MAGIC, INTUITION, AND MOTHER/DAUGHTER GUIDANCE
This BLOG focuses on a few books written about magic, mind communication and time travel, and women escaping social repression. In living 77 years, I have become aware that the following are not positive signs for humanity—book bans, government shutdowns, restrictions on women’s healthcare, and limited use of libraries.
My paternal grandmother first read The Bible’s Book of Revelation to me as a child. I would re-read and ponder this last chapter of the Bible frequently. Were these predictions of the future? Who were the “beasts” of Revelation? What would Armageddon be like? Who were the four horses of the Apocalypse? Would I see the predictions of this book enacted on the world stage in my lifetime? I anticipated the early years of 2000 as a time of great enlightenment. Perhaps mankind would learn to control climate events, live in harmony with all races and gender forms, assure that no one went hungry, no child lived in poverty, and everyone had access to books and libraries and learning. I dreamed that women would be equal to men with the same opportunities to learn and study and work.
Imagine then how horrified I have become as books are banned and libraries shut down in some states, governors clamp down on freedoms of university students and anyone who is not a white homosexual male is bullied and cast out. Worst of all is the repression of women focused around their reproductive abilities. In many states they are now blocked from healthcare. As a mother of three children, I distinctly recall the shock of realizing at the end of each pregnancy that I would need to deliver the child living inside of me. Fortunately, I had good healthcare. My first husband served in The U.S. Air Force during The Vietnam War so I received care there. My second child was born in a beautiful private hospital in Kansas funded by my job at Wichita State University, and my third child was born in a hospital where I worked as public relations director. I can only imagine what happens in a miscarriage or aborted pregnancy gone amok. Having to travel somewhere outside my state to get healthcare, being hunted down by men with guns, being forced to carry a child as a result of rape or incest while still a child yourself, or to bear a child you cannot afford is beyond appalling to me. Having to carry a dead child until sepsis occurs is unimaginable! These situations shine a light on the ignorance of usually (men) enacting laws that result in these horrifying situations. They do not understand the workings of a female body and do not even care as long as they look important.
Recently, I read two books that bring forth the repression of women: The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings (2023) and The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman (2023). Both books have mother/daughter themes. In the first book, Jo, the protagonist, loses her mother at a young age. Like her mother, she researches her family as she grows to adulthood, curious about her female ancestors. One ancestor was burned as a witch but flew off the pillar and plunged her scorched feet in the sea. The smoke became a fog and frightened people who tried to burn her. The society Jo lives in believes witches live among them. Women are urged to marry by age thirty, and unmarried women at age twenty-eight must do quarterly check-ins with the Bureau of Witchcraft to be tested. Jo learns that her mother, Tiana, believed accusing women of magic was a way to diminish their accomplishments.
When Jo reaches her late twenties, her mother Tiana, is officially declared dead. Her mother’s lawyer tells Jo that her mother left an inheritance for her but requires her to make a pilgrimage to an island in Lake Superior. Her mother had told her Lake Superior meant mystery, and is a lake that keeps its secrets. As Jo approaches age twenty-eight, she dates a man she likes but does not want to be forced into marriage. She decides to take the journey to the island in Lake Superior and finds herself in a place where women are equal, able to indulge their creativity, to explore, to dream, to create and even fly. Best of all, her mother lives there! She is alive! Jo stays with her mother for a time but eventually must decide if she will stay or return to her former life.
In The Invisible Hour, published in August 2023, the author presents repression of women in a different way than the author discussed above. First, we meet Ivy Jacob of Boston, privileged but wild daughter of a wealthy couple. She becomes pregnant by her boyfriend but finds herself shunned by both the boyfriend and her parents. She seeks refuge in a commune in Eastern Massachusetts, near the town of Blackwell where she delivers her daughter, Mia, and marries the leader of the Community. Mothers who live there help rear all the children, not just their own, but Ivy manages to remain close to Mia. One day, while the two are selling produce from the Community at a farmer’s market, Mia asks to find a restroom and Ivy directs her across the park to the library. Once Mia enters the library she is enthralled. The first book she checks out is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The library is forbidden by The Community, but Mia finds reasons to visit and check out many more books. Ivy dies suddenly one day while picking apples in an orchard when a truck backs over her. Mia begins to escape the Community and is helped by a librarian who takes her to live with a friend near Concord. The two friends join as a family to rear Mia. They send her to college and eventually she herself becomes a librarian at the New York Public Library in New York City. Unfortunately, her mother’s husband at The Community continues to track and threaten her. Mia never stops dreaming of Hawthorne, studies his life, and one day he appears to her as she wakes from a nap in a field near Blackwell. Although she only meets with him a few times, the two become romantically involved but Mia realizes she cannot exist in this form of time travel that would ruin both of their lives. She gives him a message before leaving him permanently, and becomes pregnant with their child.
In these mother/daughter relationships the reader observes how both mothers guide their daughters away from repressive situations. Tiana leads Jo to the island where women are free to explore their (often hidden or repressed) talents. Ivy steers Mia to the library where she opens the world of books and uses them as steppingstones to find her way out of the repressive Community dominated by her stepfather. I am always looking for new ways to understand my own strange relationship with my mother and have learned how she felt repressed by the culture of the 1950s and 60s. She had worked in exciting jobs during World War II and earned a degree with a journalism major from the University of Illinois before she married my father. After the War, she was expected to become a housewife, caring for children, cleaning and cooking for her family, with little intellectual stimulation or use of her acquired knowledge. She lived in a small house in a small town and was expected to support my father’s career as a doctor. Our house was surrounded by a gravel pit, the Sangamon River bordered by trees, and open cornfields. Mom grew up in Chicago and she and my father spent their early years of marriage in San Diego awaiting my father’s orders from the U.S. Navy to go to sea. Mom had seen the wide world and longed to go there. Living in a small Midwestern town in central Illinois was stifling for her. Eventually, once my brother and I were married, my parents bought a condo in La Jolla, California as a second home.
As I have studied and written about mother/daughter relationships, I have decided the best mother a woman can be is to become an example of the mother she wanted (or had). The picture with this BLOG shows me with my daughters Mindy and Becca Hardwick at a Community Fair last Mother’s Day weekend. A friend in the Union Poets discovered that all three of us are writers with published books and asked us to sit at a signing table there. I have published three books; Mindy has published nearly ten books; and Becca had a story published in a recent edition of Chicken Soup for the Soul.
