Birth & Motherhood - “Mothering Your Mother” with Beth Ann Fennelly
Shownotes:
There comes a time in each child’s life when their role begins to shift in relation to their parents. Many daughters expand their definition of mothering when caring for their own mothers, as they learn to navigate the tension of reincorporating a loved one into a new familial environment. When forced to confront the realities of motherhood in a different light, these daughters and mothers need time for introspection to engage with the expansiveness of motherhood’s demands and joys.
Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, has paid careful attention to the ways the pandemic has affected her independent mother, beyond the virus itself. She joins Eddie and Chris to talk about the hard inner work we have to do to understand our relationships with our families, the ways that generations of parents relate to one another, the disciplines that help us engage with our deep questions and doubts, and what parenting teaches us about being human.
Series Info:
Birth and motherhood are intrinsic to the human experience, yet there are aspects of these topics that often go undiscussed in church circles. Infertility, discerning birthing options, and the experience of caring for the woman who once mothered you are conversation topics that are as necessary as they are complicated. These topics are easy to overlook until they are experienced firsthand, and it’s important for the Church to understand all of the experiences that birth and motherhood bring.
In this series, we will listen to the wisdom and experiences of women who know these issues personally. Through these conversations, we hope to provide a space to recognize how spouses, friends, family, and others can come alongside mothers on their journey in a manner that is empathetic and understanding. Join in on this discussion as we consider the weight of these topics and cultivate a willingness within the Church to engage hard conversations.
Resources
Follow Beth Ann Fennelly on the web:
https://www.bethannfennelly.com
Check out Beth Ann’s books here:
https://www.bethannfennelly.com/books
Read Beth Ann’s article in the Washington Post here:
Read A Quiet Incarnation, a piece Beth Ann wrote about her mother-in-law, here:
Full Transcript:
Eddie Rester 0:00
I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 0:01
I'm Chris McAlilly, welcome to The Weight.
Eddie Rester 0:03
Today we have a poet and a writer with us from right here in Oxford, Mississippi, a professor at the University of Mississippi.
Chris McAlilly 0:12
Beth Ann Fennelly is our guest. She's a Poet Laureate for the state of Mississippi, the 2020 Academy of American Poet Laureate's Fellow, and she teaches in the MFA program. And I've known her as a poet since I was in college and have kind of followed her work through the years. She wrote a piece during the pandemic in the Washington Post, and that's really the source of the conversation today.
Eddie Rester 0:36
She wrote really a beautiful article about the impact of the pandemic on her mom. Her mom, as getting older, had some mental declines before the pandemic, but really, she watched those quicken as the pandemic rolled on, and to the point that she moved her to Oxford.
Chris McAlilly 0:57
Over the course of the last couple episodes, we've been talking about birth and motherhood as just a human reality. And this conversation, it kind of moves in the direction of what do you do or what is it like to move and shift roles and become a parent of your parent or mother of your mother.
Eddie Rester 1:17
And for her, and for many people I know who are listening, it's one of those roles that happens, you're still a parent to children, now you're taking on this new role in your parent's life. And she just shares a lot of, I think wisdom, but a lot of heart about what that life change has been like for her and maybe even some insight how we can manage some of those life changes as well.
Chris McAlilly 1:40
I'm watching my mother navigate this in her life with her mom. And you know, we're talking it through. It's not easy. And it's also not something that you even consider when you're young. And it's something I'm just now kind of becoming aware of as a reality. And it's a big deal. I mean, it involves administrative functions and taking on, you know, massive decisions around property and money and all the rest, and then you're forced to kind of transition and make decisions that you're just not used to making with parents.
Eddie Rester 2:16
And sometimes make decisions that your parent or parents are not all that happy with.
Chris McAlilly 2:21
Yeah. And I think what's great about this story is that, you know, right now things have really improved in her mother's, in Beth Ann's mother's, life as she's come down to Oxford and kind of been reintegrated, as the pandemic kind of its impact on our specific community has lessened. The restrictions have lifted just enough that Beth Ann's mother can reintegrate in some ways into her family. And there's some beautiful moments in the conversation related to that.
Eddie Rester 2:52
You're going to enjoy it. Beth and Finley is an amazing writer and just an amazing human. So we hope that you enjoy the conversation today, share it, like it, do all the subscribe things that I can't ever talk about correctly.
Chris McAlilly 3:05
Thanks for being here today.
Chris McAlilly 3:06
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 3:13
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 3:17
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 3:24
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition, in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 3:36
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity, and intellectual honesty, that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 3:52
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 3:54
We're here today with Beth Ann Fennelly. Eddie, you probably don't know that the first time that I came across Beth Ann was when I was in college, and Beth Ann, you probably don't know that as well. Maybe I've mentioned that to you before.
