Rebellion

On my study’s display shelf devoted to cherished objects stands a miniature porcelain Dutch clog from Delft. HOLLAND it proclaims above a hand-painted image of a windmill and house by a river, small waves brought to life by slashes of cobalt glaze applied by a skilled hand.

At first, I wonder if this is a memento from a trip to the Netherlands, homeland of my maternal grandfather. My cousin sends me photographs of other Delft blue and white porcelain brought from Zeeland by our great-grandmother and given to her mother, my aunt: a set of two canisters, a platter, a dairymaid statuette. I fantasize that this clog creates a connection between me and relatives I’ve never met. I want this heirloom to show me how I belong to this family, and it does, but not in the way I expect.

It is an ashtray: an ashtray cleverly made to look like a Dutch clog, with a single indentation in the back to hold a cigarette, probably made in the seventies. Learning this, I now have no trouble picturing my mother buying it for herself. I wonder if when she flicked ashes into the shoe, there was a subtle fuck you to her Dutch father.

*

My mother tells me only two stories about her father.

I.

My mother walks along the top of a rock wall. She is fifteen, maybe sixteen. She falls, hits her head on a sharp edge, opening the flesh above her eye. At home, her father says that walking on a wall is stupid and asks, stitches at the hospital or butterfly bandages here? He is not overly worried about the blood dripping down the side of her face. She chooses butterfly bandages. It takes three to hold the cut together; the scar is less neat than it would have been with stitches, but it will do.

II.

My mother wants to learn how to drive. Her father says no. They argue. Finally, he tells her that if she goes to the emergency room for at least a week and looks at every car crash victim and still wants her license, she can get it. My mother is stubborn enough that she does it. Whatever she sees in the ER means that she never, in her life, learns how to drive.

*

I do not know if these two stories reveal a larger truth about conflicts between my mother and her father. I do know that my mother spends much of her life rebelling: against social expectations, against the patriarchy, against authority in most of its forms. While I inherit her desire for justice and her deep mistrust of authority, my mother passes little of her rebellious orientation down to me: she despises rules and I cling to them, their promise of safety and control. One of us is the shadow to the other’s light. Which is which is impossible to tell.

My mother does not get married right out of high school, unlike most of her female classmates. She wants to go to college, but there is no money for that. She goes to nursing school instead, which is cheaper. She smokes, she drinks, and she is Class President.

*

Black sheep, idiom: a member of a group exhibiting undesirable qualities. Derived from the rare occurrence of a black lamb born into a white flock due to a recessive gene, the black fleece less valuable because unable to take dye. Found in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Bosnian, German, French, Italian, Hebrew, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech, Afrikaans, Catalan, Polish, Slovak, Romanian, and Dutch. For Russian and Persian, see “white crow.”

*

At age forty-eight, my mother still needs to prove that no one is the boss of her.

We go camping with my grandparents at a lake in Wisconsin. My mother and her parents sleep in the camper; my cousin Chris and I sleep in a covered pickup truck bed. My grandfather takes Chris and me fishing. He threads worms on a hook for me when I am too squeamish. He does not speak, other than to direct our casts. I can tell by my grandfather’s expression that Chris is doing much better than I am. It does not occur to me that Chris, five years my senior and living with our grandparents, has had a lot of practice. Chris catches several fish, and I earn a nod of approval when I catch one. A small burst of pride wells within me as I meet this expectation.

One morning, it rains. Torrential rain, streaming down. Chris and I play Spite and Malice with our grandmother at the camper’s table. My mother gets up, opens the door. Where are you going? someone asks.

To take a shower in nature, she replies. When she comes back, housecoat soaked and laughing, she is delighted with herself.

What did you do? her father demands.

I stood naked on the dock and washed my hair. At the look on her parents’ faces: No one SAW me. No one is out in this rain.

My grandfather is equal parts angry, appalled, embarrassed, and ashamed. Where did this wild woman with auburn hair and green eyes come from? She flicks her lighter, inhales the cigarette smoke deeply.

*

Torches of freedom, advertisers call cigarettes, encouraging women to purchase them as a sign of rebellion against the patriarchy, a way to align themselves with the women’s suffrage movement. In March of 1929, two months before my mother is born, a strategist for Phillip Morris comes up with the idea to hire good-looking women to smoke during the New York City Easter Parade. Professional photographers snap pictures of them doing the nearly unprecedented: smoking in public. This is a marketing stroke of genius: the New York event features men and women wearing their most elegant and fashionable clothing, displaying their wealth and social status, a far cry from the ‘fallen’ women and prostitutes who had been regularly associated with smoking. Not long after, cigarette companies offer women lessons in smoking properly, covering the etiquette of holding, lighting, inhaling, and exhaling. When young men ship out overseas during World War II and women enter male-dominated jobs, the rates of female smoking go up. If they can do the work, they can smoke the perk.

