4 Toward Refiguring Hester in Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood

Suzan-Lori Parks’s astounding success caught the attention of international theatre critics, audiences, and celebrants when her 2002 Broadway-produced play Topdog/Underdog won her the first Pulitzer Prize for Drama ever awarded to a Black woman. It appeared to some that Parks had burst out of nowhere onto the Broadway stage with Topdog/Underdog. The reality, however, is that she had been staging plays for more than a decade.

Intrigued by script writing since her undergraduate days in James Baldwin’s creative-writing course at Hampshire College, Parks is now widely celebrated for her unorthodox, dramatic style. For her numerous plays, movie scripts, soundtracks, novels, and grassroots theatre movements, Parks has accumulated a host of elite awards and fellowships, including the Obie Award and the MacArthur Genius Grant. She has garnered fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, among many others. She has received grants from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays and the Theatre Communications Group of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Moreover, she is a two-time playwriting fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. And, she directed a playwriting program at the California Institute of the Arts in Venice, California (CalArts) from 2011 to 2015. In 2022, she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. And, the following year, she was named among “TIME Magazine’s 100″ most influential people. She is currently Writer in Residence of the Public Theater in New York and a professor at New York University, among other high profile roles. 

With the astonishing success of Topdog/Underdog, Parks became the most highly awarded Black American female playwright of the past two decades. Accolades, awards, and theatrical achievements are her legacy. What a remarkable feat, given that Parks didn’t recognize her own dramatic talents until she was prompted by James Baldwin in class.

Born in 1964 into a military family in Fort Knox, Kentucky, Parks is the second of three children, with an older sister, Stephanie, and a younger brother, Donald. Notably, during her childhood, Parks’s mother was a teacher who stressed the importance of education and the power of knowledge. It paid off. Parks attended college at Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, Massachusetts, majored in English and German, and graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1985.

Parks’s family traveled extensively and moved frequently during her coming-of-age years because of her father’s military career. He was an Army colonel who, after retirement, became an education professor at the University of Vermont. The family lived all over the United States, from Kentucky, Texas, California, and North Carolina to Maryland and Vermont, and also in various places in Germany, where she spent her teen years. Moving every year likely influenced her writing in that her characters are primarily concerned with identity, race, parity, and displacement. Most critics note that Parks is an intensely disciplined playwright who writes every day according to a structure. Her artistry, however, is avant guarde, and it rebels against conformity—as do the traits of her anti-conformity characters, especially Hester La Negrita in In the Blood.

The Motherhood Aesthetic applies to Parks’s woman-centered play In the Blood (1998) not only because it features a Black female mother character,^[1] but also because it incorporates unconventional storytelling techniques and an unorthodox style in the play to reveal the humanity of Black women. Parks’s play revitalizes and improvises on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter to address the omission of African American perspectives in narrative history.^[2]

In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s seventeenth-century heroic and compelling white female character Hester Prynne bears a scarlet letter A upon her chest to signal her doomed outcast position in the tight-knit Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony because she is an adulterer. Having conceived a young girl child in sin and shame with the young minister, Prynne refuses to name the child’s father even in the face of the town’s fury, relentless shunning, and vicious bullying. Through the pregnancy and mothering her precocious girl child, Hester Prynne finds solace and victory.

In Parks’s In the Blood, the character named Hester La Negrita (hereafter called Hester the Black, Hester La Negrita, or just Hester) reconfigures Hawthorne’s seventeenth-century white Hester Prynne as a homeless 1990s Black woman and mother of five young children. While Hester Prynne, her namesake, wears the letter A for adulterer on her cloak, Hester La Negrita inscribes the A in the dirt, thus taking on the added burden of illiteracy. Her circumstances are especially freighted because she interacts with a round of male and female characters who offer their advice on abstinence and safe sex, even as they sexually misuse her. The five men Hester encounters, for instance, leave her with five fatherless babies and no recompense other than their disavowal of her and her situation.

