Being responsible for ourselves, knowing our own wants and meeting them, is difficult enough — so difficult that the notion of being responsible for anyone else, knowing anyone else’s innermost desires and slaking them, seems like a superhuman feat. And yet the entire history of our species rests upon it — the scores of generations of parents who, despite the near-impossibility of getting it right, have raised small defenseless creatures into a capable continuation of the species. This recognition is precisely what made Donald Winnicott’s notion of good-enough parenting so revolutionary and so liberating, and what Florida Scott Maxwell held in mind when she considered the most important thing to remember about your mother.
And yet to be a parent is to suffer the ceaseless anxiety of getting it wrong.
A touching antidote to that anxiety comes from Fred Rogers (March 20, 1928–February 27, 2003) in Dear Mister Rogers, Does It Ever Rain in Your Neighborhood? (public library) — the collection of his letters to and from parents and children.
Mister Rogers
Writing back to a young father-to-be riven by anxiety about the task before him, Mister Rogers offers:
Parenthood is not learned: Parenthood is an inner change. Being a parent is a complex thing. It involves not only trying to feel what our children are feeling, but also trying to understand our own needs and feelings that our children evoke. That’s why I have always said that parenthood gives us another chance to grow.
In a sentiment that applies as much to parenting as it does to any love relationship — one evocative of Iris Murdoch’s superb definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real” — he adds:
There is one universal need we all share: We all long to be cared for, and that longing lies at the root of our ability to care for our children. If the day ever came when we were able to accept ourselves and our children exactly as we and they are, then I believe we would have come very close to an ultimate understanding of what “good” parenting means. It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short. But the most important gifts a parent can give a child are the gifts of our unconditional love and our respect for that child’s uniqueness.
Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf
With the mighty touch of assurance that is personal experience, he reflects:
Looking back over the years of parenting that my wife and I have had with our two boys, I feel good about who we are and what we’ve done. I don’t mean we were perfect parents. Not at all. Our years with our children were marked by plenty of inappropriate responses. Both Joanne and I can recall many times when we wish we’d said or done something different. But we didn’t, and we’ve learned not to feel too guilty about that. What gives us our good feelings about our parenting is that we always cared and always tried to do our best.
Couple with Kahlil Gibran’s timeless advice on parenting, then revisit the young single mother Susan Sontag’s 10 rules for raising a child.
Elizabeth Gould (July 18, 1804–August 15, 1841) found working as a governess “miserably-wretched dull.” Artistically and musically gifted, boundlessly curious about the world, she had grown up painting and collecting specimens. Now in her early twenties, she felt life must have more to offer than the lonely occupation of looking after small children with whom one “cannot communicate a single thought or feeling.”
By twenty-four, Elizabeth had met and married the young taxidermist John Gould, himself a man of broader dreams — passionate about birds, he yearned to become a respected ornithologist, not a mere decorator of Victorian parlors and museums. He knew that the pathway to professional respect was a book, and he knew that it had to be accurately, consummately illustrated.
Elizabeth Gould
To support her husband’s aspiration, Elizabeth set out to build on her talent and master the art of natural history illustration, painting John’s taxidermy specimens with growing fidelity to life that made the stuffed dead birds come alive on the page. To learn lithography — the same thrilling new technology that, elsewhere in England, William Blake was mastering to make his myth — she began taking lessons with the young polymathic artist and poet Edward Lear, a friend of the family.
When John got access to a Zoological Society package of bird specimens from the Himalayas in 1830 — many never before seen by European eyes, some never before described in scientific literature — he immediately knew this was to be the book with which to make his mark.
As she labored to illustrate it, Elizabeth painstakingly painted the minutest details with a single-hair brush.
Himalayan monal. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
By 1831, unable to find a publisher, John and Elizabeth self-published A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (public library | public domain) — a lavish folio featuring 80 of Elizabeth’s exquisitely painted plates.
Plain-crowned jay. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Red-billed magpie. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
A century and a half before Substack, the Goulds funded their work through subscriptions. With nearly 300 subscribers — twice as many as subscribed to Blake’s Book of Job — it was considered a staggering success.
So began their illustrious career in zoology, anchored in Elizabeth’s meticulous illustrations. Year after year, she worked tirelessly through pregnancy after pregnancy, grief after grief — by the end of her short life, she would bear nine children and lose three; year after year, she refined her technique and deepened her artistry as she went on doing for ornithology what the Scott sisters did for entomology and what Marianne North did for botany.
Rock eagle-owl. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Himalayan bustard. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Western tragopan. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Scaly-bellied woodpecker. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Great barbet. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Southern spotted nutcracker. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Spot-winged rosefinch and pink-browed rosefinch. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Himalayan black-lored tit and green-backed tit. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Spotted forktail. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Malabar whistling-thrush. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
White-crested laughingthrush. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Chestnut-bellied rock-thrush. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Red-necked falcon. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Asian barred owlet. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Short-billed minivet. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Verditer flycatcher. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Scarlet minivet. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
In 1838, the Goulds set out for Australia to make field observations and introduce the continent’s native birds to European eyes. It was not an easy decision for Elizabeth. She would be a world away from her ailing mother; she feared her three youngest children would not survive the long, arduous, and uncertain voyage, so she left them in England with a family friend and took only her eldest son.
