October 6, 2013
Accusation by Catherine Bush
“I’m not a circus person,” explains the protagonist of Catherine Bush’s fourth novel Accusation, a line that had me nodding along in agreement. It’s many the author who finds literary inspiration in the circus spectacle, but books about circuses in general tend to bore me, with their freakish humans, chained-up animals and trapeze tragedies. I like my literary characters planted on the ground, preferably one that is concrete. Catherine Bush’s novel, however, is something altogether different from the usual circus story, no big-top for her, but instead a pared-down spectacle, a children’s circus in Ethiopia whose attraction is its performers and the amazing ways they can contort their bodies, how they can catch fire that they throw in the air.
Bush’s novels are always planted much more in concept than narrative and plot, and they are markedly unusual for this. They are also remarkable for their realism, details that plant the stories deep in the ground, on very specific sidewalks and streets, so that a book about a mother orbiting the Earth in Outer Space seems not so far from one’s own experience at all (as in her first novel Minus Time), and so too with this this novel about a journalist driven to explore a(n alleged) crime committed an ocean away amidst a community of street children turned circus acrobats. And this is just one way that this novel turns in on itself as we read it, for it is a story about how we project our own experiences upon those of others (and indeed, as Madeleine Thien read the novel through the lens of race, which never even occurred to me).
That Bush’s novels are planted more in concept than narrative does mean that they tend to be structurally weird, and weak in places. It takes Accusation awhile for its wheels to really start turning, and this is partly because Bush has so many narrative strands to establish. We have Sara, the journalist, who stumbles upon a performance by the children’s circus in Copenhagen. Back home in Toronto, she has a lover whose wife is undergoing cancer treatments. She also has pain her own past involving parents who are emotionally and geographically estranged, and an incident in which she’d been accused of theft and credit card fraud, sullying her reputation and severing important relationships. At a benefit, she connects with Raymond, the leader of the children’s circus she’d seen in Denmark, a black Canadian from Montreal who’d been working abroad for years. Curiously, he requests a drive to Montreal, six hours away. There has been an emergency with the circus troupe, a fall and a terrible injury, and he must return to Addis Ababa as soon as possible. On the long drive along the 401 through the darkness, she feels an affinity with him in his moment of anxiety and tells him the story of her accusation and trial. Just preceding this, there is a stunning scene of him breaking out juggling at a highway rest stop in the middle of the night, people gathering around him. The magic of this man who can summon magic into being with simple dexterity.
A few months after their curious journey, Sara learns that Raymond has been accused of abusing the children in his care, circus performers who’d defected during a tour of Australia. Due to her own past and also because of the odd intimacy of the few hours they’d spent together, Sara finds herself inextricably drawn to this story, journeying to Ethiopia in search of the truth. What she finds there is even more complicated, however, calling her deeper into this story in which she cannot truly be a detached observer, no matter how hard she tries. For better or for worse, and for all manner of reasons, her own thread in this narrative web alters the shape of the story she sees and tells.
Once the novel’s momentum is established, it continues at a heightened pace and nary a clue as to what twists the next page may bring. It was Page 262 where I gasped out loud. Eventually, the story of Sara’s own accusation began to seem extraneous and not sufficiently explored enough to warrant its place near the pinnacle of the novel, though I was so swept up by the more central plot that I ceased to mind that much. Bush explores the ethics of journalism, justice, story-telling, friendship and love, as well as the relativity of truth, or whether truth even matters at all. What is the line between the story as it is and the story we imagine? Does any story even really exist outside of our minds?
Accusation is ambiguous, complex and full of beautiful, multi-claused sentences that are sometimes as difficult to untangle as the novel’s plot is. But in the untangling, the reader becomes deeply engaged in the prose and the plot, part of the story herself.
October 6, 2013
The Things I Want to Keep
In our house, there is now a big plastic bin full of clothing that will never fit anyone in our family ever again. “Should we keep any of it?” I wondered yesterday, only because I thought I had an obligation to wonder. In actuality, we don’t have the room to keep anything and I’m so happy about that because it makes answering such questions much easier. But I wonder too if I will always feel this way, feel the urge to discard pieces of our history, like jetsam.
I haven’t always felt this way. Twenty years ago, I saved everything, any flower I’d ever received hung and dried on a line strung across my dusty, cluttered bedroom. Like most teenagers, I took great care to completely paper my room walls with ticket stubs, magazine cuttings, and photos. When the Blue Jays won the World Series, I saved that day’s newspaper in a cardboard box. I was born afflicted with nostalgia. (I imagine that I am quite human-seeming in this regard.) I remember listening to Meat Loaf’s “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad” when I was six, and telling my dad how it reminded of me of the old days (when I was three). Everything I ever did from age 16-23 was carefully mucilaged into scrapbooks. But enough time passed and so much was accumulated that eventually I could see the futility of my attempts to save everything that mattered, and also that the consequence of it all was stuff stuff stuff and necessarily room enough to put it in.
