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Some Thoughts on Motherhood, Daughterhood, and Water\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>by\u00a0Gail Aronson<\/em><\/p>\n Once a man approached me while I was reaching up to a high shelf in a used bookstore. He said unrepeatable things, and then asked me if I enjoy<\/span>ed<\/span>\u00a0sex. The employee behind the front counter intervened and these two men had a conversation, while I leafed through pages, pretending I\u2019d stopped paying attention. When the bookstore employee said to the other man he couldn\u2019t \u201cdo that\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>(<\/span>that\u00a0<\/span><\/i>meaning verbally harass me) the other man replied, \u201cbut look at her, she\u2019s beautiful.\u201d (Sidebar, I\u2019m not beautiful at all, just a woman.) During this conversation I had a dissociative moment<\/span>, as if I\u2019d just submerged myself into water and the edges were fuzzy\u2014I was somewhere else<\/span>. I realized these men were talking about me but not to me, as if I wasn\u2019t there, as if I wasn\u2019t a person at all. There have been plenty of other situations by virtue simply of being a woman that I\u2019ve felt more endangered or disrespected. But<\/span>\u00a0this conversation\u00a0<\/span>struck me with a sense of invisibility.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At this time in my life, I worked with children. One child always remarked that I looked like his mother. As a nanny, other mothers often told me\u2014while walking a stroller down the street or opening my arms to this toddler and all of her buoyant joy as she bunny-hopped from the edge of the YMCA pool and into my arms\u2014that my charge looked just like me. For a woman of age with children in tow, motherhood was assumed.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There is something I struggle to describe that fee<\/span>ls mechanical about daily life. Necessary\u00a0<\/span>habits of walking down the same streets, drinking from that\u00a0<\/span>particular<\/span>\u00a0coffee mug, coming up to<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>the wind and rain against my cheeks as I have before. Our actions are filled with circles, and our minds circle back to those repeated circular d<\/span>ays,\u00a0<\/span>of\u00a0<\/span>rising and falling back to sleep again.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When I wrote \u201cThe Only Daughter on the Coast of Mothers\u201d I was captivated by the expected roles of womanhood<\/span>. I\u00a0<\/span>wished to play with an imagined future reality in which a woman comes to know herself by being surrounded by what she isn\u2019t. I wanted to remove the personal memories we associate with our upbringings, to illustrate a space in which women exist without men, but are still performing the cultural norms of what came before. Roles we inherit often emerge from this learned automation, doing things as our mothers on<\/span>ce did simply because that\u2019s the way<\/span>\u00a0we came to know how to do that thing at all. Can mothers mother without\u00a0<\/span>daughter<\/span>s<\/span>? This<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0logically<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0seems like a silly question with an easy answer<\/span>. I\u00a0<\/span>wanted to push beyond the factually apparent<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span>To impress upon the everyday something less usual and mechanical that contributes to my own sense of invisibility, an atmosphere distant as the sea with just as much of its substance and complexity inside, underneath.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, I am a visible person living my life in the world, just like everyone else. I am a woman, a daughter. An inner life can be difficult to reconcile with reality and the way others see you.\u00a0<\/span>With<\/span>in<\/span>\u00a0the surreal conceit of a coast of mothers and a single daughter who mysteriously wash<\/span>\u00a0up to its shores,<\/span>\u00a0I hope\u00a0<\/span>the<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>boundaries<\/span>\u00a0between<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>the\u00a0<\/span>interior dreamlike states and exterior reality begins to\u00a0<\/span>muddle and\u00a0<\/span>melt away.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For me, I can\u2019t separate a sense of complicated personhood from gender. My stories often include<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0only or mostly<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0women-identified characters. Not that I dislike men. In reality, the bookstore employee did exactly as any thoughtful, kind person would do. It isn\u2019t easy to intervene, to defend a complete stranger. I don\u2019t blame him that<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0in the moment<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0my life felt somehow robotic, my personhood invisible.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n That the repetition of everyday life can begin to feel like a kind of automation seems inextricable\u00a0<\/span>from how the reality of lived expe<\/span>rience is\u00a0<\/span>infected and skew<\/span>ed by capitalist<\/span>\u00a0culture<\/span>.<\/span>\u00a0Street signs repeat and the lines between who we are and how we can create ourselves through material things naturally blurs. If<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0as human beings<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0we are to change or be changed by our own creations, I wonder what is next for humans as we evolve with the earth<\/span>, which<\/span>\u00a0we continue to ruin. An earth we\u00a0<\/span>continue to treat as a thing rather than\u00a0<\/span>as\u00a0<\/span>a living, breathing home<\/span>. As the atmosphere is altered, how will we change? I hope that\u00a0<\/span>the<\/span>\u00a0story might subtly lean into this without a direct\u00a0<\/span>critique<\/span>. I\u00a0<\/span>often think about our<\/span>\u00a0world of capital and\u00a0<\/span>how\u00a0<\/span>the\u00a0<\/span>objects of our lives\u00a0<\/span>might encourage a reframing of commodity.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>What is a woman, a person, when seen from a distance?\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Mother. Daughter. And so on.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When I am most myself, as a writer and\u00a0<\/span>(<\/span>mostly<\/span>)<\/span>\u00a0as a person, I am\u00a0<\/span>drowning and floating\u00a0<\/span>all\u00a0<\/span>at once. Away from linearity<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0inside\u00a0<\/span>the\u00a0<\/span>feedback and fuzz, a muffled thing you strain to understand<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0and yet, it draws you in.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n My mother wanted, always and without exception, to be a mother. Or this is how her story goes, how she chooses to tell it. She had me and I became an adult daughter. A nanny at the time<\/span>,<\/span>\u00a0I was also a writer-woman-person<\/span>\u00a0at the YMCA pool with this impossibly perfect little new life. And into that momentary nothingness, dipping underneath the\u00a0<\/span>waveless<\/span>\u00a0not-so-deep water with a child who is a girl who will be a woman, and most of all who is not mine\u2014these are the kinds of palpable and otherworldly moments<\/span>\u00a0–<\/span>\u00a0I cherish<\/span>\u00a0these the<\/span>\u00a0most.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n *\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Gail Aronson<\/strong> is a fiction editor for\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Omnidawn<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Publishing and her work recently appears or is forthcoming in Nat. Brut<\/em>, Midwestern Gothic<\/em>, The Adroit Journal<\/em>, The Offing<\/em>, Dream Pop<\/em>, and elsewhere. She lives and works in Pittsburgh. Find her online\u202f@<\/span><\/span>gailaronson<\/span><\/span>.\u202f<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Aronson’s fiction “The Only Daughter on the Coast of Mothers” appears in Issue 42.2 of Cream City Review<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am a woman, a daughter. An inner life can be difficult to reconcile with reality and the way others see you.\u00a0Within\u00a0the surreal conceit of a coast of mothers and a single daughter who mysteriously wash\u00a0up to its shores,\u00a0I hope\u00a0the\u00a0boundaries\u00a0between\u00a0the\u00a0interior dreamlike states and exterior reality begins to\u00a0muddle and\u00a0melt away.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37709,"featured_media":3183,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","uwm_wg_additional_authors":[]},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"\n