How Women Create the World We Want to See

Acrylic portrait of my mother, Lyn van Lidth de Jeude, with her guitar.

My hands held on strong to the red plastic hand-grips of my BMX. No handlebar tassels for me, but I could get to where I was going when I needed to, and today I was rolling home, dragging the toes of my runners along the sharp shale of our driveway.

I could hear Mum’s voice and guitar getting slowly louder as I went. The door of our green and white metal-clad trailer stood open to the wind and the May bird-song, and the familiar sounds of my mother drifted out onto the afternoon. As I dumped my bike against the dog-house and stepped up the porch to the sounds I knew so well, her words filled my mind:

Everybody thinks my head's full of nothin’
Wants to put his special stuff in
Fill the space with candy wrappers
Keep out sex and revolution
But there's no hole in my head
Too bad*

I was mildly alarmed. Not so much because Mum was obviously singing about a gunshot to the head—horrific bloody murder was typical of the traditional ballads we sang together—but because she said 'sex'! Who wants to think about that anyway! I stood there with my mouth open, and Mum looked up from her guitar, her small hands pausing in mid-air formation, as if holding the song until I’d greeted her

“Hi.”

She smiled the beautiful upside-down rainbow of a smile that pulls the pointy sides of her lips up toward her cheeks. “Hi honey!” She called across our mustard-yellow carpet to the tiles where my runners held me fast to the floor. “Have you packed your bag for the folk retreat?”

“I hope you’re not singing that there.” I said without hesitation.

Mum’s pointy smile went flat and her eyes seemed to darken. “I hope I am!” She declared. “This is a Malvina Reynolds song! Not exactly folk, but definitely important to sing. You could sing it with me.”

She must be joking. I’d never sing that word. Too bad!

“It’s about being a woman,” Mum continued, totally oblivious, apparently, to my disgust.

Her hands began to sink, now, and I knew she was going to explain something. I didn’t want to hear it. But she did, anyway. Mum told me that Malvina Reynolds was born even before Grandma. That she wrote a song about ticky-tacky houses, just like the one Mum grew up in, in Mill Valley, where she knew how to find the bathroom in any of her friends’ homes because they were all exactly the same. Mum said Malvina knew what mattered in the world. She supposedly told her husband to drive their car so she could write the ticky-tacky song, because she knew when she needed to make her voice heard. Mum said Malvina was not afraid to speak and do the things that mattered, and I shouldn’t be, either.

Mum says a lot of things that Pappa and Daddy say are ‘wishful thinking’. But she never gives up.

Mum looked into my eyes, then, and then down at her hands as they began to pluck the strings again. I took off my runners as she began to play.

Call me a dupe of this and the other
Call me a puppet on a string, they
They don't know my head's full of me
And that I have my own special thing

I thought about how Mum still makes the dinner while Pappa eats his peanuts and watches the news. I didn’t have a whole lot of respect for her, as a feminist. She eyed me as I walked by, and interjected into her song: “You know women weren’t even allowed to have a credit card until the year before you were born.” Then she smiled and continued:

And there's no hole in my head
Too bad

Mum’s face looked so proud when she sang this song. Even though she said the word ‘sex.’ She said she’s not afraid of it. She said it was still legal, in some places, at that time, for husbands to rape their wives. Mum told me that she and Pappa had to sue Daddy for infidelity because even though they’d been separated for years, he refused to sue her for it, and without one of them suing the other, they weren’t allowed to have a divorce. And that’s just stupid. But Mum said things are changing. And every change matters.

I have lived since early childhood
Figuring out what's going on, I
I know what hurts, I know what's easy
When to stand and when to run
And there's no hole in my head
Too bad

It’s been a long, long time since that day I first heard No Hole in My Head, played on my mother’s Washburn guitar and sung by her beautiful voice. But I can still hear it. Even though Mum died last year, and the months without her voice are piling up on the story of my life like the layers of plough-mud that eventually bury the whitest snow.

It’s spring, again. It’s almost May. I’m almost fifty years old, and women’s rights—the ones our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers fought and sang and laboured for—are being stripped from us, one by one, day by day, while we look the other way.

It’s not that we’re stupid or blind; some of us have just forgotten how important the work was for our mothers, and how beautiful. We’ve become distracted, almost as if it was somebody’s plan, by the necessities of working double jobs while raising kids in a society that is ever-harder to survive in. We’ve become distracted by the ticky-tacky houses that became the norm; by the products and the must-haves and the must-do’s and fear of not measuring up or out or small enough. We forgot to look away from the people who told us we can’t, and to write our own world that’s different, and hopeful and strong. We forgot that wishful thinking is exactly what dreams are made of, and that dreams are pathways to growth. Revolution. Societal evolution.

We forgot that we’re at the wheel.
We forgot that we are powerful.

In my little memory-video of Mum on the couch with her guitar that sings only for her hands, her voice carries on:

So please stop shouting in my ear, there's
Something I want to listen to, there's
A kind of birdsong up somewhere, there's
Feet walking the way I mean to go
And there's no hole in my head
Too bad

Mum loved birds. She knew all their voices and their migration and nesting habits. She created a garden where an incredible diversity of species could coexist and thrive, because she knew diversity was important in any system. Mum created a world where birds were welcome, safe, and thriving. She did the same for children, and anybody else whose circumstances made them feel weak or othered. She lifted people, and made them strong, with hopes they would lift others. Mum understood that others—especially those who are different from us—are an essential part of the whole, and she lifted their stories and voices. She loved adding harmonies and accompaniment to others’ songs. Mum worked to build the world she wanted to see, and she asked me to follow her lead, but she also followed mine.

I sang No Hole in My Head with my daughter and my son; I sang it at the folk retreat, too—even the word ‘sex’, because I don’t want to be held down by a word or an idea or a threat. I wrote my own songs and I drive my own car. I painted butterflies on my car, to make it beautiful but also to remind me that every small change leads to greater change, in the long run. I keep voting Green, even though they never win, and last year, for the first time, I elected a green candidate in my provincial riding. I will vote Green, again, because it’s right. Because I keep believing that we can build our dream. Together, we can build the world where all of us, and our ecology, matter.

Mum knew that grass-roots revolution isn’t a job for a leader or anybody with power; it’s a job for us all. The whole of us. No matter who gets elected, we have to keep working to fight for our rights and build our future. We have to make choices in every moment to follow the feet that are walking where we mean to go; to be the masses who are, inevitably, making the change. We have to stand up and speak out and not just break down the barriers we face, but turn to what’s beautiful and create the world we want to live in. We won’t all agree about how that world will look, but that’s exactly why it’s a job for all of us. If we all do what feels right, and we talk and listen and love, we will, as a whole, get to somewhere good.

It was hard work that our mothers did, building this world we’ve inherited. But it was also beautiful. Community is beautiful. Now it’s our own and our daughters' privilege to not bend to the world that crushes us; to not try to work within a system that holds us down, but to step out, sing loudly, and build this world, our way. Because there’s no hole in our head. Too bad.

*
Words and music by Malvina Reynolds

Copyright 1965 Schroder Music Co.(ASCAP) Renewed 1993.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.