The Button

William Stewart

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ON THE LAPEL of her winter coat, my mother used to wear a button that said “grub first, then art.” Or at least, that’s how I remember it; a bit of research suggests that the text was probably “grub first, then ethics.” The quote is from Bertolt Brecht, and his message, as I now understand it, is that survival must be secured before morality can be considered. But that’s not the sense I got from the words on her lapel, whatever they may have been. I took “grub” to stand for material needs, as distinct from anything abstract, metaphysical, or aesthetic; and, with more angst than discernment, I interpreted the opposing category as referring to those aspects of reality that mattered most to me, the ethereal and fantastic, which were, in my susceptible projection, unacceptable by the standards implied by the button. 

I was, in those days, an unhappy and disoriented adolescent, by preference spending most of my time in solitude, adrift in moodiness and confusion. From that place of lonely self-absorption,  I experienced the words on my mother’s button as a daily reproach. I had thoroughly internalized the emerging family ethos that activism—“grub”—was all that mattered, yet here I was, a solitary teenager who recoiled from engagement with civic concerns. In truth, I could hardly tear myself away from my fantasy-realms for lunch, let alone for the sit-ins and protest marches that figured prominently in my parents’ lives.

As a result, on some visceral level, I knew that my priorities were just plain wrong. If grub (or rather, the provision of grub, and voting rights, and all the rest of it) should always come first, with creativity and imagination kept on hold until justice rolls down like a mighty stream, then my preference for living in worlds of my own devising must surely damn me to moral failure, even though I had no will to make it otherwise.

This belief was animated by a revolution of sorts that had recently taken place in my family. In the fall of 1966, responding to a request from Brown University higher-ups, my father had reluctantly agreed to leave his perch in Brown’s genteel math department in order to spend a semester teaching at Tougaloo, a historically black college in Mississippi with which Brown had established a sister-school relationship not long before, in solidarity with the growing civil rights movement. Within weeks of his arrival at Tougaloo, he was a changed man: his letters home burned with outrage at the conditions that he saw, and sang the praises of the righteous African-Americans he was meeting who were determined to bring about change.

My mother had always been something of a radical, but prior to my father’s sojourn in Mississippi, her activist instincts had been kept in check by a grudging acquiescence to the conventions of the day that assigned her the role of wife and mother. This was augmented by a certain deference to my father’s temperamental conservatism, which she challenged but also respected, especially during the early years of their marriage when the heavy hand of Eisenhower-era conformity still held sway. But when my father came back from the south, glowing with previously unimaginable passion, the two of them plunged into action with a vengeance, and civil rights became the order of the day. I remember saying once at dinner, both hesitantly and explosively as I imagine it now: “Can’t we talk about something other than politics?” After a moment of stunned silence, I’m sure that one or other of them gently asked what topic I’d prefer, since they were loving parents who were, as I now realize, at a painful loss as to how to deal with their highly intelligent but socially awkward, emotionally volatile, and undeniably eccentric only child. I don’t recall what happened next, but the incident sticks in my mind, a telling snapshot of the kitchen table during those tumultuous years.

The occasional outburst notwithstanding, my usual mode of participation in our three-way family dynamic involved a kind of sullen, passive resistance. My psyche was largely immobilized by an invisible tug-of-war: on the one hand, I was pulled towards fantasy as if by gravity itself, but at the same time I constantly heard the voice of the parent within, condemning me as bad. Lodged deep in my subconscious was a relentless parental authority figure, quite unlike my well-meaning, clueless real-world parents who would never have dreamt of expressing disapproval towards the changeling in their midst. No, the parent that oppressed me was the one that dwelled inside my head.

I certainly never heard harsh judgments from my parents’ lips, though of course they tried to steer me in what they hoped were healthy ways. If anything, I was an overindulged child, at least in terms of what was spoken: the main directive I remember from my mother was, “you can do whatever you like, so long as it makes you happy.” The trouble was, nothing seemed to work. I had enthusiasm, but underneath my excitability was a melancholy that felt untouchable and pervasive. Paradoxically, my parents’ permissiveness reinforced my defeatism, instead of mitigating it: if I could do whatever I wanted, and yet even with all that freedom still couldn’t find anything that would shake me out of my depression, then surely I was culpable, since I couldn’t please my parents despite being given carte blanche to follow my heart’s desire. And so, in a self-perpetuating pattern, I kept looking at the same old books and artifacts, kept drawing the same imaginary subjects over and over again, prevented by guilt and shame from attempting anything different that might upset the no-win status quo, the stalemate dominating my household and my soul.

