Tiana Williams

Professor Williams
Composition 1: Tuesday 3:05-4:20
September 6, 2016
Project 1- Draft 1
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?
She 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 survived sometimes on 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.

She got divorced. She kept on bouncing around from job to job, Pier One
associate, college night school professor, school psychologist 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.
She 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.
She is confused but a little pleased when her 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 an Psychology major when you could do

anything with your brain, anything you wanted?Implying, my brain is different from
yours. Perhaps I studied Psychology by default.
She 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.

You are a mother and a mortal, and therefore you dont always know the marks in
the clay that your presence makes.
On my first big trip away from home, to camp in New Mexico, you sent me those
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.
You dont always send things in the mail. Often, its intuitive. You gave me your
boundless confidence in me, which you maybe dont have in yourself. Your 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 you drove me and drives me still. You say that youll love me anyway, whatever I
do, but sometimes Im afraid to put that one to the test.

Youre loving and curious and supportive; you pry, you ask the tough questions,
you write too many things to me on Facebook: youre everything a mother should be,
really. But I think Im only just beginning to understand how deep you go, how many
threads there are to you, my familiar old mother. For instance: when we talk about
literature, theres a note of regret in your voice, as if that study is so far away from you
and forgotten that youre 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.