{"id":7328,"date":"2014-07-10T17:03:25","date_gmt":"2014-07-10T22:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/?p=7328"},"modified":"2014-07-10T18:32:05","modified_gmt":"2014-07-10T23:32:05","slug":"mothers-the-good-the-bad-the-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2014\/07\/10\/mothers-the-good-the-bad-the-real\/","title":{"rendered":"(M)others: Good, Bad, Real"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, before I had even begun to contemplate having a child, I regularly read Ayelet Waldman\u2019s<\/a> blog, Bad Mother<\/a>, now repurposed in book form.\u00a0 What most appealed was the sense that someone was pulling back the curtain<\/a> on what was always\u00a0made to seem (with a ring of beatific sacrifice)\u00a0easy, naturalized, and rewarding. Waldman\u2019s commitment to honesty about the work, boredom, and at times ugliness (in all senses) of mothering her four children felt transgressive and, with its escape-valve honesty, like a relief.\"Bad-Mother-220\"<\/a> Soon enough, it seemed like the label \u201cbad mother\u201d<\/a> began to proliferate<\/a> \u2014 as angsty confessionals began to turn up everywhere.\u00a0 What has remained fixed, however, is the polarized use of the terms \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad”\u00a0although their definitions almost interchange as Elissa Strauss astutely writes:<\/a>\u00a0“In the beginning, bad mommy was gritty and sometimes off-putting, but overall she offered a more realistic parenting model than the good mommy, and so she took off on mommy blogs and in the hearts of conflicted mothers across the nation.”<\/p>\n

As Strauss recapitulates, then “bad mothers” started getting “a little judgey themselves” as terms such as “mom-policing” and “sanctimommy” proliferated in a culture of “reverse bullying,” as she puts it, that still bifurcates how mothering is classified, often enough with political implications.<\/a>\u00a0 The recent brouhaha that emerged when\u00a0New York City first lady Chirlane McCray dared to admit her ambivalence<\/a> about about giving up work was quickly translated into a meant-to-be-shocking “I Was a Bad Mom” headline.\u00a0Jennifer Senior’s astute retort<\/a> blames the media-generated need to distort ambivalence into mom-shaming. A video produced for American Greetings\u2019 online greeting-card shop went viral this spring,\u00a0<\/span>playing <\/a>upon the impossible-hardship-of-motherhood theme<\/a>, <\/span>with its problematic categorization, once more<\/a>, of motherhood as a job which is endlessly demanding but eternally worthy.\u00a0<\/span> \"a_3x-vertical\"<\/a>Between the tropes of \u201cgood mother\u201d and \u201cbad mother\u201d rests the realities of most women.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, a\u00a0body of literature has sprung up<\/a>\u00a0by writers\u00a0committed<\/a> to investigating the nuances of an experience<\/a> that is perpetually shifting, even moment to moment.\u00a0 Speaking out honestly about mothering can still be fraught<\/a>, but as feminist blogger Andie Fox<\/a> writes: \u201cBy sharing private and difficult moments as mothers we create a more complete picture of the reality of motherhood \u2014\u00a0it ultimately frees us all…. But the fear in us in disclosing is palpable \u2014\u00a0that we might be frauds and that our secret moments exclude us from being good mothers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The wealth of essays found within\u00a0The Good Mother Myth<\/a><\/em>, edited by Avital Norman Nathman<\/a>\u00a0is a treasure.\u00a0With chapters by Girl w\/Pen’s\u00a0own Deborah Siegel<\/a> and Heather Hewett<\/a>\u00a0the thread that weaves throughout\u00a0is exploration of what \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d even means when it comes to parenting. If being \u201cbad\u201d means eschewing cultural constrictions, these writers are glad to take on that mantle, often\u00a0while still feeling the need to explain how this deviation\u00a0is for the best. The tropes often found within literature about parenting are all here: \u201cI\u2019m too young,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not ready,\u201d \u201cBut my partner\u2019s left the picture,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not sure about the sacrifice,\u201d and \u201cI haven\u2019t overcome my own childhood enough,\u201d alongside heavier issues\u00a0such as\u00a0mental illness, postpartum depression, and anxiety.<\/p>\n

