Only the Sisterhood of Motherhood Can Save Us Now

Long ago I tried to make a poem about what fall feels like deep in the back country of the northernmost county in western Washington state. But I soon doubted any words of mine could ever convey the quietly poignant resonance of a land where the Goddess remains so untrammeled and powerful even skeptics find it difficult to deny her presence. For despite the encroachments of patriarchy, here she yet reigns supreme, and whatever you might call her – Gaea, Mother Nature, Rhiannon, the Morrigan, Lada or any of the countless other names by which she has been invoked since the advent of our species (or whether you dismiss her as nothing more than delusion) – she is what she has always been, the cosmos and all its Yin and Yang potential, which in the Pacific Northwest is most often taken as synonymous with the natural environment: the densely forested mountains that run down to the emerald ocean; the ocean itself and the inland waters whether vast or small; the stately evergreens that sometimes, as if to challenge our notions of reality, inexplicably shimmer into ultraviolet; the long slow blue midsummer dusk that is the color of sensuality and revelation; the yellow moon of late spring and early autumn, pumpkin round and indescribably pregnant, humming softly as she rises above the jagged horizon; the northern lights that crackle and hiss like radio static, writhing like ghostly serpents or flaring across the heavens, ephemeral tapestries unfurled as if by some phantom weaver; the lethal magnificence of storms; the deadly energies of earthquake and volcano; that which we most love and that which we most fear. She is all this and more, every creature living or dead; all things inanimate; macrocosm and microcosm; matter and nothingness. To me the writer, she is the Pale Dancer whose flesh is lunar mist and whose anthems are the sound of wind on harp strings or of wind chimes when the air is without motion. To me the photographer, she is the ever-changing light and all its choreographies of shadow. But most of all and even in the spiritual dead-zones of the cities, she is the season of the turning leaves, vine-maple red and big-leaf-maple yellow and cottonwood orange ironically bright against the midnight-graveyard green of the conifers, and each year I cannot but wonder if sometime in the future she will kill me with her dark and dreadful loveliness. Fujicolor 800, Pentax MX, Sigma 35-70mm f/4 at 70mm, exposure f/5.6 at 1/250th. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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MOTHERHOOD IS THE one human quality that knows no borders. It has neither racial nor political identity. Its language is so wordlessly transcendent it is truly universal – which gives a new and profoundly deeper meaning to the notion of an original human Mother Tongue. Indeed, if matriarchy was the first and most enduring social construct of our species – and I can no longer doubt it – surely in the common exaltation of motherhood (and ultimately therefore the honoring of femaleness whether fecund or not), was the original solidarity that enabled our species' survival.

I write these words astounded it has taken me nearly 74 years of life to learn this lesson that is daily taught us by women everywhere. It is a lesson that now, after I have finally learned it, seems so utterly obvious I can only rail at my apparent stupidity. Observe any gathering of women with children – especially one in which the women are of diverse nationalities or castes or races – and almost invariably you will witness how the common processes of motherhood quickly, often literally within minutes, overcome all those barriers the males of our species find insurmountable. It is as obvious as sunrise: for women with children – and I have seen it more times than I can count – there is almost invariably an organic unity of purpose so powerful its participants need not consciously acknowledge it, a momentary state of harmony and peace so deeply instinctive it seemingly has no peer in human experience.

Oddly enough, I am not sure when I first began observing this phenomenon. Probably it was during my childhood, no doubt after the savage dysfunction that shattered my family during my fifth year prompted me to begin watchfully comparing my own notably abnormal circumstances as an unwanted child to the seemingly normal circumstances of other obviously beloved children. But that seems almost too glib, for on a deeper level it often feels as if I have always recognized the solidarity of motherhood as the sole human constant, the very quality of soul my own birthmother so violently rejected, never mind that for nearly all other women it is everywhere and every-when an ultimate form of immediate sisterhood. 

Even so, for most of my life what I now think of as the Motherhood International was scarcely more than part of the background, something I noticed in the same way I might notice the advent of autumnal color or the sudden presence of a neighbor's handsome new dog, significant enough to prompt a momentary sharpening of focus but without any associated analysis. But then a couple of years ago, as part of my ongoing effort to find logical support for my growing conviction that patriarchy is a fatal mistake and confirmation for my near-lifetime suspicion that females are generally better people than males, I began closely observing women and how they interact with one another. Of course I have always observed women, but because I am a heterosexual male, most of my years of observation were beclouded by lust and lustful purpose, so it was not until I achieved the sexual neutrality of old age I was able to see beyond the (exquisitely beautiful) intellectual and physical sensualities of even the most allegedly “plain” women to the deeper implications of femaleness itself.