Several months into the adventure, she wrote to her mother:
I saw yesterday a little girl who so strongly reminded me of Lizzy, my darling, that I could scarcely leave her… Oh, my dear mother, how happy shall I be if permitted to see you once more and my dear children… Pray give my love to all our friends, none of whom are forgotten by us.
Three months later, with mounting homesickness, she rued in a letter to her children’s guardian:
I am very anxious to get back to home sweet home… And the dear little tots, how I long to see them… Most likely they will be much altered.
After two years on the other side of the globe, John and Elizabeth returned to England with the makings of what would become their most triumphant book: The Birds of Australia, featuring 84 stunning plates Elizabeth drew not from taxidermy specimens but from life.
Life itself, however, interceded. She was still at work on the project when her uncommon talent was subsumed by a common tragedy of her era. A month after her thirty-seventh birthday, days after giving birth to her ninth child, Elizabeth Gould died of puerperal fever — the same postpartum infection that had killed Mary Wollstonecraft after the birth of Mary Shelley, inflicted by the physician attending the birth in an era predating microbiology and the notion of pathogens, when doctors thought it unnecessary to wash their hands before procedures. She left behind more than 650 meticulously designed, lithographed, and hand-painted plates of creatures wild and wondrous, alien to the Western eye — a living kaleidoscope of an evolutionary inheritance humanity was yet to understand. Elizabeth Gould had a hand in its rudiments — in the final years of her short life, she illustrated, anonymously, the birds volume of Darwin’s immense Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle.
Darwin’s rhea by Elizabeth Gould from Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Complement with Sarah Stone’s natural history illustrations of exotic and endangered species from the previous century and the stunning astronomical art of the self-taught artist and astronomer Maria Clara Eimmart from two centuries earlier, then revisit the remarkable story of underwater artist Else Bostelmann, who brought the deep-sea world to the human imagination in the twentieth century.
“Did she ever have a love affair? We never knew; yet how could a nature so imaginative, romantic and passionate escape it?” wondered Julian Hawthorne about his childhood friend Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832–March 6, 1888).
When the first part of Little Women was published in 1868 to a wildly enthusiastic reception and the fate of her heroine became the subject of public opinion, Louisa railed against the pressure for conformity to convention:
Publishers won’t let authors finish up as they like but insist on having people married off in a wholesale manner which much afflicts me.
Defiantly, she vowed:
I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one.
It was a refusal rooted in her own experience.
Louisa May Alcott, age 20
Having grown up as a tomboy, having picked up the pen as her instrument of self-possession while still a child, Louisa felt that she had been “born with a boy’s nature,” that she lived her life “with a boy’s spirit” and faced her challenges with “a boy’s wrath.” Perhaps we can take the ahistorical liberty and consider her trans — who knows: no one can speak for anyone else, nor can any present apply its hard-earned standards to an unrecognizably different past. Or perhaps, as was often the case for talented and driven women in those differently gendered times (including for Emily Dickinson), the invocation of maleness was an invocation of a cultural identity rather than a personal one, of the freedoms only available to men at a time when women could not vote, had no access to higher education, and the vast majority of published authors were male — an expression of Louisa’s free spirit and her absolute devotion to writing.
One thing is clear from Louisa May Alcott’s surviving letters: Her great love affair was literature. She wrote rigorously, passionately, often falling under spells of mania inherited from her father, refusing to eat or sleep for days on end while working on a story or a novel.
I am so full of my work I can’t stop to eat or sleep, or for anything but a daily run.
Despite her singleminded focus, Louisa was not without suitors, but they failed to compete with her calling. She dismissed one as “too blew” and “too prewdent” for her. “I should shock him constantly,” she augured. To another, she simply wrote:
I have decided it be best for me not to accept your proposal.
In haste,
L. M. Alcott.
When her sister Anna got married to a young man named John, Louisa playfully lambasted the sweet delusions of love. In a letter penned in the summer of her twenty-eighth year and cited in the altogether wonderful illustrated biography Scribbles, Sorrows, and Russet Leather Boots: The Life of Louisa May Alcott (public library), she writes:
Annie is making us a visit and is as blithe a bride as one need wish to see. The world is composed of John and John is composed of all the virtues ever known, which amiable delusion I admire and wonder at from the darkness of my benighted spinsterhood. Abby lives for her crayons and dancing, father for his garden, mother for the world in general and I for my pens and ink.
She weighs the rewards of married life against the rewards of the creative life she had chosen, concluding:
Very sweet and pretty; but I would rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.
Setting her characteristic facetiousness aside, she draws an uncompromising conclusion:
Liberty is a better husband than love.
Complement with Rilke on the relationship between solitude, love, sex, and creativity and Keats on the creative fertility of singledom, then revisit Anna Dostoyevskaya on the secret to a happy marriage.
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