Eddie Rester 4:05
I did not know that about you.
Chris McAlilly 4:06
Yeah, she came to Birmingham Southern College and did a poetry reading and I was a student there.
Eddie Rester 4:11
There you go. Do you remember what she read? What she read from?
Chris McAlilly 4:14
I do not. But I do remember Beth Ann. Do you remember coming to Birmingham Southern, Beth Ann?
Beth Ann Fennelly 4:19
I do as a matter of fact, yeah. There was a Birmingham area consortium of colleges where you'd actually go to five in a kind of loop. And I do remember that trip, yes.
Chris McAlilly 4:29
Nice.
Beth Ann Fennelly 4:29
You know, I can't say I remember meeting you particularly. But then again, you don't remember what I read. So we're kind of even.
Chris McAlilly 4:34
[LAUGHTER] Well, thanks for coming. Thanks for coming on. We thought about bringing you on when we read an article that you wrote during the pandemic in the Washington Post about your mother. I wonder if you could just, for folks who haven't read that article, maybe kind of tell that story?
Beth Ann Fennelly 4:53
Sure. Well, what I was writing about was what happened to my mother's cognitive functions during the pandemic and how that changed her life and the life of my family. You know, I'm effectively an only child, and my mom lives in Illinois where I was brought up and has always visited me a lot. And I've always visited her a lot. And we're a big part of each other's lives. And during the last couple years, as she has gotten a little older, I have definitely sensed, you know, more forgetfulness and lapses and some of those things. We just would joke with her, you know, and she joked about getting dotty, but it didn't really seem so very serious, or that it was gonna change her life anytime soon.
Beth Ann Fennelly 5:41
And the pandemic really changed that, because all of a sudden, she was living in complete isolation. And you know, her church canceled, and her bridge group cancelled, and her Tai Chi canceled, and her ladies lunch canceled, and I wasn't allowed to visit her, and she wasn't allowed to visit me. And in the vacuum where she had no contact with anybody, her dementia really, significantly, noticeably increased. And I started seeing on the phone that she was struggling for words and things were changing. And I was, you know, really worried about her, worried just for all of us in the pandemic, but seeing that it was having an effect on her that it wasn't having on me, because I was, sure I was also going without church and Square Books and Thacker Mountain and everything else, but I have a husband and three kids and you know, like, a lot of other activities that were keeping my brain involved.
Beth Ann Fennelly 6:38
So I just tried to help her. I tried to call her every day and send her gifts and get her involved in things and asked other people to call her but I could tell it wasn't working. And then she said, "Beth Ann, you need to come home." And she's a kind of a proper and formal person, and she never admits anything is wrong. And when she said that, I knew it was serious. So I flew home, even though I didn't want to fly in the pandemic. And I got to her house. She looked different. Her house looked different. You know, she's always so beautiful and put together and I could see you know, her clothing was a little bit stained. It was all really upsetting to me. And then it was time for her to make dinner and I said, "Oh, I'll get dinner Mom," you know, "just don't worry about it." She didn't even have anything to eat in the fridge. It all looked weird.
Beth Ann Fennelly 7:26
And I went out in the garage and I saw her car was smashed. She'd gotten in a car accident, she'd hidden it from me, because she knew when I saw that, you know, because I've been asking her like, "Mom, do you still think you should be driving?" She always maintained yes. So when I saw that, it changed everything. I realized she can't live alone anymore. I sold her car and, you know, sold the contents of her house and Tom and I picked her up, and we had to find a place for her to live really quickly. And we luckily found a place that's not even a mile from our house at the Blake here in Oxford. But I was just writing about this, you know, all these things. You know, we talk a lot about the people who died in the pandemic, died from the virus. But a lot of people were really hurt without ever getting the virus. And my mom is an example of that.
Eddie Rester 8:19
One of the most touching parts of the article for me was, I think, you and your husband were cleaning out the house, getting it ready to sell and to move her belongings. And you found notes throughout the house. Just "remember," and notes about you and things to ask you. And, you know, I think that you're exactly right. One of the things that happened for so many of our senior adults who were so isolated, is that we didn't realize how important that day-to-day encounter was for people in keeping them going, keeping their memory going.
Chris McAlilly 8:56
The line of the piece for me that was just crushing because I feel it in some members of my family as well, "A vaccine might stop COVID-19, the disease caused by Coronavirus, but it can't replace what COVID-19 has stolen." That is so... It was just so real. And I feel it for sure. What were you gonna say, Eddie?
Eddie Rester 9:19
I was just gonna say that one of the other lines where you talked about is really after you saw the car in the garage, you said, "I've heard about this, your parent becoming your child. The transference was complete." And I think that's, you know, that's one of those moments that I encounter people my age and a little bit older having, where there's a shift in the relationship, that it's uneasy and difficult. Talk a little bit about that, kind of becoming a parent to your parent.
