My Real Mom — and My 311-Year-Old Mother by Molly Peacock

You know Molly Peacock as an acclaimed poet, but we predict she will soon become equally acclaimed for her gorgeous new book, The Paper Garden: an Artist Begins her Life’s Work at 72. We’ll be interviewing Molly next week but, meanwhile, in honor of Mother’s Day, we are so proud to feature her tribute to the two women who have had such a huge impact on her life.

Mothers are our best role models, and my mom, Mrs. Peacock, was a feisty role model for my youth. She wore scarlet lipstick like a thirties movie star, bent elegantly over the open hood of a Model A, reached in with a wrench, and fixed it — long before the wisecrack advice of the guys on Car Talk. She recognized that creativity and imagination need supplies, and she was the buyer of the books and the art supplies that I all but ate up as a child. My mother was responsible for gift of my life as a writer. But she began to shut down in her last decade.  She was sick, and her imagination folded in on itself. She died of lung cancer at 72.

Also at the age of 72, but two hundred years earlier, a woman named Mrs. Delany was beginning the great work of her life. One afternoon she watched a petal fall from a scarlet geranium. It landed near a piece of scarlet paper.  Mesmerized, she picked up a pair of filigreed embroidery scissors and from there she cut out dots and bits and moons and squiggles of that paper, assembling them into a paper portrait of the flower.  With this gesture she invented the art of collage — centuries before Picasso.

During the following decade Mrs. Delany created 985 brilliant, botanically accurate cut-paper flowers, all on dramatic, deep black backgrounds. These flowers are extraordinary;  each steps out on the page as if dressed in the linens and satins of women from girlish buds to extravagant divas.  The flowers portray a thousand stages a woman can enter, from the shy upward glance to the heavy bow of grief.  They seem to show all the emotions I saw on my own mother’s face, and ones of my own I’ve seen in the mirror,  too.

How did Mrs. Delany manage this feat of inventing an art form in her eighth decade?  How did she have the eyesight, the finger flexibility, the sheer imagination and determination?  How did any of our mothers accomplish what they did, even making toast in the morning or packing our lunches?

My mother didn’t wield scissors or a paint brush or the 18th-century scalpel (we’d call it an X-acto blade now) that Mrs. Delany employed to make her fabulous art.  Mrs. Peacock wielded a spatula, a screwdriver, a paring knife.

I did not know when I saw my first Delany flower in 1986 at the Morgan Library in New York City, the very year that my mother began to fade, that a hand, at first invisible, but then almost palpable, would reach out to show me the way to an imaginative life in age. It’s a life my mother couldn’t have modeled for me, but one I feel she would have embraced and exclaimed over—had she lived long enough to discover it. When my mother only had six more years to live, I saw the first geranium Mrs. Delany cut out, and her multilayered Damask Rose with an almost secret insect bite in its leaf.  I saw her billowing white magnolia with its sexy red throat.  And her passion flower with over two hundred purple pieces.

Then I left the gallery at the library and was swept up into the maelstrom of everyday life.

When my mother was too sick to do it, I emptied my grandmother’s house, watching the furniture loaded on a van and delivered it to my mother’s basement. What had filled lively rooms was stacked in a cement cell. How life was diminishing in size! I both couldn’t bear the thought of it and was too busy to think that thought. Instead I rushed to the hospital.  Two days before she died, not having eaten much for weeks, my mother up and demanded a chocolate milkshake.  When I returned with the shake, she sat straight up and relished the whole thing as if she were a teenager in 1935 sitting on a stool at the malt shop.

Into the shake, Mrs. Peacock’s hand inserted the straw. Into the paper Mrs. Delany inserted her blade and cut out her flowers. Now we drink them in.

Holding my mother’s hand, I never thought of Mrs. Delany. I didn’t know the artist had been married off at the age of seventeen to a drunken squire. (My mother would have identified – my Dad was an alcoholic.) I didn’t know Mrs. Delany would eventually marry again and escape to Ireland to a life of gardens and painting, didn’t know she’d become a widow again and in a spasm of grief watch a petal fall from a geranium and invent an art form.  I wouldn’t even think of Mrs. Delany until the tenth anniversary of my mother’s passing.

I was in London at the British Museum Print Study Room, discovering the flowers all over again. And then I was reading about the artist. And then I was tracking opportunities to go to places where she had lived. And then I began trying to discover as many creative moments in Mrs. Delany’s life as I could.  Could I understand her vitality and constant engagement with the world?

Gradually, she became a role model for me. Mrs. Delany was a noticer; she loved details.  She noticed everything from the buttons on a man’s waistcoat to the pistils of the tiniest forget-me-not. It took a life of intense observation to come to that moment when she was inspired to pick up her scissors. It took a flower-burst of energy for my mother just to unwrap that straw that she stuck in the milkshake with a suddenly perky look in her eye.

I know it’s ridiculous in the scale of things to compare a dying woman unwrapping a straw to a woman in mourning two centuries earlier getting an inspiration that would change the course of visual art. But each of us has our Huge Task, whether it’s tearing off a piece of paper wrapping, or assembling a hundred pieces of paper to portray a botanical miracle. The energy you expend depends on the energy you have.

Almost twenty years after my mother’s death, I finished my book about Mrs. Delany, The Paper Garden: an Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72.  There isn’t an instance when I read that subtitle that I don’t think of my mother.  Somewhere along the years, and it wasn’t a specific moment, but something so gradual, Mrs. Delany became a vibrant, vital mother figure to me. She joined my mother, in a way.

I began to realize that what I value most as a woman in my seventh decade is the capacity for imagination and engagement in life, even in the dailiest of activities. Mrs. Peacock gave me an imagination. Mrs. Delany allowed me to imagine a future. Both wielded the instruments of making something out of their lives.