Atlas
BY SHAWN LISA MAURER
There is a spot between my shoulders where a deep ache gathers. Stepping away from weight training, seeing a physical therapist, committing to a tedious litany of prescribed daily exercises, I do the work. But the pressure on my shoulders persists, a heaviness, a weight.
On a visit to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, I search the rotunda ceiling for a painting I must have walked beneath many times without noticing: John Singer Sargent’s “Atlas and the Hesperides.” Atlas—that Titan condemned by Zeus to hold the sky on his broad shoulders. Zeus’s workhorse, he’s come down to us a fool, duped when he agreed to take on Heracles’s difficult eleventh labor and bring back golden apples from Hera’s carefully-guarded garden—a no-brainer, since it was tended by Atlas’s own daughters, the Hesperides. Blissfully freed of his colossal burden, Atlas told Heracles he would deliver the apples himself, yet got tripped up by his own momentary compassion: agreeing to take back the celestial sphere long enough for Heracles to pad his shoulders and ease the burden. Of course Heracles simply walked away, golden apples in hand.
Ten feet across, Sargent’s stunning gilded work was commissioned by the MFA in 1921 for the majestic sum of $40,000—over half a million in today’s terms. It depicts a muscular Atlas in a pose of noble burden that we’d recognize today from Colin Kaepernick: one knee on the ground, head bowed, upper body resting on his bent knee, as his back curves beneath a globe decorated with constellations and astrological symbols
Investigating the story of the hapless Titan, I discover the term “Atlas personality”—the diagnosis given to someone who in childhood felt obliged to take on oversized familial responsibilities or burdens: caring for a narcissistic or pathologically needy parent, intervening in a household riven with fighting, abuse, alcoholism. Adults who have grown up this way can be anxious and depressed, feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, oversensitive to the needs of others, unable to exert their own needs, and angry at the parent(s) who took advantage of them and/or did not provide the support they needed. While I didn’t exactly take care of a parent, or not feel loved, or feel myself exploited, I did, most definitely, feel the weight of something on my shoulders. I think my own burdens were more psychological than practical, less a direct sense of what I needed to do for others than a powerful feeling of the standards I had to uphold in my own right. Driven by the need for accomplishment, for success, I was a youthful Atlas, a gifted child carrying apples suited to the meritocratic age.
According to my father, I was the product of my mother’s failure and his needs: my mother neglected to put her diaphragm in place when she returned home from a trip that had separated them for the first time in their young marriage. In the midst of what my father described to me, long after my mother’s death, as urgent needs (their erotic life a topic my mother would never have broached with me), their carelessness meant I arrived nine months later, predictably right on time.
For the record, my father never actually used the word failure. He did call me a mistake—the best mistake they ever made. A precocious child, on my first birthday I went around my grandmother’s dining room table naming everyone in attendance, and purportedly could speak full sentences at that age. Another of my party tricks was speaking French, around two. Even in my early twenties, friends of the family would ask, “Do you still speak French?” In retrospect, before I could even walk across the room with confidence on two legs, I was performing, carrying, even before my mother’s breast cancer diagnosis when she was thirty-two, some other weight tied to my parents’ relationship that I did not then, and may never ever, fully understand.
I see now that my achievements were a way to manage some part of my environment when other things were not just outside my control, but also out of my reach—the mastectomy scar on my mother’s body that could not be seen, let alone touched; the absence of words with which to talk about what lay beneath our familial reticence. My mother’s need for the adults around her to mirror her own silent strength in the face of terminal cancer meant there were no stories we could tell, no narratives that might explain to children what was happening to their mother. As Atlas, I carried some of the familial burden: to be good, to do good, to give others pleasure by meeting—or exceeding—expectations.
There is another version of the myth in which Heracles does not trick Atlas but rather liberates him. In this story, the Pillars of Hercules, two great rocks he set up to memorialize his passage (now Gibraltar and Ceuta), were instead built to hold up the sky, thereby relieving Atlas of his burden, much as Heracles had earlier freed Atlas’s brother, the Titan Prometheus, by killing the eagle who fed each day on his entrails.
