Free Fear of Fifty by Erica Jong Page A

destiny. She could-n’ t bear the world’s criticism as I could. Her inner bad reviews were so sharp and biting that she could not risk a single outer one.
    Or maybe her maternal urge was too strong. She couldn’t stop at one child as I did. She gave birth to me and gave up struggling to be free. And how can I protest her giving birth to me?
    I suffer too, and my kind of writing has never left me free of criticism, but I also have my father’s mad tenacity. Rejection and criticism hurt, but I can bear them as long as I go on writing. I know that the world will not beat a path to anyone’s door. I drag the world to my door by never giving up.
    It was not that my mother gave up. It was just that she chose a more acceptable female path: outer capitulation, inner resentment—the old, old story. The world controls women by playing on our need for approval, for love, for relationship. If we behave ourselves, excising our unruly creative impulses, we are rewarded with “love.” If we do not, “love” is withheld. The woman creator pays a fearsome price as long as she is controlled by love. Creativity is dark, is rebellious, is full of “bad” thoughts. To suppress it in the name of “femininity” is to succumb to an anger that leads to madness.
    What I remember most about my mother was that she was always angry.
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    I wanted to undo this spell, break this cycle, so for the longest time, men and motherhood were secondary. Men were acceptable as long as they typed my poems, and motherhood frankly terrified me. It had been my mother’s Waterloo, I felt, and I had no intention of taking that risk.
    â€œNo sperm could ever get through that goop,” one of my husbands said about the excessive amounts of jelly I used to use with my diaphragm. I was unapologetic. I hated the idea of losing control and I knew that an abortion would certainly break my heart. My diaphragm was the guardian of my literary ambitions, and about those I had no ambivalence. I was absolutely single-minded. It was number one on the bestseller list or bust!
    Now, at fifty, when it is too late, I wish I had more children. What safe nostalgia! But when I was fertile, I mostly saw motherhood as the enemy of art and an appalling loss of control. My mother was always so torn. “The drive of women to have children is stronger than anything,” she used to say—somewhat ruefully, it seemed to me. I did not confront that drive until I was thirty-five, and by then, I was a writer first and a mother second. I had, like Colette, a “masculine pregnancy” —book-touring in my sixth month, finishing a chapter about an eighteenth-century masked ball as my water broke. I nursed the baby as I wrote Book II of a picaresque novel.
    For years, I resolutely remained a writer first, a mother second. It took me the whole first decade of my daughter’s life to learn to surrender myself to motherhood. No sooner had I learned that essential surrender than she was entering puberty and I menopause.
    What do I regret? Nothing. I have raised a daughter who also recognizes no limits. And I have learned at last that my mother was right. Surrendering to motherhood means surrendering to interruption. Molly comes home from school and work stops. She claims all my attention. I become her sidekick, her buddy, her duenna, her walking credit card. I resent it, yet I also love it more than anything. She fills me up with feeling as no one can. She also has the power to drive me mad. She assumes her own primacy, as all healthy children must. If there were three of her—as my mother had—this book might never be. Would that matter? Or only matter to me? Who knows? I write because I must. I hope my books are useful for you, too. But if I did not write them, I would surely be half-alive, and half-mad.
    So I have made my choices and I am mostly glad of them. The intensity of one mother-one daughter sometimes