So we don’t keep much anymore. I only kept a few of the scrapbooks. I am aided in all this by living in an apartment and not having a basement, and also in that so much stuff now exists online, thereby not requiring room enough at all. My blog is perhaps my most precious repository. But I become overwhelmed even by a large number photos on my phone, deleting all those but the essential because I fear being carried away by too muchness. I hate that there are 18,000 messages in my inbox. Books aside, I feel so much lighter living my life without freight. I have decided to retrieve from that plastic bin the stripy sleeper that both my girls wore home from the hospital when they were born, and the rest will go to charity.
“In fact I no longer value this kind of memento./ I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted./ There was a period… when I thought I did./ A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep things with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things”, their totems… In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment./ In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.” –Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Nostalgia, I have learned with time, is an affliction that can’t be cured, or fixed with a totem. I will keep that sleeper with me, but it won’t bring the past any less faraway. Already, I cannot believe that anybody that I love was ever small enough to wear it.
We went out for posh sushi for dinner last night, our first time having it since our post-partum sashimi party when Iris was 5 days old. I’ve been awash lately in nostalgia for June, as Iris turns 4 months old and leaves her newborn self behind. June, not so long ago, of course, but forever irretrievable, a time like no other before or since for our family. Such a gentle time indeed, just like I knew it was while it was happening. I have no need to keep anything from that bin full of clothes, but oh, how I want to preserve those memories, those moments. That week I spent lying in bed recovering my c-section, when Stuart brought me all my meals and there were only four people in the world. I can no longer remember what it was like to not be able to get out of bed unassisted, or not to be able to turn over without a great deal of pain. All those memories gone, and I just remember the sashimi party in our room, that posh sushi. That was the night Harriet hung up the laundry, and played with her sticker book we’d just received from my friend Kate. How summer always is, the way you want to bottle it.
I remember Stuart taking Harriet to school in the morning, and then coming home to collapse into bed with Iris and I. I remember this one evening when Iris and Harriet were both asleep, and I sat down and wrote a review of a picture book. I remember reading The Flamethrowers, and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? I remember Harriet scampering up the stairs to crawl into bed with us every morning, and there would be all of us there, everyone I love best on a single mattress, an island in the universe. Stuart ensuring I was stocked with snacks, reading Harriet stories while I breastfed, how I was annoyed to once again be mobile because then I couldn’t read so much any more.
In June, Harriet watched the Winnie the Pooh movie with Zooey Deschanel over and over again, and we floated around our house like sleep-deprived lunatics, singing the “honey honey honey” song and “It’s Pooh! It’s Pooh! Pooh wins the honeypot,” whenever we changed Iris’s diaper and the situation called for it. How we’d be up at 4am laughing hysterically about Vladimir Putin’s relationship with rhythmic gymnast, and saying, “His virile persona….” which was alway hilarious. The afternoons when Stuart would strap on the baby and take the children away, and I’d be blessed with an hour or so of precious aloneness. I remembering leaving the house even–hobbling to the farmer’s market clutching my incision, going out for ice cream, walking to the playground to fetch Harriet from school. Her class’s end of the year picnic and glorious sunshine. The first time we took the baby out for a meal, for lunch on Father’s Day and she didn’t explode. Tremendous kindness from everyone: cards and presents in the post, meals dropped off, baked goods and visits. All this proof that we were connected to the world and that the world is good.
None of this particularly monumental, of significance to no one but me, though I suspect that it might remind you of your own precious memories, you own very best times. These are those memories that don’t dissolve into the blur of every day, though dissolve they someday will, all the same. And so to counter that, I write them down here, preserve them in my way. These are the things that I want to keep.
October 2, 2013
I’m going to be Wild again.
I am so excited to be returning to the Wild Writers Literary Festival in Waterloo this year, delivering a presentation called “Making the Most of Your Blog: A Guide for Readers and Writers”. I promise that my session will be useful, fun and illuminating, even. I am also excited that the famous gourmet boxed lunch will be making an appearance. And most of all, I’m thrilled by the company I will be keeping at this festival. Also on the bill: Catherine Bush, Karen Connelly, Nancy Jo Cullen, Elisabeth di Mariaffi, Miranda Hill, Helen Humphreys, Susan Olding, etc. etc. (Check it out: the lineup is fantastic). And I hope to see you too!
