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For William, Henry, and Bridget For Sophie and Lillian For Tess, Davey, Gabriel, and Joseph
F oreword
Two steps forward, one back. Or, that’s how it sometimes feels when it comes to confronting sexism, racism, heterosexism—and mother-isms Sometimes it’s hard not to roll my eyes when popular media features yet another story on mother “dilemmas” as if problems surrounding motherhood are new news. Been there, done that. All too often these top stories—teen mothers, overworked mothers, killer mothers, tiger mothers, women postponing or rejecting motherhood—just fan old fames to sell more copies, perpetuating, not resolving, longstanding conficts. To actually change oppressive politics feels like an uphill battle, the distorted assumptions buried so deep, the systemic structures so unrelenting, the signs of progress so feeting.
So, I leapt for joy when three smart, up-and-coming scholars—Annie Hardison-Moody, Claire Bischoff, and Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo— told me their plans for this book. Disturbed by the dearth of mothering literature in religious and theological studies since the publication over 20 years ago of my own book, Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, they wanted get people talking about mothering.1 So began their hunt, as they describe it in their original proposal, for “engaging and accessible essays by an intergenerational and intercultural group of mother-scholars” on questions “at the intersection of motherhood studies, religious practice, pastoral care, and theology.”
1Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994).
Their dogged pursuit has paid off. True to their original promise, this wonderful collection of thoughtful, creative, even riveting essays marks a major leap forward. Here, my work becomes my joy: I absolutely loved reading these chapters. Pushing back against the relentless cycle of regressive stereotypes and adopting new genres of intellectual refection, Parenting as Spiritual Practice and Source for Theology: Mothering Matters is a landmark volume that breaks the silence and forges fresh pathways for meaningful conversation on mothers and theology.
Let’s be honest. Motherhood studies has been an extremely precarious enterprise, especially in theology. If, on frst blush, it seems like motherhood should have a natural and obvious home in gender and women’s studies or a signifcant place in religious studies, think again. Motherhood has not featured prominently in either realm. Instead, in the words of women’s studies professor Samira Kawash, maternal studies has been “fragmented and discontinuous in the academic margins.” Her review essay goes on to cover plenty of exciting publications, but she still concludes nonetheless, “all is not well.”2 Despite efforts to make space for the study of mothering, institutional funding and scholarly backing remain negligible. That “neither the university system nor the institutions of academic feminism appears willing to support a scholarly community and a research program that explicitly foregrounds mothering is discouraging.”3
Research on mothering has certainly remained a borderline activity for religion scholars. The publication of Also a Mother and other writings in the 1990s that reclaimed mothering, such as Delores Williams’s Sisters in the Wilderness, 4 were themselves cries in a wilderness of inattention that harkens back to a 1960s essay by Valerie Saiving that also “lay mostly dormant in theological discussion for nearly twenty years.”5 In “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Saiving begins what has become a tidal wave of theological reconstruction with this opening line, “I am a student
2Samira Kawash, “New Directions in Motherhood Studies,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 4 (2011): 995–996.
3Kawash, “New Directions,” 996.
4Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993).
5Mark Douglas and Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, “Revisiting Valerie Saiving’s Challenge to Reinhold Niebuhr: Honoring Fifty Years of Refection on ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’: Introduction and Overview,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 75.
of theology. I am also a woman.”6 More than most scholars usually admit, her essay grew out of her own struggle to mother a young child while completing doctoral study in a highly competitive, male-dominated university. She uses anthropologists like Margaret Mead to lift up the distinct demands of mothering, wondering how the closely hovering physical attention and the intense emotional labor of care for the young reshapes theological constructions of human sin and love. Although she falls into the camp of many early second-wave white feminists who mistook their own experience and social science fndings as indicative of a universal “feminine view,” she at least takes mothering seriously as a pivotal activity that consumes the energy of a signifcant portion of the world’s population and has the potential to transform theological views of the good life. Fortunately, as the present book exemplifes, a fertile plurality of voices is now enriching the conversation. In fact, Kawash’s review offers more signs of hope than her pessimistic conclusion suggests, and her assessment of the nature of recent developments in particular captures a key contribution of the current volume. Despite the “surprising paucity of critical essays, studies, or book reviews on the topics of mothering and motherhood” in the last decade, she notes a new trend in the motherhood literature—a more complex understanding of mothering.7 By attending more closely to a diversity of mothering practices and experiences, the literature manages to reclaim the signifcance of maternal knowledge while simultaneously “rejecting any notion of a fxed or essential aspect of maternal experience, desire, or subjectivity.”8 The collection of essays in this book achieves the same feat, using the specifcities and particularities of mothering as a unique resource for reimagining motherhood, religious life, and theological beliefs. By affrming mothering as a source for constructive theology while underscoring its complexity, this book brilliantly diffuses two prevailing reasons behind the academic reticence toward motherhood studies—anxiety that it represents a “retreat from feminist politics,” as Kawash says, and misperception of such research as a “relic” of the naïve essentialism of 1970s and 1980s feminism, now challenged by today’s
6Valerie Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion (April 1960): 100.
poststructuralist deconstructions of the category of “woman.”9 This book answers both concerns by recognizing the politics and power of mothering while also expanding its parameters, resisting exhaustive and exclusive defnitions of where and how mothering happens.
This collection does much more than counter these worries, however. It also answers a major oversight in Kawash’s appraisal that is far too typical among feminist theorists. While covering an array of books on divergent populations—impoverished mothers of all races and ages, lesbian mothers, adoptive mothers, immigrant mothers, imprisoned mothers, mothers harboring or defying maternal desires, third-wave mothers, and so forth—Kawash doesn’t mention religion until her last section and then devotes only one page to the subject. More disheartening, she introduces the section by revealing without apology her own bias: “It is a huge irony,” her frst sentence reads, that women might actually have “better success in a religious community than in virtually any other environment” receiving support for mothering while also engaging in “meaningful adult interaction or work.”10 As if religion is so repressive that such fourishing seems impossible to imagine? She mentions in passing just one book (on home birth) and gives equal space to James Dobson and the conservative Catholic book market, which may partly explain her negative stereotypes about religion. Nonetheless, her treatment (or lack thereof) of research on mothering in religious and theological studies is disappointing, even if typical of an ignorance that separates gender studies from religious studies more broadly. She disregards religion as an area of study and has no idea that she might fnd, should she look closer, signifcant scholarship on mothering among her peers in the religious studies department or theological school across campus. Of course, religion scholars are partly to blame, having sidelined the subject ourselves and failing to reach broader publics with our own research. But if gender studies investigates mothering but ignores religion, and religious studies includes gender but ignores mothering, then a major swath of human experience and practice is evaded. As Kawash herself admits, “religious faith … is a signifcant source of meaning for most humans today.”11
9Kawash, “New Directions,” 971–972.
10Kawash, “New Directions,” 994.
11Kawash, “New Directions,” 994.
Hence, bringing religion and mothering together makes the present volume all the more important. The authors and their bibliographies correct impoverished readings of the scholarship on mothering in theology. Many contributors have written on mothering not just here but elsewhere, and the footnotes alone suggest intellectual developments too expansive to review easily here. You will fnd in these pages a whole new panorama of mothering: ancestral mothers, intellectual mothers, binging/purging/healing mothers, whore-mothers (Revelations 17–18), bereaved mothers (by homicide, stillbirth, miscarriage, war), murderers’ mothers, politically and spiritually brave mothers, adoptive mothers, mothers of children with mental health needs, mothers preparing children to survive in white supremacist society, mothers who remind children that they are beloved by God, spiritual mothers, warrior mothers, transgressive mothers, mothers mothering parents, and a multitude of foremothers (Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Julian of Norwich, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, and our own mothers and grandmothers). The theological themes are equally overfowing and compelling: creation, healing, responsibility, justice, ecclesiology, Eucharist, communion, guilt, shame, lament, tree cosmologies, black faith, suffering, practical theodicy, spiritual disciplines of attention and resilience, maternal love, the imago Dei, vulnerability, mysticism, human fnitude, ambiguity, gratitude, grace.