Midway through my twenties, the fallout from all I carried became too large to ignore. Not only was I struggling to find a satisfying long-term relationship, but my body, like that of Sargent’s Atlas, was staggering under the weight it carried. I was tired all the time, an exhaustion that no medical tests could explain. Finally ready to admit the cracks in the persona I had been fashioning for most of my life—the one who was fine, who was strong—I started psychotherapy, putting the burden down long enough to break it open and start pulling out what was inside. It was a shared labor, the work I did three times a week in my therapist’s Ann Arbor office. Inside the clear boundaries of that therapeutic relationship, I was free to focus solely on myself, liberated from my deep-rooted habit of putting other people’s needs before my own, of holding back my feelings for fear the sky might fall.
Surprisingly, unpacking grief was easier than unearthing anger. My grief had an object, a focus: the enormous chasm that my mother’s absence made in my life, even as everything else carried on. The mother-shaped hole I tried to fill had at least the outlines of her body, something concrete and tangible. Yet my ungainly attempts were like trying to force the jigsaw piece into a hole that looked right, but didn’t quite fit. A relief then, in therapy, to pull myself out, to stretch and breathe. To find, eventually, my own shape: caretaker and nurturer by choice, not compulsion.
Yet I still struggled in therapy to give shape, give story, to the anger I had never let myself feel. In the war between Titans and gods, Atlas loses to Zeus, but there was no external power for me to battle in the family story that had mythologized the beloved and beautiful mother who had fought so valiantly to stay alive—even at the cost of her own denial. Instead my rage burrowed inward, found a home in my body. It lived in the furrow along my forehead, in my gut, and in the extra body weight I carried—material evidence of the food I used to muffle my own undesirable, if not always even conscious, feelings.
The year I turn fourteen, I am by the stove waiting for water to boil while my mother sits at the kitchen table flicking through my newest Seventeen magazine. She stops at a full-page ad for Herbal Essence shampoo—the kind I use every morning. In an imitation of Lady Godiva or Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” the model’s long flowing hair swirls across the breasts and pubic area of her otherwise naked body.
My mother stands up, walks over to me. “Shawn! Look at this!” Her wide face has gone pointy and her voice shrill. Magazine dangling from her left hand, she waves her right forefinger at the model’s long thin arm, then yanks me by my own arm into the foyer. We stand side-by-side in front of the antique oak sideboard, staring together into its rectangular mirror for what seems like an endless minute. The sideboard was bought recently to decorate our new house, in part to comfort my mother, who is dying, though I don’t yet know it.
I gaze at our reflected faces in the silvery surface. My mother’s lightly freckled skin looks stretched tight across her cheeks; my own face is soft, full, unformed. I can see the top half of my body, my wide shoulders and small breasts in an orange t-shirt. Her eyes meet mine in the mirror. Her words fly at me like darts: “Why is it that you can write brilliant ‘A’ papers but you can’t lose weight?”
I can’t remember what, if anything, was said next. Did my cheeks flush with anger or smart with tears? Did I stay to confront her, run from the room, put my head down and soldier on? I don’t know.
What I know: to this day I remain haunted by this confrontation with my mother.
Our exchange happened at the apex of her chemotherapy-induced weight loss, when she was wearing the Levi’s I had outgrown when puberty began to transform my lanky twelve-year-old body. There were no anti-nausea drugs back then; I know she kept a pouch with pot and paraphernalia in her underwear drawer, but I’m not sure if smoking gave her any relief—or even an appetite. The kitchen cabinet was filled with cans of a weight-gain drink—Ensure—that we had to throw out after she died.
My mother’s formulation—“Why is it that you can write brilliant ‘A’ papers but you can’t lose weight?”—took the very thing I did well, the thing I was consistently praised for doing, the thing that would become the foundation of my PhD in literature and career as an academic, and turned it into … what? Shit, dust, molecules floating randomly in space? Her comparison—you can do this so why not that—makes the “this” part of the equation meaningless, emptied of value. What is important, what will stick with me for pretty much every day for the next decade if not longer, is the “that”—that at which I am supposedly a failure, losing weight.
My journals across my life are filled with determinations, with resolutions to eat less, exercise more so that I might lose the five or ten or twenty pounds that kept me from what I considered my ideal body size.
Only after those years of intensive psychotherapy in my mid-to-late twenties, did I make an uneasy truce with my body—and with my mother’s insult. Discussing my mother’s cancer-ravaged body, I pulled apart the layers of my own denial strategies, including the beautiful sense of numbness that eating provided. In a poem from that time, I wrote that I
anesthetized myself, stuffed it down with food,
muffled desire in a blanket of flesh
the way my grandfather once saved a man from burning
by rolling him in his overcoat.
