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              My dad had nothing to say about Carol’s second portrait. He didn’t have time. It took me four minutes to email her back. “SO COOL,” I typed, “I love this one.”

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              Maybe I should have given my father a chance to have his say or, alternatively, I could have read Carol’s email what with her being alive and actually having something to say to me in real life. Plus she had my best interests at heart and, finally, which is really firstly, it was her portrait. Of course, she had something to say about it. Eighteen months later, I read her email.  

              At the time, all I cared about was that the person in the portrait looked great. She did look cool. Her eyes were bright blue. She had high cheekbones and a very nice nose. I liked her hat and scarf. How wonderful to see myself through Carol’s eyes! This is the only portrait I printed out and I’ve looked at it so much, I sometimes think I look like that as long as I’m by myself with no reflective surface in sight.

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              How wonderful to see myself through Carol’s eyes, never mind that I had missed the point she was trying to make. That the portrait was a collage, I did finally notice about three months after my too-speedy response. I was ashamed of my egotism and my vanity that had blinded me to the fact that my eye color, my cheekbones and my nose were all a function of available scraps of paper.

              How wonderful to see myself through Carol’s eyes, although I blushed with shame at the realization that I had not read her email. Carol had described how she had created the collage. This is what I looked like assembled from scraps that Carol had found in her house. This is what I looked like superimposed on an underdrawing of pencil, made from newspaper, magazines, paper scraps, drawn with which pens on what paper. 

              The last time Carol and I had seen each other we had met at the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York City and spent a long time looking at the work of an artist who called himself a polymaterialist. The materials in that piece were burlap, string, some paint, and a dab of gold leaf. The artist had been an Italian doctor and the piece had been created – Carol and I checked the date – not long after the end of World War II, a time of shortages that necessitated such improvisations.

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              At the time, we thought this was the perfect metaphor for motherhood, of making the most of available materials, of improvising, and the joy of creating. Now collage also reminds us of the lockdown of 2020 Covid 19.

              Collage, it is said, is the modern mode because the modern world and its technologies have reduced us to fragments. Speeding past, we see pieces flying by. We can notice only a mustache, a window. Futurism shows the world fragmented by speed. Cubism breaks space into pieces. The modern city, fast and large, does both. As the bus speeds past we see pieces of each other and even of ourselves in the passing reflected surfaces. Films divide action into a sequence of frames. And plywood! A collage of wood, bendable, cheap, plentiful and the favored material of the early avant-garde artists.  The world is falling apart and artists stick it back together in novel ways. Modernity teaches us to see fragments, pieces, broken bits everywhere.  We, our selves, it is said, are also fragmented.

              Carol stuck me together out of torn scraps of leftover paper. The reassembled me was the new me.

              Where there are fragments, there can be connection. Glue. String. Tape. Nails. Stitches. The fragmented world is also one of multiple, new, changing, accidental connections.

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              Lamenting fragmentation is like lamenting the decline of a traditional society in which affiliations are based on kinship and failing to see the new affiliations based on professional associations, on residence and so on.  The story of the twentieth century is one of new affiliations and new connections.

              Every Tuesday and Thursday from 1992 until 2001, I waited in a dimly lit hallway at Beth Israel Center on Mound Street in Madison Wisconsin for whichever of my four children were enrolled in “Talmud Torah.” My husband and I consider ourselves secular, but we wanted our children to be part of a Jewish community and that’s the one we fell in with in Madison. On one of those Tuesdays or Thursdays, I spotted a pamphlet on the bench that was used as a shelf for discards from the synagogue library. How To Raise a Jewish Child by Kurt Lewin.

              My heart raced the way it does in thrift stores when I spot something in some hard-to-see corner or shelf that will make my life better. An orange and yellow Faribo blanket! A handmade, hand painted box! A Marimekko elephant! How To Raise a Jewish Child!!!