Beth Ann Fennelly 9:51
Well, I have to say, it was pretty hard and I think we were both really reluctant to acknowledge that kind of change. And even now, when I look back, I think, should I have known earlier that my mom needed help, even though she always denied it? Should I have known? And then I remember finding those notes and realizing, you know, she was also preparing for our phone conversations with, like, cheat sheets. You know, like I'm organizing a festival, and she'd say, "How is the literary festival coming?" And I would, I would think, "Oh," you know, "she remembers the festival." And then, you know, when I went to her house, I saw that she would keep by the phone, like a list of things so she'd get the names right when she asked me.
Beth Ann Fennelly 10:34
So, um, you know, I didn't realize that she was slipping. And when I realized, I mean, I knew she was slipping, I didn't realize to what extent. When I realized everything in her life had to change, and I had to make decisions against her will, that's something that had never happened before, that I took her keys away when she didn't want me to. And I grew up in a very strict Irish Catholic family, in a Irish Catholic neighborhood outside of Chicago, where it was a formal relationship between parents and children, almost Victorian, in a way. You didn't argue with your parents. You didn't sass them, you know, I mean, my relationship with my children is so much more casual and joking, and, you know, emotive really, then the way that I was brought up, and I don't think my children would find it hard to contradict me. They do it all day long.
Beth Ann Fennelly 11:32
However, I wasn't, I didn't have a relationship with my mother where if she said, "I'm okay to drive," I would say, "No, you're not," take the keys away. Then doing that was such a hard thing for me. And such a hard thing for her. And then selling her house was, you know, a really hard thing, and then taking over financial control of everything, and just really 100% becoming her caretaker very, very quickly, with all that that meant, has been a journey I really didn't anticipate. But I would have to say it hasn't been 100% unpleasant. I mean, a lot of it has been unpleasant, but there are ways I'm getting to know my mom in a new way, now.
Chris McAlilly 12:18
Talk a little bit about that. How would you say the relationship has... One of the things that you write in the piece is the late summer plum cake that you would bake every September, and the ways in which you were... "There are things still to enjoy that are sweet, even now." It sounds like, we were talking just before we started recording, that things have continued to improve with your mother here in Oxford.
Beth Ann Fennelly 12:45
Yeah, so you know, I get to see her a lot now. When she first moved into the Blake, during the height of the pandemic, it was a pretty sad situation, because I could only visit her through glass and I was, you know, always feeling like I was in a bad prison movie, you know, like, "What are you in for?" You know, but now, she's allowed out and she can come to my house, and you know, for all the holidays. She comes for every Sunday dinner, and my son is at Oxford High School, he's 15, the middle son, and he can stop by and see her on his walk home. So she gets a lot of attention from my family, but in addition, she's found friends there.
Beth Ann Fennelly 13:23
So I would say things have improved and she is finding, like, a late in life, sweetness. Things are easier for her. She doesn't have to worry so much without house, without a car. And she's allowed herself, at last, to let me take care of her and make her life easier. And I think, while it was such a hard transition, we're both finding our footing now.
Beth Ann Fennelly 13:50
So yeah, the part you're referring to is, when I wanted her to make friends at the Blake, I knew she would because she has a great personality, but I just wanted to help. So I brought over warm cake. And I was letting her hand out pieces to everybody. And, you know, I took a little hope from the fact that there was one person she didn't want to give a piece of cake to because she didn't like them, which is like, vintage Mom. It's so on brand, you know, that it actually made me happy to see that spunk of her personality a little bit coming back.
Beth Ann Fennelly 14:17
But, you know, also just with this idea of becoming the mother of your mother is this fact that like now, you know, I'm bringing snacks to my kids' classes and I'm also bringing snacks to my mom's old age home for her to make friends. So it's this new kind of mothering that I'm doing that's an extension of the mothering I'm doing to my children. It's also a reverse but also a flowering of the kind of mothering that she did for me all those years that, you know, mostly is lost to history, and is just a feeling more than details.
Chris McAlilly 14:57
I want to jump off there and maybe kind of backtrack to some of your earlier work, because I think that the idea that one becomes a mother is something that we talked about with Julia in our last conversation, and really, we were talking to a nurse midwife and thinking about the way in which birthing well can set somebody up to become a mother. But I think what I know about about you, Beth, is that you not only have become a mother, but you wrote a book, "Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother," for folks who are not familiar with that, that book that you wrote a maybe a little bit over a decade ago, what would you tell folks about that project?
