If you are sick of me talking about Igor, charm bracelets and my mother it is best not to read this one

Saturday morning I was in bed. He-weasel brought me coffee and an apple pastry( this was an attempt to make up for something silly he said on Friday night and his hope to get my sulky semi-silence to stop, which I had managed to maintain for over 12 hours, 8 of them occurred when I was sleeping). As I ate breakfast in bed with my laptop I started searching on Google for "mother's+using+children+as+symbolic+phallus substitutes". I was afraid that this phrase that my psychoanalyst, Igor, had left me with might end me up on a porn website. Happily, I was wrong. Instead of on a creepy porn site I ended up on Google books preview of Mary Kelly's "Imaging Desire."

Mary Kelly is one of my favorite artists. She is best known for her work, Post-Partum Document . "This large-scale installation work both visualizes and analyses the mother–child relationship of Kelly and her son over a period of six years, and includes drawings, diagrams, objects and sound recordings." Post-Partum Document was later published in book form. Mary's post partum project is the high-art equivalent of a baby book/scrap book only Mary analyzes hers through the lens of Freudian, Lacanian and other cultural theorists which I don't imagine occurs at many scrap book conventions or local scrapbook shops.

Let me share what my search term lead me to and what Mary had to say on the topic of mother's using their children to fill an emptiness:

"According to Freud, castration anxiety for the man is often expressed in fantasy as the loss of arms, legs, hair, teeth, eyes, or the penis itself. When he describes castration fears for the woman, this imaginary scenario takes the form of losing her loved objects, especially her children; the child is going to grow up, leave her, reject her, perhaps die. In order to delay, disavow, that separation she has already in a way acknowledged, the woman tends to fetishize the child by dressing him up, by continuing to feed him no matter how old he gets, or simply by having another "little one." So perhaps in place of the more familiar notion of pornography, it is possible to talk about the mother's memorabilia-the way she saves things-first shoes, photographs, locks of hair or school reports. A trace, a gift, a fragment of narrative, all of these can be seen as transitional objects, not in Winnicott's sense, as surrogates, but in Lacan's terms, as emblems of Desire."

All this got me thinking about my longing for evidence of my mother's love for me in my blog post on Friday and of my loss over the "me" charm from my mother's charm bracelet and grief over the fact that there is no evidence of my childhood: no pictures of me with my mother, none of my artwork, school work or report cards and how I dreamed of making a charm bracelet for the child I never had. In the same blog post I talked about collecting Lily's teeth and wanting to make or have someone to make a scrapbook for her and then the very next day I find this.
It made me more aware of how my desire to document her puppyhood is an emblem of my desire for a baby and for Lily to stay a puppy.

It is likely that if I had discovered post-modern theory when I was 18 I would have gotten a MFA in art and maybe a PhD in cultural theory and has fewer job skills and larger student loans so it is probably for the best that I didn't find Mary Kelly, Jenny Holzer or Barbara Krueger earlier. If I had I would be making charm bracelets that tell the story of my childhood, infertility, Oedipal battles, and how I am sublimating my desire for a child with my Lily love. Really, these charm bracelets of desire, loss, grief and Freudian figurines might be hanging in galleries next to Jenny Holzer's plaques or at least on my wrist. If only I could convince WendyB to make "Emblems of Desire" charm bracelets. Really, they would be much more clever and interesting than Italian charm bracelets or Aaron Basha shoe charms.

Oh, and, Lily has lost three more teeth over the weekend and I'll have you know they are all safely placed in a plastic bag.

Photo #1 is from Mary Kelly's Post-Partum series.
Photo #2 is Jenny Holzer's plaque from her Truism series.
Here is a nice explanation of Mary Kelly's work if you are interested.