My run-on sentences are stylistically off, but they are one way to capture the richness you will discover herein. Not only this, each author is refreshingly earnest, open, and honest, addressing personal spiritual challenges right next to personal political battles right next to personal theological hopes.
The immediate audience is other scholars in religion, of course. But the book deserves attention from people in other felds and from nonacademics invested in sustaining loving and just religious communities and families. How people imagine the divine, for example, or understand the order of creation has an impact on daily life, on how people order households, understand love and service, depict human potential, and care for offspring. The reverse is equally true: how people mother transforms theology. As this collection demonstrates, sustained scholarly attention to mothering will help secure the lives of those tossed and torn by the whims and distortions of popular culture as they try to nurture infants and children. And sustained attention to mothering in theology and religion will enrich the academic discussion in women’s and
gender studies, which remains greatly impoverished without the voices of religion scholars. For, motherhood has not disappeared at all from popular and political culture, even if academics haven’t deigned to treat the issues seriously. The range of scholarship that appears in this book on the particularities of multiple mothering practices offers an incredibly helpful response and correction to the resistance to motherhood studies across the university and to the need for more careful consideration of spiritual life and theological assertions.
Thank you to the editors and contributors for putting the subject matter front and center in vivid and real ways. Thank you for moving an important conversation a big step forward. I hope the encouragement that I discovered in this book will be contagious to all the readers exposed to its rich spread of maternal theological and spiritual knowing.
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore
Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo
Teresa Dávila
e ditors and C ontributors
About the Editors
Claire Bischoff is an Assistant Professor of theology at St. Catherine University and co-editor of My Red Couch and Other Stories of Seeking a Feminist Faith (2005). Mothering her three children, alongside teaching undergraduate and graduate students, is central to nurturing her sacramental imagination.
Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo is Edith B. and Arthur E. Earley Assistant Professor of Catholic and Latin American Studies at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Her frst book, The Power and Vulnerability of Love: A Theological Anthropology (2015), draws on women’s experiences of maternity and natality to construct a theology of suffering and redemption that is anchored in the reality of human vulnerability. Her theological work is informed, and often interrupted, by the daily work of caring for four young children.
Annie Hardison-Moody is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Human Sciences at North Carolina State University, where she focuses on the intersections of religion, gender, and health. She is author of When Religion Matters: Practicing Healing in the Aftermath of the Liberian Civil War (2016) and co-Director of Voices into Action: The Families, Food, and Health Project.
Contributors
Karen Baker-Fletcher Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA
Claire Bischoff St. Catherine University, Saint Paul, MN, USA
Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL, USA
María Teresa Dávila Andover Newton Theological School, Malden, MA, USA
Neomi De Anda University of Dayton, Dayton, USA
Kelly Brown Douglas Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, USA
Wendy Farley San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, CA, USA
Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
Annie Hardison-Moody North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
HyeRan Kim-Cragg St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon, SK, Canada
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA
Hellena Moon Decatur, GA, USA
Mary Elizabeth Moore Boston University School of Theology, Boston, MA, USA
Marcia W. Mount Shoop Asheville, NC, USA
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Claire Bischoff, Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo and Annie Hardison-Moody
How can and do mothers experience, undertake, and understand parenting as spiritual practice? How do mothers’ and children’s intersecting identities of gender, race, sexuality, and class affect parenting as spiritual practice? And how can the spiritual practices of parenting contribute to theological scholarship?1 Parenting as Spiritual Practice and Source for Theology: Mothering Matters explores these interdisciplinary questions that arise in felds such as motherhood studies, religious practice,
1 Recognizing women’s complex and multiple identities, we have adopted an intersectional approach with this volume and have encouraged contributors to explore and challenge the
C. Bischoff (*)
St. Catherine University, Saint Paul, MN, USA
E.O. Gandolfo
Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
C. Bischoff et al. (eds.), Parenting as Spiritual Practice and Source for Theology, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59653-2_1
spirituality, pastoral care, and theology. The embodied practices of care that most mothers carry out on a daily basis historically have been devalued in Christian spirituality, which has too often sought an ethereal escape from matters of the fesh. Moreover, maternal voices have been missing from theology for most of Christian history. Therefore, this volume generates a fertile space for academic, ecclesial, and everyday conversations about how the experience of mothering challenges and informs both spiritual practice in particular and theological refection more broadly.
How and wHy it all began
Our memories of how this project came to be are a bit fuzzy, in large part because we started this process seven years ago while graduate students at Emory University, but also because our experiences of mothering have profoundly shaped this journey. During the course of this book’s writing, the three of us have birthed four children, experienced eight miscarriages, and parented nine children. We have also written three dissertations and negotiated several academic transitions—graduate student to Ph.D., adjunct to tenure-track, and stay-at-home parent to full-time faculty member. It might surprise you to know that the three of us have never been in the same place at the same time, and two of our editors (Claire and Liz) have never met in person. Instead, this book was birthed through countless Skype and Google Hangout calls, which started as the three of us tried to fgure out how to navigate our own mothering in the context of our lives as scholars of religion and theology. As we talked amongst ourselves about how mothering (and experiences of loss) shaped our scholarship, we broadened our circles to get advice from our mentors and professors, who shared with us their excitement, and also hesitancy, in thinking more critically about the intersections of mothering and theology. This volume was born out of these conversations and was transformed by dialogue with the authors represented here, who were excited to think
ways mothering has been defned and confned within various power structures. See Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299.
about how their lived realities of parenting had shaped the work that they do and how they do it.
We must also confess that this volume has been birthed with a sense of nervous trepidation—among us as the editors and several of the authors represented here. Writing about our personal experiences of mothering feels dangerous in the academy and beyond; writing frankly about the feelings of loss, fragmentation, guilt, pain, anger, and isolation that often accompany mothering feels precarious, as if we are lifting the curtain on a show that is not quite fnished. We were all too aware of the trope of the “good mother,” a classed (upper-middle) and raced (white) stereotype of someone who has it all together, as we edited this book. The deconstruction of this trope is behind many of the chapters represented here, but its specter no doubt haunted our work. Additionally, we wondered how writing such personal refections on life and motherhood might impact our work as scholars. Would others see us differently when our anxieties and challenges were on full display? It was only the strong support of the contributors in this volume (and others who were unable to contribute but who no doubt infuenced its writing) that pushed us forward. These stories, we felt, needed to be told and told in dialogue with other scholar-mothers.
We became convinced, then, that the topic of mothering as spiritual practice and source for theology is of critical importance to academic theologians, faith communities, and parents today for several interrelated reasons. First, mothering is often very isolating work; this is especially true when it is undertaken in conjunction with an academic vocation, as evidenced by several studies and volumes that have been published recently on motherhood and the academy.2 Methodologically, much feminist, womanist, mujerista, and Asian women’s theology, by contrast, is done in conversation and collaboration. To do the kind of theology that we all do, we need to be in conversation with each other, and
2 See, for example, Mari Castaneda and Kirsten Isgro, eds., Mothers in Academia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Elrena Evans, Caroline Grant, and Miriam Peskowitz, eds., Mama, Ph.D.: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Kristen Ghodsee and Rachel Connelly, Professor Mommy: Finding Work-Family Balance in Academia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld Publishers, 2011); and Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas H. Wolfnger, and Marc Goulden, Do Babies Matter?: Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).
mothering is one point of entry into a potentially rich dialogue across identity markers. This volume thus brings together a diverse group of women to create a more identifable community of mother-scholars and scholar-mothers.
