February 24, 2006

Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined ed. by Buchanan and Hudock

"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune"
(Francis Bacon, Essays)

In their introduction to Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined Andrea Buchanan and Amy Hudock make the convincing argument that literature about motherhood has generally been undervalued; that it is a sub-group of women's literature that gets little respect from men or many women. Anthologies such as this one and the Literary Mama website, where these pieces were first published, are attempts to fill a gap and redress a need.

The quote from Bacon, above, may not be entirely pertinent here, as it is addressed to men and seems to admonish them that if they want to achieve "great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief" they had better remain single. Would-be nuclear physicists or bank robbers, take heed. But then again, the tension between mothering and outside work/life/identity is a constant theme in this collection, so perhaps it applies after all. And even if it was not Bacon's intended meaning, I have always found the term "hostages to fortune" to be resonant of the particular anxiety of being a parent.

Even more graphically — though it doesn't roll off the tongue in quite the same way as Bacon's words — and I can't remember where I read or heard it, but — someone wrote that having a child was like having your heart removed from your body and watching it walk around.

Which is all to say, don't read this book in a public place or you may end up sobbing in a cubicle in the washroom at your local diner but quickly stifling it when someone else comes in, someone who thinks they are alone and so shuts off the lights when they leave, which would leave you sitting in the dark but not enough in control of your voice to call out, "Hey lady, I'm in here!" and so you would have to find your own way to the light switch in pitch black, and you might bang your head. Which would improve neither your state of mind nor your appearance.

To be fair, this might not happen to every reader. And please don't be alarmed at the sobbing part. I certainly don't mean to give the impression that all, or even most, of the pieces collected here are tragic. A couple are; a couple may break your heart. But almost all of them share, in one way or another, in the sense of how the world becomes a much more threatening place once we have birthed a child. In the sense of how happiness is revealed as so much more fragile than we had thought, back when our hearts were safely inside our bodies and not tottering around on two very small legs.

There are some tragic stories here. There is, in fact, a whole section about illness and loss which contains some wrenching writing (Megeen Mulholland's "Miscarriage of an English Teacher," Phyllis Capello's "Hospital Quartet," and Heidi Raykeil's "Johnny" are particularly powerful). But I wasn't even there yet when I embarrassed myself at the diner; I was reading something more quotidian, something about the small, incremental losses that inevitably happen as a child grows up and away: Linda Lee Crosfield's "Packing the Car," maybe, or garrie keyman's "Son of a Bitch."

There are other clusters of texts that caught me up, as well. Short of revealing too much on a blog that some of my students read, let's just say that some of the pieces in "Sex, Fertility, and the Body" resonated, and leave it at that.

The texts in the section "Mothers, Fathers, Parents" were mainly about being a child rather than having one. Two of the pieces, Sybil Lockhart's "Grey" and Liz Abrams-Morley's "Mitzraim," describe caring for parents with Alzheimer's or dementia. That is my own situation, and I found both pieces oddly comforting.

I don't want to imply that these writings are only interesting in a therapeutic way; they are, after all, published in an anthology called Literary Mama. The editors are claiming a place for narratives of motherhood within, rather than separate from, literary writing. And I think that is precisely the point here: I and many other parents have read all sorts of resource books. I, and many other parents, are educated parents who try to approach our roles thoughtfully. And yet no amount of such reading can come close to producing the frisson after frisson of recognition provided by this anthology.

Sarah Pinto's "Third Month" opens the collection. Since I began in alarm, I will end on a note of hope and anticipation by quoting from it:

This is what if feels like
from the heart of a barrage of everything.

And what should smell of time
and the sweeter side of impermanence
is a vertigo of stopped seconds.
My amazement stands ready for use
like a regiment tired of weekend drills.

Hope and anticipation. But carefully armed, for all that.

Scribbled at February 24, 2006 12:39 AM AST | Permanent link to this post | More? books/reading, parenthood, review

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