Beth Ann Fennelly 15:44
Yeah, sure. I'm happy to. Well, my husband and I were already living in Oxford, and we had our daughter, who now is 19, shockingly. And I, before we moved here, I taught at a little liberal arts school in Illinois called Knox College. And while I was there, I was only there for two years, but I got particularly close to one of my students who dropped out of college to go home and nurse her mom who was dying of cancer. So, you know, she said, when she left school, like, "I wish I could keep staying in your class and have you looking at my poems and giving me critiques and advice." And I said, "Well, just keep sending them to me." So she did.
Beth Ann Fennelly 16:26
And she kind of like, never graduated in effect from like, that class with me, because for a long time, she would send me work. So I learned a lot about her life. And I stayed in touch with her. And she ended up getting engaged, and she was going to be moving to Alaska with her fiance, and she wanted to come for a visit. So she came for a visit. And at my house, she just was drinking from a cup of coffee in my kitchen, and had to spit it out. And she said, "I don't know why coffee just doesn't taste good to me. All of a sudden, I hate the taste of coffee." And I said, "You're pregnant." And we drove to Walgreens, and we bought a dozen pregnancy tests, and they all confirmed that she was pregnant. And she was really upset because her mom had died, and she was moving to a new state where she had no friends. So I said, you know, "I'll try to help you. I'll try to give you some advice. I'll write you letters. I'll write you a letter every day."And I'm not even sure if I believed it at the time, but what happened was, you know, she moved there and she didn't have a computer. So she was writing me letters longhand. And so I started answering her letters longhand. And it's been so long since I've had that pleasure, the true pleasure of slowing down with a pen in your hands, on paper, taking time to choose your words and think of your sentences and not using, you know, just email to communicate facts or dates.
Beth Ann Fennelly 17:52
And I ended up finding that, through that slower rhythm, I had a lot to say about motherhood. I didn't... You know, if I had known that the letters I was writing would later be collected in a book, I'm sure I wouldn't have written them, because I certainly don't think that I'm an authority or have all the answers. It's more the opposite. I'm full of questions and doubts and frustrations and self criticisms about my own job as a mother, but I think about motherhood a lot. I'm engaged in the issue of what motherhood means.
Beth Ann Fennelly 18:26
So I ended up writing her a lot of letters, pretty much every day. And later, she asked me if she could loan those letters to a friend. And it surprised me. Because I said, "They're so personal," you know, "they're to you." Like, "I don't think your friend would get anything out of it." But then that woman who I had never met wrote me a letter thanking me and explaining how the letters were helpful and asked if she could share them. So I was like, "Wow, that's weird." And at the same time, my agent was saying, "Oh, Beth," you know, "I thought you were going to be writing a new book of poems," you know, "where's the new book of poems?" And I said, "I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm not writing." And she said, "You're not writing?" And I said, "Well, I'm spending about three or four hours a day writing the letters."
Beth Ann Fennelly 19:09
And then I explained the story to her and she said, "Can I see the letters?" So I sent them to her and it ended up being this happy, lucky book. My third book is this "Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother," and I got money for it, which I never got with poetry. I never have, you know, written with the hope of getting money, but I got money for that book, and was able to buy off a semester to be home because I got knocked up with my second child. So um, yeah. I stayed home.
Eddie Rester 19:38
The circle was complete.
Beth Ann Fennelly 19:40
I know, yeah. And I was able to buy off my time from the university where I'm a professor and being home with my little one for his first eight months.
Eddie Rester 19:49
So as you think about that process of kind of sharing motherhood and experiencing motherhood at the same time, I mean, obviously, there was a lot of wisdom. As you think about those letters, were there some of those letters that you, I guess, you think of maybe it really expressed what I knew or hoped or were kind of worried about motherhood? Any of those that you remember?
Beth Ann Fennelly 20:17
You know, that was just all different kinds of musings. So sometimes I was talking about a particular frustration, or sometimes I was sharing something that I had read or talking about, you know, a personal experience, like having a miscarriage before I had our daughter, Anna Claire, or I would be talking about how motherhood is portrayed in the media. So it was just, you know, anything that was going through my head, which is everything. So I would say the letters don't have like a single particular theme, they really vary in terms of tone. Some are chatty, and some are kind of funny, and some are really serious, and some are philosophical.
Beth Ann Fennelly 20:58
But they were just a way for me to think through some of the questions I had, because when you're in the nitty gritty of motherhood, when it's just the daily thing, like, "Oh, okay, do I need to change the baby? When did she eat? Can I cut his fingernails now? When's the doctor appointment?" you know, all those crazy details that pack your head, you almost don't even get a chance to step away from what you're doing and think hard about the big picture. And for some reason, writing those longhand letters to a friend and a student far away gave me the opportunity to step back and do that type of reflection.
