Daisy Chain

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

~ Margaret Mead

Lara was going through some old high school and college work. She was wary of getting them out because they always created a mixture of emotions.

“That was so long ago.”

It was, in more ways than one. 

“I don’t remember writing that.” A shudder. Maybe a cringe. Memory gap.

If we all could recall everything we’ve written, we’d be going around trying to find three quarters of it, so we could gather it up, then burn it or shred it.

“I can see now why I got such a low grade.”

Funny how it gets easier to accept our lack of perfection as we get older. Either we did the work at the last minute to meet a deadline, or we had dashed it off without getting enough information. Padding reports or essays is an art. So is pulling all-nighters to finish in time.

“Why did I ever take that course?”

There are so many examples of poor matches between students and classes. So hard to know ahead of time what we’re signing up for.

“Look at that! I guess I thought it was art.” Maybe it was. Back then, at least.

It’s easy to fall in love with our own efforts at painting flowers or dogs. We get distracted by the shapes and colors, or maybe by our good intentions, the emotions behind what we paint or draw or print. We have no idea what a mess we’ve made or how washed out it is. We’re wedded to how hard we tried.

Then we get to go back and look at that art. If our mothers have saved it.

Lara was becoming aware of all these things, her obvious shortcomings and deficient skills set. Sifting through the old box was going from uncomfortable to just feeling sad. Clearly she hadn’t excelled at anything her whole life.

Her mother hadn’t cared. She had saved everything her daughter had put on paper, from the boring to the ugly to the really lousily-done to the brilliant. She had no criteria except that if her daughter had done it, then it was worth keeping. Little stick figures with no necks. Houses done in crayon, up in the clouds instead of on the ground, with yards. Blue cows. An over abundance of circular flowers.

After high school was over, additions of college work were mostly in the form of final papers for different classes Lara had taken. When she came home after the semester was over, she might bring some of them, so her mother had quietly, almost surreptitiously, added them to her treasure trove. They really were no treasure, that was obvious.

“Mom, you really should have thrown some of this away.”

“Sure.”

But Mom had not. Good mothers will not. They are like archivists for their children. The little collection is a comfort for when the children are gone. The paper is like their skin. The drawings are self-portraits. The essays and exams are symbols of the person to whom the mother has given birth, a thinking person who has gone beyond maternal teachings. One doesn’t ever throw things like that away.

This type of act is orderly and constructive, as Margaret might say. It is an act of caring, a construction of a child’s life - no, a reconstruction - that the child may inherit and cherish or may hate and toss. Both responses to a life stored away in boxes, reverently maybe, are to be taken into account. Mothers who make keepsakes of such things at least give their child the choice to accept or reject, to care or to destroy.

Mothers, however, may be unaware of the future, because their goal in preserving their children’s lives is fused with past and an absent present. Some cases of mothers and children are heart wrenching: they are rarely ever together any more. Some of those mothers will hide the boxes in the attic or basement, because they cannot bear to see what they want to hold onto. When the child comes home and sees the box or boxes, there may be the devil to pay.

This is quite a complex matter. Do not sell it short.

We will try to explain this later. 

A friend of Lara’s, Myrna, is an artist. She works with multimedia, which seems a bit too chaotic for Lara. Myrna loves all kinds of ephemera, the more vintage the better, and combines paper, lace, leather, paint, leaves, you name it, in her work. She has a good following. Most recently she had a successful show on a gallery on the coast. It was all fabric manipulation into unexpected patterns.

Now Myrna has asked Lara if she has any old school work, with school going from kindergarten to post-graduate studies. She wants the papers for a collage, but isn’t willing to provide any more details than that. Like a novelist, she doesn’t want to risk ruining the plot by revealing it. Lara doesn’t even know if Myrna has asked other people for materials of the same sort.

In any event, this is the reason why Lara was going through all the items her mother had saved. Artifacts. Only valuable to the person who had archived them, building, re-building, her daughter’s life. Constructing it from her detritus, piece by piece, more slowly after a certain point. Without her permission.

And then she was gone. No person left to archive. Although, if the truth be told, almost no new artifacts had been added in over a decade. It was as if Lara had ceased to exist. As if it were only her posthumous self rummaging through her own cast-offs.

Lara had not been able to remove all the boxes from her mother’s house because there had been too many. She had hastily - and guiltily - disposed of several right away. Others had been purged and combined with sturdier boxes, none of which was new. She was beginning to regret having said yes to Myrna’s request for her old student papers. 

It felt so different going through the boxes in her home several states and hundreds of miles away. The contents had been placed inside by another pair of hands, watched over by other eyes, under a different roof. They hadn’t deserved to be uprooted, and it really did seem as if little filaments had wriggled their way out of the bottom, attaching the boxes to the attic floor. 

