Later, in recovery from my own debilitating descent into panic, which kept me housebound for two years in my early twenties, I came to believe that my mother and father represented two distinct sides of my personality: the bold, adventurous me who ultimately would go on to have a very public life as a teacher, writer, speaker, and the fearful me, who, even after recovery, remained unable to fly, drive across bridges or through tunnels…
But if my mother represented the private, diminished, retreating Susan, why then did I find myself writing a doctoral dissertation which was, at least in part, an ode to the “maternal” world of inter-connections and “empathic” knowledge that the scientific revolution had replaced? And why did I feel that in doing so, I was recovering a part of my mother—and myself—that was did not fit neatly into the category of the fearful self?
Writing that dissertation, I remembered that my mother, even when she was most anxious and depressed, would smile at strangers, strike up conversations with people who looked like they needed a word, flirt with shopkeepers. She knew how to be warm. And I realized her capacity for human connection was not some compensating factor, to make a limited world bearable. It was big. It was strong. It was powerful. It was a gift. She wasn’t afraid of people! She was an adventuress! (From “Nominating a Mother: Reflections on the DNC”)
“The most important television in our home is in the living room. That’s where my husband and I sit in the evening, watching MSNBC, shouting obscenities at pundits and politicians. It’s also where I often drift to sleep under a huge quilt, my three dogs nestled against (read: shoving) various parts of my body, unable to move myself to go to bed despite the fact that I’ve been relegated by Piper, Dakota, and Sean to about one quarter of the available space of the couch. It’s shaped my body into a permanent pretzel, and I’ve tried to wean myself of this habit, but like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I can’t be evicted from that magnetic spot, not even by myself. My husband turns down the volume as he goes upstairs but I often wake in the middle of the night to the second round of Rachel Maddow in the background. The strangest thing: I sometimes wake at exactly the place where I nodded off during the nine o’clock show. It’s as though my television is keeping track of me.
Why can’t I move from the couch to the bedroom? Partly it’s the quilt—put me under a cozy enough one and I’m two years old again. And partly it’s the doggies, whose warm breath reassures me that sweetness and innocent, creaturely love still survives.” (From "We Have Six Televisions" )
Binnie Klein, Marilyn Silverman, Scott Shapleigh, Edward Lee, Cassie Lee, Susan Bordo
"In our talk, rooms and emotions surfaced and entwined. Memories of furniture gave way to discussions of how a particular armchair was transformed by whether daddy or mommy was sitting in it and how their presence and absence transformed the emotional climate of the spaces. We all remembered holding hands for reassurance and comfort at bedtime, Binnie reaching through the bars of her crib. In our train of associations we were now into dangerous and safe places. At this juncture we discovered, with an eerie jot, that in sketching diagrams of the apartments we grew up in, none of us could place and describe the kitchens..." (from "Missing Kitchens," co-authored by Susan Bordo, Binnie Klein, and Mickey Silverman)