Chris McAlilly 21:40
I think that, you know, when you're in the midst of it, you are in the process of becoming a different person, and you realize it. I mean, it's almost like drip by drip, rather than all of a sudden. It's like, "Oh, I'm here, I'm a different person." But then you wake up, and you're telling dad jokes. And, you know, it was funny, my sister who is an amazing mother, she and her daughter, my niece, called me yesterday, and I can't remember, I started singing to my niece. And my sister said, "Oh, my gosh, you are our father. What are you doing?" It's like, you wake up, and all of a sudden, you're taking on these, I don't know... You've become a different person.
Chris McAlilly 22:21
I guess for you in the process of thinking about that, you know, what would you say to somebody who is maybe out there and listening and really trying to grasp either of these roles, rather than... You know, becoming a parent on the front end or kind of transitioning into a new role of of becoming a parent to their parent, what, any advice or any thoughts that you would offer to a person out there that might be listening to that with that in mind?
Beth Ann Fennelly 22:53
Well, I don't really know if I have any advice, because most of the advice just kind of sounds pat, you know. It's just like, "Don't go to bed angry," or like all those things people tell you when you get married. It's like the same thing. Like, "Oh, it goes so fast," they'll tell you when you become a parent. So I think it's more a sense, I would just encourage anybody who's going through any big change in their life to try to find a way to be slow with themselves. And that can have a number of different ways that comes to you. Like for some people, they can pray, or some people can meditate. For me, it helps to write, you know, but anything that allows you to stay in touch with your feelings. I think, when we're going through big times of transition, our feelings are all in flux and it's hard work to know what we're going through and how we're feeling. We think it's easy to know what we're feeling. But that's actually very rarely the case. So to find a way to listen to yourself, and acknowledge where you are, might be a way to help you move forward.
Chris McAlilly 24:02
What I hear in that is that you're a writer, and the way that you would think about becoming a mother or the way that you would think about, you know, becoming a mother to your mother is by way of this deeper part of who you are, which is, you know, as a writer and then slowing down. I think we've... You know, we on the podcast a while back, we had this conversation with a visual artist who was trained in in nihonga style of Japanese painting, and the whole process by which he describes his work is the whole goal is to use materials to slow down, you know, and...
Beth Ann Fennelly 24:41
yeah.
Chris McAlilly 24:41
You know, that process of slowing down long enough to really... I mean, so much of life is just coming at you day by day, and you're just going from task to task to task. Slowing down in whatever way I feel like is is a good word.
Eddie Rester 24:54
And I think that all those emotions that come at you day after day, I remember as a young parent, when our our first child screamed for eight solid months.
Beth Ann Fennelly 25:06
Oh, wow.
Eddie Rester 25:07
Yeah. And you just don't sleep. You don't eat well. You don't function well, and you have those emotions. And then I remember when my dad was doing a lot of the work with his mom that you did with your mom, and just a lot of the emotions of guilt and fear. And I think one of the things, particularly with those that we love the most and are closest to us, is they cause in us the most emotional response. And I think sometimes that slowing down is significant. For you, is that... I know when you wrote the letters as you were a mother, and you wrote the letters to the younger woman, was one way for you. Are there other ways that you, as you deal with all this coming on, I know you've got almost grown children, but then your mom here in town, are there things that you do specifically to slow down?
Beth Ann Fennelly 26:02
Well, for me, you know, the primary way I connect with my emotions is through words. And I use writing to help me investigate my soul, and to figure out how I'm feeling to educate myself. But I think that any method that a person can find that helps them slows down is going to be helpful method. So another thing that is often helpful for me is like yoga, or running, you know, something physical that has a rhythm to it. I just feel like we're living in a world that only rewards speed, and it only rewards things that can be valued in dollar terms. So to step out of that economy, to step out of the world of speed has to be an act of will. Like, if you just are going down the stream with everybody else, and all the technology and all the media coming at you from every direction and all the multitasking, you're only going to go faster and faster as you go down stream. If you're going to step out of that, it's because you've chosen to do it, and it's not going to be easy. And the strange thing is, once you step out of it, you realize it's kind of better and healthier. But we can't step out of it forever. It's just, I think even a bit every day is helpful in terms of just a rebalancing technique.
Eddie Rester 27:25
Yeah, I think about a dad I talked to recently that talked about the gift of the quarantine time. That he's got kids who are active in sports, dance, cheer, everything. And he said that was all gone. And he said, "I feel like it just suddenly all came back at once." There was no moment of moderation for him, that it just--suddenly the floodgates opened again, and he wished that they had somehow had time to rethink or more, I guess will.
Chris McAlilly 27:59
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this. I've wondered if it's... You know, part of me, I wonder if it's the external set of their things in motion in a kind of consumerist, capitalistic society that kind of frame the way in which we think about time and activity. And I also think, like, at the heart of it, that we're bored with our lives. And it's like, the way that we deal with our boredom is busyness and hyperactivity, and we just pile on things after things. That I don't know... What do you think, Beth Ann? What do you think's driving the speed?
