I HAVE SAT this summer in my garden watching bees and yellow-jackets flitting through our raspberry canes. The raspberries have been good this year, and now the canes stand dry, stick-looking, with limp leaves and tangled branches. We have eaten all the goodness from them. But the bees still come, humming over us where we sit, circling the late yellow-flowering broccoli gone to seed. We are reading—my son sitting snug between my thighs, smooth bulwarks against any stings, while splashy sounds of other siblings reach us now and then above the hums. Niobe-like, languid and proud, I hold him at the end of summer, his golden skin challenging any radiance sent down from the sky. Smooth rounded-brownness, now squirming to be off; white soles flashing as he races through the meadow to join the others, crushing wild strawberries and clover with his heels.

[Niobe]

My own Achilles. I must whisper of my pride even here in this garden. Myths and archetypes float like pollen in the air. Time and space do not dissipate the passions aroused by mother love. I pick up my book on mythology. It was hubris which destroyed Niobe. Niobe, who was so proud of her seven sons and seven daughters that she once boasted that their beauty could rival that of Leto’s children. No mean boast, for Leto’s children, fathered by the great god Zeus himself, were the glorious Apollo and long-legged Artemis. Leto had labored nine days to give birth to Apollo, clinging to a palm tree with her encircled arms, for Hera, Zeus’s wife, had forbidden the goddess of childbirth to assist her. At last he was brought forth, and indeed all the jealous fears of Hera were fulfilled, for Apollo was the embodiment of the Hellenic spirit. He was the god of light, and music, and had the gift of prophecy as well. Foolish Niobe to set her sights so high. Like avenging falcons, Apollo and his sister swooped down on Niobe’s children and killed them all with their bows and arrows. Weeping Niobe was turned to marble and her tears formed a running stream upon its surface.

[Demeter]

Summer is nearly over and the blue Berkshire hills on my horizon are lit here and there with early red and yellow leaves, the chlorophyl sucked out by the heat of August days. Soon the hills will be ablaze with autumn tints, a never tiring sight. Indian folklore tells that there was once a great bear hunt in the sky and when the hunter fought the bear, the blood, dripping down to earth turned the leaves to red; and where the great bear’s yellow fat ran over the edge of the clouds, the leaves it touched were turned to gold. I sit musing on myths and folk-tales with mixed late-summer emotions. In the city, removed from nature’s patterns, my thoughts don’t run so. But here, faced daily with the signs of earth’s cycle, fecundity and agriculture, birth and death, are intermingled. I am the earth, my offspring are saplings produced by tilling and warmth. I see them grow and change. Autumn reminds me of the coming white-winter, the inevitable separation.

Demeter was the original earth-goddess, perhaps the only mother, Euripides declared, who overturned “this last and crowning sorrow of all mortals.” Her daughter, Persephone was abducted by Hades, Lord of the Dead, and taken away beneath the earth to live with him. Demeter wandered the earth wailing and mourning. She accused Zeus of neglecting his duties in allowing his brother to abduct Persephone. She vowed to let no plants or food grow on earth until her daughter was returned to her. And, indeed for one long, thirsty year the earth was utterly barren. At last Zeus begged his brother to allow Persephone to return to her mother.

[Thetis]

But I have no Demetrian power to yoke my children to me. I am rather more like Thetis of the silver feet, who drifts under the ocean with her handmaidens, the Nereids, pushing seaweed from her hair and, as we read in the lliad, lamenting her knowledge of her son’s mortality: 

Woe is me, unhappy mother of a noble son. I bore a lovely boy, perfect and strong, a hero above heroes. He ran up like a slim wee, I tended him like a choice plant in the garden, I let him go in the fleet to fight against Ilios: but I shall never have him back again, he will never return to his father’s house. As long as he lives and sees the light of the sun he has only sorrow, and I can do nothing to help him.

Poor Thetis, mother of that greatest Of heroes, Achilles, was a goddess burdened with the pain of all mortal mothers, the knowledge that his firm youthful flesh would one day rot, and that there was nothing she could do t o stop it. No path of avoidance she could take. It was fated. One must accept.

I must let go, loosen the threads like weeds, that bind my children to my hair. Finger-splaying, comb them out till they float free, rising like bubbles to the surface where they can swim, transparent seahorses on the waves. The male seahorse carries the eggs. Is that my freedom? Or theirs, my children?

[Clytemnestra]

My children shout. Thoughts scatter like shards. I try to reconstruct the bubble. Do fathers feel the same, wanting to let go; not wanting to let go; freedom or chains? Or does the biological function of the mother make her love her child more? I know without a doubt what womb these children came from. They are mine. There are no lingering dark corners in my mind.

