Free Fear of Fifty by Erica Jong

thrust myself into the world like a boy, and then I atoned with female fears—fear of flying, fear of the marksman behind the writing desk, fear of fifty. I paid for my success by making myself fat, by depriving myself of good relationships, by depriving myself, for many years, of the joys of mothering. I also pushed my mother away because her example was too scary. And she pushed me away because my success was too painful. In that mutual repulsion-attraction dance, I feel my mother and I are all too typical of mothers and daughters of the whiplash generation.
    I try to see my mother as a separate person, and still I cannot. She is a part of me, a part that criticizes and stings and disapproves. She will never be satisfied because what she wants is basically impossible: for me to be just like her and yet to succeed as she did not.
    I was really the marksman behind the desk. It was not my mother or even my imaginary mother. I wanted to kill the traitor self that wanted to break from my mother. I knew my writing was my means of escape, and I wanted to stay, yet go at the same time. Hence the perfect metaphor I devised was fear of flying.
    Fly I would, but never without fear. Fly I would, but always in a state of torment—a metallic edge behind the teeth that says: You cannot dare, dare this. I flew but suffered for my hubris like Icarus. Even my chosen symptom was half-father, half-mother. Even my chosen symptom expressed the split in my soul.
    In Isadora Wing, I invented a typical heroine of the whiplash generation. She flew and fucked and achieved in the world, but she punished herself with men. With her heart in the past and her intellect in the future, she was doomed to suffer no matter what she did. Her self-mockery and humor became her survival tool, because only through irony can you say X, yet mean Y.
    I think Isadora touched women of my generation because so many of us are similarly split. We are our mothers, but we are also women of the future. We earn our own livings, support our own children, fight for our careers in a world that still does not give us economic equality with men, but that dark undertow is pulling us back to our mothers, making us feel guilty even for the crumbs of autonomy we achieve.
    Often we express our darkest ambivalence with our men and our children. Fierce competitors in the world of work, we crumble in relationships or become slaves to our children. Some of us finally give up men because it is just too tough to keep on suffering. We tend to give too much in love, so some of us decide to give nothing at all. Some of us turn to women, hoping that way to break the sadomasochistic chains that bind.
    With our children, it’s harder. Often we spoil them because we have no model of mothering that includes independence. We can’t stay home as our mothers did, but the mothers in our heads still have the power to make us feel guilty. So we set too few limits and buy too many goodies we cannot really afford and consequently we raise children who dictate to us, all the while feeling deeply insecure.
    Thinking of my mother’s life, I am overcome with feeling. Talent alone is never enough. My mother had talent to burn. She could draw and paint, model clay, cut patterns, create collages from bits of silk and paper, create ballet dresses from ordinary crepe paper, embroider a green needlepoint forest without any pattern but the pattern in her head. She once turned me into a forest sprite for Halloween, covering my leotard with green and gold and orange leaves until I fluttered in the wind like a quivering autumn tree. She made me cut-outs, sewed my baby dolls Victorian bonnets and crinolines, painted tiny portraits to hang over the mantelpieces in my doll’s house. There was nothing her nimble fingers could not do, nothing her visual mind could not conceive. But all this talent was not enough. She lacked the courage to follow her talent into the dark woods of any artist’s