Second, mothering is a ‘hot topic’ in contemporary popular culture— romanticized, reviled, and passionately contested. Recall, for example, the controversial May 21, 2012, cover of Time Magazine, in which a beautiful, thin, blond mother was pictured breastfeeding her older toddler son. Or consider the debate that ensued around Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” in which she argued that despite women’s many gains in the professional world, the odds for moving ahead were still stacked against working women.3 More recently, Beyonce’s artistic tribute to black motherhood and the divine feminine at the 2017 Grammy Awards almost broke the internet. Furthermore, over the past decade or so, rich and exciting conversations have been taking place amongst scholars in the interdisciplinary feld of motherhood studies (see below for a brief reference to this literature). Generally absent from both cultural and academic conversations on mothering, however, are the voices of women in the theological academy whose lived experience includes mothering. This volume allows both for theological refection to enter into fruitful dialogue with these cultural and academic trends and for experiences of (and research on) mothering to inform theological scholarship.
Third, theological discourse on the religious meaning of motherhood as a spiritual practice is often dominated by ecclesial authorities (read: men) for whom women’s ultimate vocation is total self-sacrifcing motherhood. Further, there is little appreciation of how the joys, challenges, and sorrows experienced by mothers are far from homogenous and are always and everywhere affected by markers of gender, race, class, culture, and sexual orientation. There is a continuing need for black, white, Asian, and Latina scholars in the theological academy to challenge this association of mothering with oppressive, white-washed, and religiouslybacked gender norms. At the same time, we hope that this volume fulflls a need for exploring the spiritual dimensions of mothering that can and
3 Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” The Atlantic, August 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-canthave-it-all/309020/
do contribute, in diverse and sometimes paradoxical ways, to women’s empowerment and well-being.
Fourth, in the realm of practical theology and ministry, we fnd that all too often faith communities are child-centered and thus fail to support the spiritual lives of mothers and provide for their care as they encounter the process of becoming a parent; the reality of reproductive loss; the daily rigors of caring for dependents; the integration of professional and parental roles; the guilt involved in perceived and real parenting failures; and the joys of family life. Most Christian traditions lack language for talking about the way parental experiences have a profound impact on the spiritual growth and well-being of parents in general. And again, our traditions lack an appreciation of how these challenges and joys of parenting are diversely affected by the intersections of gender, race, class, culture, and sexual orientation. As such, faith communities often miss opportunities for care and formation of current and future mothers, whose spiritual health is important not only in its own right but also in relation to the care of children and other dependents.
Fifth, mothering largely has been absent from mainstream conversations about religious practices and practical theology, and it makes even less of an appearance in systematic theology, theological ethics, and biblical studies. Nevertheless, an increasing number of women have begun to incorporate experiences of and research on motherhood into their theological writing (see below for a brief review of this literature). This growing body of literature indicates a burgeoning interest in bridging the gap between mothering, on the one hand, and theological refection, on the other. Women are pushing back against the implications of the traditional lacuna between these two poles, arguing that the mundane and embodied tasks of parenting are not separate from or unimportant to the formation of theology and questions of spirituality and are not something to be left behind in the search for intimacy with God. But the conversation has only just begun, and there is much work left to be done. If we allow the lacuna to persist in mainstream theological refection, the result is that much theology does not speak out of and back to the lived experiences of mothers and that our Christian traditions will continue to lack language for talking about the way parental experiences have a profound impact on the spiritual growth and well-being of mothers in general. Thus mothers (and parents in general) need an avenue to express their profound awareness of God in the everyday to their faith
communities; in turn, we need enhanced theological resources to enrich and expand this experience of parenting as spiritual practice.
Finally, parenting practices and other practices of interpersonal care are rich and much-needed resources for theological scholarship. In a tradition that historically has valorized fight from the world, embodied experiences of mothers can keep theology honest with the vulnerability of human existence and the reality of divine solidarity with creation. This volume invites and models collaborative, intercultural, and crossgenerational conversations that can break new ground in discussions of theological meanings of motherhood. The authors in this volume demonstrate how practices of mothering shape theological refection, as well as how understanding the work of motherhood enriches our understandings of spiritual practices and our commitments to both compassionate self-care and a justice-oriented public ethic of care.
MotHering and tHeology: Mapping tHe terrain
While an increasing number of academic titles have been published on the topics of motherhood and parenting over the past two to three decades, this volume is—to our knowledge—the frst of its kind. Since the 1980s and 1990s, popular and academic writing on motherhood has exploded, and the new interdisciplinary feld of motherhood studies was born. Many academic edited volumes have been published recently on motherhood, and an entire book publisher, Demeter Press, has been founded for the purpose of focusing solely on motherhood.4
4 In addition to the volumes on academic motherhood cited above, some of the more signifcant titles of edited volumes on mothering include: Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds., Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency (New York: Routledge, 1994); Julia Hanigsberg and Sara Ruddick, eds., Mother Troubles: Rethinking Contemporary Maternal Dilemmas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1999); Alexis Jetter, Annelise Orleck, and Diana Taylor, eds., The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997); Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Twenty-First-Century Motherhood: Experience, Identity, Policy, Agency (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); and Joyce Trebilcot, ed., Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld Publishers, 1983). See also the dozens of volumes available at www.demeterpress.org. Demeter Press is the publishing house partnered with the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (www.motherhoodinitiative.org). Both Demeter and MIRCI were founded by and continue to be under the leadership of Dr. Andrea O’Reilly, Professor of Women’s, Sexuality, and Gender Studies at York University in Toronto, Ontario. O’Reilly has authored and/or edited some 20 books, most of which are related to the topic of mothering.
While these volumes—and still many other academic articles, book chapters, and monographs on motherhood—offer an incredible amount of diversity and scholarly sophistication in their approaches to analyzing the institution and experience of motherhood, they include very little analysis of religious meanings of motherhood that go beyond critiquing the religiously sanctioned institution of patriarchal motherhood.5 This volume contributes theological voices to this conversation in order to offer an account of motherhood in which religious faith and spiritual practice can be nurturing and empowering for mothers as they live into their identities as mothers and more.
Aside from conservative missives on total motherhood as women’s God-given vocation, Christian theology, ethics, and biblical studies have been rather slow to catch on to the upsurge in scholarship on motherhood. However, we are hardly the frst to consider the signifcance of mothering for spiritual practice and Christian theology. Many women in theology have paved the way for and inspired the work of this volume. In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist theologians such as Margaret Hebblethwaite, Sallie McFague, and Elizabeth Johnson drew on maternal models and metaphors in order to incorporate the experiences of women who are mothers into Christian language and imagery for the divine.6 In contrast with the relatively ‘colorblind’ maternal musings of these white feminists, womanist theologian Delores Williams presented the challenge of womanist God-talk primarily through the lens of African American
5 One very recent exception to this rule is Vanessa Reimer, ed., Angels on Earth: Mothering, Religion, and Spirituality (Toronto: Demeter Press, 2016). While Reimer’s volume is more geared to the academic study of religions, the present volume is geared to the Christian theological academy and persons involved in pastoral ministry in Christian contexts. Further conversation between and across these two volumes, and their respective authors and audiences, would surely bear much fruit. The closest comparison that can be drawn to what we aim to accomplish in this present volume is a 1989 issue of Concilium, edited by Ann Carr and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and entitled Motherhood: Experience, Institution, Theology (Edinburgh: Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd, 1989). This is an edition of a journal that was published prior to the subsequent proliferation of writings on motherhood that has come out in the 1990s and 2000s. This volume is out of print and not widely available outside of academia; while it offers a variety of theological perspectives on motherhood, it does not address mothering through the specifc lens of spiritual practice.
