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Tiana Williams
Professor Williams
Composition 1: Tuesday 3:05-4:20
September 22, 2016
The Space Between
The story begins with a mother, like the stories of daughters often do: the mother who
bears, holds up, molds, prods, pokes, who, goddess-like, makes her daughter, maybe not in her
own image but in the image of the life she never lived. This is the danger and the joy in sculpting
with human clay: it cracks, it gives too easily or not enough, and someday it starts off on its own
to form and re-form itself. It becomes evident that the product will always be unfinished, will
always have certain fissures. And thats where the story trickles in. Without motherhood, without
birth, there would have been no story: but who was she to mold and shape? And again, who was
she not to?
My mother graduated with her Bachelors in Psychology in 1983, got a job at some local
business and married her college boyfriend. They traveled around the country, living in
Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Mississippi, while he pursued his dead-end dream of becoming a
professional golfer. They ate pasta and kept the heat as low as they could tolerate, and while
surviving sometimes on only checks from her parents.
She was desperate to get out, she said. She looked at social work graduate programs, but
didnt apply. She would have liked to study English. Anything looked better than pasta and office
work.

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My mother got divorced. She kept on bouncing around from job to job, Pier One
associate, college night school professor, school psychologist and then school counseling itself
for several years. She got married again and had two daughters, fifteen years apart. She says
confidently that it was the best, most transformative experience of her life.
Above all, she wanted them to cherish learning, especially literature. She taught them to
read before they learned how to in school; she made reading out loud as a family an essential
tradition, assailable only by the later demands of homework, orchestra, dance, newspaper, all the
things she encouraged her daughter spread herself over.
But her employment history embarrasses her sometimes. Ive never had a career, she
says, just jobs. Shes at peace with her choice, birthing other peoples stories instead of one
that is selfishly her own, but that doesnt keep her from wondering what might have been.
My mother wants something different for her daughters. No meandering or bouncing off
things like a runaway golf ball: instead clarity, precision, direction. Talk of years off makes her
uncomfortable. She and her rather opinionated mother-in-law, who got married and pregnant
instead of entering a School Psychology Ph.D. program, agree on this: Are the foundations weve
given her shaking? Will she compromise or put something ahead of all that shiny promise? They
wish hard for her, hard and deep and long.
My mother is confused but a little pleased when her eldest daughter declares a
Psychology major: like mother, like daughter, ties them together a little more tightly. But she also
resists Honey, why do you want to be a Psychology major when you could do anything with

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your brain, anything you wanted?Implying, my brain is different from yours. Perhaps I studied
Psychology by default.
My mother is a force to be reckoned with, take my word for it, as someone whos been
reckoning with it for 19 years now. Shes a community activist, an advocate for the environment,
an organizer of concerts and a diehard Rachel Maddow fan, a lover of singing and a woman who
insists that we all sit down to dinner as a family when were all home together.
She is a mother and a mortal, and therefore she doesnt always know the marks in the
clay that her presence makes.
On my first big trip away from home, to camp in New Mexico, she sent me cheery letters,
changing the font and the type color to translate your eternal optimism onto the page, to transmit
it to me, your bashful daughter.
She doesnt always send things in the mail. Often, its intuitive. She gave me her
boundless confidence in me, which she maybe doesnt have in herself. Her praise encouraged
me to be relentless in my pursuit of goals, including leadership, listening, a spotless transcript,
and integrity, and this taught me single-mindedness. My need to please her drove me and drives
me still. She says that shell love me anyway, whatever I do, but sometimes Im afraid to put that
one to the test.
Shes loving and curious and supportive; she pries, ask the tough questions, and write too
many things to me on Facebook: shes everything a mother should be, really. But I think Im
only just beginning to understand how deep she goes, how many threads there are to her, my

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familiar old mother. For instance: when we talk about literature, theres a note of regret in her
voice, as if that study is so far away from her and forgotten that shes shy talking about it.
I am the daughter, and this is my shaping: my melding of the elements, my playing with
the clay, hers and mine, that brings me to this:
I feel the pressure of her hope for wholeness, for coherence, her unsettled-ness, her doubt,
but I remember her confidence and her love.
I come from my mothers relation to literature, but I also come against it.
I am the product of her story, but I am also mine: together we are the threads, the
weaving, the fabric, the text, and the clay.