Mom had done this all out of love. The good side of people, which was the only side she had, thought her daughter, wishing her mother had been less kind. She could never be like her mother, and that upset her terribly.

Mom’s hand feels like it is on Lara’s, then seems to move to the contents of a box. Lara shakes the image away by jerking her head up. What she has just seen makes her feel strangely angry, and like she wants to hit somebody or break something. Or tear up a lot of paper. She doesn’t like it. She is raging against the dead light, having past the point where Dylan Thomas writes to his father, “… rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

When her rage subsides sufficiently, Lara sees only her two hands and the boxes, one of which she flips open.

She stops momentarily when sees one of the papers she had written as a second year student, still somewhat immature about the logic of required courses and resenting some of the requirements. She had slipped a scrap of notebook paper with some scribbled remarks. She knew she’d ‘talked back’ to the professor through written comments that were for her alone. Had her mother snooped? Did she know how sassy her daughter really was? Of course she did.

Lara realizes now she must have felt threatened by her professor’s intelligence and also her needing to show she was just as smart, maybe smarter. She is maybe not ashamed at her defiance in this case, but she is not proud of it. Rage happens, but it is rarely pretty.

Then an essay appeared. It had been for a gender studies course and the assignment had been to write about a woman who did not follow the norm in either her personal or her professional life. It hadn’t been a good assignment. The students would also have to present a fine minute summary of their findings. Lara read, the papers that were still stapled together resting atop the open-flapped box: “And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942).

“What did I think I knew about Margaret Mead? What did I know about Anthropology? I had never taken a course in it.” Guilt. Anger at having faked her way through the paper to a grade of A?

Lara had drawn her name and quote out of the hat for the assignment. The course had included the studies of metaphors describing human existence, looking for gender discrimination. It would have been easier if she’d gotten Eisenhower or Gandhi (although they were men, not women). She thought even Saint Scholastica of Nursia would have been easier, even though she was a nun and from well over a thousand years ago.

Now that she had her assigned metaphor there was one month to prepare. She had to deal with ideas like: ‘Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin do not represent the past to which one belongs by birth, but the past to which one tries to belong by effort’. All men, all apparently the standards for being a good, strong American and winning the war.

Except who was to say they are the best measuring sticks? And are we good if we engage in warfare and kill enough people to win? Does that make us heroes? Humans are potentially aggressive, said Mead. 

“What was Margaret trying to tell us? Her statement is obvious.”

Yes. Either we attack and destroy, or we protect and build, build and protect. What is so original about that? Humans can be good or bad.

Lara was thinking about all this, fighting her anger at having spent so much time on a useless topic. Myrna was welcome to her drivel. Or maybe it would be better just to toss it. 

Can be good or bad. Or good and bad? Simultaneously? Or are some people good by nature but others bad?

Wait. We are leaving out one of the anthropologist’s words: potentially. Which still doesn’t explain whether the same person can be both destructive and constructive, tearing things (or people) down and building them up, or whether each person is either aggressive or caring. No mixing.

“Mom thought I was perfect, even when I was behaving horribly. She called me a good girl, and certainly never raised a hand to me. She never spanked me. But this shrine she left of my past accomplishments - which were hardly anything - is infuriating. Did she know what she was doing? Creating an altar to my mediocrity.”

How dare she? 

Lara’s whole body crumpled right then and there. She had nothing left because all that mattered was in the boxes brought from home. Boxes that there was no room to store in her own house, which was small. Just more clutter. 

Boxes that had been filled for all the right reasons, maybe, but which Lara was beginning to think were telling her that she was no longer her mother’s daughter. Only the memory of one. Maybe a fake memory, at that. The thought made her angry all over again. All her ideas about who her mother was, how she thought, everything was being uprooted, like the boxes of daughter that were never meant to be removed from that house because the boxes, with the daughter inside, had never been about the little girl and her art, her essays, her science tests.

Lara looked at the paper on Margaret Mead she’d forgotten she’d written. She wondered how a woman who had lived in such wonderful, natural, exotic places had ever thought Americans could be bold and good, heroic rescuers of humanity. How she could have been so wrong, despite her own bold, good, free life, thrice divorced and every bit as intelligent as the professor who had threatened Lara enough to make her write threatening secret notes?

She looked at her hands, her empty harms, her silent house, and wondered if she were getting what she deserved. If she had turned out to be one of the people who had been born bad (one interpretation of Margaret’s statement) or if she could still prove herself capable of doing something good (another interpretation).

Myrna could have the box, all the boxes. Even if it would hurt Mom’s feelings, she wasn’t around now, and Lara had to start figuring out for herself whether she was the daughter packed away or the one quietly waiting to dispose of herself in order to avoid being posthumous.

It was a real daisy chain, the most dangerous kind.