I found this in my file of “rants” and thought it was fun. Here it is. Jamie
Women Write to Keep from Going Crazy.
Last night I met Einstein’s wife on PBS. It slams me to realize I never gave a thought to the other mind behind the great mind. Her curiosity was as wide as his, wider perhaps because of the living physics of birthing babies and making milk—and yet she went crazy in the end, died of disappointment, alone, broke, broken. Her doors never opened like his did.
I felt kinship. It’s wild what happens when a woman’s mind is as hungry as her body and birth is not enough. And Einstein, foolish man, seduced by his male culture to see only his face in the mirror of fame and acclaim. It notched him down a level in my eyes. It put me on the side of his wife, scientist, mother, woman, peacemaker—a woman caught between a mother’s heart and her love of physics.
A woman gives a decade or two of her attention to the children and is punished and tossed away.
I tell the women in my writer’s group about Einstein’s wife. They are all older than me. When I mention that I will turn fifty soon, they call me “baby” and put age back in perspective for me. I read an edgy piece about a woman who lives in Tucson who steps out of a sunken tub, nude and dripping, only to catch sight of a woman’s body in the mirror, breasts heavy with life and grief, pubic hairs curling, a vagina proof to the woman’s place. In my story, the woman can’t imagine how she missed the fact that she is a woman.
The group reacts, relating, recognizing kinship with my character. One woman says there must be something about the southwest that makes women crazy. I lost my mind in Tucson once, she says, and didn’t want the good doctors to lock her up for being crazy, so she told them she was an alcoholic off the wagon, just a stumble, and could they admit her? This writer, this woman of seventy plus years, this mother and grandmother, slams me again. Ann, another woman, thirty years a teacher, says she lost her mind in Tucson once too. She doesn’t go into detail, but I wonder how often women lose their minds in the southwest or elsewhere. Carol jokes that we should amend the song to “I lost my heart in San Francisco—and my mind in Tucson.” The group doesn’t know my story that is set in Santa Fe this week will travel to Tucson next week where my female protagonist will loose her mind.
Women write to keep from losing their minds. Like Einstein’s wife. No need to feel shy about my edgy stories with these women. We reveal all the edgy things, once removed, honing off the sharp edges and making them less dangerous by writing. Gretta reads a story about a hit man who is after her son-in-law, a memoir. Ann reads a fuck-you story about a sorority of teachers who bar the doors when she walks by. Casey reads about Rachel whose boyfriend wants to get in her pants and later, about a father who did. Joline reads of two children asked to dig the bones of Rob Roy under an apple tree in a misty grove in Ireland. He has been dead and lingering these one hundred years. Joline’s ghosts scare her and so she must write about Robbie.
Women write to sort the envelopes of their lives like they sort laundry, to keep from going crazy in Tucson, to keep from cutting and burning, to keep from killing. We’re an optimistic lot, we women, rubbing salve on old scars, brave, enduring, ready to take it on, ready even to travel to Tucson if that is where the story begins—or ends.