Here of course is one great advantage of the observational skills I acquired as a journalist and photographer. But the irony of those talents is the extent to which their application – mostly in official functions such as the enactment of legislation or the formal interviews essential to biographical reportage or investigative work – radically limited what I could watch and therefore might see. A woman in a forcefully patriarchal society – which the United States most assuredly is – must necessarily adopt the defining male qualities of aggression and ruthlessness if she is to achieve and maintain any sort of power or influence. Hence I spent most of my professional life observing women trying to function within the confines of a nation that is reduced to moral imbecility (if not manifest evil) by its commitment to capitalism – infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue – and to capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else. What I typically saw was therefore scarcely representative of womanhood per se.

My first clear look at what might obtain beyond the confines of patriarchy was in the context of the old Counterculture. Though mainstream-media employment severely limited my ability to give myself wholly over to la vie boheme, I nevertheless managed several sanity-preserving interludes away from the world of deadlines and tweed-sportcoat conformity. Typically but not always these de facto vacations were in association with the alternative press. Hence I was able to observe a goodly number of womens collectives, which were an organic and influential faction within the Countercultural rebellion, particularly in the rural Pacific Northwest. Those with which I came in more than merely superficial contact all seemed possessed of a unity far more resilient than anything men alone or even men and women together were able to achieve.

But the real eye-opener came after my downfall, when the 1983 housefire destroyed all my life's work and the definitively USian, no-jobs-for-crazies odium of the subsequent clinical depression banished me forever from any sort of journalism save part-time or freelance work. Thus reduced to inescapable poverty, I spent (and spend) a disproportionate amount of time in welfare offices and other such realms of ruined lives, impossibly straited circumstances and irremediable dispossession. And there for the first time I witnessed how the very realities that had us men sitting as far apart from one another as possible and invariably in sullenly silent, utterly alienated mortification seemed to somehow free the women from the societal restraints that might otherwise have kept them divided. I saw it repeatedly: how women of diverse races and nationalities and even castes (many of them by their clothing obviously the newly impoverished victims of capitalism's most recent savageries), somehow as if by magic set aside their differences enough to freely converse, often with obvious empathy for one another, as each woman awaited the elaboration of whatever bad news had summoned her to Misery Central, the harshly lit, heartlessly managed offices of the Washington Department of Social and Health Services. And whenever these women were accompanied by their children, the sisterhood of motherhood – race and caste and nationality be damned – became overwhelmingly apparent in mere minutes.

But that beautiful and compelling solidarity of mothers was not just a phenomenon of the welfare office. I witness it time and again on public transport. First and long ago and before I realized what I was watching, I had seen it on the Knoxville Transit Lines and Grand Rapids Coach Company buses of my 1950s youth, women helping other women with children regardless of race or apparent social status. I had seen it on the subways of Manhattan and Brooklyn and on the Hudson Tubes and other rail transport in New Jersey during the 1960s and again during the 1980s, and in all probability had seen it as a child on the trains and trolleys I rode with my parents in New York and lesser cities during the first years of this lifetime. Now I see it regularly on crowded Tacoma buses: women who are total strangers to one another, as in “here I can hold your baby while you fold up that stroller,” a well-dressed young black woman helping a shabbily dressed young white woman, the black woman cooing to the white child as the white woman fights the perambulator down and under the seat as required by transit regulations, then the black woman handing the white child back to the white mother and the two women now talking about babies and children as easily as if they were sisters. I have seen as many as four young women – all strangers to one another, two white, one Asian, one black, the Asian and one of the whites barely able to speak English – collaborate to hold a tiny baby and find a fallen-off perambulator part to solve a problem that became obvious when the big pram which was fully laden with groceries and baby gear collapsed just after the mother had lifted her baby out. The four women worked together as if they had been teammates all their lives and within minutes they had repaired the pram, and the Motherhood International had triumphed once again.

That I can tell this story is the beauty of regularly riding mass transit. It enables you to witness every extreme of human behavior, from criminal selfishness to selfless humanitarianism. In this sense it's the same in Manhattan, where public transport is a civil right, as it is in Tacoma, where the Ayn-Rand-minded electorate publicly denounces transit users as parasites, damns mass transit itself as welfare and is maliciously downsizing an already inadequate bus system in the hope of socioeconomically cleansing the area of all the lower-income peoples who make up more than half of its population but vote in disproportionately small numbers because they believe, mostly correctly, that USian elections will make no meaningful differences in their lives. Local politics aside, there is probably no better or more thought-provoking sociological vantage point than a city bus, trolley or subway car, especially for a journalist whose inclinations run toward social commentary. And it was on a Tacoma bus just yesterday again watching with awe the international sisterhood of motherhood it came to me: first that motherhood has no borders, next that only the solidarity of motherhood is powerful enough to save our species from self-extermination. 

LB/17 November 2013

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