With each therapy session, I peeled away layers that had concealed those terrifying emotions: the grief, anger, confusion, resentment, and shame that had always felt too dangerous to acknowledge, let alone examine or feel. Yet slowly, painfully, painstakingly, I picked off the scabs of my denial, finding new skin below. Skin that thrilled to someone’s touch, on a body that remembered being strong, that relished running, that consumed food when it was hungry. A body at peace with itself.
Why had my mother—who had gotten so much so right throughout my childhood and adolescence, even as her own body weakened—poisoned my body with her words, leading me to starve it and hate it and deny it pleasure?
A photo from my childhood falls from the pages of an old journal. I hold its thin white border, reminded that photographs used to be so much smaller. In the picture, I stand on a beach, with the flat roof and TV antenna of our rented house just visible behind the dunes in the background. I am facing forward, squinting into the sun behind the photographer, who must have been my mother. I’m in a two-piece bathing suit, a pinkish-red with small dark blue flowers, my breasts just starting to fill out the halter top. I stand off-center, holding a towel in front of my thighs as if I were embarrassed about them, but my waist is high and trim.
I try now to imagine what she felt that day, looking at me through that lens. What—whom—did my mother see? To my eyes now I look lovely: not skinny, certainly, but not fat, starting to become a woman. Could my mother see my loveliness, or was mine just another body that she couldn’t control?
In a paradoxical equation, my struggle to feel at home in my body meant that my mother was always there, with me in the mirror, holding my arm, waiting for me to prove myself to her. But how do you prove yourself to a ghost, to a memory, to an angry voice in your head?
Allaying my own ghosts meant understanding that my mother, too, was an Atlas, carrying the unbearable weight of a knowledge she could never put down, never fully share with anyone, let alone her children.
“When did you know?” a writing teacher asked me. He wanted the timeline, the clear-cut narrative of how my brother, sister, and I learned about our mother’s breast cancer—about the mastectomy, radiation, more surgery, chemotherapy—and he especially wanted to know when we knew she would die.
But I didn’t have a clear-cut answer. I was twelve, my brother eight, and my sister five when our mother was first diagnosed. For the next five years of her short life, it was as if we’d always known, but at the same time like there was nothing special to know. No one kept her cancer a secret, but somehow the facts of her illness had no bearing on how she lived—or at least on how we kids treated her, and on how she cared for us. I can only imagine the kind of bearing it had on those adults who cared for her—on my father, grandmother, and the aunt who was her sister-in-law and best friend.
I visited that aunt in New Jersey, at the home she and my uncle had built a few years after my mother’s death. Since the deaths of first my father and then my grandmother, my aunt was the only person left who had been with my mother through the day-to-day reality of her illness; she was also, I would learn, the person most intimately involved with my mother’s treatments and their aftermath. She was someone I always knew I had to consult, yet it had taken decades for me to initiate this conversation.
On Memorial Day, we sat at her kitchen table with our coffees. “Your mother was never a patient,” she told me. “No matter what procedure she was going through, you would know that.”
Never a patient. Her formulation felt like a key, a way to illuminate the murky details of those years between my mother’s diagnosis and her death. From talking to other family members, the ones who had been adults when she was still alive, I already knew that my mother never discussed, or let anyone else discuss, her life-threatening illness. But this phrase revealed something different, a glimpse into the way she saw herself. Never a patient.
If she was never a patient, then she didn’t ever have talk about being ill—not after surgery, or radiation, or chemo. Instead she was simply there: in her tiredness, in the scarves to cover her bald head, in the nausea that made her slim body even thinner. Still she was never a patient—and she was acutely impatient with anyone who might treat her as one. My aunt said that she could only talk to my mother in the present, about practical things, about what she could and couldn’t do. “Should I take Jenny to the doctor?” she might ask my mother. “Yes, I think so,” my mother might reply.
My mother died on July 1st, just three months after my brother and my aunt’s son celebrated their bar mitzvahs together. On that day my mother wore a striking red suit and a big smile, her hair short and brown, grown in from her most recent course of chemo. That much I know from the photographs. What I didn’t know: that my mother asked my aunt if she should pin a big flower, a kind of corsage, on the lapel of the red suit. “That way people won’t hug me,” she told my aunt.
She hurt, but no one would have known.
We kids knew, yet didn’t know. We knew she was sick, that she went in and out of hospitals, but those things were simply part of our life. Following her lead, we normalized not just the seriousness of her cancer, but also the visits and treatments themselves. We adopted her attitude, believing it would just keep going this way: she would go into the hospital, and then, a few days or a week later, she would come out, seemingly restored.
