May 15, 2012
On the baby blues, that space in between
The unhappiness I felt during my early days as a mother has been diagnosed as post-partum depression by such authorities as complete strangers and the back of book in which my essay “Love is a Let-Down” was published. And I’ve fought this label from the get-go, resenting the neatness with which it packages my experience. I think calling every difficult time in one’s life “depression” undermines the experiences of those who actually do endure this disease, and I maintain that my unhappiness was born from one salient point– life with a newborn was hard and crappy, and I am not very good at adjusting to change.
So I was thrilled to hear an interview on post-partum depression this morning on the radio, for a variety of reasons, actually, because the conversation was very interesting, but in particular because the doctor spoke about “the baby blues”. Of course, we’re all familiar with the term, but I was pleased to hear it delineated. She describes the baby blues as feeling “down and teary”, and the difference between it and PPD is that the former goes away in a matter of weeks (and it did!), and that it is so common that it’s not even classified as a disorder. It’s a period of adjustment, she says, which is what I’ve been saying all along. It was the whole point of my essay, which some readers missed and others resented. My friend Heidi says something similar to this in her blog post “Sometimes It’s Just that Becoming a Mother is Hard”.
I am a huge fan of in-between spaces in general, but I like this one in particular– this space between the blissed out new mom (who does exist! I’ve ever met a few of her) and the mom with PPD. The thing is that all of us are normal, that all of us need support from friends, family and our communities to make it through the early days. And it’s by acknowledging the various degrees of experience that every new mom will be able to find the support that she needs.
May 14, 2012
Oh come over here, kid we’ve got all these books to read
“Oh come over here, kid we’ve got all these books to read,
With the turtles and frogs, cats and dogs who civilize the centuries,
And in a world that’s angry, cruel and furious,
There’s this monkey who’s just curious,
Floating high above a park with bright balloons.”
From “I am the one who will remember everything” by Dar Williams, from her very wonderful new album In the Time of the Gods which I received for Mother’s Day, along with a new guitar tuner.
May 14, 2012
"I’m not sure if it’s sad or amazing that this is my life now."
“I’m not sure if it’s sad or amazing that this is my life now,” is something I wrote here nearly three years ago, not long after my life had changed forever and I still wasn’t sure if I liked it. “Now, must wake baby, feed baby, change baby. For we’re off to a program at the library that promises songs, and stories and “tickle rhymes” for all.”
And we all know how that worked out, of course: that first day, Harriet fell asleep in my arms, and we kept going back and back to learn new songs, hear new stories, so I could learn new ways to engage with my baby, to memorize the tickle rhymes that made her smile so I could pass them onto her Daddy when he came home at the end of day. The library became our community centre, its staff became some of our favourite people (and there was a time when Harriet referred to four people by name: Mommy, Daddy, Elmo, and Cindy [from Spadina Road] so that means something).
We had good company, made some excellent friends– though truth be told, not so many. I used to spend a lot of time sitting in circles of Mommies I could never love, wondering what had happened to my life, and also why everybody was thinner than me. I also dealt with a reputation as “the mom who knows all the songs”, which was a little embarrassing. But then as Harriet got bigger, we grew more secure in our new world (and found enough friends gathered from here and there that we always felt bolstered), the crowd seemed to matter less and less and the library program became about us, something fun for us to do together. We also weathered the stage where she wouldn’t sit still and I spent Baby Time chasing her around the library.
We graduated to the toddler program at the Lillian H. Smith Library, which came with a door that closed so Harriet couldn’t escape. And like that touchstone first day of Baby Time, when Harriet fell asleep in my arms, we had our toddler touchstone too when at the end of The Beanbag Song, 18 mos. old Harriet could not stand relinquishing her beanbag and howled inconsolably. The next week, however, she’d got with the routine, and returned her beanbag with all the other kids, and I had this sense that here was my girl learning the ropes, figuring it out, watching the world around her and deciding how she’d fit into it.