In the Odyssey, Athena questions Telemakhos, “You must” she asks “be Odysseus’s boy? The way your head is shaped, the fine eyes, yes, how like him!” But the boy replies: “My mother says I am his son; I know not surely. Who has known his.own engendering?” In Myth, Religion and Mother Right, J. J’. Bachofen’s thesis on the existence of a pre-Hellenic matriarchy, Bachofen expands this theory of the uterine link between child and mother to that of the uterinl, children of the same uterus. They are closer, he argues, than are the consanguineri, those children engendered by the same father. Thus he quotes Lycaon, son of Priam, who shouts out, in order to save his life, to Achilles: “I am not from the same womb as Hector, be who killed your powerful and kindly companion.” And who can forget Antigone’s passionate defense of her beloved Polynices, or those brother-sister murderers, Orestes and Elektra? My God, what an added torture for Clytemnestra. Nights in bed with cowardly Aegisthus could hardly have been worth it.

But the real reason for Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband was her towering anger against him for sacrificing her daughter Iphigenia to the winds. Her darling “long-wept” blossom” of herself. Orestes was a little boy then. Like mine. Clytemnestra sent him away, probably for his protection. Why, then, when he grew up did he turn against his mother, the wronged wife, the sorrowing mother? And why did Elektra too, the image of Iphigenia, turn against her mother, and support the cause of revenge for her father’s death? Does this disprove the bond of the uterini? Or is the reason perhaps that myths, as they have come down to us, written by the great Greek tragedians, have been written by sons—not daughters?

Were the fears of men to be allayed, the power of the womb destroyed, by punishing mothers for the presence of those dark corners? 

A cool afternoon breeze rouses me. It rustles the tops of the corn. I must go in. There are things to be done. I call to the children not to catch cold.

One evening when the sun was sinking like a great orange globe behind the woods and the children were darting in and out of the house like moths round a candle, I picked up a book a guest had given me. Pungent drafts of rosemary roasting in the oven with the meat were carried on the air. The kitchen beckoned. Children called. My typewriter yawned, a grey question-mark in the room. Distractions of a summer evening. I flicked open a page—the book was Tillie Olsen’s Silences—and the sentence jumped at me: “Almost no mothers—as almost no part-time, part-self persons—have created enduring literature … . “

[Pandora]

I feel as though I have got too close to my daughter’s horse and been kicked in the stomach. Is it true? Part-person. Parturi-ation. By being whole, have I become less? Has all the creativity I once felt in my pen been confined to that creativity between my legs? A sick joke is woman. Like the gift of Pandora played by Zeus upon men. Let them pay for the price of fire, he decreed, and ordered Hermes to add to his creation, to “put lies, and wheedling words of falsehoods, and a treacherous nature . . , to be a sorrow to men who eat bread.” And so Pandora was created. Punishment for sexual desire. In the process of sexual fulfillment, are mothers to pay too? Am I to be left as silent as the marble mound that once was Niobe?

[Medea]

Two names immediately.jump to mind. Jane Austen and George Eliot. I have been reading Middlemarch this summer. Hiot’s heroine, Dorothea, nearly dies in childbirth. Fecundity and death. Is that how freedom is to be achieved? Medea killed her children. Her revenge was against Jason. And yet she asked Aegeus what the oracle had advised him on the subject of his own infertility. Aegeus had replied: “I am not to open the cock that projects from the skin … . ” And she interrupts; “Till you do what? Till you reach what land?” For Medea that solution is too late. She has her children. Her road to freedom, from pain, from Jason, lies in killing her children. And she is carried off in triumph to the land of Erechtheus in a chariot drawn by winged dragons.

[Hera]

Hera, wife of Zeus, uses less drastic measures to return to that state of freedom, oft equated by modem women as childlessness, by bathing yearly in a magic stream. This stream, called Canathus is near Argos and returns her to her original state of virginity.

[Phaedra, Jocasta]

Mortal mothers in Greek tragedies, however, with neither the stomach for Medea’s ghastly methods, nor the magic of Hem’s bathing, usually kill themselves. Phaedra, consumed with passion for her stepson, Hippolytus, tries to starve herself to death, and failing that, accused by Hippolytus of being a curse, a snare, a poisonous weed, she hangs herself from a swinging noose. Jocasta too, fearing the worst long before Oedipus was aware of the truth, hung herself “in a twisted noose of swinging cords.”

One may argue that these women chose death to avoid shame and guilt, not to achieve the freedom to create. But the freedom to be is as powerful an emotion as the freedom to be creative, and the fast freedom must precede the other. These earlier mothers were still prisoners of their biological destiny. And yet, when we take comfort in that fact, we think of the example of Sylvia Plath. In a letter to her mother written in 1960, she writes: “I really hunger for a study of my own out of hearing of the nursery where I could be alone with my thoughts for a few hours a day. I really believe I could do some good stories if I had a stretch of time without distractions.”

