Mothers, and Other Mythological Creatures

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, May 9, 2010,

in tandem with a PowerPoint presentation of photos and drawings (here represented in PDF format).

 

My grandsons are children of their time, taken with various sets of mythological creatures that inhabit the cartoon world, especially the world of Japanese anime.  One of these sets of creatures is collectively known as Pokémon, which is a contraction of the Japanese Poketto Monsutā, or Pocket Monsters.

In this mythical universe, the human hero, called Satoshi in Japan and Ash Ketchum on this side of the Pacific, becomes a Pokemon Master in training.  He travels about with his friends Brock and Misty and all their Pocket Monsters righting wrongs and learning from their adventures.  Other friends named May and her brother Max and another girl named Dawn make appearances;  numerous Pokémon of good and bad dispositions come and go.  I understand the latest series is called Diamond and Pearl and includes the aspects of FireRed and LeafGreen.  If you’re a mom and understand all this, more power to you.  If you’re a mom of young kids and you don’t know about this yet, good luck.

If you’re a mother who has little kids around the house these days, surely you must know about Bakugan Battle Brawlers.  I’ve stepped on plenty of these at my house - these little balls of plastic that, when they come in contact with the right magnetized game card, open up into fearsome-looking - and sharp - fighting machines.  In this mythological universe, the Bakugan inhabit the imaginary world of Vestroia where one power-hungry Bakugan named Naga has absorbed too much energy and found the Silent Core - the universal source of negative energy.  Another Bakugan, Wavern, has absorbed the Infinity Core, the source of positive energy in the world.  Could you have guessed that the two might be at odds?

The heroes of this myth are seven kids named Dan, Shun, Runo, Marucho, Julie, Alice, and Joe.  In their struggles together, they come to learn more about the origin of the Bakugan, about the world of Vestroia, and about the game involving them. 

“The game involving them.”  Both of these mythological constructions are part of what you might call vertically integrated marketing machines:  television shows and movies drive the video games based on them - or is it the other way around?  And the plastic toys give you something to purchase and play with when your parents have shut down the video games or when there are no more disposable batteries lying around. 

So those are two of the mythic systems our children rely on today.  When my step-kids were coming up, it was Transformers that were all the rage - machines that went about in one form but that would ‘transform’ into their fighting form when situation dictated.  Very heavy metal.

Way back in those rockin’ 1980’s, there were also Masters of the Universe, featuring the power duo He-Man and She-Ra and their arch nemesis Skeletor.  I still think pageboy haircuts are cute, but they’re not the first thing I think of when I think of an overabundance of testosterone.

We all need myths to provide the framework we hang our worldviews on.  A little before my own time, but only a little, there were cowboy heroes like Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry.  I had no idea at the time that my deep-seated lust for six-guns and bb rifles might possibly be traced to the integrated marketing techniques of television executives and toy manufacturers - we were a naïve bunch, weren’t we?  And we wonder why our kids have such issues.

Many of us don’t like to think that we’d be so shallow as to still believe the myths of our childhoods.  We’d much rather see ourselves as high-minded and better educated, harkening back to the Greek philosophers and mythmakers - and maybe think of Jason and the Argonauts as our defining myth.  But none of these are so far off that mark.  They all portray the very human battle between good and evil.  They all have villains and heroes and heroines…

Well, sometimes the heroines do seem a tad underdrawn, don’t they, in the tension-filled metaphors of battle and war and fighting for the right against the wrong.  So let’s draw some heroes that fit a different worldview.

 

In her book Founding Mothers, journalist Cokie Roberts writes of another mythical-sounding world, the world of pre- and post-Revolutionary War America.  To ears that have grown up in recent decades, this world sounds almost as fantastic as the worlds of the Pokémon and the Bakugan.  But the women portrayed here by Ms. Roberts actually lived lives of struggle and hardship but they also exercised some power and influence over the times in which they lived.

Abigail Adams was the wife and by all accounts the best friend of President John Adams and so was thereby also the mother of President John Quincy Adams.  Her husband John readily acknowledged the debt he owed to Abigail for pushing him to be the leader he was and for doing the hard work of keeping the home fires burning while he was off playing at building a country with his manfriends.  Abigail happened to be a Unitarian.

Judith Sargent Murray was a young widow by the time she met and married John Murray, the leader of the Universalist Church in America.  Judith had a career as a writer - an anomaly for her time - and wrote an influential poetic essay entitled “On Equality of the Sexes” published in Massachusetts Magazine in 1790.

Both these people worked hard in their time pushing for the education of women as a precursor to securing women’s right to vote.  Why the men running around starting the country couldn’t have listened to them about allowing women to vote from the very beginning is beyond me, but those are the same men who institutionalized slavery, so what can you expect?