6 Margaret Hebblethwaite, Motherhood and God (London: Cassell Publishers, 1984); Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1987); and Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992).
motherhood as a distinctive spiritual and theological experience of surrogacy, wilderness, and God-dependency.7 And Karen Baker-Fletcher poetically explored the connection between God and humanity that is experienced in and through creation, asking the question of “what about the children,” to challenge and resist the degradation of environmental racism. Motivated by maternal concern for future generations, she wrote, “We are guardians of the children, guardians of this planet that is on loan to us, guardians of our children’s future.”8 Critical theological refection on motherhood also made its way into the work of mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Diaz and Latina feminist theologian María Pilar Aquino, both of whom insist on the theological signifcance of lo cotidiano—the everyday life of Hispanic and Latina women.9 Furthermore, scholars from around the world published their refections on searching for, clearing, cultivating, and transforming their own mothers’ gardens.10
In the realm of practical theology during this same time period, Bonnie Miller-McLemore authored what may have been the frst feminist theological monograph entirely dedicated to theological refection on mothering: Also a Mother: Work and Family as a Theological Dilemma.11 In Also a Mother, Miller-McLemore developed a feminist maternal theology that rethinks human generativity from the perspective of maternal caregiving labor. In her more recent work, In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice, 12 Miller-McLemore rethinks Christian spirituality, presenting the varied and messy tasks of parenting as opportunities for parents’ own spiritual wisdom and growth. In the Midst of Chaos represents a conversation on parenting and spirituality that this
7 Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993).
8 Karen Baker-Fletcher, Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 79.
9 See María Pilar Aquino, Our Cry for Life: Feminist Theology from Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993) and Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996).
10 See Letty M. Russell et al., eds., Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1988). The title of that book takes inspiration from Alice Walker’s book of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1983).
11 Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother
12 Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2006).
present volume continues, expands, and diversifes. While In the Midst of Chaos focuses on parenting more broadly and the care of children through adolescence, we seek to revisit the particularities of mothering and look at parenting throughout the life course, from pre-conception to parenting the elderly. Furthermore, we see a need for an intersectional dialogue on spiritual and theological meanings of mothering and parenting: namely, a dialogue that de-centers white middle-class mothers and highlights the diversity of maternal experiences that emerge from intersecting contexts of race, class, culture, gender, and sexuality. This volume thus builds on Miller-McLemore’s maternal contributions to Christian theology and spirituality by creating space for a larger conversation amongst a diverse group of women in the theological academy on the impact of mothering on their spiritual lives and theological worldviews.
In the past decade, we have seen many more women-centered theologians tend to the particular, multifaceted, and complex identities and experiences of mothers as sites and sources for spiritual practice and theological scholarship.13 For example, in The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language, Janet Soskice critiques the ‘received view’ of Christian spirituality as disembodied and argues that the embodied tasks of caregiving carried out by parents in general and mothers in particular is as legitimate a form of imitatio Dei as the monastic life.14 Marcia Mount Shoop employs pregnancy and motherhood as metaphors for the relationality and ambiguity of the human condition in her monograph, Let the Bones Dance: Embodiment and the Body of Christ. 15 In Being About Borders: A Christian Anthropology of Difference, Michele Saracino offers motherhood as an example of incarnating hybridity in human life,16 and in Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious
13 What follows is a brief listing of monographs in which mothering informs theological scholarship. Many other journal articles and book chapters could be included in this list as well.
14 Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
15 Marcia Mount Shoop, Let the Bones Dance: Embodiment and the Body of Christ (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010).
16 Michele Saracino, Being About Borders: A Christian Anthropology of Difference (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011). Saracino also uses maternity as a metaphor for human hybridity in a chapter, “Moving beyond the ‘One True Story,’” she contributed to Susan Abraham and Elena Procario-Foley, eds., Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology: Shoulder to Shoulder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2009).
Dialogue, Jeannine Hill Fletcher fnds motherhood to be a common thread that aids in the expression of the relationality, messiness, and creativity involved in interfaith encounters and human existence more broadly.17 In the feld of pastoral theology, Chanequa Walker-Barnes’s Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength explores and calls for healing from the burden of what Walker-Barnes names as the “StrongBlackWoman” archetype, particularly as it relates to expectations on mothering and the self.18 Writing in ethics, Cristina Traina’s Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality Between Unequals lays out the contours of maternal eroticism, analyzes the phenomenon of child abuse, and offers a full-bodied Christian ethic for selectively cultivating passion as erotic attunement between parents and children.19
Kelly Brown Douglas’s powerful monograph, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, concludes with a refection on maternal cries for justice in the face of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism as it culminates in stand-your-ground culture and state-sanctioned destruction of black bodies.20 Finally, and most recently, in When Momma Speaks: The Bible and Motherhood from a Womanist Perspective, New Testament scholar Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder offers a compelling account of womanist maternal thought, which informs her engaging interpretations of biblical mothers such as Hagar, Mary, and Zebedee’s wife.21
Each of these publications draws on experiences and practices of mothering as valuable resources for Christian theological scholarship— from theological anthropology to spirituality, biblical studies, pastoral theology, and ethics. This present volume brings some of these very same voices together with other women theologians in rich and groundbreaking dialogue that we hope will lead to further conversation and collaboration in the future.
17 Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious Dialogue (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
18 Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014).
19 Cristina L. H. Traina, Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
20 Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015).
21 Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, When Momma Speaks: The Bible and Motherhood from a Womanist Perspective (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2016).
organization oF tHe book
This book is arranged around topics that are important in the lives of mothers but that also raise crucial questions for theology and the care of mothers. In each section, authors aim for dynamic interplay between theological refection and embodied practices of parenting and faith. Contributors draw on personal refection, interviews, narrative, ethnographic, and sociological studies to refect on the lived reality and theological implications of parenting practice, as well as rethink key concepts in theology and contribute to a more robust account of parenting as practice from various theological perspectives.
part i: wHy MotHering Matters
This book opens with a series of essays that explore just why this volume is so necessary. We begin with Kelly Brown Douglas’s “The Race of It All: Conversations Between a Mother and Her Son,” in which Douglas explores—through conversations with her son—how a mother is to ensure the fourishing and wholeness of her black son in a world that continuously threatens his body and devalues his very selfhood. We open with this piece because it puts into place critical questions that are explored throughout the volume: What does it mean to mother in a world that is broken and riddled with oppressive structures that aim to destroy and degrade precious human life? How can and do (and should) mothers from different (and unequal) contexts encourage their children—and themselves—to hope and to love, despite the precariousness of the world? What do the complexities of motherhood reveal about God in the world? These questions continue in the next essay, from Karen Baker-Fletcher, who looks to her academic and literary foremothers to explore the ways that motherhood reveals the divine in the world, while also reminding us of the tragedies inherent in all aspects of the mothering process. As she writes, “To say ‘mothering matters’; is to say that mothering is embodied, spiritual and has inherent value in the concrete everyday life of ordinary mothers, whether they are biological mothers, adoptive mothers, or ‘other mothers’” (p. 47). Following this, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, too, looks to her mothering ancestors, particularly focusing on the “concrete everyday life” of Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the frst ordained woman in the U.S., but also a mother. This chapter argues that the embodied knowing that is entailed in mothering
indeed matters for spiritual practice, theology, and how we understand the divine. Like Douglas and Baker-Fletcher, Miller-McLemore calls our attention to the actual bodies (and lives) of actual mothers, inviting the authors that follow to be attentive to the ways that the messy, complex realities of mothering have real implications for the ways we inhabit our spiritual lives, do theology, and practice care.