              Prepare your child to experience anti-semitism was not the advice I had been prepared to mock, but I kept reading, not expecting much. How wrong I was! The key passage was, perhaps, innocuous enough. The author, Kurt Lewin was making a case that something he insisted on calling “group-belongingness” depended on differences among group members, not similarities. His example for his counter-intuitive point was yet another counter-intuitive move, was the family. Family members are different ages. He elaborated:

               A husband, a wife, and a baby are less similar to each other, in spite of their being a strong natural group, than the baby is to other babies, or the husband to other men or the wife to other women.

My world turned upside down.                                                                                                        

                                                                         6                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     6                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          My world turned upside down.

              Why don’t husbands live with husbands, babies with babies and teen-agers with each other? No reason! Then moms could do more of what we liked to do best—talk to other moms -- and without the annoying interruptions from those dissimilar people we supposedly belonged with.

              The gloomy synagogue hallway suddenly brightened.

              Moms are the world’s great storytellers. Our conversations about our growing children, partners, friends, parents, about love and illness, sex and anger, food and laundry and sleep and dirt were endless and always to be continued with the next phone call, the next time we managed a walk together, the next time we enjoyed our stolen minutes on the sidelines of our children’s lives.

              Those were epics we were creating. I had read the Greek ones in college and graduate school: Homer’s Iliad about the Trojan War, when the Greeks followed Agamemnon to recover Helen and his Odyssey concerning Odysseus and his long journey home to Ithaka and what he found there. As I learned Greek, I found out that Ulysses was the Latin and Odysseus the Greek name for the hero who had fought at Troy and whose homeward journey took 20 years. The Iliad begins: “Wrath be your song, O Goddess, the wrath of the hero Achilles.” Sing goddess of the man of many ways, Odysesseus.”

              Let Homer have the wrath of Achilles and the many ways of Odysseus! We had the passions of parenting. As for the bard, we didn’t need him! We goddesses could sing our own songs, no middleman of a bard required.

              Sing, Goddesses!

              Who needs Homer? He was a fiction, a fantasy, a blind man to wrest ownership from the goddesses. The epic was the culmination of generations of stories repeated, stories sung from one to another. I learned to call it an oral tradition. Homer had his and we had ours. My mother used to say… I had a friend who… My grandmother once…. Did you hear about…. And then my sister said….

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               Sing, Goddesses!

              According to tradition Homer was a blind bard who travelled from one place to the next, reciting the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ours was also a traveling epic to be repeated and continued from kitchen to kitchen, from soccer field to playground to playroom to coffee to lunch on the phone and finally emails, chats, and texts.

              Sing Goddesses!

              I learned to wonder how one person could memorize an epic poem that went on for thousands of lines until Millman Parry discovered mountain tribes who assembled their many-thousand line epics out of blocks of text shared among a far-flung group. These blocks of text and the shorter tag lines (like rosy-fingered dawn or Odysseus the man of many ways) were like stock photos of certain generic, typical scenes describing scenes common to all/everyone. Each bard assembled their own blocks of texts to make their own epic.

              An epic is a collage

              So it was with us. Patched together from our stories as interchangeable as Homer’s. Originality was not the goal. Nobody wants to be unique. What would be the comfort if our woes were singular? Misery does not love solitude.

              Our epic united us. Our great epic of raising children could not be told by one person alone. The Moms of a Thousand Faces. We didn’t tell our stories to dazzle or distress with the extraordinary nature of our circumstances. We told our stories to find out how ordinary we are. Our epic made us less lonely. 

              Sing goddesses!

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              Had you told me then that the group-belongingness I felt with other moms would all but completely evaporate, I would not have believed you, but perhaps Lewin was right that relationships based on similarity do not last. True to Lewin’s theory, similarity was not enough to sustain group-belongingness: “belonging to the same social group means concrete, dynamic interrelation between persons.” Group-belongingness is something we do, not something we are. That similarity was temporary. For a finite number of years all of us were in the thick of figuring out how to raise children. I moved away, which explains why I lost touch with some, but even many of my friends who stayed in Madison lost touch with one another. Nevertheless the epic doesn’t evaporate. It continues. Same epic. New goddesses.

