Penelope at her loom unravels the mother–son bond across centuries, from Lawrence’s kitchens to Hansberry’s Chicago.
By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 22, 2025
He thinks I don’t notice the way his hands tremble. The sandal straps slip, and Telemachus pretends it is the leather, not his resolve, that resists him. His satchel waits by the door—innocent enough, a traveler’s bundle, though to me it has always been a suitcase, stuffed with folded shirts still warm from the hearth. He believes he is leaving Ithaca; he believes he is leaving me. But I know better. This is how literature begins: a son at the threshold, and a mother who cannot follow.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he mutters, eyes fixed on the floor.
“I know,” I say. “But I will anyway.”
“I’ll be back.”
“That’s not the point,” I whisper. “The point is that you go.”
He pauses, fingers fumbling with the strap. For a moment I see the boy and the man flicker in the same face.
“Do you remember when you were small,” I ask, “and you said you’d never leave me?”
He smiles, barely. “I also said I’d marry a dolphin.”
“You were serious,” I say. “You cried when I told you they lived in the sea.”
“I still cry,” he says, tying the knot. “I just hide it better.”
I want to reach for him, to smooth the wrinkle from his brow, a habit I have not broken since he was a boy. But I do not. My hand is a tether he must learn to sever. He looks at me then, his gaze a question: Am I what you wanted? And I want to tell him: You are more. But I just nod, because some truths are too heavy for a whisper.
The scholars call my loom a metaphor. They are wrong. It is an archive, a restless ledger of grief and return, recording each knot and unraveling, every departure that insists it is final yet never quite is. Each thread hums with another mother’s voice: Gertrude’s sigh and the clatter of a teacup in a Nottingham kitchen, Amanda’s brittle drawl heavy with the perfume of wilted magnolias, Jocasta’s terrified whisper in Thebes, Úrsula’s admonitions echoing through Macondo like church bells. The critics call them “characters.” I call them mirrors.
Each afternoon, the suitors pressed their claims; each night, I undid my day’s work. But there was another kind of unspooling in the quiet hours. My own grief at his father’s absence. The memory of his first steps on the cold stone floor, the weight of his head against my shoulder. I wove and unwove not just a shroud but the fears and hopes for my son’s future. The loom hummed with my worries, my questions: Would he know how to protect himself? Would he find his own home? Scholars may see fidelity. I see the invisible threads of anxiety and love, the silent architecture of a family built on waiting.
Do they ever truly leave? Or do they simply walk out of one page and into another, carrying us like a watermark?
And so they came, these suitors of the soul, each offering a thread I knew to be false.
Gertrude Morel arrives first, out of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. She offers her son a devotion so fierce it consumes his every chance of love. “‘You are not like other men, you are more sensitive,’” she tells Paul, and with that praise she loops a cord he cannot cut. Miriam waits for his soul, Clara for his body, but neither can displace the mother who holds both. “He could not bear to hurt her, and he could not love her less,” Lawrence admits.
“Why do you always make me feel like I’m failing you?” Paul asks, voice tight, weary from battles he never wins.
Gertrude smiles faintly. “Because I know what you could be.”
“You mean what you wanted me to be.”
“Is there a difference?” she asks, and the silence between them stretches like thread pulled too taut.
This is not love. This is the snare. I undo her thread under cover of night.
Amanda Wingfield presses next, Tennessee Williams’s matron in The Glass Menagerie. She arrives with her cracked smile, her voice a brittle tapestry woven from fading Southern graces. She clings to Tom as though he might restore her illusions, yet splits her maternal love between him and Laura, fragile as her glass figurines.
“You think you’re better than this house,” Amanda snaps.
“I think I’m drowning in it,” Tom replies.
“You’ll regret leaving,” she warns.
“I already regret staying,” he says, the doorframe his stage, the suitcase his prop.
Her thread is glass—glittering, fragile, already fractured. A son vanished, a daughter left behind. I unravel it.
From Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Jocasta slips in cloaked in prophecy, bearing the darkest knot. “Fear? What should a man fear?” she asks, not knowing the answer waits in her own arms.
“Do not, I beg you, hunt this out,” Jocasta pleads. “If you care for your own life, don’t pursue this!”
“I must know the truth,” Oedipus retorts, “though it destroy me.”
Freud later gave it a name, a “complex,” as though pathology could explain what was always archetype. His theories scribbled what I had already woven in myth. Jocasta’s knot is a tangle, unworkable. I cannot weave her either.
