Wrestling with the Mother Monster

There are a great many beginnings and endings that are smashing into each other at the moment. I feel a bit like I’m in the middle of a natural disaster. I’m taking heart in my belief that whatever new land emerges will be fertile with possibility and not just scorched earth.

My body is still very much involved in the whole process of transformation, now that I have given myself permission to put all my pieces back together. My hips are in better shape, which means I am no longer creeping about the boat like the terrifying apparition in The Yellow Wallpaper. In less cheering news, my migraines have come knocking again and this morning I woke up with a trapped nerve in my neck and shoulder, so it’s not all star jumps and hoopla. I take comfort in the fact that things are clearly moving, which is better than things being rigidly stuck in place.

For a couple of days last week, when my hips wouldn’t lie, I had to stay very still and think my thoughts and feel my feelings and there was no way of eluding them. I could neither outwit or outrun myself. It was really miserable and also, annoyingly, undoubtedly very, very good for me. I had quite a few moments of absolute and utter childish petulance about the whole thing, and had I been physically able, I would have 100% taken the opportunity to lay down on the floor and drum my heels wildly whilst screaming ‘it’s not fair,’ to anyone who cared to listen.

I took all these thoughts and grumbles to the therapist this week, along with my unfinished Mother Monster. I told the therapist that I’d quite like to go back to being dissociated from myself because frankly, being in my skin wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and I had gone off the whole idea. She laughed and said: ‘Yeah, it feels utterly shit doesn’t it?’ which is one of the things I love about her. She doesn’t try to make you feel calm about things if you’re not feeling calm about things. She said that she always laughs when she sees ‘goddess’ workshops being advertised and they’re the type of things with scarves and candles and nice smells, when actually, a lot of getting to your inner goddess can be like going head to head with Kali in full destroyer mode. Once I felt sufficiently seen, we got on with the work of figuring out how to look at all the good stuff that’s coming from this.

Afterwards, I felt a lot better and came home with a plan as to how to finish my Mother Monster, which was good, because deadlines loom and there has been much sewing into the wee small hours going on. We have been very much operating into injury time, both metaphorically and physically.

It has been a very different experience creating my Mother Monster.

To begin with, I had a clear idea of one aspect of her and vague outlines for everything else. As I began to piece her together I found myself feeling resentful, afraid and overwhelmed in quick succession. Unlike the moment in making the doll of myself when I thought: ‘I’ve done this before’ and relaxed into it, this has been very much a: ‘What the actual, living fuck am I doing?’ The question: ‘Have I bitten off more than I can chew?’ has been roaring through my thoughts on repeat.

At the end of the first day of making, when I seemed to have been working for weeks and had very little to show for it, I nearly threw in the towel. I took myself off for a small but powerful chat. I reminded myself that I didn’t have to finish it actually. This always helps me when I talk myself into a dead end where I am so stressed by something I feel I don’t have any choice but to quit. This feeling usually cues up the the well worn harangue I have taped in my brain about the weakness of quitters. That’s the sort of language that has kept me in destructive relationships, toxic friendships and damaging jobs over the years though, long after I should have thrown in the towel. There is a lot to be said for quitting. Quitting can be your friend.

Once I realised that I had choices, I was able to step away from the noise in my head sufficiently to decide if I really did want to quit. I came to the conclusion that I would keep making it until it was either finished or I couldn’t get any further. If it was finished by the deadline I would submit it. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t. That made everything feel instantly more possible and allowed the room for what I could do rather than what I couldn’t.

During this power chat, I realised that the feeling of making the doll is in fact very much like the feeling of motherhood. Overwhelmingly large, impossible to manage in one go and very much better if you lower your expectations and do what you can do rather what you think you should do. Of course making this doll felt different. It is a different doll, created to express a different set of feelings. This, blindingly obvious fact, calmed me all the way down and was the key that allowed me to start again.

Once I started piecing all the elements of the Mother Monster together it was apparent that she was huge. She is an adult sized doll, for an adult sized job. This time I didn’t start with an existing doll, I made all the parts of her separately out of a combination of my own things and things I found in charity shops. Her arms and legs are made out of my old, knee high socks. Her body is made out of baby clothes, which seemed very apt. Her head is made out of an old beanie of mine, which I ended up shaping into a skull, rather than a face. She has quite a Basquiat air to her. She’s graffiti made real, which I really like. I love that her skullness points to what lies underneath. There is something clear and direct about a skull. It’s not pretending to be anything else.

Her head is held up by one of my wooden spoons, which again, seemed to the point. She has boobs and bum cheeks shaped from stuffed socks in a nod to adolescence. She has wide hips and a soft, cushioned belly for obvious reasons. I stitched an evil eye charm over her belly to protect her softest parts. Her arms are long, because she has to hold so much and encircle so much of life. Her mouth is a zip and so is her vagina. Entries and exits should always be guarded with teeth. I’ve long had a soft spot for the idea of vagina dentata.

Her eyes are mismatched buttons, in a nod to Neil Gaiman and the Other Mother in Coraline. Her eyebrows are made from the scarf I made the doll of myself with. They are the part of me I always said I loved the best if asked. They had to be included. Her hair is made from a scarf that my good friend Kaz sent me as a gift, many years ago. It’s an art piece in and of itself, and like the doll of myself, I wanted her hair to be an expression of her hopes and dreams and the wildest, imaginative parts of herself. Even monsters dream.

When she was done, she seemed like she had always been here, which is what the archetype of the mother does for us. It roots us in a tradition of mothers and daughters going back into the far past and forward forever.

Despite all this, I couldn’t work out how to display her and worked through lots of ideas as I was stitching. After my therapy session, it came to me. First I made her a bag from a bag for life. Mothers, like dogs and bags are always for life. On one side I cut and stitched the words: ‘Make do and mend Mother Monster,’ which is the spell of the whole doll. On the other I cut and stitched the words: ‘The Pram in the Hall,’ which is from an essay by the critic Cyril Connolly about how children are the enemy of good art, because once they arrive, they stop you making anything. I’m not sure I agree. In the case of this doll, she only exists because of the pram in my hall.

I stuffed the bag with kapok and sewed it shut so that it is both heavy and useless, which is what a lot of mothering can feel like on a bad day.

I found a knitting basket in a charity shop for £2. I stuffed it with an old pillow of my mum’s and stitched a load of baby clothes over it all to make it look like a laundry basket, spilling over with washing. Then I sewed the Mother, sitting on top. I sewed the bag to the side and then I sewed a baby doll and muslin to the Mother’s knee, and she was done.

She is exactly right and not at all what I expected in the end, which is also very much my experience of motherhood. And I finished her with days to spare until the deadline, which is definitely a lesson in getting out of my own way. In some ways, making her has felt more important than making the doll of myself, except that I don’t think I could have made her until I made myself, so it is all, as it so often is, exactly as it should be, even when it’s extremely painful.