There are obvious similarities between Parks’s In the Blood play and Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter that literary critics and dramatic scholars can’t help but notice. For one, the main characters share the first name Hester. Both characters are afflicted by the letter A and its various meanings in their lives. Both characters have at least one child born outside marriage between the parents. Cleverly, Parks acknowledges these similarities between her character/text and Hawthorne’s. She also identifies her character/text as distinct from his by recognizing that:

They’re contrafacts, like in jazz, where composers take the chord progression of a standard and write their own melody to it. These plays aren’t in response to Hawthorne. Bless his heart, he wrote a great book. It wasn’t like, ‘I have to do it right because he didn’t.’ Dead male writer of European descent and contemporary black woman playwright: The math may suggest that the black playwright has ‘something to say’—finger waving in the air, neck working—to the white man. But what I wanna say is, Please just imagine someone who is taken by the notion of an A on a woman, and who is thinking what that might be for someone like me.^[3]

More than just to revise The Scarlet Letter, the play In the Blood offers readers a moment to contemplate the impact of interpersonal relationships. In describing part of her impetus for writing about Hester in The Red Letter Plays (the text in which In the Blood appears), Parks asks us to consider this question:

Who are we to each other? People do not see how they are intimately and deeply connected, so revenge and anger and violence run rampant. People do not see that when they harm the person they think is the other, they are actually harming themselves.^[4]

As a playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks certainly had enough creative license (YouTube) in 1998 to draw her Hester La Negrita as a revisionist character who prevails. She could have used Hester to explore the falsehoods found in the stereotypes and prejudices against Black Americans. Hester could have vanquished defeat, triumphed over her circumstances, and confuted conventional expectations of a Black woman with five “illegitimate” babies. But the playwright doesn’t use Hester in this way. Instead, she makes a larger point. “Parks dislodges the notion that motherhood and womanhood must conform to prearranged and predestined callings.”  Parks dislodges the notion that motherhood and womanhood must conform to prearranged and predestined callings. Hester births five babies without the ongoing support of their fathers—and that puts her motherhood in the spotlight where readers and playgoers can examine her motherhood for real and imagined connections to promiscuity, fertility, fault, poverty, and sexually predatory behavior. Parks suggests, through Hester, that her character is both villainized by and liable for her own demise at the hands of society. Hester La Negrita is potentially strong enough to overcome her circumstances because of her connection to the Motherhood Aesthetic, as defined in the previous chapter. But she doesn’t overcome them. What Hester La Negrita experiences in In the Blood (YouTube) is a new, twentieth-century version of womanhood under attack—on the one hand for multiple sexual relationships and on the other hand for promiscuity and illegitimacy.

Agency

In Hawthorne’s novel—ironically subtitled “A Romance”—Hester Prynne cannot fully speak for herself. She is a captive of her 1642–1649 Massachusetts Bay Colony, where people were put to death for both adultery and having illegitimate children. More than that, people were put into “the locks” (i.e., their hands, feet, and sometimes head were bound) if they missed church on Sunday. People were shunned if they blasphemed the town’s theocracy (i.e., religion and government). Children who disobeyed parents were sometimes put into the colony jail. In this case, Hester Prynne has, by her relational involvements, disabused her town’s social order. By virtue of her status as a woman in this society, she has neither legal grounds nor standing to make her own case. She takes the shame, umbrage, bullying, and even the shunning of her lover (the minister) without a word of dissension or “snitching.” As a result, she is viewed and summed up by the omniscient narrator, who is presumably male.

The seventeenth-century Hester Prynne neither utters her own account nor speaks her own truth, although she desires to. As a married woman in 1642, she is, in fact, spoken for by her husband. Hester Prynne presents as a unique feminist character who acts with fortitude, courage, and intrepid self-control even as all those around her, especially the religious zealots, demonize her. But, in the same way that scientists offer control groups against which the experimental groups are measured, Hester Prynne is a kind of literary societal control group against which her male and female fictional contemporaries—and Hawthorne’s contemporary readers, too—measure the piety, purity, and domesticity of white women and white mothers in America’s mid-1600s.

By contrast, the twentieth-century Black Hester (Hester La Negrita) has agency to speak for herself—and she does. Rather than wearing the letter A for adulterer (which Hawthorne’s Puritan colony forces Hester Prynne to do) the Black Hester inscribes the A in the dirt as she attempts to learn the alphabet and move from illiteracy to literacy and thus to self-help.The Black Hester, who is unable to read or write, and who is ostracized and dismissed by everyone she encounters, articulates her own story in real time directly to the people who have influence over her life, even if that articulation does not change the way they treat her or give her more jurisdiction over her circumstances. This act of transcription expands the meaning of the A from a sign of sin to a sign of sin and illiteracy. This is especially significant given that the first scene of the play hangs on Hester’s inability to read the word slut. This Hester, who is unable to read or write, and who is ostracized and dismissed by everyone she encounters, articulates her own story in real time directly to the people who have influence over her life, even if that articulation does not change the way they treat her or give her more jurisdiction over her circumstances.

Given the irony in The Scarlet Letter (the novel condemns the townspeople for their smug cruelty) and the ways in which Parks manipulates the conventions of half a dozen genres, it is doubtful that the audience is supposed to accept All’s judgment of Hester at face value. And yet, Parks uses All to put forth the idea that Hester is solely responsibility for her impoverished state and that society accepts no blame for the heroine’s deficiencies. As in a Greek tragedy, the chorus gives voice to the hypocrisy, judgment, and social injustice that lie in the community’s consciousness.

BAD NEWS IS IN HER BLOOD PLAIN AS DAY.^[6]

The prologue and epilogue suggest that no amount of insight into the victim’s life will alter society’s view of a woman like Hester. The prologue begins by spotlighting Hester as she stands alone in a community that publicly and frequently brings attention to her motherhood complications. “THERE SHE IS!” they shout.^[7] And while the play neither vindicates nor supports the chorus’s assessment, throughout the entirety of the play All ridicules Hester for illiteracy, single parenthood, and poverty. In its declaration against her, the chorus cries:

WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS

THE NERVE SOME PEOPLE HAVE SHOULDNT HAVE IT IF YOU CANT AFFORD

IT

AND YOU KNOW SHE CANT SHE DON’T GOT NO SKILLS CEPT ONE

CANT READ CANT WRITE SHE MARRIED? WHAT DO YOU THINK?

SHE OUGHTA BE MARRIED

THATS WHY THINGS ARE BAD LIKE THEY

ARE

CAUSE OF

GIRLS LIKE THAT [. . .].^[8]

Not only does All establish a separation between itself and Hester, it also insists that “girls like [Hester]” create larger problems that plague the community.

This faction of society refuses to view Hester as a victim of unfair and unprecedented social practices. The chorus neglects to question if and how social practices demonstrated by other characters contribute to Hester’s choices regarding illegitimacy, motherhood, and sexuality. The chorus assumes that the tragic heroine deserves society’s perception of her because her children are exposed to a life of struggle and hunger. The chorus is not sensitive to the role it could play in Hester’s life. Instead of acknowledging the troubling actions directed toward Hester, the chorus turns a blind eye, thereby giving permission for the assaults to occur without repercussion. This in-dangers Hester to vulnerability and defenselessness, which leaves her bared and unshielded from protection by the very community members who could empower themselves to uplift her.

Hester, La Negrita, affiliates with what Jessica Marie Johnson calls “wicked flesh” in her book titled: Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World.^[9] The nomenclature “wicked flesh” indicates a kind of epistemological violence against women. It emphasizes gendered frameworks, especially the frameworks related to parity and equity between white and Black women who are mothers. In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers is also occupied by the signification of the flesh. She identifies flesh as a “primary narrative” when she insists that the effects of the Middle Passage have situated Black femininity,^[10] even up to the present (and as it is rendered in non-ethnic narratives), as a deviation from white norms, arranging it as a deviancy with a degenerate difference. This deviancy, she argues, is policed and perpetuated in the United States by institutions, constructs, and ideologies that are enforced by a normative order.^[11] But in this, there is an opportunity, Spillers insists, for feminists of all genders to do gender differently.^[12]

Suzan-Lori Parks attempts to do gender differently by characterizing Hester differently—as La Negrita. This Black Hester exaggerates how we imagine the canonical “Hester trope” in literature by presenting her as an unfortunate deviant by normative standards. When Hester arrives to ask Reverend D. what to do about her homelessness and four fatherless children (one of whom is his), the reverend (a leader of a congregation) tells her: “My [church] following are an angry bunch. They dont like the likes of you.” And yet he admits later that her “suffering [was] an enormous turn-on.”^[13] As one of the chief perpetrators of harm against Hester, Reverend D. explains his attraction to her as if it were her fault, saying: “She had a look in her eye that invites liaisons/Eyes that say red spandex.”^[14]

Virtuous Womanhood

By reimagining Hawthorne’s Hester Prynn as a twentieth-century woman who is more in control of her own account, Parks’s Hester the Black complicates the tenets of the “Cult of True Womanhood,” which Nathaniel Hawthorne’s text predates by one hundred years.^[21] The prevailing virtues of the 1850s woman were piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness, as outlined by Barbara Welter in her 1966 article “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.”^[22]

Welter asserts that while men were busy building the materialistic structures of the new economy in the United States, they “neglect[ed] the religious practices of their forebears.”^[23] To assuage their guilt, they left their women at home as “angels of the house” to tend to these religious matters and other pillars of “true womanhood.” These pillars represented new ideas of domesticity and femininity that relegated wives to the private sphere, inside the home. Within this domestic space, women’s duties revolved around childrearing, food production, religious devotion, and preparations for their husbands. By their submissiveness to these domestic duties, they espoused and defined the chief characteristics of a “virtuous” woman. These women—who were predominantly white and middle/upper class—represented the “true women” of society. Their men, who were the predominant literary authors of the era, used their novels and short stories to reinforce the ideals of domesticity and “true womanhood”; they also used these texts to ostracize women who did not conform to these virtues. In doing so, the men created a “hostage” life for their own white women wherein these women were hostage to the ideals of “true womanhood” that the male economy builders created to “salve [their] conscience” about turning away from religion.^[24]

Since the tenets of the Cult of True Womanhood primarily outlined the 1850s home life for middle- and upper-class white women, lower-class white women and Black women were automatically excluded from achieving “true womanhood.” In this patriarchal structure and framework of female identity, lower-class white women did not own land. Black women did not either. What’s more, Black women’s subject position as a result of enslavement further complicated their status and perception.

The anthology Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels: Myths, Legends, and Other Lies You’ve Been Told about Black Women confirms that enslavement denied Black women the opportunity to conform to ideals of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. In fact, the legacy of slavery, with its tendencies toward sexual exploitation and separation of families, forced Black women into situations that directly contradicted the ideals of “true womanhood” and “proper motherhood.”^[25] Therefore, in the pervasive American consciousness, Black women and girls were left outside of “true womanhood.” This reality ties directly to the Motherhood Aesthetic because these same Black women who were excluded from “proper womanhood” were and are also excluded from ideals of “proper motherhood” (i.e., being supportive, loving, nurturing to their children, and married to their children’s father).^[26]

In the Blood signifies on the dichotomous relationship between the virtues of “true womanhood” or “proper motherhood” and their application to Black women. Parks accomplishes this by crafting a homeless Black Hester who is neither pious (i.e., religious), pure (i.e., virginal), domestic (i.e., homebound), nor submissive (i.e., obedient to men). If considered in relationship to the Cult of True Womanhood—which has influenced our notions of American female identity since the 1850s—Hester is an outsider. In an effort to secure help and kindness, she exchanges sexual favors with nearly everyone she encounters. She believes these intimate acts will attract social approbation, positive regard, and assistance from the receivers; but, instead, these acts only reinforce her position as someone who is outside of society’s concern, protection, and care. Since these relationships are steeped in power, carnality, and domination, Hester cannot adopt the recognizable categories of the Cult of True Womanhood. She cannot aspire to these categories because her gender, financial hardship, and race block her alignment to them; thus, she represents a contradictory positionality to the tenets of “true womanhood” and “proper motherhood.”

Poverty

As a play that falls within the Motherhood Aesthetic, In the Blood tells a tale of the sexual exploitation of an impoverished woman, Hester. It critiques the ill treatment of the poor and the powerless. Parks’s Black female heroine is subjected to suffering that may be deemed partly not her fault. In “Suzan-Lori Parks’ Hester Plays: In the Blood and Fucking A,” Rena Fraden describes Parks’s protagonist as “trapped, entirely and absolutely, in a tragic plot.”^[27] On the surface, Parks’s play easily holds elements of a classical Greek tragedy. It includes a prologue, epilogue, chorus, and catharsis, to name some of the elements.^[28] More significantly, however, Parks positions a Black homeless woman—one of the most oppressed and supposedly insignificant figures in US society—as the protagonist, in the place of a king or otherwise powerful person. By doing so, the play riffs on another form of classical literature, the Greek tragedy.

Universal themes of suffering and loss relate to the human condition in Greek tragedy, so when the tragic hero meets his or her downfall, readers and audiences feel empathy and understanding for his or her suffering. Here we find the connection to Hester, La Negrita. In the Blood is a tragedy that nudges the audience to see Hester’s complexities and her humanity. But it also depicts Hester as a poor, illiterate, sexually abused victim “who lives outside of the normal boundaries of social acceptance.”^[29] The tragic irony is that even as Hester musters courage, spirit, and resilience to manage motherhood in the face of adversity, she is unable to “get a leg up,” particularly because of the hypocrisy and injustice of the social order under which she is living and dealing with children.

As a reimagined tragic heroine, Hester, in the face of resistance, exhibits fatal flaws or errors in judgment that contribute to her downfall. One of these errors in judgment is that she participates in both risky and risqué sexual acts to supplement the low-paying jobs offered by Welfare. The inclusion of Welfare as both a character in the play and a signifier for the US welfare system suggests that the play is engaging with elements of allegory as a genre. It also leads playgoers and scholars alike to categorize Hester as the archetypal Welfare Queen.

The Welfare Queen caricature was conceived during the “Reaganomics” years of the 1980s to categorize poor women according to their financial hardships, such as homelessness, poverty, illiteracy, birth rate, and reliance on public and governmental assistance.^[30] The Welfare Queen is a “controlling image” that has been used to oppress and marginalize poor women, especially poor Black women. Patricia Hill Collins notes that controlling images such as this perpetuate harmful myths and negative stereotypes about Black women.^[31] Parks’s Hester shares many stereotypical characteristics with the Welfare Queen, inasmuch as she is a symbolic category or representative of a whole group of women in her position. But, Hester also presents her own narrative and story. More than suggesting that this individuality is only true for Hester, the play more broadly reinforces and challenges the stereotype of the Welfare Queen—even as it reinforces it. Hester recognizes and illuminates the ways in which “the system” takes advantage of and maintains her in a lower-class positionality—no matter what she does to break out of it. At one point she exclaims, “All I need is a leg up. I get a leg up I’ll be ok.”^[32] Thwarted by opportunistic other characters and unfortunate circumstances, Hester is positioned in a particular version of womanhood and motherhood—and she is totally aware of it.

This play frequently aligns motherhood with naturalism—an American literary movement and aesthetic that emphasizes the ways in which people are trapped by their class and social position. Naturalism is a grittier form of realism that identifies life as it is, not as idealistic accounts would have it. In the play, after creating death stories to justify the absence of her children’s truant fathers, Hester yells, “Yr all bastards.” Then she tries to comfort them: “Cmmeer. Cmmeer. Mama loves you. Shes just tired is all. Lemmie hug you./ My 5 treasures. My 5 joys.”^[33] According to Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, the same “maternal bonds” that “devour” a woman’s individuation, as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, are present in Parks’s In the Blood, where gender and power collide. Hester’s history—or her imagination, past, re-memory, and repackaging of pain—takes the blame off any particular group and appropriates it to all who are hypocritically involved in her demise: the doctor, the Reverend, Amiga Gringa, Chilli, the chorus, and, of course, herself. The play asserts that maternal responsibilities can usurp a woman’s individuation—especially in the absence of (a) her man.