And Hamlet storms in, dragging Gertrude of Elsinore from Shakespeare’s tragedy. He spits at her weakness: “Frailty, thy name is woman!” He corners her in her chamber, too close, too raw.
“Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,” he rages, “stewed in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty—”
“O, speak to me no more,” Gertrude cries, “these words, like daggers, enter in mine ears. No more, sweet Hamlet!”
Daggers in the ear—yes, words wound more fatally than blades. His thread is accusation, sharp, unraveling even as it’s spun. I leave it loose on the floor.
The loom turns, and Gabriel García Márquez lends me Úrsula from One Hundred Years of Solitude, matriarch of Macondo, outlasting sons and grandsons until her memory itself becomes the compass. “Time was not passing,” Márquez writes, “it was turning in a circle.” Even blind, she scolds: “It’s as if the world is repeating itself.”
“What you people need,” she chides, “is someone who will force you to think clearly.”
Her thread is strong, yet endless, a circle that traps itself. I almost keep it. But I remember her blindness at the end, her memory faltering even as she remains the compass. A pattern that repeats without release is no pattern I can finish. I unpick it carefully, as though handling gold.
From Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Agnes enters quietly, smelling of soap and cabbage, bearing her own secret shame. Her Oskar beats his drum, refusing to grow. “I refused to grow up,” he declares, “I beat my drum and the grown-ups quailed.”
“You’re always drumming,” Agnes says, folding laundry.
“It’s how I speak,” Oskar replies.
“Then speak gently,” she says. “The world is loud enough.”
“Will you listen?”
“I always do.”
But later, when he drums her name, she does not answer.
The drum is his loom—rebellion as mourning. But a cloth beaten cannot cover a grave. His thread quivers in my hand, too heavy with mourning to weave.
And then Ocean Vuong whispers in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: “I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.” His mother lights a cigarette instead of answering, smoke curling into silence.
“Ma, do you remember that night in the field?” he asks her in memory.
She doesn’t answer.
“You said the stars were holes in the sky. I believed you.”
“You were a quiet boy.”
“I was listening.”
“Then you heard too much.”
“I wrote it down.”
“You think I didn’t love you,” she says suddenly.
“I think you didn’t know how.”
“I knew how to survive,” she replies. “That was all they taught me.”
“You taught me that too,” he says. “But I wanted more.”
“Then write it,” she says. “Make it yours.”
His thread gleams strangely in the candlelight, silk woven from wounds. I hold it, tempted, but I cannot tie it in.
Silence weaves its own counter-pattern—Tom’s slammed door, Agnes’s grave, Jocasta’s plea, the unspoken violence in Vuong’s tobacco fields. A loom records what is said, but silence is the blank space that makes the pattern visible. We mothers live equally with words and with their absence.
Once, in the threads, I glimpsed a boy with a backpack slung too low, his mother in the doorway pretending not to cry. She only said, “Call me when you get there.” He didn’t. Days passed. She checked her phone each morning, scrolling through silence. The shirt she folded for him remained in his drawer, its cotton still carrying the ghost of her hands. You think this scene modern—cell phones, voicemail, dormitories. But I assure you, it is ancient. The threshold is eternal.
And yet, after all the unraveling, a new thread appears. One that does not fray or break, but holds.
It comes from Chicago, from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Lena Younger’s thread. She does not cling; she steadies. She does not bind; she believes. She loves Walter Lee fiercely, but never coddles him. She sets boundaries without withdrawing love. “There is always something left to love,” she tells her daughter Beneatha, and with those words she entrusts Walter with the family’s future—not in naïveté, but in faith that he might grow. When he falters, she does not disown him. She forgives, not by forgetting, but by holding open the door to change.
A mother as compass and anchor—authority without humiliation, conviction without control. Her thread lies warm in my hands.
At last, the cloth begins to hold.
I watch Telemachus lace his sandals. He looks back once, though he pretends he doesn’t. I whisper to the thread: the first goodbye is never the last.
He walks away, the cloth tucked under his arm. I do not call out. I do not cry. I return to the loom, but tonight I do not undo. The pattern holds. It is not perfect, but it is true.
And somewhere, in a smaller house, a boy leaves with a backpack slung too low. His mother lingers in the doorway, saying only, Call me when you get there. He doesn’t. A shirt remains folded in his drawer, its cotton still carrying the ghost of her hands. She checks her phone, scrolling through silence.
The loom hums. The cloth endures. The threshold is eternal.
THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI