the blog where I connect my leo mood swing to politics to a possible, maybe? novel?

I remember finding the script of Camelot in my high school library one study hall.  It was hard cover, but wrapped in that yellowed and already split with age cellophane they used to protect books in school libraries.  I might have already had the cassette of Julie Andrews and Richard Burton at that point… or maybe I got it soon after.  And it definitely added some clarity after that trippy Richard Harris blue eyeshadow interpretation I taped off of television.

That was how I first came to know the Arthurian legend.  I guess you could say it was even a minor obsession at one point.  I still have almost a whole shelf of interpretations from John Steinbeck to Deepak Chopra to Malory to the glorious Mists of Avalon.  The last of course, took it to a whole other level for me… and even though that story is rather unsympathetic to Guinevere, it drew that character in a whole new dimension.

I was in my early twenties when I read that… when I was still finding myself with idle hours at the end of the day waiting for a guest to wander the Great Hall of Higgins… but often floating between suits of armor and the sunbeams that captivated me with the dust that cartwheeled from some distant time and place.  I thought a lot about that legend and plotted out a movie I thought I would some day write, direct, and produce… featuring, of course, Kenneth Branagh.

I have thought of late about dragging it out of my dusty memory and making it a novel.  There were a lot of things about it I really liked.  A lot of things I lifted from the five or six books I had read and re-read… but mostly… the part that struck me (even at 21 when I had no idea this was going to be a reality I knew well) was the fact Guinevere did not have a child.  Now obviously, my real life does not translate to the expectation of a queen producing an heir… nor do I have a husband who successfully procreated with his sister.  But it is a part of that story that has been told… but not told completely, I think, with a lot of empathy.

Indeed, the empathy gets cast aside in favor of the adulterer bit.  So her barrenness is karma.  Right?  Well, yes, some stories play it out that way.  Sometimes it is the karma that Arthur brought on the marriage by hooking up with Morgan le Fay.  And that is the consequence of the whole Uther raping Igraine… well it’s all really a matter of interpretation, as all oral legends tend to be.

But my young feminist brain lingered on the sadness of a young queen failing to fulfill her most significant obligation.  Maybe because it really isn’t that far from the obligation we women are still handed today. 

That idea is much on my mind these days.  My sister had a baby recently.  I have a nephew.  He’s great.  Wonderful.  And the occasion of his birth gave me a chance to spend time with my nieces, who are growing into little human beings.  Little human beings who are starting to remember who I am and like my company.  That fills my heart.  It fills a hole or holes, even, in the place where I don’t have children of my own.

I’m not going to go on and protest about how I’m okay with that.  95% of the time I really am.   And if you want to have an honest, open-minded conversation about that someday, I could share thoughts that I continually ponder on the subject.  5% of the time it really brings me down.

I struggle to know if that comes from me… or primarily outside me.  That old as Guinevere feeling of inadequacy for being a woman who hasn’t fulfilled her earthly duty by bearing and birthing another human being.  I feel it every time I meet someone new and they realize my age and ask if I have children, because of course that’s what I should do at this point in my life.  Every time I feel awkward in my family or group of friends because I have nothing to contribute about motherhood topics, even though I’ve been a caretaker (but I know it’s not the same) of children for decades.  Every time someone posts on Facebook how hard it is to be a parent and how selfish I am for thinking… well, thinking I can rightfully claim exhaustion as something to complain about.  Or just plain old selfish for living a life as a female without producing a child.

Then… this week the Supreme Court made a decision about birth control.   I could get all legal and Constitutional and attempt some sort of intelligent argument about why this is a woeful misstep in the justice system.  I know there are parameters in this decision that are about rights and ‘freedoms’ and business wanting a loophole to not have to deal with health costs and maybe even some deluded concept of morality.  But isn’t it more or less part of that unspoken shaming of women that they are obligated to reproduce in order to be a good, upstanding citizen of society?  Or just plain good?

Maybe some will read this and argue that I am taking the news yesterday far too personally and emotionally.  (That’s my favorite retort of conservatives when they don’t want to listen to my attempts at another point of view.)  But maybe, yeah, this time I am.  This news is a sucker punch to my heart... because I’m tired of having my heart defined by what my uterus produces.  And I am pissed off that one greedy corporate leader can claim his goodness as superior to my intelligent choice to not bring a child into this world.

And my mind floats back to Guinevere again.  I think because I’m starting to realize I can’t sum up all my complex emotions and rationalizations in one succinct blog.  Maybe Arthurian legend has been done to death… but maybe… sigh, with a little water in my eyes… this is where I connect to it. And sometimes... that's just what a writer needs to do.