part ii: CoMpliCating Categories oF MotHering
This section takes up questions of mothering identities in conversation with other academic streams of identity conversations, considering, for instance, what mothering has to contribute to conversations about interrelationality and hybridity in both human existence and divine redemption. The chapters in this section complicate and question static understandings of mothering and motherhood, calling attention to and challenging the raced, classed, and gendered assumptions that underlie popular conceptions of what it means to be a mother. Hellena Moon’s chapter explores mothering as a human rights practice, resisting reifed stereotypes of motherhood to embrace a new image of mothering as “a transgressive, counter-hegemonic spiritual practice” (p. 90). Drawing on human rights theory and her own experiences of cultivating communities of parenting justice, Moon argues that mothering is best understood as a verb, a “discursive subject,” out of which we might fnd ways to resist and challenge the status quo and “decolonize motherhood from its current circumscribed identity” (p. 106). Annie Hardison-Moody’s chapter questions ideas of “good mothering” via the lens of infant feeding in the United States. Arguing that breastfeeding has become a moral marker of good mothering (thereby reinforcing racial and class-based oppression), she refects on the ways that mothers might resist tropes of good mothering to instead fnd solidarity in the ambiguities and nuances that infant feeding entails. HyeRan Kim-Cragg next explores mothering as a “negotiated complex identity,” looking to both non-biological mothering and her own experiences of lactation and breastfeeding to explore how the give-and-take dance of the mothering relationship provides a glimpse of divine reciprocity and grace that can only be felt within community. And fnally, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder’s chapter uses a womanist lens to examine the “mother-whore” of Revelation 17–18 in order to expound on the ways that African American women have historically done whatever it takes—even “unseemly acts”—in order
to “hold families together” (p. 163). Crowder’s exposition of this oftreviled biblical mother is a direct confrontation of the ways that “unjust systems, impotent indictments, hollow convictions, and sordid fnancial settlements all slaughter the spirit and soul of modern-day mothers” (p. 167). For the authors in this section, mother is not a fxed term, but instead is a fuid identity, a verb even. They challenge our dominant (read: white, middle class) popular stereotypes of motherhood, and in doing so, expand ideas of mothering to envision new practices of mothering birthed of vulnerability, solidarity, love, and justice.
part iii: breaking silenCes, bearing witness
At least in part because of the tropes of good mothering to which we are subject, there are many aspects of our lives as parents that often remain unspoken, particularly in relation to the world of academics. Mothers fear that we will not be taken as seriously as scholars once people know the extent to which we are committed to the care of those who depend on us or that we will become identifed only with a particular challenge we have faced. Further, because of the way in which topics like pregnancy loss, mental health (of mothers and their children), and the parenting of elders are forcibly silenced, many of us face a dearth of supportive, spiritual resources both within and outside of our religious communities. The authors who contribute essays to this section break silences and thus bear prophetic witness to the messy, ambiguous realities of mothering, determined that it is only by acknowledging the turbulent waters in which we all swim that space is made to receive grace.
Neomi De Anda opens this section with an essay on miscarriage and stillbirth, life events experienced by countless women, yet still rarely discussed openly, let alone ritualized in communities of faith. The system of kyriarchy that forcibly silences pregnancy loss contributes to an objectifcation of women’s bodies as vessels for reproduction. De Anda excavates the Tree of Many Breasts, a symbol from Tonacacuauhtitlan of the Nahua peoples (in what we now call Mexico), as a source from which to rethink women’s bodies and their experiences of pregnancy loss. In the next chapter, Claire Bischoff writes openly about how an already existing eating disorder was exacerbated by graduate theological work and stayat-home parenting. She also names how adopting a spiritual perspective on her eating disorder and training the mothering practices she uses with her children on herself has contributed to her journey of recovery.
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He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head and smiled.
“What is it?” asked Bonnie May anxiously.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t explain to you. I was just thinking about—about certain forms of reconstruction.”
CHAPTER XVI
MRS. THORNBURG REVEALS A SECRET
B shook his head slowly He had been thinking about that advertisement in the Times which Thornburg had answered without any result.
“Strange,” he mused. “I won’t believe but that somebody is looking for her—somewhere. Children like that are not dropped down and deserted like superfluous kittens or puppies. There’s something wrong somewhere.”
Then he remembered that Mrs. Thornburg wished to see him; that, according to Thornburg, she had “mentioned Bonnie May.”
Possibly she knew something. At any rate, Baron felt that he ought to call on her. It was just after the dinner-hour—of the day on which Mrs. Baron had announced her policy of reconstruction—and the evening was flinging a challenge to all mankind to get out of doors and enjoy the spring air.
He took up his stick and hat and left the house.
He found Mrs. Thornburg sadly changed since he had seen her last. She was unmistakably very ill, though the only symptoms revealed to Baron’s inexpert eye were a pathetic thinness and pallor and a profound lassitude.
She was alone, Thornburg having just gone out.
“It was good of you to come,” she said when Baron entered. She spoke as if she had been expecting him. And without circumlocution
she continued: “I wanted to talk to you about the little girl. You haven’t let anybody have her, have you?”
“No,” replied Baron. Then he added lightly: “I think we’ve changed our minds about letting her go. It seems likely now that we’ll keep her with us indefinitely.”
He was glad that her glance rested upon her thin, clasped hands. He could note the effect of his statement with a steady scrutiny which need cause him no compunction.
To his surprise she seemed quite pleased. “It makes me glad to know that she is to be with nice people,” she said, lifting to him now a softly grateful glance. She explained: “You see, I’m sure I’m too ill to have her now, even if....” Her lips trembled and her eyes filled.
“But you’ll be better,” said Baron, reading her thought. Clearly she had despaired of ever being any better “When you’re able to have her, she’ll be so happy to visit you. I mean Bonnie May. She’s a wonderfully sociable little creature. If she were invited to come to see you she would be delighted. Attentions like that—such as you would pay to grown people—have a wonderful effect upon her.”
“Yes.... And of course some day she will be coming here to stay.”
“You mean—” Baron was surprised that his suggestion had been received with a dully uttered, enigmatic remark, rather than gratitude or eagerness.
“You don’t know what I mean by that?” There was regret in her tone, reluctance in her glance—as if she knew he was not dealing honestly and frankly by her
“No, truly, I don’t.”
“Ah, well.... But I wanted to tell you why I was so eager to have her when you called before. You see, I wanted to—to atone....”
She sat listlessly, lost in troubled memories, and Baron waited.
“Mr. Thornburg came to me one time, in the one moment of his greatest need, and asked me to help him. And I failed him.”
She leaned back and closed her eyes for a moment, and Baron thought how out of harmony she was: the ailing woman whose whole being was in a minor key, amid surroundings which suggested only sturdiness and well-being.
“He was always generous toward me, and patient. He was always giving, giving, and never asking. I think I got used to that and just took it for granted. And then one day he came home, excited, as happy as a child ... and asked me.... It was such a little thing ... and I refused.
