Pasteur, strawberry jam and I

Virginia Woolf wrote, in her essay published almost a century ago :

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”

She argues the case of fiction, however in today’s world fiction could encapsulate so much more. Last week back in Algiers, I helped my mother empty her office in the hospital where she was a professor of microbiology. My mother is passionate and collected every diploma under the sun and neighbouring galaxies. I helped her sort her documents, books, notes, we found a scorpio in a bottle of formaldehyde because why not, we found drawings of my sisters and even one of my kid.

While many parents hang pictures of their kids, pets in their office by mother carried from one office to the next throughout her carrier a giant portrait of Pasteur. A copy of the 1885 painting by Albert Edelfelt that may be seen at the musée d’Orsay in Paris.

I was born 1982, exactly a century after Virginia Woolf and I have spent countless, pre-ipad-era, hours in my mother’s office when for one reason or an other school or grand parents were not an option. I spent what felt like hours and hours starring at Pasteur and hating his guts. How smug he looked with his suit? Surrounded by all the cool instruments, starring himself at glass jar, with no gloves, oblivious to the child who was bored to tears, I mean sir who does this?

You may ask what did Pasteur do to me to cause such a wrath of a grumpy 8 year old ? It’s simple, he stole my mother’s attention and he stole the strawberry jam.

Most of the mums of my friends in primary school her stay at home mothers. These mums knitted sweaters, baked cookies and made strawberry jam. Mine did not. Mine was a working mother of three, juggling her work in the lab, teaching at the university, travels in Switzerland to learn new techniques, being the doctor of her siblings, parents, cousins.

However, the obnoxious kid that I was, the one who loved her mother deeply, all she saw for many years this was the absence of home strawberry jam. For sometime, I suppose I wanted my mother to be a trad wife.

Besides my current attempt to make peace with the conservative child in me, all I am left with are questions and interrogations. I suppose that my mum had to protect her own passion, she had to put metaphorical walls with one of the people I am confident to say she loved the most in the world to be able to have an intellectually rich professional life. I wonder if this is a necessity ? Does every working mother, every mother with a passion has to go through ? I see it myself today with my own child that I love beyond measure and while it’s never pleasant to draw these lines, these boundaries, I see how essential, nay vital they are. For sometime a child in literally an extension of you, you love them and yet you have to keep them away for some period of times to be a whole functioning human being. I wonder if there a cure against the guilt this causes ? Is this way of being that ressembles the motion of a harmonic oscillator a sine qua non condition for pursing a creative life outside of motherhood ? I feel like I can’t draw firm conclusions as I am still in the midst of it.

All I know for certain is that my mother is my hero, that I love strawberry jam and that I flew back home with a pot my mother made. What I also know is that the scheming conservative child in me didn’t mind being patient and quiet for a few decades, she is the one who took over and harboured her own smug smile when she pulled down portrait of Pasteur from the wall, sorry dude it was never personal.