The Truth in the Middle

A very pregnant woman in a print sundress to her knees strides past the cafe tables on her way somewhere. Mary Poppins, umbrella in one hand and that magic carpet bag in the other, floats down the outside of the woman’s tanned, bare calf. The tattooed image is a unique symbol … of what exactly?

If I could, I would ask the woman with the Mary Poppins tattoo to tell me the story of her chosen symbol. Does the magical nanny have the same meaning for a Spaniard as she does for a Brit or an American?

The Disney version of Mary Poppins is a whimsical metaphor for a balanced life of discipline and play, a cheerful reminder of life’s priorities, and of our responsibilities to our children if we have them. In the books by P.L. Travers, Mary is fiercely independent, vain, beholden to no man, with a sliver of heart that peeks through only occasionally with Uncle Albert and a couple of other relatives. She is a deliciously complicated woman who Walt Disney famously did not embrace as written. Americans don’t do complexity all that well.

“We do tend to be a culture of dichotomies,” Cheryl Strayed told Elizabeth Gilbert in a recent podcast interview about creativity and motherhood. “You’re the good mother or the bad mother. You are there for your children or you’re not there for them … the truth is, there is that muddled middle where a whole bunch of things are true at once and sometimes they’re in contradiction to one another.”

Women in particular don’t often get to be multi-faceted in the movies or in real life, and that includes our role as mother. Our culture righteously touts an iconic vision of motherhood that no one can define because, of course, it doesn’t exist. There are as many ways to mother as there are mothers.

The cultural catch-22 is that you’re either a good mother, which can’t be defined, or you’ve doomed your child to a lifetime of purgatory scrutinizing the mother damage. Mostly, we can’t control how anyone, including our children, will interpret our character or our story, but between the telling and the interpretation is always the muddle in the middle.