And so I got a bit teary this morning as I watched Harriet put her beanbag away for the final time, so at home in this environment and 
without a doubt that she’s entitled to the richness our community offers us. I remembered that 2 mos old baby in my arms that very first day as we sat in a circle singing Sea-Shell, Sea-Shell, Sing a Song to Me, and that screaming toddler clinging to her beanbag for dear life, and now this fabulous child who will be three in two weeks, who knows the ropes in some ways but is still figuring out in others– she likes to watch up to strangers and say, “I’m Harriet.” Sometimes she will hug them. Sometimes they are more or less comfortable with that, and my heart seizes. I already feel like the mother in Kristen den Hartog’s And Me Among Them who’s silently imploring her daughter’s schoolmates as she follows them all on their way to school, “Walk with her, please walk with her. Walk the rest of the way with my girl.” My girl. Yes.
But then my girl is also fierce, hilarious, loving, enthusiastic, fun, and kind, and her hugs are still age-appropriate enough that they’re met with the same. And now she knows all the songs too, singing along out of tune and half-screaming. Today when Joanne read us Jamberry, Harriet amazed us all by reciting the book along with her. Last week, she didn’t even sit with me, but up at the front with the other kids where she took her cues from the rowdiest ones and had a brilliant time. And once again, I wasn’t sure if it was sad or amazing that this was my life now. Sitting back, watching Harriet begin making her way in the world– it’s incredible to see her independent of me, but I miss the squishy goodness of her body in my lap, in my arms. Watching her put the beanbag away one last time, like a veteran toddler. When the program begins again in September, Harriet will be too old and enrolled in nursery school.
And so it’s away with one stage and onto another, sad and exciting, tragic and wonderful, and I’m getting the idea that being a mother means that we do this over and over again.
May 13, 2012
Malarky Launches
Malarky, which I loved madly, launches in Toronto on Tuesday. And since Rebecca Rosenblum has other plans that night, I’m going solo, which is terrifying. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a literary event without Rebecca. So here’s hoping that you’ll decide to come along, and I don’t feel altogether lonely.
May 13, 2012
Bad Mommy by Willow Yamauchi
The world already having had its fair share of bad mothers, bad mothers, and bad mothers, I’d wondered if Willow Yamauchi’s new book Bad Mommy was a necessary addition to the canon. But the book turned out to be quite different from what I’d supposed it was, not another tell-too-much so-bad-I’m-awesome mother memoir, but instead a satirical guide to motherhood, the perfect antidote to any baby book I ever read, particularly in the early days.
And best intentions do start early, don’t they? I spent my pregnancy reading Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth and Pam England’s Birthing From Within, eventually become a compulsive parenting expert, found becoming a mother akin to the universe exploding, and clung to its pieces with my few certainties: cloth diapers, front-facing strollers, not to feed baby to sleep, to breastfeed lying down at night, black and white mobiles, etc. At first there were the things I “knew”, and eventually, with enough confidence and experience, there were actual things that I really learned, though it baffled me how inapplicable my advice seemed to be to other people’s experiences. Why weren’t they taking my certainties on board? And even more baffling– why did I care so much what other people were doing? Why did other people’s (ill-advised, I thought) breastfeeding holds make me crazy? Why did nothing terrify me more than seeing other mothers making different choices from mine, I wondered? And of course, I see now that I was clinging to order in a chaotic world, imagining there was one path to good motherhood and that I was walking on it, because the alternative (which was the reality) was too much consider–that there was no path, and that all of us were all just stumbling blindly, making our own way as best we could.
I’m not sure I could have read Bad Mommy back when I was still clinging, when it was so important to me to be certain. Yamauchi’s irreverence is without restraint, nothing is sacred, and anyone and everyone is a target– she’s fair and balanced in that respect. Let’s face it, she tells us in her introduction, you are a bad mommy. You may be trying to be good, but you’re still bad, or at least somebody is going to tell you so. And in the next 40 chapters, she proceeds to tell us how: you will always be too young or too old to be a good mommy; no matter how you time your pregnancies, you’ll always get it wrong. Even if you remember the folic-acid, there will still be plenty of opportunities to fail your child’s development in utero– sushi, cheese, paint and kitty litter to choose from! You’ll gain too much weight, or not enough. You’ll deliver your baby in an idyllic water birth, and have the baby get stuck in the birth canal, or you will give birth in a hospital with painkillers which will result in an apgar score of less than perfect.