October 1, 2013
How to Feed a Family by Laura Keogh and Ceri Marsh
”Pratt’s postwar-era family table is a site of constant labour, meal after meal–which all fell to Mary, with no foreseeable end.”–Catherine M. Mastin, “Base, Place, Location and the Early Paintings” , from the Mary Pratt book, an excerpt from which appears today on the 49thShelf blog.
It’s a whole new world at our house these days, as I’ve got a 4 month old baby and a kid who has just started all-day school and is usually exhausted by 5pm. So while I am still a decent cook who makes dinner from scratch every night, I find many of my old standard recipes don’t quite work anymore. I need dinners that are quick, healthy, with minimal preparation (because heaven forbid the baby lets me put her down). I need dinners that my big kid will eat, even with her kiddish tastes, and oh yes, they need to be delicious, because I’m going to eat them too.
Enter How to Feed a Family by Laura Keough and Ceri Marsh, a book which couldn’t have come around at a better time. The first meal I made was shakshuka, a tomato egg dish for which I really did have all the ingredients already in my pantry. We got home at 6 that night, and I had to go out again at 7:15, but it all came together, and even Ol’ “I Don’t Like Tomatoes” Harriet ate hers up fine. Here, I thought, is a cookbook that does what it says on the tin.
We’ve had the ridiculously easy and tasty Lemon Linguini (though I threw in some spinach to up the greens), apple chicken curry (which we all enjoyed), tilapia tacos with fresh lime, though everybody’s favourite has been the so-simple sweet potato macaroni and cheese (which I particularly like because it makes a huge batch, and I freeze half for later). I have baked the whole-grain blueberry muffins three times now, and the whole play school is having them for snack tomorrow. I’ve stolen sandwich ideas (chicken and grapes. Yum!), made breakfast milkshakes, and we had cornmeal pancakes for lunch one day, which were terrific.
How to Feed a Family is a product of the blog Sweet Potato Chronicles, from which I’ve scooped recipes from time-to-time and for which my friend Athena writes a lovely column called “A Quick Bite With”. Reflecting its origins, the book is a bit of a mishmash and guided mainly by its writers’ tastes instead of a grander scheme. So you end up with a cannelloni recipe with a whole page of ingredients with another recipe calling for store-bought pastry shells (gasp! horror! says me). And they’re really, really into spelt flour and brown rice syrup, which I just don’t happen to have on hand. Further, my child wouldn’t touch an asparagus/tomato frittata with a ten foot pole, but that’s my problem (and it is. Because when she doesn’t eat her share, I eat it instead, which is a problem I don’t expect is come across by the book’s authors, two former fashion magazine editors who’ve probably long-learned the art of restraint).
I am not completely the target audience for this book–I’ve got my own ideas about food and cooking and I dare their recipe for wholewheat pancakes to compete with mine, which I fry up every Sunday (blueberry banana!). But I’ve also never needed a book like this so bad in my life, and the spine is already way cracked. The pages splattered.Here is a cookbook that’s made to get used, and I am having an awfully good time with it.
September 29, 2013
Projection: Encounters with my Runaway Mother by Priscila Uppal
A few years ago, I developed a cautious admiration for the literary bolter, those mothers in fiction who had dared to turn convention on its head and flee the children–the narrator’s mother in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love was known as “the Bolter”, and my thoughts had been inspired by the mother in What Maisie Knew. In conversation we also came up with Mrs. Brown in The Hours, plus the mother in Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. In the latter two books, the psychology of these bolting mothers and our eventual sympathy for them becomes the point on which the novels turn.
How does “the bolter” complicate our ideas about motherhood, I wondered? What if “the bolter” was a maternal archetype, instead of her actions being construed as unnatural? What does it tell us about motherhood and ourselves that we do such construing? And what does understanding the bolter’s psychology help us to better understand about mothers in general?
In Projection: Encounters with my Runaway Mother, Priscila Uppal is pondering the psychology of the bolter in order to understand nothing in general, but instead to better understand her own life. And here is the thing about non-fiction, of course, that it takes out the nuance and raises the stakes (and I still can’t stop thinking about that line from Americanah: “Like life is always fucking subtle.”). You see, my literary bolters of the fictional persuasion were always a but romantic, bobbed hair, cloche hats and long cigarette holders, far too fabulous for the home-front, or else they were running from something, selfless martyrs who flee for their children’s survival. But real life, of course, is rarely so photogenic, or tidy, as Priscila Uppal discovers for herself when she goes to Brazil to find her mother who’d bolted years before.
Projection has recently been shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award for Nonfiction, and rightly so, as it is one of the most extraordinary memoirs I’ve ever encountered. It begins with Uppal–an accomplished poet, novelist and professor, with two experiences as Canadian Poet-in-Residence at the Olympics amongst her remarkable achievements–encountering her mother for the first time in twenty years on the internet. Though Uppal has not been pursuing her mother–it is while googling herself in search of reviews of her novel that she discovers her name listed on her mother’s website, along with a childhood photograph. After years of the past being put far away, Uppal must contend with evidence that her mother’s life continued after her bolting, and moreover that Uppal herself exists as a secondary character in her mother’s life.
