Maman
In the months following my divorce, I became preoccupied by a spider.
I discovered the spider entirely by accident one afternoon while attending a free family day at the former home, now museum, of a long-dead local philanthropist. To enter the museum, my four-year-old and I crossed a wooden suspension bridge over a belt of sandy bayou. That morning it had rained, and the bayou was swollen, muddy. Debris flowed in the current. Beneath our feet, the wooden bridge trembled. On the other side, sprawling, wet gardens framed a Southern mansion in deepening shades of green. The gardens were named for Greek goddesses, or muses: Clio, Diana, Euterpe.
Slowly, my son and I made our way across the property, churning with the bodies of young children. Behind the house, a private drive led to other mansions. These were not museums, not open to the public. In contrast to the museum’s antique decadence, they were boxy and modern, quietly imposing beneath a canopy of pine trees.
My son darted down the drive, his red shirt bright against the lush green landscaping. “Race me, mama,” he called, his small, sweaty hand slipping out of my own.
I was too exhausted to race. My ex-husband and I had separated two years prior and officially divorced six months ago. There had been trauma in our marriage I could not recover from, trauma that had warped my understanding of my husband like a beam of wood exposed to floodwaters or extreme heat. Though, we told everyone, we remained good friends.
As a result, I had full custody of our son. I was in graduate school yet again, attempting to provide financially for myself and my son as a single mother. In previous jobs, I had always made a fraction of the income my husband made. This was no longer possible. We lived with my parents, whom I relied on for everything as I completed my coursework—childcare, housing, meals. Even simple choices, like when I would eat dinner, were no longer up to me.
Earlier in the week I left my son downstairs for a few minutes to use the bathroom. When I returned, my mother held him while they colored pages from an activity book, chattering and laughing beneath the kitchen window. Their bodies draped over one another and drenched in sunlight. When I first moved in, scenes like this delighted me. But this day I put my head in my hands and sobbed. I needed to be my own kind of mother. I felt I was being robbed of this experience—not by my parents necessarily, but by my own life.
Of course, I was also deeply grateful.
My son had stopped running outside a decorative iron gate delineating the backyard of a contemporary home. Through wide gaps in this gate, I glimpsed a metal sculpture. It was ten or fifteen feet tall and made entirely from cast bronze. Situated carefully between two oak trees, its legs seemed to melt into the branches, shadowed. It rose like a threat. “Oh,” I gasped in surprise and pleasure.
It was one of Louise Bourgeois’ spiders.
Bourgeois is one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, although she did not achieve this fame until she was in her seventies, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York first exhibited her work. Yet she began to make art in her early twenties, after her mother died, switching her field of study at the Sorbonne from mathematics to studio art. For fifty years she remained relatively unknown, living and working in Manhattan, an exile from her native Paris. Her subject was the maternal female body. “The subject of pain is the business I am in,” she wrote.
The house was an arrangement of glass cubes and pale stone, accented by dark wood. The grass beneath the spider’s long legs a shocking, radioactive green.
Later, I would learn this was the home of another philanthropist, a man who had worked for what was formerly the largest natural gas company in America while its executives quietly committed fraud, hiding financial losses until the company very publicly collapsed in the early 2000s.
A butterfly turned in the humid air, catching the light for a moment, then falling. The sun through the branches of an oak. The sky, blue through a panel in one of the home’s glass cubes. The black limbs of spider dissolving into the trees’ nodes . My shirt heavy in the humidity, my hair heavy, my skin. A camera in the panel on the gate. The feeling of being watched, watching.
“Mama, mama, ma-ma,” my son called. “I was dreaming about you,” he said, looking up from the gate, then without warning shoved his fingers into my eyes in the carelessly violent way of young children.
Bourgeois’ spiders are self-portraits, or portraits of her own mother; the distinctions seem to slip into one another. Inside their enormous metal abdomens lie piles of white marble eggs. The spiders tower. They guard. They threaten. “Protector or predator?” ask the museum brochures at her retrospective exhibits. Describing her own mother, Bourgeois writes: She was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat.
That fall I started returning.
First, I took my son to all the family days, when the museum opened for free. We would sprint through the gardens, past the old gothic mansion to the private drive. The metal gate. Then I started going alone: The spider was a balm on bad days, a treat on good ones. I went to the spider if I wanted to think or write or get away from the web of relationships that bound me to my own life. The camera watching me from the gate.
Truthfully, I was in awe that this spider—its seeming assertion that the beauty of maternal bodies was synonymous with their shame and horror—watched me from the backyard of a man who had made a small fortune at Enron, then a larger one investing that money in a private hedge fund. A man who, of course, embodied the systems of power and domination that the spider existed to obliterate. That he very intentionally picked the gate meant to be seen through—was it an invitation? A taunt? I marveled at these facts, the way one looks up at a night sky thick with stars and marvels at one’s place in the universe.
The dominant emotion I felt in those days, my spider days, was anger. Like many women, I had repressed my anger for years—the span of my entire twenties. I spent that decade trying to be a good girl, assuming this would work for me. I was promised it would work. So, I starved, performed, worshiped, married, labored, and delivered. All the while, hiding. The promise, in exchange for my middle-class goodness, was a certain stability. This stability was rooted in class, in race—it haunted nearly every aspect of my identity. Yet it had disintegrated almost overnight. Quite spectacularly and dramatically it failed me.
The spider became a kind of mirror, reflecting my anger endlessly. She, too, had lost her freedom. Her location, at the center of this country’s extreme wealth disparities, had a fated quality to it. Of course I’m here, she seemed to say quietly. Where else would I be? And of course I was here too, upstairs in my parents’ house, bound in totality to their financial support and my young son’s all-encompassing need. Where else would I be in a culture that has, theoretically, changed the potential outcomes for women without changing the underlying structures or beliefs that continue to render them second-class citizens?
I began this essay believing that my anger, despite its location in the particularities of my private life, was communal anger: It belonged to all women. I was neither the first, nor would I be the last, to fall for the good girl’s promises. In other words, not even my loss of autonomy belonged to me.
Now I’m not sure. Now I see that beginning with the presumption of stability—that is what is truly astounding. Not its failure.
Over many weeks with Bourgeois’ spider, I began to understand something else too: Nothing about the spider’s location lessened the sum of her body’s allure and terror. If anything, these were heightened by contrast. How grotesque she was against a backdrop of over-watered grass and luxury cars. How elegant beside the endless cubes of thick glass. The spider seemed to promise that I too might locate my own power at the very site where I was bound. That I might find all my pleasure and all my radiance and all my capacity already present, even as I writhed at the center of my web.
Cover photo by Hamish on Unsplash
About the Author
Catherine Cleary received her MFA in poetry from the University of Houston in 2018. Her work has been published in Poetry, The Southern Review, Bennington Review, and other literary journals. She has been awarded fellowships from the Texas Cultural Trust, the Brown Foundation, and Inprint Houston. She lives with her son in Houston, TX.
Related Posts
And Then There Were Two →
Flappable →
Ordinary Love: An Interview with Marie Rutkoski →