Everything you do as a mother, says Yamauchi, will be wrong, so you might as well have a sense of humour about it. Oh, and the breastfeeding– night nursing leads to tooth decay! Women who pack in breastfeeding are failures! Mommies who breastfeed into toddlerhood are perverts! The chapter on circumcision was my very favourite, the entirety of which I read aloud to my husband whilst laughing hysterically– “A common reason given for circumcision is that men want their little boys to ‘look like them’ down there. This is such a bizarre concept. First of all, what kind of parent and child compare their genitals for familial similarities?…” Though, she writes, don’t circumcise and your son will end up with STDs, Bad Mommy.
And so it goes, through disposable diapers and cloth, how to put your baby down to sleep (and the standards for this, Yamauchi notes, change every ten minutes, along with car seat requirements, and when and how to start solid foods), to vaccinate or not to, to work or stay at home. The point is to go confident in your choices, says Yamauchi, because you’ll only ever be wrong in them.
And there are so many ways to be wrong– I related in particular to the “Crafty Bad Mommy” chapter, as our craft supplies haul is mainly stubby crayons. You can be the Bad Mommy who sends her kid to school sick, or the Bad Mommy with muchhausen by proxy. You’ll have fat kids, or anorexic ones, you’ll look like a frump or a mutton-dressed-as-lamb, and onwards and onwards, so it goes, until you start to see that Yamauchi is joking but she also isn’t.
The book ran a bit too long to my tastes, and I found Yamauchi’s chapters more interesting than the case-studies that followed each of them (though even these had their moments), but in general, Bad Mommy is a great counter to so much of the faux-earnest or overtly polemic conversations about parenting going on all around us these days. Though everything is fair-game in the book, its point is not to abandon your principles as a mother (and for the record, I am still a cloth diaper fanatic. I just shut up more than I used to. Not that anyone actually wears diapers in our house anymore [!!!]), but to embrace them.
To be Willow Yamauchi’s bad mommy is simply to be the mother you are, but with gusto.
May 11, 2012
In which I help solve a literary mystery I unwittingly created
1) Dear Ms. Clare, I recently signed out a copy of Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World from the Toronto Public Library and found it inscribed, “Kerry Clare, March 2007,” as well as with a hand-written “To Kerry” and an illegible signature on the title page. I did some Googling and saw that you reviewed this book on your blog in March, 2007. So this must be “your” copy of the book, right? I’m just wondering why a library book might have your name in it! And possibly the author’s signature, too?
Hoping you’ll be willing to provide an explanation, I remain
A curious fellow reader (who is, incidentally, enjoying the book very much),
Kyle Miller
Toronto
2) Wow, I gave away an autographed book? That wasn’t so clever. I did see Lionel Shriver at HarbourFront in 2007 and she was wonderful. But I have far too many books in my life, and regularly prune my collection, donating the discards to the Spadina Road Library, which is one of the best places I know. If I’d realized it was autographed, I probably would have kept the book. But then I love a good literary mystery as much as the next guy, and I’m pleased to have been a part of one, so I’m glad I didn’t.
Can I post your message on my blog? My blog is all about literary connections, and this is perfect.
Thanks for writing. I’m glad you’re liking the book. I liked it too, as my review attests.
All the best to you,
Kerry
May 9, 2012
And why pray tell should Harriet be invited to join our group?
This is perfect. Thanks to Patricia for the link!
May 9, 2012
The Vicious Circle reads My Life in France by Julia Child
On Monday night, we assembled in Brockton Village for some French fare– quiche, excellent wine, truffles, profiteroles, and the cake from Bringing Up Bebe. Our book was Julia Child’s My Life in France, which was our first foray into autobiography, and which everybody liked, which was very unusual. And even more unusual– even though everybody liked it, we had plenty to talk about.
In general, we found the book delightful. There was speculation as to the nature of Julia and Paul’s romance, as to the lipstick on his belly-button. It was supposed that they’d had “a delicious sex life”, though we wondered how to rectify that with rumours that both were actually gay. And here is the thing with biography, especially auto– how fast we stop thinking about the book itself and instead become intent on the people within it.
