Being/Writing a Mother

A record of the birth of Giyu and Sano’s first son, Kihaku.

I sensed Sano’s presence everywhere, but for a long time I didn’t know her name. She was most difficult kind of person to trace through the archive, the quintessential “well-behaved woman” who seldom makes history.

Sano was married to Tsuneno’s oldest brother, the head priest at a small village temple. She tended the altar and ministered to the village women; she supervised servants and ran the household. She was the vital center of her world, and everyone depended on her. But as far as I could tell, she never signed a document that she wrote in her own hand.

I looked for her name in everything I read. The record of her marriage listed her father’s name but not hers. The record of her children’s births gave me her age, but it referred to her as “the head priest’s wife.” Her son wrote down her posthumous name, but that didn’t tell me what she was called when she was alive.

Years later, I finally found the name “Sano” buried in one of her husband’s letters: “The mistress of the temple, Sano, is pregnant, and she is also suffering from a diarrheal illness, and it’s been very difficult for her, though she seems to be getting a little better recently.” After that, I could see Sano more clearly. Tsuneno sometimes wrote about her and even sent her gifts. But since Tsuneno used phonetic script, and Japanese doesn’t have a system for capitalizing proper nouns or leaving space between words, I had never been able to decipher those passages.

The years I spent searching for Sano’s name were also the years I spent bearing and raising my own children. I thought of her as I cut endless strawberries and rinsed raspberries and unwrapped cheese sticks, as I chopped things into very small pieces and filled up cups and placed napkins. I thought of her when I rocked my toddler to sleep, as he squirmed and tried to bite me, and on the weekend days when I didn’t have time to sit down. 

I had only two children. Sano had five. I was alone with my husband. She had a mother-in-law and maidservants to help her. But I had electricity and running water and modern medicine. I also had options. Sano probably had little say in who she married, or when. She had no access to contraception and a limited capacity to refuse her husband if he demanded sex. She didn’t plan – or choose – her pregnancies in any meaningful way. She couldn’t. 

Sano could never have imagined how easy my life was, how I had escaped most of the constraints that she would have considered fundamental to being a woman. But during those endless nights when I comforted feverish children, racked with chills myself, or when my shin was bruised because my son had kicked me hard in the middle of a tantrum, or when I burned myself on the side of a pot of boiling water, I thought I understood something about her. I imagined that the physical labor of motherhood connected us. I knew about babies and nursing and laundry, stuffy noses and menstrual cramps and backaches. I knew how exhausting – and exhilarating – it was to believe that no one else could take my place. 

Sometimes, usually late at night, I worried that I, too, might disappear into the life I’d created, leaving only the shape of a wife and mother behind. 

But I could still find the time and space to write. So I wrote about myself, and Tsuneno, the rebel I never would have been. And I wrote about Sano:

At Rinsenji, Giyu’s second wife, Sano, kept quiet and stayed busy. Between 1832 and 1842, she had five babies. She had the help of servants, Tsuneno’s little sisters, and her still vigorous mother-in-law, but her days were occupied with babies and laundry, fevers and tantrums, broken dishes and runny noses. There were rooms to be swept and servants to be supervised, a husband to tend to, village women to visit, and always more offerings to be laid on the altar. During those years, she was the vital center of the household, and everyone depended on her efforts. Maybe she stopped in the middle of arranging her daughter’s hair and found herself staring at nothing or watched her son run through the garden and fantasized about leaving. Occasionally, during her daily prayers to the Amida Buddha, different, harsher words might have echoed in her head. But she still managed to do what was expected . . . She was bound by duty and routine, by the presence of children who needed her, by a workable, durable marriage, and maybe also by love.

This turned out to be the most controversial paragraph in my book manuscript.

“What is your problem with Sano?” my readers asked. They pointed out that by the standards of her time, Sano lived an ideal life. She was mistress of a wealthy temple; her children survived infancy. I argued back that Sano’s choices were severely limited, that having five babies in ten years is grueling physical labor, that no one would question me if I had suggested a coal miner might have resented his work. I said that personal contentment isn’t the same as the attainment of a cultural ideal, especially if that ideal is oppressive (and, to put my cards on the table, I think it was, and is).

I sat the head of a seminar table – the same one where I lead graduate classes – and said, “You can have everything – children who love you, a husband who loves you – and it still might not be enough.” *

The room fell silent. Immediately, I knew where I had gone wrong. A historian is not supposed to cite her own feelings of alienation in a discussion of someone who lived two hundred years ago. Finally, a kind older man with grown children interjected: “At least give us the other possibility. Give Sano a chance to be happy.” 

I had thought I could get away with the “maybe.” I had wanted to leave space for Sano’s anger, for the possibility of a different life, for a rebellion like Tsuneno’s, for something - anything - in place of her unyielding silence.** The evidence wasn’t there, and that was the substance of the other scholars’ objection. But nothing was there, where there should have been a person, and that was my objection. 

In the end, I rewrote the end of the paragraph: 

She must have known she was fortunate. Her marriage endured, and all of her children survived. Her household was secure, she didn’t have to go work in the fields, and she never had to worry about how to afford miso, sake, or lamp oil. If it wasn’t enough, if sometimes, during her prayers to Amida Buddha, different, harsher words echoed in her head, she didn’t let on. Sano was bound by duty and routine, by the presence of children who needed her, by a workable, durable marriage, and maybe also by love. 

I wonder if I gave Sano the chance to be happy. I wonder if she was happy. I know nothing about her personality. If she lived today, and I met her at the school bus stop, she might be the kind of mother who loves the work. She might caption every Instagram post with “#blessed,” and she might actually mean it. (“And,” the cynical, seminar room version of me protests, “she might still be angry all the time.”) 

The question isn’t really one of personality. It’s about the meaning of silence, and who can fill it in, and how. A good social historian can use context, understanding the values of the time and place, but then we’re left with a flat sameness: the sociological type rather than the individual, and the denial of the counter-narrative that plays in our heads even as we say and do all the conventional things, even as we’re grateful, humbled, overwhelmed with love.

Or maybe that’s only me.

 *Here my older son starts reading over my shoulder. “Did you actually say this?” he wants to know.

** Here my younger son starts whining that he wants to play a math game on the computer, and I have to close my laptop.