Beth Ann Fennelly 28:39
Yeah, I do. I think it is boredom. But the crazy thing is, we're losing the powers of reflection because we're losing the ability to daydream. You know, when we have an idle time, and I don't even mean like 10 minutes of the doctor's office, I mean, 10 seconds at a red light, the first thing we do is reach for our phones. It's almost that we're threatened by any type of silence, any moment of absence, and we rush in that vacuum to fill it with other people's voices and images and data, instead of spending that time just staring out the window or, you know, doing some thinking or doing nothing seemingly productive except stroking the powers of our imagination.
Chris McAlilly 29:29
That kind of brings us back to your craft and your vocation as a writer, as a poet. What have you learned through time as you've engaged in that long practice, that long craft? What have you... How has that, I guess, stretched that muscle in you? And then and also, I guess another way to frame the question would be, you also are a teacher of writers, and I would assume that you're kind of, you know, thinking through how do you help somebody else grow in that capacity?
Beth Ann Fennelly 30:04
Yeah, I do actually think a lot about that. And, you know, I get these really talented undergraduates, you know. A lot of my students at the University of Mississippi are from Mississippi, and we have a great storytelling tradition. We have a great literary tradition, and I get really talented students, and sometimes they're doing good work in my class, but I do have this fear that as soon as last day of class is there, you know, the last deadline, they'll want to keep on writing, but they won't. And the reason is because they don't have a certain kind of discipline, and they need an artificially induced deadline to get the work done.
Beth Ann Fennelly 30:42
And so I do talk a lot about the artist way, or how we embrace the discipline of the artist life, and, you know, really, even what a struggle that is. You know, my path has changed a lot. Like, when I started getting serious about writing and realizing it was something I wanted to do, I was in college. So how did I write a poem? Well, I waited for some boy to dump me and then I'd stay up all night weeping and drinking wine, and, you know, writing till dawn with mascara streaming down my face. You know, guess what? That's not sustainable.
Eddie Rester 31:13
That's the Taylor Swift method, isn't it?
Beth Ann Fennelly 31:16
Yeah, exactly. You know, and so, you know, here I am, next month, I turn 50. And so how does it become something that you can discipline yourself? For me, it was a matter of getting professional about it. And we... You know, "professional" is almost a dirty word. But what I really mean about it is understanding it's part of my job and so I need to be someone who finds time to be the desk every day. So it turns out the morning is the best time for me, because it's the time less likely to be kind of broken into by other people and their needs. So, you know, I get up and I take care of my kids, and I get them on the bus. And then I go to my desk.
Beth Ann Fennelly 31:55
And, you know, my deal is I have to be there and I have to be present. So what does that mean? It means before I start writing, I can't look at my Visa bill, you know, no online banking. I can't check social media and start getting upset that someone else won something that I didn't win, you know. I just have to go there, you know, open and ready for what comes, and if nothing comes, that's fine. But my deal is I have to be there. I think of Flaubert phrase where he talks about daily fidelity to the desk. And I know, you know, I can't always, not every single day, try to write, but that is the way work gets done, is daily fidelity to the desk.
Eddie Rester 32:37
So thinking about that, helping, thinking about and helping your students learn that, that's something that you've learned, how are you passing along that kind of daily fidelity to the task to your kids? I know you've got a freshman in college and some younger kids. And by the way, turning 50 isn't so bad. I did it a few months ago, you do survive. But how, through the years, do you think you've been able to maybe model that or share that with your kids?
Beth Ann Fennelly 33:09
Oh, gosh, you know, I guess it's just a matter of, like, walking the walk, you know, which is to say, I don't really think if you're telling your kids a way to live your life and you're not practicing it, that it's really going to have a lot of effect on them. So the things that I value I have to put in place, which is to say. For example, Sunday family dinner is important to me. It's just something that's always been important to me. Weeknights can get a little crazy with different kinds of lessons and everything else. So you know, I want to cook an amazing meal. I want them to know the food was prepared with love. And I want to think about the various things that everybody wants to eat. And then I want the table to look pretty, and it might seem like it's a waste of time, but ultimately, I don't think so. I want it to be a spot of enjoyment.
Beth Ann Fennelly 34:02
And I want them to look back on their childhood, and, you know, think that I worked hard to feed them well to get nutrition into their bodies, but I also worked to make the dinner table a space where conversation could happen. So part of that work is, you know, doing the cooking and thinking about it, although part of it is me being present and me, you know, trying to make the conversation happen and not having myself cell phone at the table so they can have their cell phone at the table, and me, you know, if I get an invitation to do something on a Sunday night, turning it down because I'm going to want them to turn it down. So you know, part of it is just kind of creating the environment you want to live in and then sticking to it.
