Shame and blame as a single mother was always confusing for me. I went home to see my mother after a miscarriage and she said something like, I thought that is what it was when I heard you were in the hospital; then she encouraged me to get an abortion if I ever got pregnant, again. I didn’t get much support for having a baby in my normal feminist, avant-garde, intellectual and artistic circles either as many had a critique of motherhood as an impediment to self discovery and also a critique of the family as a social institution. Instead I found support in the natalist cultures of Jerusalem and Mexico where I was working on a book, writing poetry, and working as a psychic reader. I was later in the field birthing as part of my fieldwork in MX in 1992 (Weinbaum, 1999) and had to come all the way home to ask my thesis advisor in an American Studies Program at University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1993 why he hadn’t responded to my dissertation proposal. He told me motherhood was so good for me and dropped me, asking why I needed a PhD now that I had a baby. My need to support said baby didn’t phase him much.
And so it went. When I had a tenure-track job in the Department of English at Cleveland State University, 1998-2003, all hell broke loose for the way in which I needed to meet up with tutors and her in my office at work around the limitations of child-care hours. I also brought her to a faculty party or two because I had no one to leave her with and was unable to drive a babysitter home (if I could afford to hire one) which would have required leaving my daughter asleep alone. My motherhood was attacked in letters that went in my file at the fourth year review. Apparently from the sound of the letters, my six-year-old child was disrupting the entire 18th floor which housed the department! Even though other letters defending me on the basis of scholarly achievement and actual job performance were sent in, from within the institution, nationally and internationally, and married male colleagues brought their babies to work and parties without similar results, I lost that job in 2003. Swearing I never wanted to work in an English Department again, I tried the intentional community circuit, where I was shamed for being a single mother again. Heterosexual coupledom was the prevailing familial norm operating in both these institutions.
I was also blamed and shamed at a Jungian graduate institute where I had taken a job for taking calls from my daughter when at work, on days where she would be home sick.
And so it went, even further and even to a greater degree. When my daughter left home at 18 very suddenly, and I didn’t know where she was for about a year, I was blamed for somehow not raising her well enough, though we had been very close until she was 13; then she herself started to blame me for what happened to her in the world. She ran away and cut off communication.
My healing began while I was involved in self-propelled activities trying to reconstruct my feelings of identity after such a traumatic loss of my anchor in the person around whom I had constructed myself. I began to carry out many projects I had put on hold as impossible to do with a child in order to regain my shattered self-esteem. That included going to India to follow sacred cows down streets and write poetry, going to rural villages to collect women’s art (Weinbaum 2014) and going to Taxco MX to make goddess jewelry with my designs in silver. I also made a trip to Buenos Aires to interview palmists for my column called “Opening Palms.” This column was carried in a California newspaper, the Santa Barbara Independent. One palmist whom I had identified through the international hand research organization to which I belong mentioned in an interview a community in which she participated in Uruguay which piqued my interest as there were ongoing channelings of visitations from the Divine Mother, and in that community Mary was a part of a spiritual band in which Jesus was like her just one of the gang.
I accompanied this palmist, who had introduced me to the community, Sheila Murphy, on her next trip and experienced healings. These were so powerful that I returned again later on my own, and then made an extended visit to the mothership of that community based in Brazil called The Figueira Community of Light founded by Jose Trigueirinho Nettio, the Spiritualist philosopher (See Weinbaum, “Seeking the Divine Mother,” 2017; Weinbaum, 2013,”Casa Reduncion” “An Interview,” “Sheila Murphy.”). One of the many apparitions I had at Figueira on my own was was the Divina Madre coming to me in my monastic room and telling me that my daughter had a soul path of her own, that she would have to go through, and asked, look what the world did to my son, and did he blame me? No! Although granted, she probably did not deliver this pearl of wisdom in the yiddish inflection with which I recall it!
This communication from the Divine Mother, which was how the Virgin Mary was referred to in the Spiritual Hierarchies channeled on that land, jolted and freed me. I came back to my house in Cleveland Heights, OH, and started painting from images I had collected in India and from photographs that I had of my daughter and of us together. In these images I found solace that women and children were universally close, and then that the separation from that closeness had to have been messy, powerful and painful. I also was able to realize and let in the awareness that my child must have felt unstable by being provided a shaky home, but that also there had been good times between us that were part of her upbringing as well as we traveled from job to job.
Having moved from hurting to healing, I was soon to turn to helping other blamed and self-blaming mothers as well. I do this primarily through the vehicle of working as a psychic healer on phone lines, which I have done for 14 years. This business picked up particularly over the pandemic, during which time I diversified onto more lines (Weinbaum 2022). On these lines, I have many one-time and return callers to whom I am able to offer my own experience as well as Madre Divina’s advice, that her son did not blame her and my callers should not blame themselves as well.