More unusual are contributions from parents positioned outside the mainstream of what is often represented. Erika Lust, an independent filmmaker<\/a> who currently lives in Spain, writes straightforwardly about prioritizing time without children for the sake of her career and for her partnership as she hopes that motherhood, rather than challenging sexuality, can be a source of its inspiration. In the essay, \u201cConfessions of a Born-Bad Mother,\u201d author Joy Ladin <\/a>writes astutely about transitioning from male to female: \u201cI might be recognized by mothers (the ultimate judges) as a \u2018great dad,\u2019 but the top of the fatherhood scale fell well short of the lowest rung of true motherhood.\u201d Ladin\u2019s perspective, after inhabiting both gender roles, is intriguing as the \u201cnamelessness\u201d she experiences as a transgender parent opens up a new space for negotiation, albeit, as she writes, one often filled with tears and confusion. \"21-200x300\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Food is a common theme. In \u201cThe Macaroni and Cheese Dilemma\u201d Liz Henry<\/a> comments on her guilt in reaching for the ubiquitous boxed product in the context of writing about parenting and poverty alongside decisions around abortion. \u201cIt may not be a roasted chicken with asparagus and couscous, but that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not Good Mothering,\u201d says Carla Naumburg<\/a> in \u201cMama Don\u2019t Cook.\u201d Naumburg takes on\u00a0the onus of \u201cnourishing souls\u201d at the family kitchen table, with \u201cgood family meals,\u201d an obligation she refuses. In Heather Hewett\u2019s<\/a> touching essay, \u201cParenting Without a Rope,\u201d she navigates caution and overprotection in regards to her daughter\u2019s life-threatening allergies, and the delicate positioning the child-with-allergies and the parent-of-a-child-with-allergies must take\u00a0within the classroom and social situations.\u00a0<\/a> Competition, self-perception, and the spiraling thoughts that ensue, are hilariously captured<\/a> by Amber Dusick<\/a> as she writes about a trip to Target in which she\u00a0spots another Mom who looks perfectly put together and whose kids look \u201ccalm and clean and happy.\u201d After which, she writes, \u201cmy heart sank \u2014 pretty much all the way down to my vagina, and then easily fell out on to the seat of the car.\u201d The new pressures of selective exhibitionism,\u00a0mediated through\u00a0social media, is\u00a0Sarah Emily Tuttle-Singer<\/a>‘s theme in \u201cNo More Fakebook.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s clear is that mothers are caught between more than just\u00a0the polarizations\u00a0of \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad.\u201d There\u2019s joy and hardship, fury and sweetness, days of spiraling despair and moments of unbridled amazement. Judgment lurks behind every corner, and some days it\u2019s the self in the mirror who seems to be casting the sharpest glance. As the phrase \u201cgood mother\u201d is turned over and over, its meaning becomes more porous and latticed by nuance. Kristin Oganowski<\/a> writes, \u201cI challenged the idea that the \u2018good\u2019 pregnant woman keeps quiet when she loses a pregnancy, and that the Good Mother hides the loss from her other children and carries on with work and family obligations as if nothing happened.” \u00a0In \u201cThe Impossibility of the Good Black Mother\u201d T.F. Charlton<\/a> takes on issues of race when she writes, \u201cStill, the images projected on me as I walk my neighborhood streets are not of the Good Mother. No, they are of the Black welfare queen, the baby mama, of women maligned and demonized as everything a mother should not be, foil and shadow to the Good (White) Mother.\u201d \"MothersDay\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Blogger\u00a0Andie Fox,\u00a0while on\u00a0an annual holiday with female friends and their kids, sans<\/em> husbands, is frank about\u00a0the joy they feel when unleashed from the imposition of societal expectation. Hearkening\u00a0back to a line by foremother Adrienne Rich,<\/a>\u00a0Fox writes, \u201cHer discovery back in the seventies that being a \u2018bad mother\u2019 could actually make you a \u2018happy mother,’ and that happy mothers are good for their children, should not have been news to me when I started my own journey into motherhood in 2005.\u201d \u00a0Commenting that\u00a0Rich’s thoughts are “as revolutionary today as they were then, more than forty years ago,” so the cycle spins.<\/p>\n

As a poet, I have to give a shoutout to two other books that have joined The Good Mother Myth<\/em>\u00a0on my night table’s stack. \u00a0Rachel Zucker<\/a>, whose work I have reviewed previously,<\/a>\u00a0teaches literature and creative writing and also works as a doula. \u00a0Motherhood has always been central within her work, but never as explicitly. In Mothers<\/em>,<\/a> Zucker writes primarily about her relationship with her own,\u00a0Diane Wolkstein<\/a>, a professional storyteller<\/a>. Zucker\u2019s prose rotates around an\u00a0axis of trying to understand their relationship, foremost as a daughter, but also as a mother of three sons, as a writer in search of literary foremothers, and as an adult woman who still craves\u00a0mothering from other maternal figures.<\/p>\n