“You know, he had been married when I first met him. An actress. It didn’t last long. She got tired of the life and wanted to go back to the stage. I think she appealed to his generosity. It would have been easy to do that. At any rate, he allowed her to go away and take their little girl. I can’t understand how he brought himself to let the little daughter go, too. I have an idea he was so troubled because she wanted to go that he didn’t realize how much the child meant to him, or would come to mean. She was only a year old then. I never blamed him for that episode in his life. I just concluded that the woman was worthless. And when I married him we didn’t speak of his other marriage—nothing in connection with it. It was just as if it hadn’t happened. Then, after a year, or about a year, he—he made the one request of me. The mother had offered to give him the little girl. He wanted to bring her to me, to have her in our home.
“And that made me jealous and unhappy. I can’t explain ... or defend myself. I could scarcely answer him when he spoke about it. And when I didn’t answer he looked at me, and after a little a strange expression came into his eyes. He was chilled and bewildered. He had been so happy. He couldn’t understand. He just gave it up, and the next day he was trying to pretend that nothing had come between us; that I hadn’t been ungracious and cruel.
“You see, I was thinking of her child, and he was thinking of his own. Mine was the woman’s—the narrow—point of view, and his was the father’s. Maybe you can understand a little of what I felt. I couldn’t have the child here in the house, while its own mother.... It would have been like giving her a place in our home—the woman, I mean.
You can’t really separate people by putting their bodies in different places. You see what I mean?”
“Yes,” assented Baron, “I think I see quite clearly.”
“And I was sure she was a bad woman. And I felt that if her child were in the house, her—her real self would be here, too. Her influence, I mean. Bodies are not everything. Sometimes they’re even the least things of all. I was afraid that other woman’s very presence would be here among us on the most sacred occasions: at bedtime, to see if her child were covered up, and in the early hours of Christmas morning, jealously looking to see what we’d given her, and jealous of us, because we were fond of her. She would be a real influence in the house. It couldn’t be helped.”
“But a bad woman.... Surely a bad woman would forget,” suggested Baron.
“Well, not our kind of a woman, anyway. How could she have deserted a man who was good to her? And how could she consent to give up her child afterward? It might be right for her to leave her husband; but for a mother to give up a little daughter.... No, I couldn’t think of having here in our home a link to bind us with a woman like that—a life out in the unknown, on the streets that are strange to us, that are strange to all faithful, happy people.
“And then when it was too late I began to see his side of it. He was the father just as much as she was the mother. She was his child as much as hers—more, if he loved her more. And I began to realize what it must be to a father to have his little daughter away from him, perhaps not loved and provided for, possibly facing an evil future. Oh, the night that thought came to me! And always he was so kind to me, and patient. He did not speak of his daughter again. And I waited.... I knew he would speak again some day, and I wanted to grow strong enough to say to him honestly: ‘Ah, do bring her, and she shall have love here, here in her own home’....”
She lifted her hands to her cheeks and closed her eyes. It was as if she must shut out some of the impressions which crowded into her mind.
Baron waited until a measure of calm came upon her “And—he never did?”
She opened her eyes and regarded him inquiringly
“I mean, he never spoke of her again?”
She regarded him with a smouldering look in her eyes. Then she leaned forward, her hands gripping the arms of her chair. “I honestly believe you don’t know!” she whispered.
And in an instant she had taken from a little box on the table near which she sat an envelope. She drew from it a single sheet and passed it to Baron.
He turned a little, so that the light from the table fell upon it and read:
“Do be good to the little girl your husband has brought to you. You ought to be, because he is her father.”
There was no name. Baron handed the sheet back to her. He was thinking hard. “Who could have written it?” he asked.
“Of course you realize that I don’t know,” she replied. “Do you mean to ask me what I think?”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think her mother wrote it. I think she must have lost track of the child, and concluded that Mr. Thornburg had taken her. I think she must have known of my—my jealousy on that other occasion. I think she wrote this note hoping that I would refuse to have the child in the house if I knew who she was. It seems plain that she wants her now.”
Baron was examining the date of the postmark on the envelope. She saw that furrows were gathering on his forehead.
She explained: “It came some time ago. I had it with me here when you called that first time.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Baron. “And you knew, then——”
“Yes, I knew then.”
“But you haven’t.... Mr. Thornburg....”
“I didn’t show him this. He doesn’t know. Surely you can understand. He has acted a lie, in trying to get the little girl into the house without telling me about her. And I can’t blame him for that, after what happened that other time. But I can’t bear to let him know that—that I know.”
“But don’t you see, if Bonnie May is really his daughter, and if he weren’t afraid to tell you so, he could bring her here without any further hinderance!”
“No, he couldn’t. Not if the mother wants her.”
Baron arose. “After all, it’s largely guesswork—conclusions reached in the dark,” he said. “You’ve received an anonymous note. That’s all the foundation you have for what you’ve told me. And people who write anonymous letters....”
He reflected dubiously, and then he came to a decision.
“I’ve reason to believe,” he said, “that there is good ground for you to reject what’s in that note.”
She leaned forward, observing him intently.
Baron was remembering the actress who had called on Thornburg; the woman who, almost certainly, was she who had taken the child into Thornburg’s theatre. He was recalling his question to the manager, and the latter’s vehement, prompt response.
“You mean,” questioned Mrs. Thornburg, “that you don’t think Bonnie May is really ... that you don’t believe it was her mother who wrote this note?”
“It’s difficult to be quite sure of anything,” said Baron, “but I would stake a great deal on that one thing being true—that it wasn’t Bonnie May’s mother who wrote that anonymous note.”
CHAPTER XVII
“A KIND OF DUEL”
T night in his attic room Baron arrived, by perfectly logical reasoning, at two conclusions, each of which was precisely the opposite of the other.
The first of these conclusions was that he had a perfect right to shape Bonnie May’s future according to his own inclination. The second was that he had no right at all to do such a thing.
He arrived at the first conclusion in this manner:
He had made an honest effort to locate any person or persons having a legal and just claim on the child, and he had failed. If the Thornburgs had any claim upon her, it was not his fault that they had bungled their affairs until they were unwilling to make their claim public.
Therefore he had a right to have and to hold Bonnie May, and to regard her, if not as his own, at least as a permanent member of the household.
His second and contrary opinion began to shape itself when he recalled the picture of Mrs. Thornburg, helpless and despairing, greatly desiring the presence of the child in her own home in order that she might complete a great moral victory over herself.
A man couldn’t oppose his claims and advantages to a need like that!
Besides—it was borne in upon Baron more and more strongly— there was a very serious question as to the child’s best interests.
She was an actress, born and bred, and some day she would surely hear the call of the theatre. Not in the near future certainly. Baron
couldn’t bear to associate children and the stage. But in a few years....
And if she were ever to return to the profession which was her birthright, it was Thornburg she would need, and not the Barons.
Moreover, Thornburg was a wealthy man, and childless. He was now ready to take the child into his home as his own. There could be only one outcome to such an arrangement—an outcome wholly in Bonnie May’s favor.
Therefore, his—Baron’s—right to keep the child was of the shakiest possible nature.
And having reached these two conclusions, dwelling now upon the one and now upon the other, Baron extinguished his light and went to bed.
In the morning at about seven o’clock, while he was standing before the glass with a military hair-brush in his hand, his problem was solved for him in a flash. He stood with the brush suspended in air. A light leaped into his eyes.
“How simple!” he exclaimed. “The very way out of it. The only way.”
At three o’clock that afternoon he entered Thornburg’s private office, after having taken the precaution of ascertaining (1st) that Thornburg had returned from luncheon in a fairly good humor, and (2d) that the manager was alone.
“You know I had a little talk with Mrs. Thornburg about Bonnie May last night,” he began, when Thornburg had thrust a chair toward him. He was assuming his most casual manner, primarily because it suited his present purpose, and also because he had not failed to note that Thornburg’s face had darkened slightly at sight of him.
“Yes, I know.” The manager glanced at his desk as if he were a very busy man.
“I felt the least bit—up a tree, as the fellow said, after I had talked to her,” continued Baron. “You know I want to—to be decent about things.”
“Of course,” agreed the manager, giving part of his attention to the papers which were strewn about his desk. “And I suppose the child is a good deal of a burden——”
He glanced up, and Baron wondered why a man shouldn’t be able to keep the light of triumph out of his eyes when he really tried to.
“Not at all!” he interrupted blandly.
“——or that you are sure she will be, when the novelty of having her about wears off.” He squared about sharply, with the air of a man who means to do something handsome. “I’m still ready to take her, if you decide that you’d like to give her up. Of course, I don’t know how soon I might change my mind. In case Mrs. Thornburg loses interest, I’d be through with the case, naturally.”
He turned to his desk again and examined a letter which came uppermost, frowning and pursing his lips as if he were giving it deep consideration.
Baron did not wholly succeed in repressing a smile. “All wrong,” he said amiably. “The Greeks must have borne gifts to you before now, Thornburg. No, I’m not tired of her. I’m not likely to be, either. Why, she’s like a tonic. Sense? You wouldn’t believe it. She’s forever surprising you by taking some familiar old idea and making you really see it for the first time. She can stay at our house until the roof falls in, if she only will—though of course I don’t hope she’d be willing to. But don’t think there’s any question of our getting tired of her. She’s not that kind. I might add, neither are we.”
Much to his amazement Thornburg sprang to his feet excitedly.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at!” he exclaimed. “If you’ve got anything to say, why not say it and be done with it?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at!” he exclaimed. “If you’ve got anything to say, why not say it and be done
with it?”
Baron arose, too. He thought he was justified in feeling offended. “I think,” he said quietly, “I haven’t got anything to say, after all.” He managed to keep his voice and eyes under control. These proclaimed no unfriendliness. But his lips had become somewhat rigid.
“But you did have,” retorted Thornburg. He sat down again and produced a handkerchief with which he wiped his face and neck nervously. “Come, don’t pay any attention to my bad manners. You know I’ve got a thousand things to worry me.”
“Yes, I know. I’m really trying to help—or I had the thought of helping. You—you make it a bit difficult.”
“There was something about the little girl,” said Thornburg. “Yes. As to her—status. Chapter I—the inquiry for her, and our little flurry—seems to be completed.”
“They probably didn’t care about her very much.”
“Well—possibly. At any rate, we seem to have come to a full stop for the time being. And I’ve been thinking about the future. I ought to tell you that after my talk with Mrs. Thornburg, the case didn’t seem quite so simple as it had seemed.”
Thornburg, clasping his knee in his hands, was bending upon the floor a gaze darkened by labored thought.
“I’ve begun to feel a kind of moral responsibility. At first I thought only of my own point of view. My family’s, I mean. Our interests and pleasures. But you see there’s also something to be said from the standpoint of our—our guest. I wouldn’t want to lessen her chances of future happiness. I wouldn’t want to have my way altogether and then find out after a while that it had been the wrong way. I never realized before how much the people of the stage are born and not made. That’s the gist of the matter. There will come a time when nothing in the world is going to keep Bonnie May off the stage. That’s my conviction now.”
“They say children do inherit—” interposed Thornburg.
“The question of her future stumps you a bit. It’s not as if she were like any other little girl I ever heard of. It’s like this: I’d like to have a skylark in a cage, if it would sing for me. But I’d never be able to forget that its right place was in the sky. You see what I mean. I don’t want to be wholly responsible for keeping Bonnie May—out of the sky.”
“Well?”
“My ideas aren’t exactly definite. But I want her to be free. I want her to have a part in working things out the way she wants them.”
“That’s good sense. Turn her over to me, then.”
“That’s not the idea at all. I think up to a certain point it may be good for her to experience the—the gentle tyrannies which are part of her life with us. On the other hand, if she becomes identified with you (I don’t know just what other word to use), and you get to be fond of her, why then in a material sense.... Oh, I don’t like the tone of that at all. But you’ll get the idea, and take it for granted that what I’m trying to get at is that I don’t want to stand in Bonnie May’s light.”
Baron tried to join the manager in the latter’s impatient laugh. “You’ll have to excuse my denseness,” said Thornburg. “I get your meaning as easy as I can see into a pocket. The way it sounds to me is that you’re sure you want to keep her, and that you’re just as sure that you don’t want to keep her.”
“That’s nearly it,” admitted Baron, flushing slightly. “Suppose I say that I want to keep her a part of the time, and that I’d like you to keep her the other part. Suppose I offer to share her with you: to encourage her to visit Mrs. Thornburg a day at a time—days at a time—a week at a time. Suppose we take her on a kind of partnership basis. No unfair influence; no special inducements. Suppose I make it plain to her that you and Mrs. Thornburg are her real friends, and that you will be glad to have her come as often as she likes, and stay as long as she likes.”
Thornburg’s eyes were beginning to brighten.
“Would you,” added Baron, “do the same thing by us? I mean, would you encourage her to come to us when she felt like it, and see that
she had the chance to go as freely as she came?”
Thornburg’s flushed face was all good-nature now. The little barriers which he had kept between his visitor and himself fell away completely.
“A kind of duel between us,” he elaborated, “to see which of us has the best attractions to offer?”
“Well—yes, you might put it that way, I suppose. That’s a theatrical phrase, I believe. Perhaps it wouldn’t have occurred to me. At any rate, the plan I’ve outlined would give her a chance to do a little deciding on her own account. It would give her a chance to give her affections to those who win them. It would place some of the responsibility for her future on her own shoulders. And whatever conclusions she came to I’d be willing to bank on.”
“That,” declared Thornburg with enthusiasm, “is what I call the proposition of a first-class sport.” He extended his hand to Baron. “You stick to your part of the bargain and I’ll play fair to the letter.”
He would have shown Baron out of the office, then. He had a taste for suitable climaxes, too. But Baron lingered, chiefly because he didn’t like the prospect of an almost mischievous conflict which the manager seemed to welcome and to anticipate.
“She can be loyal to us all,” he said, “if she’s encouraged in being.”
At the sound of his own words he fell to thinking.
No, she wouldn’t need to be encouraged. She would be loyal without that. There was nothing to fear on that score at all.
He looked up rather whimsically. “Well, I’ll tell her,” he said.
“You’ll tell her——”
“That she has been invited to visit Mr. and Mrs. Thornburg, and make herself quite at home.”
CHAPTER XVIII
MRS. BARON TAKES UP THE GAUNTLET
H decided upon what he conceived to be an admirable plan of action, Baron was unwilling to believe that he ought to be in any hurry to execute his plan.
For the time being Bonnie May was getting along very well indeed. In fact, Baron made a point of looking into this matter with a good deal of thoroughness, from a somewhat new angle, and he was greatly pleased by what he discovered.
Little by little the child had become habituated to the home atmosphere. This, of course, was due largely to the fact that the other members of the family had become habituated to having her about. They no longer felt constrained to utter pleasant nothings, or to hold their tongues, because of her presence. When they forgot her “strangeness,” she ceased to be strange.
