Happy Mother's Day

From my mother Mary Ellmann's book Thinking About Women (1968), an excerpt from the preface, an imagined dialogue between an interviewer (I) and the author (ME) (at page xii):

I.        It cannot be wrong to urge understanding.
ME.   No, it must be right in social work. But in novels, say, misunderstanding reasserts itself. its resilience is apparent, and one feels a grudging admiration for resilience, the admiration one might feel for a viral strain which all the aspirin in the world won't eradicate.
I.        Then really, you relish confusion -- or even sore throats.
ME.    I said it was a grudging admiration. There's an enormous number of opinions about women, and I will admit I'm impressed by the regularity and the intensity with which they are expressed. Some are more plausible than others, but their plausibility or implausibility isn't so much the point. It's their reiteration. 

 Carefully expressing no opinions, I simply say: Happy Mother's Day!

Remembering my mother Mary Ellmann

In memory of my mother, Mary Ellmann, who was born on January 5 93 years ago, here is her always timely description, in her book Thinking About Women, of the "extraordinary expedition" of the ovum:

an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Ordinarily too, the ovum travels singly, like Lewis or Clark, in the kind of existential loneliness which Norman Mailer usually admires. One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15. 

That about sums it up, don't you think?