I’m not sure when my mother starts smoking; maybe during nursing school in the late forties. Maybe earlier than that. She certainly never takes a smoking etiquette class. Smoking is her fuck you to patriarchy, to expectations of good girls.

Once she starts, she never stops.

*

My mother marries the black sheep of his family, my father, who briefly smokes a pipe because that is what math professors do, but who abandons the habit quickly. Next, she falls for her dissertation advisor, another black sheep, gifted and gone to college at age fifteen. He smokes. I suspect my mother thought she had found her herd. But she makes a mistake: these are lone wolves in black sheep’s clothing.

*

My mother smokes Camels as she co-authors a paper with Marijean Suelzle, founder of Berkeley’s chapter of the National Organization of Women. They put forward what is, at the time, a radical proposition: that sociology as a discipline should, as standard practice, include data about women and consider how that data either supports or contradicts prevalent sociological theories. If a theory cannot account for data about women—half the human population—they say, then the problem is with the theory, not the women. It’s epistemology, stupid.

My aunt tells me that my mother’s marriage falls apart, that she fails to have lots of children, because of feminism. But my mother has always believed, fundamentally, in equality. A young wife, she refuses to move to the South while segregation is the law of the land. She supports the student protesters at UC Berkeley demanding the creation of an Ethnic Studies department, the first in the nation. The dissertation she never writes focuses on the disenfranchised taking back power. She studies how psychiatric nursing staff—predominantly women—use formal and more often informal methods to transform their jobs. Often, the state remands patients to the psychiatric unit as a means to detain and control them; in this sense, the state views the unit staff as akin to prison guards. The nurses, however, want more control over who is admitted because they view their roles as therapeutic, not disciplinary.

I also learn from my mother’s dissertation proposal that there are two kinds of patients the nurses don’t want to work with if they can avoid it because they believe these patients cannot be helped: the senile and alcoholics.

My mother never admits she is an alcoholic.

*

“Cast out all the Prophane people among us, as drunkards, swearers, whores, lyers, which the Scripture brands for blacke sheep.”

–Thomas Shepherd, The Sincere Convert (1640)

*

Perhaps my mother inherits her rebelliousness from her father’s side of the family. The Dutch know how to rebel.

The Dutch Revolt against the Spanish lasts eighty years. Initially led by William the Silent, it establishes an independent democratic republic within fifteen years, but it takes another sixty-five for that to be recognized in law. Those fifteen years are a lesson in persistence: the Dutch rebel, the Spanish quash them. The Dutch rebel, the Spanish quash them. The Dutch rebel. And so on.

When not battling Spaniards, Zeelanders battle the sea. Zeeland’s coat of arms shows a lion, half submerged in water, with the Latin motto luctor et emergo: I struggle and emerge. This could have been my mother’s motto. Until it wasn’t. Somehow we all knew how that struggle was going to end as we watched it happen, sometimes with admiration and oftentimes with fear and embarrassment.

Those Dutch genes seemed to have missed me. This makes me both ashamed and relieved: ashamed I am not brave, and relieved I will not suffer the consequences of rebellion.

*

I fail my mother.

I want only to please. I want to follow rules. I want to be liked. I want to be safe.

I desperately want to be a crossing guard, but I have to wait until fourth grade. Upon achieving that hallowed rank, I put my name in. I am selected. I love the discipline, the rigor, the routine. Each morning, arrive early, don the fluorescent orange chest strap and hardhat, march in careful synchronicity to the flagpole. Attach the flag to the hooks, pull the wire to send it to the top. Return to formation. March to the main street corner in front of the school. At the corner, we split to our designated spots. My favorite is on Patton Street, about fifty yards from the corner. I stand at parade rest, my left hand behind my back, my right hand holding a stop sign on a pole at a precise angle. When the leader blows the whistle, I snap my feet together, lift the sign, step out into the street with my right foot, swing the sign down to stop oncoming traffic. When the leader blows twice, I reverse the process.

When I tell my mother why some days I will need to be at school early, she is full of disdain. You want to be a crossing guard? I’ve seen those kids, marching like they’re in the military, lockstep. You just want the power. You like the power to stop cars. She flicks her ash into the ashtray.

No, I say. I want to help people. I want to keep kids safe.

She looks at me with disbelief. Sure you do. She takes another drag on her cigarette.

Now, I question my motives. Do I really want to help people? The truth is, I do like the power. And now I am ashamed of it.

*

I am in my forties before I realize: it is okay to want and like power. The trick is, what kind and to what end.

*

My cowardice appears early.

I tell my mother that a boy named Stephen pushed me down in the playground and called me a motherfucker. I ask what a motherfucker is.