But that’s kind of the point– we were fascinated by Child’s restraint, her control, by what is held back in her autobiography and what is revealed. How she dares to say that she hadn’t cared for her father, that she was glad when he died. Later on, she notes that she’s not a sentimental person, and we note that this is an understatement. Like Edith Piaf, who seems to be the one person Julia Child didn’t attend dinner parties with during her years in Paris (although she was Matron of Honour at Bumby Hemingway’s wedding to Puck Whitlock), Child regretted nothing, and this is a character trait that is as admirable as it is troubling and intriguing. (Also, none of us were fully convinced by it. We were sure that beneath the narrative, there was so much more going on.)
We were fascinated that the story begins when she is older, in her late ’30s, a late bloomer– what a different story this would have been had Julia Child not gone to Paris in her prime. We wonder what she was doing in the years before her story starts– yes, there was the war, but otherwise, apparently, she was up to not much. And once again, we speculate that something is being obscured. We wonder at her complete lack of emotional trauma. Though we note that she does get her digs in– she just lets her husband do the dirty work, and here we’re talking about the terrible things she lets through that he says about Simca. Her restraint is certainly not entire.
We talked about Saving Rome, a book we read last Fall, which divided us in its depiction of expatriate life. At one point, Child runs into an old friend in Paris who is as fed up with the expat thing as Megan Williams’ character had been, and Child confesses herself to be baffled by this response to Parisian life. And it’s true that Child’s take on Paris is what some of felt was missing from Williams’ book, the enthusiasm, willingness to learn and explore. But then we concede that Julia Child was a very unusual person, and the Saving Rome characters are probably more the norm.
We note that Child’s sense of adventure was never stymied, that she viewed challenge as an opportunity. That after two decades of drifting that she was so glad to find her place in the world, her path in life. That she had an unusual amount of freedom accorded by inherited wealth, but also by her extraordinary marriage. That in some many ways, her husband was her wife, and that she never fulfilled for him the role of the diplomatic wife, but this never seemed to bother either of them.
Something about the narrative grated though, however much it was delightful. That there was no depth, no variance in tone. Can one person be so perpetually buoyant? There is such distance between writer and reader and we wonder where it comes from– is it her disposition? The co-author showing his hand? We note the peculiar structure of the book itself, that it does not reach for depths. It is to be a book about “things I loved in my life.” It is to document a world that is almost gone, in terms of her own life and the food culture she came to know in France. We talked about the resources available to her in reconstructing her history– her husband’s extraordinary letters home to his brother, and also his photographs. Anyway, this is a book about vignettes. They’re meant to be sketchy. But the distance still means that we find them “sketchy” in another sense.
Anyway, she wasn’t a memoirist, but a cookbook writer. Though there was nothing lacking in her narrative here, or at least unintentionally. She knew what she doing, but why did she do it this way? We remark upon the fact that Julia Child was a very strange woman, 6″2, and that voice. This leads to more talk of her sex life again. We note that she seemed more upset at leaving her house in France than at putting her husband in a home. She writes of certain individuals who “weren’t intellectuals.” We wonder where she gets off with these judgments, and then realize that she didn’t consider her own self an intellectual either, and it is one of the instances where she is self-critical. She resents her inability to hold her own in political discussions, and it’s an ongoing project in her life to do this better.
We talk about the book’s cover– the schlocky picture on the front which makes more sense when you realize that Paul and Julia made such pictures for their Valentines cards every year. And some of us have the movie tie-in version, which is less appealing, and Meryl Streep all over the place. We talk about the movie, and how it was surprisingly charming, and we have strong opinions about Julie Powell. Though she can write, it is admitted. And then talk turns to lesser bloggers-turned-writers.
And before the talk of other things totally takes over, we remark upon how much Julia Child has to say about the publishing industry, about how much it as been falling apart in the same old ways for years and years and years. That she also had issues with and ideas about self-promotion, which is interesting because this self-promotion is meant to be a fairly modern phenomenon. Her editor Judith Jones was behind the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank in America, and we’re bothered that in Child’s book, Anne Frank’s name is misspelled without an “e”. It’s the only typo in the book that we could see, but a glaring one. And in other mistakes, we’re thinking about how the first version of her book advised baking French bread on a slab of asbestos tile, but it was righted in the end. We loved Child’s approach to life– never stop learning and don’t apologize.
