate playing The Cure? Kate with an impulsive haircut she hacked into her own head after seeing Instagram tutorials on using a razor to create “shag petals”? Weirder art? Confusing art?
*
A few years back I had a phone interview with Sharon Horgan, whose work I LOVE, and I asked her question that really ruined the vibe: Do you ever think about what your kids will think of the work you leave behind, your legacy? Horgan clearly thought this was a ludicrous question, I think she said something about them not giving a shit about her “work,” as she sat in the backyard of their home; something about them hopefully just remembering her as a mum???? I think the question pissed her off a little, probably because she just wanted obvious questions about Motherland.*
What I was trying to get at, which maybe is solely the terrain of those prone to existential crises, is this: do you ever think that moments where your work nails down some tiny piece of truth, however weird or funny, could be useful when your kids—much later—have to figure out the confusing world of growing up and growing old? Like, part of their inheritance? I think about it, although I think about death more than the average person. As I learn how to paint, I’ve created dozens of paintings of my children that are worth exactly nothing to anyone else, but are going to be a strange remnant for my kids. Did you remember the bit in 50 First Dates where Drew Barrymore shows Adam Sandler her studio of portraits based on his egg-head? One day, it will be like that. What are they going to do with the trove of half-finished gouache and oil paintings? Maybe the bad art mother is just the embarrassing parent who won’t stop with the Mary Cassatt homages.
If Death came early, I guess I do wonder if something I wrote or made would be useful, or would endure long enough to be meaningful to my kids (see also). Even just the instinct to sit down and puzzle out a color or composition when you need out of your head, the way we talk about letting kids see you move your body, giving them that mental health tool. Is that too bonkers?
The biggest problem in Bad Art Mother isn’t really that Veda wants to pursue her poetry, it’s that the gatekeepers get in the way. The rejections eat away at her, the barriers are impassable. I’m not sure that motherhood contributes that much to her suffering—for Owen, it’s a potential point of connection. Owen inherits her poems, and the task of creating meaning from them … and of course he’s ultimately Preston’s creation. If we are the weather in the epic poem of their life, we get make them characters in our vignettes.
Veda might not have been happy, but Gwen Harwood ultimately was: she had four children and her marriage was a positive pivot out of a literal convent. Phew!
*If you think I let myself down in that interview, let me tell you about the in-person interview I did with Horgan and Rob Delaney, at the end of which I said to Sharon Horgan, rather involuntarily, “We have on the same pants!”
What you’ve missed
My parents were just here and I always forget how novel they find America. My dad—the guy who once a week sends me an email with the subject: “USA” and then an op-ed predicting the end of democracy here—was shaking out a garbage bag to put in the kitchen bin and said, “these are really nice rubbish bags,” in absolute admiration. The US is NUMBER ONE about having scented, reinforced, flexing garbage bags, I must admit.
My mum is usually entranced by squirrels, but this time it was the robins that really got her. We went for a walk on an island in the Hudson river to see bald eagles, and every half mile she’d be like, “Look! Another robin!” Equally as excited if not more so over the signature bird of America. Bald eagles are for the birds.
It was wonderful to have them here.
Goodies
Haely White and Samantha Gutstadt are comedians who have a new poddie, Everything Is Awkward, out now with Sputnik in which they share the most debasing moments of parenthood (ever milked yourself?) in order to make you feel better about your ride through life. They kindly gave me an editing credit on it because I published their column back when I was at Romper <3 <3 This reel of Haely’s gets me every time:
Contributed a few must-read novels of summer 2023 to Lit Hub’s roundup—Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility is so great. It’s out August 1 from Crooked Media. (See also my weirder list of freaky-good novels people actually read on the beach.)
I thought this
post from Garbage Day on brand-nothingness was brill. has noticed all the branded baseball caps from beauty companies claiming to help you stay sunsafe: “Aestheticizing skin cancer prevention with a newly-purchased wearable corporate ad is a touch too bleak to buy into, no?” (Any old hat will do)There’s a new Lorrie Moore imminently coming out, can’t wait.
Move over Darcy.
Vale Tina Turner, who for Aussies has a particular significance: she was the icon for the NFL two years running in 1989 and 1990, when the Canberra Raiders were hot shit and Raider’s Lime was a thing you could have the milkman deliver (yes, lime milk). May Tina dance for eternity with the scantily clad bodies of rugby players. <3
I would never allow anyone, in any situation, to go unawares if we had the same pants. Pants club!