Fifty years later, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Transcendentalist and Unitarian friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, built a network of women’s education and debating societies in the Northeastern United States before traveling to Europe to cover an Italian revolution.  On her return voyage, she and her new Italian husband and young son were killed in a shipwreck within sight Fire Island, New York.

Another almost mythical real-life human being was Julia Ward Howe, who had connections in both Unitarian and Universalist camps.  We might remember her as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but she was also a wife, mother, and activist who was driven by the carnage of the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War to agitate for mothers to quit sending their sons off to indulge in senseless killing.  Her work and the work of Anna Jarvis led to the first officially sanctioned Mother’s Day holiday.  They both then spent many years fighting against what Mother’s Day quickly became - a syrupy-sweet rather than real recognition of all the things mothers have meant to us.

 

This is my great-great-great grandmother, Frances Cooke Lipscomb Van Zandt - Fannie to me.  Born in Tennessee in 1816, she married a local dry goods shopkeeper named Isaac Van Zandt, started having kids, and moved to East Texas in 1840.  While Isaac was off acting as Chargé d’Affaires from the Republic of Texas to the United States, Fannie built a home and raised the kids, so when Isaac died while campaigning to become the first Governor of Texas, she was already used to being on her own and relying on herself.  Family mythology has it that she was a tough old bird, and it’d be no wonder if she really was.

Another woman who for me has moved into the realm of the mythical is my own mother, Sandra Loraine Smith Van Zandt.  Sandra Smith grew up as the golden child, a gift from God to the childless couple who adopted her in Fort Worth in 1931.  But for whatever reason, Sandra never quite shook a feeling of worthlessness.  Those around her were impressed with her talent as a artist, but when she became a young mother in the 1950’s, she seemed to let all that go and fell further and further into her world of concern about ‘what the neighbors will say.’  The rest of her life seemed to be a retreat from engagement - she had fewer and fewer friends, went out less and less, began to stay behind closed doors as much as possible. 

But the woman who bore me and my two siblings, the one who suffered numerous miscarriages and a painfully botched surgery, the one who cooked and cleaned while my father was at work, the one who tentatively tried to take on several employment opportunities but was held back by the tenor of the times - that’s a woman only hinted at in this, her high school graduation portrait, which is a picture of a girl I now know to have a close-mouthed smile because her two front teeth were already rotted and she hated dentists and she didn’t think she was worth going to the dentist to have work done anyway. 

I can’t look at this photo dispassionately - this is the image I see in my mind’s eye whenever I say the word ‘mother.’  To me, this ‘mother’ is outwardly and forever a poised young woman whose countenance of calm wisdom and self-possession hides inward storms that will eventually drag her down.  I know this picture points to a flesh-and-blood person with both talents and faults, but since she died in 1997, it has occurred to me that the mother I have inside of my psyche is only marginally connected to that person who lived and died in the last century.

There is inside me the mythical mother that exists only in my head and heart, an archetype that causes me to both cleave to notions of family and to simultaneously be repulsed by it.  I suspect that many of us have similar tensions as we come to celebrate Mothers’ Day - the usual saccharine overdose of a Hallmark holiday notwithstanding.

Whichever mythologies we’re choosing today, they had better take into account the complicated realities we face:  not all our relationships with our mothers are happy ones;  not all of us knew our mothers;  and even if we did, not all of us are able to communicate effectively with our mothers or they with us;  time, miles, illness, and passing impede and divide us.

And if you’re the mom or want to be, whether or not the ecstasy of motherhood lives up to your expectations, the pain of it will surely break your heart;  likewise, non-motherhood, whether by your own choice or by an accident of nature, can be equally devastating.  I have found no Mothers’ Day cards that pay attention to such difficult emotional realities.

But we all have our time, and we all have our version of the myths, whether of Pokemon or the Iliad and the Odyssey, to help us make sense of a sometimes senseless world.  It is an often moving and joyful task, and often made the more so by our forebears:  thank goodness for Founding Mothers like Abigail Adams and Judith Sargent Murray;  for activists like Margaret Fuller and Julia Ward Howe and Dorothy Height;  for our grandmothers and great grandmothers and theirs, whether we knew them or not.  We are who we are today because they were who they were back then, because they lived in their times and did their best and worked for their families and struggled to make the world a better place.

And we are who we are because of our children, too.  Their myths - as odd as some of them may seem to us -  are showing them how to get along in the world of their time.  And if we pay close enough attention, perhaps they can teach us the simple things we forgot so long ago - to be here now, to listen, to help each other, and to say, “Happy Mothers’ Day, Mom, We love you.”

Happy Mothers’ Day, indeed. 

So may it be.