Well, she says, drawing on her cigarette, unfazed, there are two possibilities. It either means you fuck your mother, which you can’t since you’re a girl, or it means that your mother is a fucker.

No, I say. It can’t mean that. No one would say that about my mother. And if he did, I would need to defend her, somehow, maybe even push the boy down, which is impossible. So it can’t mean that.

She shrugs. She doesn’t care what Stephen thinks of her, or of me.

Other times when I complain about bullying in the schoolyard, she responds, you can’t let people treat you like that. You have to stand up for yourself. Just say, “Hey, you can’t talk to me like that. You can’t do that.” She can tell by my face there is no way in hell I can do that. I can tell by her face she is disappointed in me.

*

My mother does things nice girls don’t do: drinking, smoking, having sex.

She also makes art.

She paints illustration-quality fashion plates of historical gowns in watercolors, wide Southern belle hoop skirts, the swinging black fringe of flapper dresses, using toothpicks to get the minute details perfect. She paints small abstract works with geometric shapes in black, cream, and sage. Perhaps her best piece of art, and certainly most embarrassing to me: a nude self-portrait done in oils, capturing her once-perfectly-hourglass proportions, that hangs on her bedroom wall.

If she were a man, if her life were seen through the prism of the selfish, suffering, unconventional genius artist, everything might have been different. But she is not. In this painting, she is both object/model and subject/artist. The first pairing might be barely acceptable for a woman in the sixties, if scandalous, especially if painted by that famous genius (male) painter. But she transgresses social norms by picking up the paintbrush herself, making her naked self the center, exposing herself. This painting is my mother’s fuck you: I like my body and I like my art and fuck you if you don’t.

After my mother dies, the painting disappears, probably into the trash. Strangely, I like to think of the painting destroyed–burned or shredded–rather than just tossed out. I don’t want some stranger with their hands on my mother.

*

Sometimes being a rebel means being revolutionary. Most of the time being a rebel means losing: jobs, relationships, life.

*

My friend Tiéra gets to swear as a privilege. If she does all her chores for a week, she gets a certain number of shits or fucks. If she does something worth punishing, her stash of swear words for the week decreases precipitously.

My mother, upon hearing this, draws long on her cigarette. She says, look, I’m not going to limit your language. Use the word that best fits the situation. When someone does something shitty, you can call that shitty. Just know that you might offend people if you swear.

I can call things what they are. When I am older, sometimes I do.

*

My friend Mimi and I set up camp in Joshua Tree National Park. We decide we can fit in a hike before sunset. She goes before me on the trail. She passes a rock and a sound begins and I think why would they have automatic sprinklers in the desert? Not a sprinkler—a rattlesnake, as thick as my upper arm, coiled in the rock’s shadow next to the trail.

Okay, I think, I know from reading Michael Crichton that rattlesnakes have a striking distance of six feet. If I go by, will I be in range? How many feet is that? Shit. Probably in range. Okay. I have a metal canteen. If I dangle it along the side of my leg, what are the chances that it would hit the canteen and not me? It’d probably hit lower rather than higher, right? Just below the knee? Lower?

My friend waits for my decision. I stare at the snake. I look at the canteen. I stare at the snake. It is a full minute before I realize the answer: I can go off the marked trail. Once I am past, the rattling stops.

It takes me a whole minute to realize that to save my own life, I do not have to follow the rules.

*

Can you be a black sheep by virtue of your circumstances rather than by the vices of your personality and behavior? Born to a black sheep, am I one too by association? Will I grow into a predisposition to rebellion? Is it possible to be a piebald sheep?

*

I struggle with how to judge my similarities to and my differences from my mother. We are both intellectuals. Feminists. Teachers. Artists. Mothers. We both would rather be the authority than answer to authority. She was an addict–an alcoholic and a smoker—and I am lucky I am not. She was a disrupter, and I am a conciliator. She said fuck you, loud and clear, and I say what the actual fuck? silently to myself.

At least, that has been true until more recently. These days, as I get older and the world burns, I sometimes sense my mother behind my gaze in the mirror, sense her voice in my head when I say fuck all y’all to those who would fuck with me and mine.

-Kathryn DeZur

Kathryn DeZur is an essayist, poet, professor, and avid treasure-hunter in thrift, resale, and consignment stores. She loves to spy out the stories and meanings of the particular objects she comes across. She lives and writes in the northern Catskill Mountains. Her creative nonfiction has been published in the following literary journals: “Evidentia” appeared in The Nassau Review in Spring 2023. “Small, Comfortable Lies” appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes in Fall 2023.Her poetry publications include a chapbook, Blue Ghosts (Finishing Line Press, 2019), as well as poems in The Fourth River, FEED, Press Pause Press, and Blueline.