Distractions. They are the tools with which mothers ply their trade, and motherhood is my profession while my children are so young. But Tillie Olsen warns that it will only breed more “distraction, not meditation… Interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil” which is vital to the achievement of any art form. She warns that creativity will atrophy, cease to be; opportunities, ideas will be lost forever, gives multitudinous examples of periods of silences. I am afraid. My emotions refuse to accept what my mind hesitates to contemplate. The facts. The facts are in.

[Athena]

Creative gods. Let’s think. Mothers if possible. With a shock I realize there are none. The two most creative gods, Athena and Hephaestos, are also the product of “virgin” births. And Athena, of course, often called “Pallas” Athena, meaning the Maiden, was the eternal virgin, the daughter every man wanted. Once, in a fit of womb-envy, Zeus had produced her from his forehead. Not to be outdone, Hera, his wife, conceived Hephaestos on her own. Unfortunately, he was born lame, and she pushed him over the edge of Olympus. Hephaestos, however, became the master craftsman, the god of fire who worked with metal and made jewelry and weapons for war, he built the houses the gods lived in and adorned them with beautiful things he had made. He even created the fast robots, in feminine form we read without surprise, who aid him when he walks.

Athena, however, outdoes him in the number of skills with which she is endowed. She is credited with the invention of the rake and the plough (to rape the mother-earth?); she shows man how to yoke cattle and bridle horses; she teaches him the secrets of shipbuilding, pottery and weaving. (She was so proud of her needlework that she turned Arachne, an expert weaver who challenged her work, into a spider so that she could spin forever.)

It is the childless Athena too, the maie-begotten child, who overturns the old goddesses in the Eumenides into weak female forms. Bachofen sees this play as symbolizing the turning point between the old (matriarchy) and the new (patriarchy). Modem scholarship has thrown doubt on the historical accuracy of his hypothesis. But Joseph Campbell has pointed out the unique and valuable insight Bachofen gives into a period in man’s growth, into the psychological understanding of our “entire cultural heritage.”

The Eumenides are the old Furies, who extract blood for blood and are out for revenge against Orestes for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. Orestes is on trial and Apollo and Athena are called in to judge Orestes’s guilt. Orestes asks the Furies why they did not chase his mother for revenge after she killed his father. The Furies answer, because she was not a blood relation of the man she slew:

ORESTES. Do you call me related by blood to my mother?

CHORUS: Why, in what other way did she nurse you, you miscreant, within her girdle? Do you disown the dearest blood of a mother? 

And then Apollo gives his ridiculous argument, that 

the bearer of the so-called offspring is not the mother of it, but only the nurse of the newly-conceived fetus. It is the male who is the author of its being; while she, as a stranger for a stranger, preserves the young plant for those whom the god has not blighted it in the bud.

Athena is then produced as proof that one can become a father without a mother. She wholeheartedly supports the male cause, a perfect child-woman till the end. “I shall give this ballot to Orestes; for there is no mother who gave me birth, and I approve of the male side—except that I do not marry—in all respects with my whole heart, and am entirely in favor of the father’s cause.” 

And the chorus is overcome by this logic; “Grant that our lovely young maidens may have wedded lives … at every time exercising due weight in their dealings with men, everywhere the most honored of the gods.”

And they are led, happily chanting behind victorious Athena who shouts: 

Forward! Let the light of the torches also proceed, in order that these friendly dwellers in the land may become noted hereafter for the prosperous fortunes of the male inhabitants.

I AM afraid. I am afraid of modern-day Athenas. They are seducing us with their torches and their songs. We dance like mice behind our new Pied Pipers, determined to turn us into female forms of eunuchs. Instead of feeling the kicks and bulges of a new human being, they offer us instead empty bellies of guilt, envy and frustration.

The question of creativity is not an either-or one. At last, in this century, we are freed of the bonds of our female bodies. We are free to choose—both. Motherhood and creativity. What is any art-form anyway but an attempt to concretely express an experienced or imagined emotion? Motherhood is all emotion, grist for the mill. Blue daytime soaps for housewives to weep over, or Tannhauser at the Met, or college courses on mythology read in summer gardens.

God, I wish I could convince myself, lay waste this cold question which won’t leave me alone. Have I given up my best work for them? Is that all there is? Do my childless-sisters and disgruntled mother-friends have truth on their side? No. No. No. Listen to my heart. Shut my ears. Do what I want to do. What is that? Who knows for certain any more?

Warily I watch my own grey-eyed Athena as she runs in from the garden. The boys follow her excitedly. They have found a bird. She holds it in her cupped hand, it is small and featherless. Its beak is too large for its head to support. Ants are crawling round its blue, thinskinned eyelids. We place it in a box and shine a goose-necked lamp on it. It is time to gather and eat. The candle is lit. Outside, the cicadas have begun and the darkness has descended. “Oh Earth … . What pang is this that enters my side? Hear the cause of my wrath, mother Night!  Dispossessed of my ancient honors, the baffling wiles of these gods have made me of no account.” Round our table it is warm. Now and then we hear the bird chirping as it struggles to survive.