               Or sometimes it’s the same goddess. Carol and I call our epic The ABC of Family Life after one of my unpublished novels or, sometimes, The Greatest Show on Earth. Although we have known one another for more than 30 years, Carol and I have lived in the same place for only one year. Both of us lived in Oxford, England in, I think, 1990-1991, almost at the end of our six-year sojourn there. We overlapped again for part of one summer. Our epic is episodic.

              On the one hand, there are gaps of a decade and more; on the other hand we excel at what Homeric scholars call the ring structure, which is a narrative device that emphasizes suspense. A story is interrupted at a suspenseful point and then, after a long digression, the story continues, suspense resolved. 

              The famous example of Homeric ring structure is in the Odyssey. During his twenty year absence, other men have taken over his palace. His son, Telemachos, was too young to do anything but watch as the men compete to become king in place of Odysseus, seizing his wife, Penelope, as part of the prize. Odysseus is one man against many and even with the goddess, Athena, at his side, he needs all of his  cunning to succeed. His first step is to return to his palace in disguise. He sets aside the glory of kingship for a beggar’s rags and gains entry into his own palace by this subterfuge. All goes according to plan until his old nurse, Eurykleia, bathes his feet. As she bathes his feet, she recognizes the scar on the Odysseus’ leg.  She recognizes Odysseus and, in her shock and joy, she overturns the basin of water. The simple hospitality of a simple old woman threatens to undo all the cunning of the hero and his goddess. 

              Will she reveal his true identity? What if she exposes him? How will he kill his wife’s suitors? How can he reclaim his throne? Homer doesn’t let on. He leaves us hanging. He pauses the story. He sets aside the urgent matter of our hero’s future to tell us a long story of his past. Homer leaves the present moment and its sickening tension. He meanders. He digresses. He tells the long story of how Odysseus got his scar. 

              When we left Providence, Rhode Island for Oxford, England and I had to tell my best friend, Barb, I cried uncontrollably, standing at my front door: I was inside and she was standing outside. Barb did not cry.

              But we will keep in touch! Barb said. We will see each other again! 

              But we will never again live across the street from one another, I said. Our children never again play together day after day, moving from one back yard to another. We would never again spend so many hours together.

              But I would repeat her stories, her tag lines over and over again in Oxford and then Madison and then New York and then New Haven, I would repeat things she and Mike her husband used to say. I added them to my goddess repertoire and taught them to others. I know there are people in Oxford and in Madison, New York, and New Haven who say what Mike’s mother used to say to him, “Don’t stare at evil.” And somebody who worries about their children’s future, will also say, “There’s falling in love!” Or when quarreling at the end of the long day with her partner, will remember what Barb told me she told Mike, “Wait. What were we talking about?”

              But when I see Barb again when both of us are grandmothers, Barb herself cannot remember any of these lines. We talk for hours catching up, we keep exclaiming at how glad we are to be in touch again, but we cannot yet close the ring. 

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              A scar binds the two ends of Homer’s ring. Between the fear that his nurse will reveal his true identity and the relief that she does not, Homer inserts the story of how as a young prince Odysseus went on a boar hunt with his father. The boar attacked the young prince, leaving a large scar on his leg. 

              The story of the scar, inserted into a larger story of identities, real and assumed – a king disguised as a beggar -- -- is about an identity embedded in the body. 

              Odysseus can wear the clothes of a beggar or those of a king, but nothing will alter his scar. He can pretend to be a beggar or declare he is the king, but he cannot pretend or deny that he has a scar on his leg. It is as much a part of his body as the rest of him and as impossible to alter. In fact, everything else has changed since he got that scar. He has aged. He was vain to suppose he needed a disguise.

              The rest of his body has changed since he first got that scar as a young man. He is no longer the young king, a young father. After 20 years of war and wandering, Odysseus’ son looks more like Odysseus than Odysseus himself.  The son is about the age Odysseus was when he left to fight at Troy. Time had disguised him more than any simple change of clothing could have. 