Chris McAlilly 34:43
I think one of the things that I love about the article you wrote about your mother is that you were raised in a strict Irish Catholic family, you mentioned that before and that the upbringing was almost Victorian, but your life in Mississippi is nothing like that that. Loud, messy, confident children. You've grown into a confident adult. I think that that's one of these dynamics, though, about raising kids is... I don't know. It's like, folks... There's both, there's this transference, both of the things that your parents offer you that you want to offer your kids. It's almost like we parent against the style of our parents' parenting, as well.
Beth Ann Fennelly 35:23
Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 35:24
I guess how do you, how have you navigated that? Because clearly, like you've made some choices to, you know, deliberately raise your kids in a different kind of way. But I can tell even in that example of wanting to set the table for Sunday dinner and conversation, that there's some things that you want to bring forward.
Beth Ann Fennelly 35:43
Yeah, absolutely. Like my mother put a big premium on family dinners, and also a huge premium on beauty. Like, it was really important for our house to be beautiful, for people to be beautiful, and for people to dress formally. But so the only real part of that that I've, like, taken is like, I have an appreciation for natural, beautiful landscape. Or I like flowers on the table, but mine would probably be something from the backyard, for example. But I do acknowledge and appreciate some of the stuff that she taught me in that regard. It is a strange situation, though, when you know, for all these millennia... Like, if your dad was a baker, you were going to be a baker, you know, or whatever the situation was. Like many, many, many, many, many generations, things weren't going to change all that much between one generation and the next.
Beth Ann Fennelly 36:38
And then a situation like the way I was brought up and the way I'm raising my children is really pretty different, because my mom was a stay-at-home mom. She never had a job. She never wanted to have a job. My dad was the breadwinner. We didn't really see him very much. You know, my parents fed us dinner, and then my, or my mom fed us dinner and then my dad came home from work and they would eat themselves, you know. Kind of like a Mad Men feeling kind of to it.
Beth Ann Fennelly 37:03
And so the way I'm raising my children is just different, so I can't really look to my mom for advice, or think about how to do something in terms of how it was done for me, because it's a completely different situation where, you know, we don't have a stay-at-home parent in our family. It's too bad. Why can't I have a sister wife who's doing my errands? But you know, it didn't work out that way. So you know, even like a lot of the advice my mom has given me over the years about parenting, you know, some of it's just funny to me. Like, I remember one point when Thomas was a little baby and he was crying, and she's like, "Well, honey, you just take his pacifier and you stick it in bourbon." You know what I mean? Like, Lord God, like how many bourbon pacifiers did I have in my youth? I don't want to know. My God. You know? So there are just a lot of ways where I had to make it up on my own or turn to other people and make community by like, chosen families, too.
Eddie Rester 38:04
Just thinking about those Sunday night dinners, and now that your mom, now that we're kind of moving through the pandemic to the other side, and she joins y'all for dinner. Three generations sitting there, weekly, how is that? How has that dynamic changed the Sunday dinner? What has it added to the family dinners?
Beth Ann Fennelly 38:27
You know, I think it's added more of a sense of occasion and more of a sense of... I do now how a sense of my mother's mortality that I don't know how many more years she'll be able to join us, and that does add a sense of preciousness to what's going on. So that has been one of the hard things about realizing that my mom has, you know, lost a lot of her cognitive ability the last couple years, is understanding that, you know, that things are only going to go one direction from here, so I better appreciate what I have every single time because it's not going to even be the way it is now in months to come.
Chris McAlilly 39:15
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the way you describe in your personal life, in this relationship with your mother, what I think the pandemic as a cultural moment has done for all of us, which is it's just heightened our awareness of the reality of death. And I think it's pushed back this idea that we've got a kind of scientific or technological mastery over, you know, over the length of our lives or anything else. I mean, everything feels just a little bit more... I don't know, just a little bit more risky or just I'm more aware of, of the reality of death as a just a reality in the way that I think about how I navigate all aspects of my life. It's certainly there as I think about how I parent my children, as well. You know, that's just there for us in a different kind of way.
Eddie Rester 40:05
But I think the flip side of that for me, as well as the preciousness of the moments now, as we finally get to see folks that we haven't seen in a long time or when we do get to see folks, it's a freer moment of being together. If everybody has the vaccine, we can take our masks off. And I feel like my hope is that, particularly for families, there's a preciousness that gets held.
Chris McAlilly 40:32
At the heart of that, I think is just slowing down and being present, you know, and I think that you can find that through crafts or through, you know, various practices. Back then you found it through writing, but I think that then translates into the, you know, yeah, I mean... I guess at its best, it can translate into interpersonal relationships. It can also go the other direction. It goes the other direction in my family from time to time.