I appreciate Zucker\u2019s celebration of the literary mothers she has had, particularly Alice Notley, whom she quotes and corresponds with throughout the writing of this book. Yet, much reads\u00a0like a series of journal entries about coming to terms \u2014\u00a0literally \u2014\u00a0about what motherhood means as\u00a0Zucker gathers\u00a0fragments from\u00a0her past and holds them up against\u00a0her present moment. \u00a0I can\u2019t help but wish she\u00a0offered more synthesis\u00a0of what she\u2019s connecting, or, at the least, more nuance and less worry. \u00a0<\/em>Instead, the lines feel collaged onto the page with the reader left to associatively connect the gaps. \u00a0While her diary-like entries intrigue, there seems a deliberate turn from the satisfaction of a narrative arc. I suspect this is,\u00a0conscious or not,\u00a0part of Zucker’s refusal to participate in\u00a0her mother’s art, storytelling, and to break\u00a0her writing in parallel to her subject(s) \u2014\u00a0how mothering shatters continuous time and divides the mind. \"MothersFrontCover-240x300\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The book\u2019s epilogue\u00a0is its most surprising part \u2014 and the most powerful. The inclusion of a letter Zucker’s\u00a0mother writes to her, eschewing this very book\u2019s publication and urging\u00a0Zucker not to tell these stories \u2014\u00a0takes on a poignant resonance by the time the reader gets to it. \u00a0\u00a0Clearly, her own urge to write is both heritage and embattlement. \u00a0She ends with the central tone of\u00a0ambiguity mothering represents for Zucker: \u201cThere are mothers. I found and lost them and was born to one and she is hardly mine. What I make of her. Neither real nor wrong nor ever really mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"bring-down-the-little-birds\"<\/a>After meeting Carmen Gimenez Smith<\/a> at the 2014 AWP conference, and then hearing her speak at this truly innovative colloquium on feminist poetics,<\/a> I was eager to read her contribution, published at the vanguard\u00a0of these other two. \u00a0Like Zucker, Gimenez Smith\u00a0has to untangle her mother\u2019s story in order to understand her own. In\u00a0Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else<\/a>\u00a0she catalogues parts of\u00a0her life\u00a0as a mother of a toddler, as a professor, as a poet, as a spouse, as a daughter, as someone who is preparing to have a second child. \u00a0Written in single lines or short bursts of prose, her writing is lyrical, thoughtful, and shot through with honest anger and frustration as well as the amazement that comes in sudden, saving bursts. \u00a0The narrative of more fully inhabiting motherhood, as she goes from having one child to two, is freighted with the simultaneous worry about the demise of her mother\u2019s memory and the complicated recognition of Gimenez Smith\u2019s need, as a mother, to be mothered, while recognizing\u00a0she may well soon be in the role of parent to her own mom.<\/p>\n

Bring Down the Little Birds<\/em> bristles with honest emotion as Gimenez Smith explores the conundrums mothering presents. She writes about the presence of her belly \u201clike a bullet\u201d in the room when she discusses intellectual matters at a student\u2019s defense and the hiring of a housecleaner \u201cto serve as a mediator between the house and me.\u201d Her writing manages to be sharp even as she hones\u00a0in on the liminal: how hard enduring a moment can be, how much anger is buried inside a dose of joy, the amazement glittering inside still dangerously sharp fragments.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want so much\u201d she says\u00a0frankly, and then later, \u201cA long day at home, no work. Full of resentment.\u201d All of which is tempered with lovely recognitions of other ways in which time can now pass,\u00a0as she says of her\u00a0firstborn child, \u201cI\u2019m telling him the world and he is telling it back.\u201d Married to another writer, both know they must guard their time, yet, \u201cMy personal time comes at a larger price” Gimenez Smith writes, “I want to find a number value for it, but I don\u2019t have the time. It seems like two and a half to my husband\u2019s one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hovering\u00a0between poetry and prose, a strength is\u00a0Giminez Smith’s\u00a0ability to\u00a0telescope forwards and backwards, as she remembers her life, pre-child, and looks into the future. Her meditations into her maternal legacy are rich, and allow Gimenez Smith to frame her own entry into motherhood:\u00a0\u201cI grow into my mother, I grow old with her.” \u00a0She is skilled at writing about the underweave, the backing that holds a garment together, and there we find this book’s\u00a0lyrical gift, keen observations weighted down by reality, flying into unseen spaces.<\/p>\n

“The good enough mother. The real mother. Other mothers,” Zucker meditates in the middle of her book. \u00a0These shifting variations are\u00a0pertinent to all these writers. \u00a0Zucker simply continues: “I too seem to have gotten older. Am the mother.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, before I had even begun to contemplate having a child, I regularly read Ayelet Waldman\u2019s blog, Bad Mother, now repurposed in book form.\u00a0 What most appealed was the sense that someone was pulling back the curtain on what was always\u00a0made to seem (with a ring of beatific sacrifice)\u00a0easy, naturalized, and rewarding. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-off-the-shelf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7328"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7489,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7328\/revisions\/7489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}