The first painting I re-examined in this art process which I call the Individuation Project, currently at the Museum of Motherhood, was one I made when my daughter was 17. She had just begun to burst out of the bubble which is misshapen in the large painting, and the image shows a large Goddess IxChel of Maya culture with an overly-large rabbit on her lap, pushing the boundaries of an eggshell-womb black outline. IxChel is the goddess of fertility and creativity, and the arm of the rabbit reaching out tries to break away from the goddess under which my daughter had been born, with rituals on the Ixchel temple ruins being carried out praying for her to be born.
In the second painting in the Individuation Project, also at the Museum of Motherhood, I created after my daughter abruptly left home, and the shell is broken. There is an eye in her head popping out of wild splashes of paint behind me, representing the eye of the storm in her separation. I am turning into some kind of a monster; and the quote is – I often use words on my paintings – And then I read Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother, published in 2012, which is the story of her own relationship to her mother. One of the lines she said was, I have to destroy my mother–and when I read that everything went CLICK, oh right, she had to destroy me, in order to separate from me, because I had been so dominant in her life. And she was always hidden in my aura which was very powerful.
To share my process, I am sure many of you have photographs of your child or of you with your child. So what I do is work from these, and get the feel of the painting in a small sketch with ink, colored pencil and/or watercolors. I get the feel of the painting even more as I enlarge it one size up. Some become abstract as I go up one size more, to the point where the bubble is completely broken around either the mother or the child. There is a mother and a daughter. They are still there and you can see it in the colors, but the boundary around them separating them from the world has completely exploded. So this is how I painted through my trauma, having realizations about my daughter experientially as well as about myself. For example, once I worked from a photograph and painted an image of her pulling herself up on her crib, and I realized how shaky the foundation of her childhood must have been as we moved from place to place. I had been in graduate school, and then I took a job and she was always traipsing after me as she metaphorically held onto her crib trying to stand up. Of course she had an unstable experience as a child. When I finished that painting, and had this epiphany, and began to paint the feeling from her point of view, she called me, even more cementing me into the veracity of this project. I was propelled to go further with this experimentation.
I went to Madhubani, India, and collected images, painting then from other representations of mothers with daughters or children, made so frequently around the world. When I painted from one of these archetypal paintings which I later enlarged even further to a mural in my bedroom, I realized I had been focused with my eye on my baby inside a shell, an internal shell between us, even though as she grew up that shell was beginning to break. When I painted this painting I had another epiphany which was that this might go on in all other mothers around the world and this is when I started reading the myths of Persephone and Demeter. Then I went mad painting images of women and children around the world, and also fertility goddesses which was the beginning of an eight year art installation of mosaics on a wall and then a whole building growing out of fertility goddesses, then morphing into warrior goddesses.
After I went through the mythology, I returned to a calm; the circle was open but moved beyond us, and thus through this process I centered myself by getting a sense of resonance with the universality of motherhood. I realized throughout the universe and over time there were ruptures but the world is bigger than the world that had existed between the two of us.
My hope is that this exposure though deeply personal might lead to discussion of similar experiences others might want to share. For those interested in more discussion in greater details with images, see some of my work that has been published elsewhere (Weinbaum 2017 “Painting through ruptured motherhood; 2015).
References
Weinbaum, Batya. 2013. An interview with ex-TV palm star Sheila Murphy. In Weinbaum, Batya. Opening Palms Vol 2. Femspec Books. Pp. 35-44.
Weinbaum, Batya, 2013. Casa Reduncion. In Weinbaum, Batya. Opening palms Vol. 2. Femspec Books, pp 50-52.
Weinbaum, Batya. 2022. Crone on the phone–first person accounts: The secret life of a phone psychic. np
Weinbaum, Batya. 1999. Islands of women and Amazons: Representations and realities. Austin, University of Texas Press.
Weinbaum, Batya. 2014. Madhubani art: What do women experience painting Durga and Kali. Femspec 14 (1). Pp 14-73.
Weinbaum, Batya 2017. Painting through ruptured motherhood. In Mothers and daughters, Demeter Press, eds. Dannabang Kuwabong, Janet MacAdam, and Dorsia Smith Silvia. Pp. 51-64.
Weinbaum, Batya. 2015. Painting through trauma.” Rain and Thunder; A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, No. 61, Winter, p.29.
Weinbaum, Batya. 2017. Seeking the Divine Mother: The disappointed feminist field worker in South America, or should she be?” Femspec 18 (1). 43-78. Weinbaum, Batya. 2013. Sheila Murphy, part 2. In Weinbaum, Batya. Opening palms Vol.2. Femspec Books, pp. 45-49.
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