Eddie Rester 40:58
So, Beth Ann, as you think about your kids' relationship with your mom, and one of the really, I guess, joyous moments of this is that your kids will get to spend significantly more time with your mom than they would have if she had stayed in Illinois. How have your kids... You said your 15 year old son could stop by and visit with her in the afternoons now. I mean, how has their reception to their grandmother been, being here in town with them?
Beth Ann Fennelly 41:29
I think it just seems like she should have been here all along.
Eddie Rester 41:34
Yeah.
Beth Ann Fennelly 41:35
You know, and I think even she thinks that now. As hard as it was, like, she really didn't want to leave her house. And, you know, I think she would never have guessed how easily she'd find her way here. And I guess, you know, we've been talking about how the pandemic has perhaps offered some really important unlooked-for benefits. And I would even say that's the case with this terrible disease of dementia. It's been really difficult for me to see my mom's memory slip and not to be able to talk to her about things or refer to a joke that we always had and it's not funny anymore, because she doesn't remember the reference and you know, these things that are falling.
Beth Ann Fennelly 42:23
There is something to be said, though, from the fact that it does have us be more in the moment with each other, and even that terrible thing of selling her house and, you know, the antiques that she had collected or been passed on from her parents, you know, she wanted me to take it. I can't. I don't have that big of a house. And I don't have a formal house where you have heron china on display, you know, I mean, that's not my lifestyle. So there was nothing to do but sell it. But the truth is, she doesn't remember any of it. And now she's got this small apartment and she's really happy there. She doesn't seem to ask about that old stuff anymore. She's not troubled by it. So I guess I'm appreciating that, too.
Eddie Rester 43:10
I think it just reminds us that the substance of relationships at the end of all things outlasts all of it.
Chris McAlilly 43:18
Yeah, I think that the other thing that here in this is just the reshaping of, I don't know, just our sense of independence, our sense of, you know, we're individuals, we're independent, but at the end of the day, it's super, just... It's a good and deeply human thing to have community, to have family in connection with one another across the generations. And that's an important part of life. I don't know, I feel like that has definitely been heightened in this time.
Chris McAlilly 43:51
As a writer, for you are there other ways in which you're thinking about kind of how the pandemic is shaping the way that you're approaching the work that you're doing?
Beth Ann Fennelly 44:03
Well, I wouldn't say my writing life has changed in terms of, you know... I mean, because some people were not able to practice their job anymore, like people in the hospitality industry, you know. But for me, my writing was always being home by myself. And so that aspect didn't change with the pandemic, but the part of my life in which I am public facing changed a great bit. So while the real work I do as a writer is home with me and the terrifying blank page, that ancillary work I do is when I perform and present my work at readings or at schools and as a Poet Laureate, you know, making visits to do workshops or, you know, help people read or write or think about them, and that all came to a crashing halt.
Beth Ann Fennelly 44:55
And, you know, my daughter introduced me to this term called... Let's see. What is it? Ambivert. It's when you're not an introvert, and you're not an extrovert, but you're both just at different times of the day.
Eddie Rester 45:12
Yep.
Beth Ann Fennelly 45:12
And I realized that that's what I am, like, I never heard that term before. Because I everyday I like to be alone by myself and do my work. And then I want to go out and be with all my people and just hug everybody and have champagne. So, you know, I found that I missed traveling and giving readings and giving workshops because I really love talking about writing. I like getting books in front of people,. I like getting people thinking about reading and how reading changes their life. And I've really missed traveling and performing and being in public spaces to talk about work.
Chris McAlilly 45:50
I guess, part of the unlooked-for benefit of the pandemic as well is, in addition to all those, I mean... If you're doing all of those things, it would have been been difficult to re-engage this, you know, identity and this vocation of being a mother to your mother. I mean, that's a job as well.
Beth Ann Fennelly 46:07
Right.
Chris McAlilly 46:08
And we're grateful, both, you know, we're happy for you that you've been able to enjoy your mom in that way and given her the gift of kind of a reincorporation into your family and the ways in which you've written about that and shared and kind of given us a window into that experience. I'm incredibly grateful.
Eddie Rester 46:29
Thank you for your time today, Beth Ann. It's been a great gift to talk with you about family and mothering and all that goes into that. Thank you.
Beth Ann Fennelly 46:38
Oh, my goodness, thank y'all so much for your good questions and your kind conversation. I appreciate you having me on.
Eddie Rester 46:46
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 46:49
If you like what you heard today, feel free to share the podcast with other people that are in your network. Leave us a review. That's always really helpful. Subscribe, and you can follow us on our social media channels.
Eddie Rester 47:01
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]