              But the scar has not changed. It doesn’t age. It doesn’t soften, weaken, sink and collapse like the rest of him. The scar remained. The scar has been a steadfast witness for all he has experienced.  Same scar. Changed man.

              A wound healed stays with us. The scar is a memento of the wound and of the healing. There should be Latin phrase for it. Not a memento of death, memento mori, but a memento of our lives. Vivi? The scar reminds us that we’ve survived. The healed wound inscribes our history on our bodies.

              A wild boar inflicted the scar of Odysseus. The history of that scar is the story of his boyhood audacity in the boar hunt. Scars are memories embedded in the body.

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              “I have not lived in vain!” 

              Carol said this after hours of conversation as we sat on the big green couch in the so-called sunroom in the Roby Road house. Carol remembers more than I do about the first time we saw each other again after a gap of 10 years or more. She remembers that we read Virginia Hamilton Adair’s poems. Adair is one of those publishing successes that moms like us cherish. Mother publishes first book at 83! Recently Carol sent me one of her poems and I didn’t even remember who she was.

              I can remember that when Carol used one of the five toilets in the Roby Road house, she said that she had cleaned the toilet so as not to leave any residue behind. And she commented that well brought up children learn this. Not for the first or last time, I was envious of Carol’s superior upbringing.

              I remember that she exclaimed, aware of the melodrama of the exclamation, but nonetheless sincere, “I have not lived in vain!”

              The phrase more usually refers to people who have died young, for instance, soldiers in battle. “They did not die in vain!” Phoebe’s best friend Jessie in Oxford believed that the idiom meant that someone had died with all their veins, a much more positive interpretation of the familiar idiom. But here is no triumph without failure. The exclamation point suggests surprise, and surprise, uncertainty, even fear. On the other hand, if the end is inevitable and happiness is guaranteed and if the people are so perfect, where’s the story? Where’s the joy? No scar. No story.

              When Carol declared, “I feel that I have not lived in vain!” I heard her fear that we would have nothing to say to each other. Would our friendship be resumed after having been suspended for ten years?  Would the ring be closed? What would Homer sing? 

              What kind of song could he sing without kings or princes or wild animals? Where’s the epic without the killing? But the agony does not lie in those manly heroics. What about the nurse, Eurykleia? What happens to her when she threatens to reveal the true identity of her former charge? He threatens her. That’s a drama any mother can understand. Homer sings of the child’s threats and of the nurse’s fear. In the background lurk doubts about love and whether it lasts. He sings of the agony of the nurse and her child.  

              Domestic drama! That’s the song Carol, Susan and I were singing in Susan’s park-like yard outside of Oxford that long ago summer. Susan set up chairs in the shade for the three of us and our children commanded the rest of the yard and the house. We sang the agonies of marriage and work back then. 

              Carol and I discovered what Homer knows. It’s all about the background. In the foreground, Carol wrote poems about her husband, David and I loved through our children and fought with each other. Susan wanted to escape her marriage without divorce. For now, she kept the radio on all night as if the BBC was her true bedfellow. In the background was our friendship. We depended on it and also took it for granted.

              When Carol and I met up again in Madison, there was no suspense about our marriages or even our children -- not that we didn’t talk about them and worry about them, but we were beginning to suspect that there was no once and for all resolution -- all the agony of suspense was about our friendship. Neither of us had managed to keep up a friendship with Susan.

              “I have not lived in vain!” Carol said, laughing. I remember laughing back. I remember that we did not have to explain our shared joy.

               Even Kurt Lewin did not get to the bottom of group-belongingness. Why else did he settle for such a clumsy, invented, portmanteau word, sticking two words together with an inadequate hyphen? Or maybe I should see that hyphen as a scar holding together the fear of the group and the desire to belong. In any case, I can think of no better word. Group-belongingness has the rightness of onomatopoeia – the way that squirt and squelch and squish sound the way they feel. Group-belongingness is a clumsy made-up word for a thoroughly unwieldy and if not completely made-up thing – then an elusive, aspirational state that slips out of reach: people collaging themselves to each other by any means available.