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PATTI SMITH, WIFE, MOTHER, POET AND REBEL
Posted 02.14.10 by annajohnson
I look for role models but I never find them in the places I am meant to. Women’s magazines alienate me so badly. I turn page after page and can’t see a face or a story or even a handbag I can relate to. Then, last night, I invested in a copy of British Vogue and read a beautiful (if brief) interview with Patti Smith. Written to promote her forthcoming memoir (JUST KIDS, Ecco Books) about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, the piece described Smith as wearing a designer coat covered in cat hair. Details like that grip my heart.
Patti Smith was at the height of her fame in 1979 on the crest of her cult album ‘Easter”, when she moved to Detroit with Fred “Sonic” Smith and raised two children. She took out ten years and I always wonder about them. I wonder what she looked like at the supermarket with a bag of oranges or pregnant in a pair of black jeans. I wonder how she kept her revolutionary zeal simmering when doing the normal quiet things of mothering. Some of my curiosity has been satisfied by recent interviews online to promote her book. In one she described her working life at home in an all too familiar terms of planning and stealth:
“I feel that I really learned to be a writer in Michigan,” she says. “I couldn’t sit around smoking pot waiting for the muse to visit. I had to get up when Fred and the children were asleep. I’d write from 5 to 8, then get the kids up and ready for school. I had to choose my moments and use them well. That discipline, which wasn’t so easy at first, became a point of pride after a while. I worked harder in that period than I ever had before. Fred and I wrote many, many songs that have yet to be recorded. Among all kinds of writing I did, there are four other books of prose that I imagine will eventually be published. So we were very prolific, just not publicly.”
Now, today, her daughter is an accomplished musician and her grown son, Jackson tours with her playing in her band, and perhaps she see’s the cycle of advance and retreat between public and private life collapsed. Or maybe, for a woman as original as she is, mothering was every bit as creative and raw and important as playing rock and roll. Some days I try to take that approach. Would would Patti do?
Yesterday it rained really hard and we walked home from the ferry soaked to the skin. “Rain is gonna make the flowers grow” said my son and he didn’t complain, because he knew fluffy dry towels were waiting for him. We stood at the base of a giant tree whose limbs looked strong and erotic shining with water. “It’s a wet elephant!” I yelled. “It will dry in the sun, but now it’s drinking!” said Marcello. When we got home we played some early Bowie. Marcello always complains about ballads. “Faster! Louder! Rocker!” This is his current mantra even though we both know Rocker is not a verb. So we spin out together. Him in his polyester Zorro cape and me in the bathroom, drawing a love heart in lipstick on the mirror, cutting myself a fringe with a pair of nail scissors and listening to “Easter” full blast. He doesn’t listen to the lyrics. A song will either be electric for him, or totally meaningless. When I look at him dancing and declaring “Look at my kung fu moves” I wonder what he’ll be like ten years from now: is he going to come home with a lightning bolt tattoed on his shoulder or refuse to speak, locked in his room listening to Joy Division? Will he be too cool to rock with Mummy?
Patti Smith, when you see her website (http://www.pattismith.net/news.html) see her sing live (she sings “In my Blakean Year” on her website from a recent book signing and is EPIC) or read her interviews always hammers home the same message: the experience is NOW, the chance and the joy are also right now. In the Vogue piece she said “I tell people don’t romanticize CBGBs. Make your own. It was just a place. All punk rock meant to me was freedom. Punk rock is not sacred It belongs to anyone who wants to embrace it, just as I embraced French symbolism.” Now none of this matters one little bit to the mothers in my neighbourhood. They are not going to be cutting their own hair or going bra-less in the rain anytime soon, but they could…If they got talking to me or if Marcello took his own music to playdates!
In my eyes Patti’s message to the mothers of this world is to abandon cool and embrace an authentic experience. To ignite a sense of freedom in the ritual of living and keep it burning. If we all woke up everyday with that imperative then I think much of the normal strain and repetition of parenting (and relationships) would take on quite a different hue. Some days when I take off my sandals to race our half broken stroller across the cricket pitch to the ferry, and keep them off. Or when we have knotted hair and sweaty grass stained bodies entering the lobby of a great museum. Or when I stop to swear out loud at a car skidding through the school zone…Well, I feel a bit ragged and wildly unsuited to the sedate role of custodian. Mothering ought to tighten my grip on decorum when actually it just unravels it. These last few months any thought of being “together” with cello in tow has dissolved. We are always moving so we are always sweating and become so quickly scruffy. But after so many days lived on the edge of losing it or having lost it and not really caring and I wonder when the appropriate behaviour is going to set in. Um, probably never. And it’s not actually a matter of immaturity or wishful thinking, it’s a matter of choice. Between good sense and a good rain storm, between discipline or dancing in public, between putting on a bra and eyeliner or us making the ferry in my pajama top with a grin. I look at Patti Smith and clearly imagine her priorities. She’s nonchalant in the very best way. A woman raised in the fifties who has dressed like a boy her whole life, a woman who may possibly never have owned a tube of lipstick, a woman who raised her son to seriously rock. And a woman who changed my life and is still changing it. At the scruffy start of the day or the raggedy end it’s all a matter of freedom. When you taste it you just don’t want anything else.
Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.
XXX ANNA