May 8, 2012
Almost There by Curtis Gillespie
“Happy families are not the most fertile writerly soil, for as Tolstoy so famously wrote in Anna Karenina, ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ But if I can be so presumptuous as to reframe Tolstoy’s words, I would say that every happy family will vacation in its own unique way, whereas unhappy families are all alike on vacation.” –Curtis Gillespie
There was the trip to the east coast when I was ten, when the floor of the backseat was so packed with toys that we could only sit cross-legged. Memories include the jellyfish sting in New Brunswick, being buried in the sand in Ingonish, lobster dinners, the Sandspit Amusement Park in Cavendish, too much mini-golf, and winning a free supper someplace with my rendition of “Free to be you and me.” The west coast was six years later, and I remember less because by then I was a sullen teen scouring small towns for payphones from which I could call my boyfriend, but I remember Banff with my sister (who would, a decade later, decide to call the place home), disgusting roadside bathrooms, swimming in the freezing cold Alice Lake, how beautiful was Victoria, and goats on a rooftop on Nanaimo. And before and after and in between, there were summers at the cottage, drives to Florida, boat rides through the Thousand Islands, road trips all over Ontario, and unfortunate March Break when money was a bit short and we resorted to making Kitchener our destination.
So yes, I agreed with Gillespie’s thesis entirely in Almost There: The Family Vacation Then and Now that our family vacations are the means by we get a sense of who we are as a family, of what “family” is. He writes, “The family vacation is a way to bank family memories, to colour in what might otherwise be broad outlines.” His book is a mix of those memories, of his childhood family vacations and vacations now with a family of his own, with broader historical and sociological research in regards to the family vacation. Which, academically speaking, remains an unexamined field of study– the family vacation itself is a very modern institution.
It begins, Gillespie tells us, with the advent of leisure time, to paid holidays and weekends. And, he notes in his first chapter, with the widespread use of the automobile that suddenly made “getting there” not only an attainable goal, but also part of the adventure. From the history of the road trip, he moves on to camping and cottaging: “Returning to a favoured place, owned or not, is a key and appealing aspect of the cottage ritual, and therefore becomes a central part of our memory making… The ritualized and repetitive nature of such holidays becomes a measuring tool…” His observations regarding camping– that we’re looking for a manufactured form of adventure– become even more pertinent in his chapter on cruises, then Disney destinations, and RVs. (Gillespie writes, “But it seems to me that if the point of having a luxury RV is to take your home with you, then why don’t you just stay home?”). And what is the future of the vacation? Gillespie fears that our children are being entertained to death, losing the vital skill of being able to pass hours on a car journey whilst staring at the window, which is the kind of experience that opens the mind up so wide (and what vacations are about in the first place).
Gillespie’s anecdotes throughout the book are funny, the first and final ones horrifyingly so. His parents and five siblings took advantage of their station wagon’s jump-seats and partook in an epic drive from Alberta to Mexico City whose highlights are the highlight of this book also. Later on, the family got serious and bought themselves a converted bus, which they eventually decided to sell due to its dubious propane stove. He recounts also a harrowing trip down a hill in Australia behind the wheel of an RV, his terrified family behind him, also how they all barely survived a hot air balloon ride, and the time his daughter tried to take off his pants at a public reading during the summer they spent in France.
It must have broken Gillespie’s heart to discover that the very best title ever for a book like this was already taken– Are We There Yet? was published in 2008. And though he demonstrates that he’s familiar with that book and others in the same field, even though his research in general was impressively extensive, I came away with a sense that his material was still unprocessed. The anecdotes were hilarious, the trivia was fascinating, but what it culminated in failed to leave a great impression. At times, even Gillespie seemed aware of the lack of momentum in his narrative, as ideas kept being rephrased and re-framed, as he would backtrack to undermine his own points or ideas, many instances or “as I’ve already said” or “…but we’ll get to that in a moment.”
Though in a way it’s a fitting structure for a book about the vacation, the journey being the point after all, and the diversions, the surprises. For a book that calls itself Almost There, and so it is, but the trip is still memorable.
