Single mothers before feminism
This week I finished writing the next episode of “The Color of Light,” which will feature Tsar Fedorsky, an artist/photographer. She won a Guggenheim Award in 2018 for a series of images entitled “The Light Under The Door,” taken in and around her home in the Lanesville woods.
What I didn’t have time to cover in Tsar’s story is her mother, Marge Mills, pictured here, an artist and single mother who made me think of my own mother.
Marge grew up in Fitchburg, MA, and wanted to leave. She moved to New Orleans at a very young age, where she met Tsar’s father, with whom she had two children. At the same time Marge was trying to become an artist. When she divorced Fedorsky, she moved to New York City with her daughters. Tsar loved New York, but in middle school her mother relocated the family to Rockport, an art community they had visited in summers, and a more stable place than New York City for her children, or so Marge thought.. That transition away from a lively and diverse urban place to a small New England town was hard for Tsar.
My own mother married my father very young. By the time he was clerking for Chub Peabody, a future Governor of Massachusetts, my father was already a legend in meanness. Fortunately my mother divorced him, but that meant returning literally to her childhood home in Baltimore when I was an infant. I loved Baltimore; for me, it was a hive of loving family humming around me - grandmother, great-grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins. For my mother these were the people - and narrow expectations - she had tried to escape. When Baltimore turned chaotic after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, my mother brought my two older brothers and me to E. Sandwich on Cape Cod, a small New England town that could not have felt more barren and lonely to me. The closest relative was my father.
My mother was not an artist, but she was fringe enough. She was a single mother in Sandwich, MA, in 1968, where there certainly were not a lot of divorced people, if any at all.
She worked at Cape Cod Hospital as a respiratory therapist,but there was a vague sentiment in our rented Cape Cod farmhouse with a barely-functioning car in the driveway that ideas and culture mattered. My mother scoured thrift shops not for our clothes but for old issues of Gourmet Magazine and The New Yorker. By the time I was 11 years old I knew that E.B. White, author of Stuart Little, was married to New Yorker editor Katherine White, and that when they arrived in their Maine home from New York for the weekend, Katherine didn’t bother to change out of her tweed suit before pulling weeds. I knew that historian and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Theodore White (no relation to E.B.) attended Boys Latin before Harvard, and that he was friends with the Kennedys. My mother taught me what a white garden was, and why there is a painting of Gertrude Jeykll’s boots in the Tate Museum. These were the things I thought about waiting for my public school bus in the morning, and that was because my mother would have talked about them at dinner the night before. I realize now that she had no adults with whom to discuss what she was reading (Katherine White’s gardening essays? The Making of the President?), so she talked about them with her children.
These women were mothers too early for feminism. Women’s situations have improved nominally with 1st, 2nd and 3rd waves of that movement, but conversations around equal pay and equal rights at least recognize women’s struggles, and invite people into a community. Marge and Carole (my mother) had been working, parenting, and struggling for independent dignity all alone for 12 - 16 years by the time these conversations were happening.
Marge Mills married 3 more times; her last husband was Ken Grayson Mills, who recorded some of the most important New Orleans Jazz of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
I think about these women, alone, trying to make good decisions for their children, and at the same time fighting for an interior life. I don’t know about Marge, but I think my mother was lonely. There may have been a few thrilling moments in which she recognized freedom for what it was - she talked with me about the joy of spending her small paycheck as she chose - but she also chose marriage again over this independence. She remarried when I was 20 to someone who did not share her eccentricities. She moved to his town. She accepted his very different tastes. I always saw her as a strong woman suddenly conforming to this new husband, and abandoning her free will. But I think for her the loneliness more than even the financial stresses was too high a price to pay for freedom.
I’m hoping that Tsar creates a larger piece about her mother - I think her story is a good one - and I’m grateful that it sparked a few moments this gray week in Marge Mills’s chosen town to consider mothers.