This idea is especially evident in Parks’s use of the fairy tale genre to clear up Hester’s social and moral dilemma about having five children with five absentee fathers. When Hester’s children confront her about their fathers, she relays a fantastical, enchanting story to them about herself as a princess and their different fathers as loving suitors:

‘There are five [brothers], and each one is wonderful and special in his own way. But the law of my country doesn’t allow a princess to have more than one husband.’ And that was such bad news and they were all so in love that they cried. Until the Princess had an idea. She was after all the Princess, so she changed the law of the land and married them all.^[34]

On the one hand, the play is farsighted in Hester’s re-envisioning her multiple pregnancies as a celebration of love and community (and not as a series of mistakes with opportunistic men). This use of the fairy tale allows Hester to present positive rewards and a positive resolution for the children. The irony, though, is that Hester/the Princess can only achieve a happy ending in overtly fantastical contexts. For many readers, this rendering of a creative story is exactly what makes Parks’s Hester La Negrita an overcomer of her plight: Parks’s imagination, creativity, and storytelling bring to light Hester’s suffering in a way that makes it contemporary and reveals its advancements over Hester Prynne’s from the seventeenth century.

Tragedy

By the time Hester commits a tragic and horrendous murder—killing her eldest son, Jabber, in an effort to avoid yet another “jab” from society—she is no longer pitiable by her community. Her community, represented by the chorus, suggests that Hester chooses to rear her children in an abandoned location under a bridge. It condemns her illiteracy as self-inflicted.

Echoing the self-sabotage trope seen in Parks’s other plays, namely Topdog/Underdog and Venus, In the Blood challenges one’s ability to feel sympathetic for Hester and her heart-wrenching situations. The play functions as a tragedy, wherein the heroine mostly brings about her own suffering. In “Staging a New Literary History: Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus, In the Blood, and Fucking A,” Carol Schafer asserts that Parks revises the tragedy by “plac[ing] African or African-American women center stage in order to question representations of women’s bodies as possessions, as objects of desire, and as bloody biological battlefields.”^[35]

In the Blood is situated within an urban and dangerous setting where the protagonist resides as an outsider. Parks’s characterization of Hester as an illiterate mother comments on the judgments placed on women who often struggle within their social environments. In Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre, Kevin J. Wetmore argues that African American playwrights have adapted the mythological Medea to convey a specific point about Black motherhood. Through an analysis of plays such as American Medea by Silas Jones and Pecong by Steve Carter, Wetmore concludes that the Black Medea transforms “from dangerous, violent child-killer to admirable and justified proto-feminist warrior.”^[36]

An In-dangered and Endangered Species

Mis-education and promiscuity are ascribed to Parks’s Hester, for sure. In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (published in 2000), Patricia Hill Collins argues that:

the welfare mother is labeled a bad mother. [. . .] She is portrayed as being content to sit around and collect welfare, shunning work and passing on her bad values to her offspring.”^[37]

It is evident that Parks’s welfare mother, Hester, desires a better life for her children and herself, so she attempts to operate outside of the exaggerated sketch of the Welfare Queen that Hill Collins defines. Hester is employed, but the pay for her low-skill jobs is never enough to sustain her family. She attempts to learn reading and writing, but shows signs of a learning disability, as exemplified by her inability to move beyond practicing the letter A. She instills morals within her children, and she uses the only tool she possesses—her sexuality—as a means of survival. Through this characterization, Parks implies that Hester’s state of poverty is in part the consequence of a system designed by the “higher ups” in society to keep her in a lower social position, rather than a consequence of her own disposition.

In the Blood offers a scathing social commentary on motherhood as it relates to womanhood, poverty, and victimization to suggest that society. It also offers a scathing indictment of the cruelty, judgment, and meanings of society from the chorus—a group whose members cannot set aside their own prejudices and social politics to even help Hester for their own benefit and the benefit of their community. Just as Hawthorne’s 19th-century society did not have a shred of sympathy for the jailed, pregnant, young mother who could have been put to death, who almost died in jail, and who in turn was forced to take care of herself on the outskirts of town, Parks’s Hester La Negrita is left with her children as her only companions. The irony is that the existence of her children—in addition to her promiscuity and perceived immorality—is in part to blame for her situation. And yet her children are the most creative aspect of who she is. Her motherhood is the means of her pushing forward.