And then there was that button. Grub first. How could I fail to imagine covert judgment, when that was the message my mother put forth to the world? How could I feel safe in her all-enveloping love, while in her public person she so harshly condemned the self-indulgence and inertia I knew I was guilty of?

The core of the conundrum, I now believe, was that without either of us being aware of it, she was using me as a vehicle for dealing with internal conflicts that she couldn’t resolve on her own. Profoundly self-critical, she could never live up to her own high standards: “Be like your father, not like me,” she used to say—that is, don’t get caught up in emotional drama as I have been. I think she hoped that maybe, if she could just give me enough of her own under-utilized essence, I could achieve the fulfillment that had eluded her. Maybe, in other words, she could redeem her sense of failure by living vicariously through me. 

This pattern was exacerbated by her ambivalence about her marriage. Despite her injunction that I take my father as a role model, the very steadiness that she esteemed in him and urged me to emulate was also deeply frustrating for her, junkie for big emotion that she was. On top of that, his two semester-long sojourns in Mississippi, while on the one hand feeding her passion for the good cause, also left her feeling abandoned and alone, with no one to turn to for reassurance but me.

As a result, while her intention was undoubtedly to be supportive, I mostly experienced her as invasive and needy. Her hunger for me to be free of demons, running up against my actual inner turmoil, led me to feel like I was being pulled into a web of enmeshment that I had to avoid as best I could. Her need triggered my resistance, my resistance triggered her feelings of hurt and exclusion, and so on, in a self-amplifying feedback loop.

To some extent, I think, this dynamic was present even in my earliest years, but it intensified dramatically when I hit puberty. Once I discovered masturbation, there was one big thing that I felt I needed to keep secret from her, along with all the little things that contributed to my general sense of otherness and inadequacy. A turf war ensued between us, the disputed territory being my psychic space.

Evenings were particularly hard: my father would go to bed soon after dinner when he was at home, while my mother stayed up late, fretting about the state of the world, the state of the family, and—especially when a couple of drinks were involved—the state of her aching heart. She would sit at the kitchen table after clearing up, smoking and writing whatever public official had aroused her ire that day, until at some point, wanting validation and respite from her loneliness, she would call upstairs to me, asking for “just a minute” before bedtime. Summoned against my will from the comforting nest of my imagination, I would come down resentfully, subconsciously trying to gauge the right amount to withhold in order to stake my bounds without getting buried in an avalanche of need. These exchanges would follow a predictable course, eventually circling round towards my mother’s tearful plea that at least we not go to bed angry with each other. (“Don’t go to bed angry, just go to bed!” was my unspoken response.) As quickly as possible after our mandatory reciprocal assurances of undying love, I would escape to my room, making sure that my bladder was empty so I wouldn’t risk encountering her again when she came upstairs. Even then, I wasn’t always safe; one memorable night, after I thought she was asleep, I heard a plaintive voice outside my door, entreating “please don’t masturbate!” Small wonder that I turned to my private worlds of fantasy, trying to wall her out.

The sense of having my boundaries violated, while amorphous, was pervasive. Twist and turn though I might, the internalized parent was always there, telling me that I was shirking the responsibilities imposed on me by circumstance, to make amends for unearned privilege through service to a higher good.

This sense of unfulfilled obligation operated in a couple of different ways, which reinforced one another seamlessly. On an intellectual level, I felt guilty about my class and economic privilege: this was thrown into stark relief by my parents’ commitments, especially to various dirt-poor black Mississippians whose struggles, conveyed through letters and photographs, put my own to shame. Compounding this, more insidiously, I felt burdened by my mother’s adoration—presented as boundless generosity, asking nothing in return, but subliminally imposing a feeling of indebtedness that I knew I could never repay. “With all of your advantages,” ran the whisper in my head, “what is wrong with you, that you sit there doodling, that you can’t stir yourself to be of use in the world? Surely you, of all people—white, male, a child of wealth, with unstinting parental support—ought to be able to give selflessly to others. If those heroic black people can do it, if women overcoming gender oppression can do it, if your parents can do it, why can’t you?”

Such was the refrain that held me in its grip, and my response was, metaphorically speaking, to squeeze myself ever more tightly, to take up as little space as possible. If I couldn’t do positive good, then at least I could minimize the harm created by my parasitic existence, made possible by the sacrifice of others. This self-imprisonment, running up against my temperamental inclination towards flamboyance and grandiosity, served mainly to neutralize whatever aliveness might otherwise have been available to me. 