Because she was never a patient, she never let us see her scars. We never saw the place where her breast used to be, or her bald head under the scarves. We never saw our mother shave her head. My aunt told me that it happened after she was driving in the car with my father and her hair started blowing out the window.
To us kids she was a magician, always appearing whole, beautiful, intact, and we were the willing audience for her sleight of hand. The scarves she pulled from the dresser framed her face in such a way as to make not wearing a scarf look unattractive. For five years we believed her tricks, and not just because she believed them herself. What other choice did we have?
There was something alchemical about her, the way she could transform illness and pain into an impression of wellness, a semblance of normalcy. And her will was so strong. Maybe she really would make good on the promise implied by the martialized language of cancer—that she would conquer her illness, win her battle, beat back the malignant cells invading her body.
Or maybe she would admit defeat, would take her gauzy white scarf and wave it over her head, would finally tell us goodbye.
But no. Not even at the very end. Not even when everyone else knew that the current hospital visit would be her last.
My mother died on a Friday. The previous Saturday morning, my aunt drove her older sons to the camp bus, then went to see my mother. She was in bed, belly distended, worried because she had spilled something on her nightgown. “Do you think I should go to the hospital?” she asked my aunt. “You’re so uncomfortable, they could give you some relief,” my aunt replied. So my father drove her in.
At 6 a.m. the next morning, my aunt’s phone rang. Her first thought was that someone was calling to tell her that her my mother had died. But no—it was my mother, wanting to let her know she was feeling much better. They had tapped her abdomen, and the fluid coming out brought her relief. When my aunt went to see her later that morning, my mother said she felt great. That was Sunday, but already she was starting to fade. By Thursday she was no longer conscious.
It must have been that Saturday, the day my mother went into hospital, that my father called me in Cambridge, where I was visiting a family friend, and asked me to come home. I resisted, not wanting to cut short my trip for what I thought was just another of my mother’s routine visits to the hospital, like the ones in earlier months. No one had told me how serious the situation had become, and my father didn’t say anything alarming on the phone. He let me stay one more day, but got me a flight home for the next morning. That was when he told me, when I arrived at Newark Airport.
The spell my mother cast only worked if we, too, believed in the illusion of her invincibility. So what happened for me on that last visit, the one where I knew that my mother was, in fact, dying? How did I respond when my mother, lying jaundiced but still beautiful in her hospital bed, said “I’ll see you at home”?
I can’t remember.
What I do remember: sitting beside my aunt in the hallway outside my mother’s room, on a cot we were using as a kind of sofa. Holding in my hand the white box with a gift from a cousin, a gauzy scarf threaded with multi-colored strands. The gift my mother had told me to take back home for her, saying “I don’t need it here.” We laughed then, but for me it was the laughter of discomfiture, of confusion.
On the day my mother could no longer keep from us the reality of her imminent death, the magic circle she had drawn to protect us evaporated. Just like that, we were left exposed, out in the cold. For the first time in my life, I felt unparented, alone.
I was not yet seventeen when I walked out of my mother’s hospital room on that brutally hot summer day, dressed in my Indian-print sundress, outfitted in a kind of existential knowledge I was wholly unequipped to handle. That day shifted the tectonic plates of parent-child responsibility. To keep from plummeting, I tried for years afterward to pick up the burden, to fill the enormous void my mother’s death created by taking her place. I grocery shopped, drove the Hebrew School carpool, took my siblings to doctor’s appointments and play dates. But most important, I stayed strong for those I believed needed my strength, subsuming my own loss within what I imagined was the even greater loss suffered by others.
Through therapy, in relationships, while being a parent and, perhaps most of all, through writing, I have learned that the weight I carried was less my mother’s actual death than the web of belief in which we were all, albeit willingly, ensnared. I am learning to untangle the effects of the sticky paradoxes in which we were caught: that we knew, yet didn’t know. Or that the wellspring of my mother’s strength, her seemingly adamantine denial, was for us a kind of fraying rope bridge, collapsing once she died.
Atlas was also the legendary king of Mauretania, after whom the Flemish geographer Mercator named his own collection of maps, the “Atlas.” Yet there was no atlas for the internal country I had to discover. In letting myself take possession of the grief and anger and knowledge that my adolescent self could not withstand, I am learning to tell my own story.