She obediently and even intelligently attended when Mrs. Baron gave her her lesson on the piano.
“Though I think,” she confided to Baron on one occasion, “I could get hold of the high places without going through all the funny business she seems to regard so highly.”
Baron spoke in defense of the “funny business,” and presently she agreed with him.
The guest’s wardrobe had been made gloriously complete, and in this relationship another pleasant development was to be noted. Bonnie May had been painfully accustomed to the use of trunks. Now she made the acquaintance of bureau drawers, and her delight was unbounded. She spent hours in arranging her things. She won Flora’s genuine applause by her skill and taste in this matter.
Flora bought her a hat.
She looked at it in a queerly detached manner for an instant. “Oh, a hat,” she commented. She might have been repeating a word spoken by a travel-lecturer, describing some interesting place which did not seem to concern her. It appeared that she never had owned a hat.
She put it on before the glass. “Oh!” she cried. She thrust impulsive arms about Flora’s neck and hugged her.
Flora enjoyed that experience so much that she bought another hat which she described as “unmade.” Ribbons of gay colors, and white lace, and little silk flowers of various hues, came with it, and the child was given these materials to experiment with as she pleased. Flora gave advice, and was ready with assistance.
Again the result was interesting. Bonnie May experienced a joy which was rapt, almost tremulous in quality. A desert-bred bird, coming upon an oasis, might have regarded its surroundings with the same incredulous rapture.
Baron’s room became hers permanently, and here she developed a keen delight in “housekeeping.” Here also she received Mrs. Baron and Flora as guests, and amazed them by her performance of the part of hostess.
“I call it nonsense,” declared Mrs. Baron to Flora, after the two had paid a formal call. But her face was flushed with happiness and her voice was unwontedly soft.
“Not nonsense,” responded Flora; “it’s just happiness.”
She spent whole afternoons with Mrs. Shepard in the kitchen and dining-room. She learned how to bake little cakes.
It became her duty—by her own request—to set the table, and upon this task she expended the most earnest thought.
Baron commented upon this on one occasion. “Ah, you’re not an artist, after all. You’re a Gretchen,” he said.
“But everything about the table is so pretty and nice,” she responded. “It’s as elegant as a table in a play, and ever so much more sensible. You know something always happens when you sit down to a table on the stage. A servant comes in and says: ‘Beg pardon, mum, but there’s a gentleman—he says he’s your uncle from Green Bay’—and then everybody gets up in a hurry, because the uncle is supposed to believe his niece has a lot of children he’s been helping to support, when she hasn’t got any at all. Or something like that.”
In brief, there were a hundred accumulating evidences to prove that Bonnie May in the Baron household was the right individual in the right place.
It is true that Mrs. Baron did not forget how Thornburg had called on a certain night to take the child away, and how she had given him to understand—she supposed—that she would expect him back on the same errand some other time. And Baron could not free his mind of the fact that he had voluntarily entered into a compact by which his guest must sooner or later be lost to the household at least a part of the time.
But these were matters which were not discussed in the family.
A week passed—two weeks, and Baron hadn’t seen Thornburg or communicated with him. One day in June the thermometer shot up in real midsummer fashion, and the audiences in most of the theatres were such that all the shrewd managers became listless and absentminded. The “regular season” was over.
Thornburg closed his theatre and turned his attention to a summer resort where there was an opportunity to launch an al fresco entertainment scheme. “Everybody was leaving town.” There remained only the uncounted thousands for whom some lighter form of entertainment must be provided.
The flight of time, the inevitable march of events, brought to Baron a realization of the fact that there was a promise he must keep. And so one day, during an hour in the attic, he spoke to Bonnie May.
She didn’t seem to pay any attention at all to his preliminary words. It slowly dawned upon her that what Baron was saying concerned her in a special way.
“... people you will be interested in, I am sure,” Baron was saying. “Thornburg, the name is.” He glanced at her; but the name had made no impression. “Mrs. Thornburg is not very strong, and a cheerful visit ought to be just the thing to help her. Mr. Thornburg is a theatrical man. Why, it was his theatre I met you in. They have a beautiful home.”
“Oh, that makes me think,” was all the reply he received. “What became of the man who had a play?”
“Eh—a play?”
“You remember—when I first came. He had the first act and read it to you in the library, and I had to go to bed.”
“Oh—Baggot. He’s probably forgotten all about it by this time. Or writing another that he’ll never finish.”
She shook her head, unconvinced. “He was so enthusiastic,” she objected.
So for the time being there was an end to the discussion of her visit to the Thornburgs.
Another week passed, and then Baron had an extraordinarily busy day.
In the forenoon came a letter from one of the dramatic editors for whom Baron had done special work occasionally.
“They are launching some sort of a dramatic stock enterprise out at Fairyland to-night,” the letter ran, “and I’m hoping you can do it for me. Thornburg is managing it. I don’t hope it will be much as a dramatic proposition, but you might be able to get some readable impressions. Please let me know.”
A later mail brought a communication from Thornburg.
The sight of the manager’s signature brought Baron up with a jerk— but he was reassured by the first few lines. Thornburg wasn’t charging him with bad faith. Instead, he was enclosing an order for an unlimited number of seats for the Fairyland opening.
“I understand,” ran a pencilled line by way of postscript and explanation, “that you are to represent the Times to-night.”
Also there was a letter from Baggot. Baggot’s play had reached a stage where it needed Baron’s inspection. The budding playwright asked no questions. He merely declared his intention of calling that night.
Baron went up into the attic to look at the morning paper. He wanted to know what they were doing out at Fairyland, and who was doing it. And while he noted one impressive name after another, he was arrested by an altogether amazing sound down in his mother’s sitting-room. Mrs. Baron had been giving Bonnie May her music lesson, and now, the lesson done, she was singing for her pupil.
The thin old voice faltered on some of the notes, but the words came clear enough:
“... She’s all the world to me, And for bonnie Annie Laurie....”
Baron smiled and shook his head.
“What was it,” he mused, “about a plan of reconstruction?”
Then he went down-stairs to telephone his acceptance to the man on the Times. Baggot he completely forgot.
When Baron entered the dining-room at dinner-time that evening Flora looked at him with mild surprise.
“All dressed up and nowhere to go,” said she.
“But there is somewhere to go. I’m going to write up the Fairyland opening. Would you like to go with me?”
“No, thank you.”
It was clearly understood that Baron’s question had been put in a spirit of jest. It was understood that Flora and her kind did not go to the Fairylands—and their kind.
But Bonnie May failed to grasp the situation.
“What’s Fairyland?” she inquired.
“A large enclosure occupied entirely by mad people, and with a theatre in one corner.”
She ignored the reference to mad people. “Oh! a theatre. What are they playing?”
“A piece called ‘The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,’” said Baron. She sat up, swiftly erect, and clasped her hands. “How fine!” was her comment. “Do you think you could take me?”
“I should say not!” Baron responded without thinking. His unthinking refusal was a result of the habitual Baron attitude. But as he regarded her thoughtfully, and noted the puzzled inquiry in her glance, he couldn’t quite understand why he had been so emphatic, so confident of being right. “It’s not a play a little girl would care for,” he added, now on the defensive.
She smiled indulgently. “The idea! I mean, anybody would be interested in it.”
“What’s it about?” challenged Baron.
“A lady who died because they were unkind to her—even the people who loved her. It’s about a lot of snobs and a—a human being.” She spoke with feeling. She sensed the fact that again she was being required to stand alone.
Baron frowned. “How in the world did you find out anything about a play like that?”
