This morning I am relishing my quiet, messy house after a weekend of solo parenting. It was the kind of weekend that I was imagining when Adrian Shirk asked me “what does utopia mean to you?” and I answered: “Everyone getting their needs met.” I knew what my needs were for the weekend: to not feel trapped alone in my home with my bored, whining kids. So a neighbor took my older son out for a cookie. So we hosted a closet sale and raised money for reproductive justice. So I asked for some help with morning school dropoff. So we had other kids over. So I made some tiny cakes and decorated them with flowers and put them on a table outside for people to take home. So we went to Quaker Meeting and First Day School. So a friend brought me some of her leftovers so I could eat grownup food instead of quesadillas again. I filled the weekend with other adults for my sake and theirs, at a scale that would be unsustainable everyday, but in a way that pointed me towards what I can hope for, and what I can ask for, when times are bad or when I just need a break. Whatever your relationship with motherhood, I wish for us all to spend more time honoring the caring and nurturing we do for each other, every day.
This weekend I was also thinking about another kind of mother: the mother of the annsisters, Priscilla Mullins Alden. Priscilla was the first white mother on this continent. She is also my 11th-great grandmother. Priscilla’s first baby, Elizabeth Alden Pabodie, lived to nearly 100 years old and birthed thirteen children; when she died in Little Compton, RI, she had 556 great-grandchildren. Her descendants today number in the thousands.
In 1882, after decades of local effort, Little Compton residents erected a commemorative granite obelisk to Pabodie, into which they embedded her original slate tombstone. One side of the monument reads “Elizabeth Pabodie, daughter of the Plymouth Pilgrims John Alden and Priscilla Mullin, the first white woman born in New England.” Another side contains this poem:
A bud from Plymouth's Mayflower sprung,
Transplanted here to live and bloom,
Her memory, ever sweet and young,
The Centuries Guard within this tomb.
I’ve been reading Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse, a collection of essays which does a truly wonderful job of connecting 17th century colonialism across continents, focusing on the story of the small Indonesian islands where nutmeg was grown. When the Banda people refused to grant an exclusive contract to any nation for the trade of the nutmeg, the Dutch destroyed the web of life on the islands (not all of the people, an unknown number of whom escaped) in order to take the nutmeg for themselves. Ghosh draws parallels between the genocide of Banda society by “burning everything” and the “war of extermination” waged against the Indigenous people of “New England.” By telling the story of these two catastrophic destructions, Ghosh shows how the 1600s brought a new kind of human interaction with planetary consequences, waged simultaneously on both sides of the globe.
There is so much violence, Ghosh reflects, contained in the “New” of “New England.” To attempt to make one place into the image of an other requires violence. Colonists “transplanted” their crops by destroying complex, abundant ecosystems and the people who cared for, relied on, and were part of them. By 1882, it seems, white people’s memory of that violence had faded, and only flowers remained. And so they built a monument to the destruction, a monument for someone in my family tree.
This is my favorite kind of question: so what do we do now with Priscilla and her daughter Elizabeth? The word annsisters is derived from a different devotional 19th century interpretation of these women: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody claimed that the first thing this long line of sisters-in-white-named-Ann did when they came to this land was to build a schoolhouse. In this little puppet show video, I narrate Peabody’s quote about this, in which she imagines colonist women as mythic schoolteachers, rather than mythic mothers. Peabody herself was a schoolteacher and not a biological mother; the stories we tell about our ancestors are sometimes stories that we are telling about ourselves.
So what do we need Priscilla Mullin Alden and Elizabeth Alden Pabodie to mean to us now? Can we be in awe of the work they must have done as women and mothers, and reject the role they played in the planetary destruction that their society required, and the ongoing destruction that their myth enabled? This Mother’s Day, I am thinking about how to acknowledge my own role, as the mother of another generation of descendants of colonizers of stolen land, another link in the chain of planetary destruction. What an inheritance for my children. So my motherhood must also be: to try to give them something else, too.
I’m having some really wonderful conversations on the podcast about these questions. Hope you’ll join me there too!
conventicle news
I’m listening back to last year’s Floralia Flower Moon collaborative playlist.
Nun news:
Archaeologists identified (in 2019) lapis lazuli pigment in the dentine of a c.11th c German nun’s tooth, confirming what we already know, which is that women have always been creative. I appreciated the way this piece really highlights that what we think we know about the women of the past mostly has to do with the blind spots of historians.
Subversive Habits is an excellent book title and looks like a great read. It was recommended to me by Paige Johnston.
If you like nuns, you’ll love Matrix by Lauren Groff. If we had a Conventicle book club that would have been a good pick.
If you’ve picked up any of these books, let us know! What are you reading, watching, visiting, listening to, making? Doesn’t have to be about nuns.
Did you know you can find annsisters goodies on Bonfire? Childcare tees, utopia map tees, and annsisters tees are all there.