With the sense of impasse growing, we eventually agreed that I would be sent away to boarding school. I was desperate to escape the claustrophobia at home, and my parents shared my hope that a new environment might reset my modes of navigating (and not navigating) the world around me. Even my myopic mother knew that something needed to shift, and my father, while instinctively recoiling from the melodrama swirling around him, did his best to be supportive of us both (“Be kind to your poor mother,” he used to say to me, and then, turning to her: “be kind to your poor son”).

Boarding school was a welcome change in some respects, but there, too, I felt like an awkward outsider, beset with irreconcilable impulses. On the one hand, I wanted to live big, theatrically, like the queen I subconsciously yearned to become; but on the other, I felt that the only half-acceptable choice was to box myself up, since I already took up more space than I was entitled to, and needed to renounce any more. It was as if I had been given a prize for a race I had not competed in, which I could not return but also could not legitimately keep, because I was too weak-willed to attempt a penalty run to retroactively earn it.

Somehow, slowly, I began to free myself from this double-bind, but it wasn't easy. Immersed as I was in the paradigm of struggle against oppression as defined by material circumstances, for many years I just assumed that my confusion and inertia could only be the result of personal failure, the self-indulgent neuroses of a spoiled rich kid who didn’t have anything better to worry about. It never occurred to me that I might be dealing with a kind of oppression myself, no less real for being self-enforced and internal rather than inflicted upon me from an outside source.

I remember hearing on the radio an interview with the first woman to appointed to a cabinet post in Morocco (as minister of health, I think, or maybe culture), who had reached her position despite having been raised in a brutally patriarchal harem where she had been virtually imprisoned without access to education or the outside world. When asked how she had broken free from such a restrictive environment, she replied that, having been blessed with an intrepid spirit, she had never been daunted by external obstacles, and that in her opinion, the most destructive oppression is the kind that people impose on themselves, which she had never been subject to. Her answer felt like a tremendous gift: maybe my difficulty in liberating myself from unproductive habits of thought wasn’t a failure of will, but a condition deserving acknowledgment and compassion.

Another breakthrough came after my mother died, when I happened upon the notes she’d written while I was being seen by a child psychologist, around the age of six or seven. I had mostly forgotten about those sessions, but my discovery brought them vividly back to me. Most importantly, her jottings gave me tangible evidence that I wasn’t making things up: that my tendencies towards melancholy, isolation, and paralysis weren’t merely the whims of an over-pampered imagination, but were deeply embedded traits, handicaps if you will, that had been with me from an early age. Presumably in preparation for a discussion: “All I need is someone to help me do the right thing by this only child. He’s bright and imaginative, but anxious and insecure, talks incessantly, performs below expectations in school. Does he need more of my attention, or should I try to push him away?” And, scribbled more quickly, as though listening to the doctor: “Often tired and listless, lacks energy. Uncoordinated, poor sense of body awareness. Marked fear of physical activity, compensates by playing old man or cripple. Attaches himself to adults instead of other children, especially out of doors. Not happy in his role as a child. Friends no longer want to play with him, because he wants them to share his fantasies and won’t join their boyish games. Spends hours in long, coherent creation of an imaginary world, leaning towards the feminine. May be homosexual.”

These messages in a bottle were oddly reassuring. They showed me that I didn’t just have the vapors, but instead had internalized some stubborn behavior patterns early on, in symbiosis with my mother’s worry about me and our relationship. I realized that often she had been dealing with her own unresolved issues while intending to be supportive of me—perhaps an inevitable pitfall of parenthood, but none the less toxic for that. I didn’t need to blame her, but at the same time, I didn’t need to see my life-path as a trail of failure either. It was simply what it was, and my goal was to make sense of it.

Seeing one’s woundedness doesn’t automatically heal it, but recognition is an essential prerequisite for moving beyond its constraints. For years, I’ve been trying to disentangle the knotted skein that enmeshed my younger self, noting where it still trips me up and gently, patiently, trying to tease the fibers free. I work to accept that my imagination and whimsical creativity are gifts to the world, no less than the provision of healthy food or the furthering of social justice. I honor my generosity while also recognizing that it has a shadow side—because I see how sometimes I, like my mother, aim to give without imposing obligation but end up subverting the empowerment I want to support. I look for ways to foster worthy causes while respecting my own aptitudes and limitations, instead of condemning myself for not doing it the way my mother did. Self-liberation is always a work in progress; messages are everywhere, waiting to be recognized. When it comes to the one conveyed by my mother’s button, I want to honor its big-spirited impulse, without being constricted by its underside.