She goes to Brazil in search of a story, curious and cautious about what she will find there. Brazil, where her mother had come from and the place to which she returned when her daughter is eight years old. And even Priscila can understand what drove her mother to go: an accident had rendered her father a quadriplegic, altering the trajectory of their family life and making her mother his full-time care-giver. Other details are harder to stomach though–how she cleared out her children’s piggy banks, for example, or that her children were left to care for their father in her absence, contending with a serious lack of essential financial and emotional support.
Uppal’s mother is a film reviewer, and a prolific movie watcher, movies becoming the method by which Uppal frames her narrative. Each chapter is title after a different movie, preceded by a line of dialogue, and the narrative of the film itself becomes integral to how Uppal understands her own narrative. Some of the movie picks are straightforward in their mother-daughter associations–Mommie Dearest, Stella Dallas, Freaky Friday–while others seem more of a stretch, but then Uppal makes the connections seem so natural. So too the lists that pepper her text, top 10 lists of things her mother and she share, or of places she has visited in Brazil on her trip. Her chapters also contain special cuts, montages, and flashbacks in keeping with the film motif. It is a curious construction, but one that works, in particular because these breaks provide moments of relief in a narrative which is full of unbearable tension.
It has become standard to refer to memoirists as “brave”, but I can’t help doing the same for Uppal, with the caveat that “brave” means something totally different here, something substantial. First, Uppal’s bravery in staring down this woman, her mother, who is clearly unhinged and exists in the alternate reality her love of movies provides. Uppal dares to confront her, but also dares to understand her, however unforgivingly. She is also brave to not forgive, or to have her story not adhere to standard narratives, to have a happy ending. She refuses to compromise, but also manages to see her story from all points of view. She is brave to take a story with so much pain and turn it into art that’s so extraordinary.
She writes, “I’m willing to endure [my mother] for a book for all the other children of disastrous, neglectful, and narcissistic parents, who beat themselves up for not being able to alter their gazes, not being able to create the love that would salvage the past, turn into into the turbulent backstory of a triumphant comedy.”
Projection is fascinating, compelling, as beautifully written as it is honest. Honest too that there is artifice at work here, that this book is so consciously art instead of a factual record. And yet there is documentation, note and photographs. A fantastic blurring of art and reality, which is the book’s very point, how we all do this to suit our own purposes, Uppal’s mother escaping to movies in order to justify her own choices.
The literary bolter in Projection must be read to be believed. She is so impossibly divorced from reality (as well as the common rules of social decorum) that if she showed up in fiction, you wouldn’t believe she was true. She exists to underline that mothers are fallible, and more: that some mothers are horrible. That real life is more complicated than a story could ever suppose, but then without story, how would we ever convey that?
September 27, 2013
I used to wade into fracas all the time.
I write about my children here more than I write about the wider world, the wider literary world in particular. And sometimes I feel bad about this, about the disconnect, my insularity. I don’t seem to have my finger on the button. It hasn’t always been like this either–I used to wade into fracas all the time. But then it got to the point where I could set my calendar by it–brouhaha about women writers, the Orange Prize as ghetto or goldmine, Canada Reads outrage, Giller Prize moroseness. I was writing the same blog posts all over again, in the beginning fervently hoping to bring change, hoping that if I could just explain the way things ought to be, everyone would finally understand. And then eventually despondently, as it began to become clear to me that these arguments were futile, all of us hashing out the same lines over and over again. It was even boring, and I was really tired, and there are oh so many books to read, books to write about instead. And yes, my children, who are never ever the same, even two days in a row. So now I cease to wade, for the most part, which I fear might suggest I don’t have opinions anymore, except about out-of-date encyclopedias. Because I do have opinions, and they’re even works in progress too, but it’s progress that interests me more than opinions themselves, so I don’t bother to wade anymore.
September 26, 2013
Our Complete Childcraft How & Why Library
It was almost two years ago that I found a near-complete set of encyclopedias out on somebody’s curb, and schlepped them all home in our stroller (which later fell apart, and this may be part of the reason why). The books were the Childcraft How & Why Library, which is basically the whole universe printed and bound circa 1987. Three books devoted to literature (nursery rhymes, poems, myths, fairy tales, and also contemporary stories), and then others about space, plants, animals, math, crafts, world cultures and more.
I am very excited that I finally purchased our two missing volumes online (one of them for a dollar, no less) and that our Childcraft set is finally complete.
The photos are dated and the print a bit faded, but we love these books, and because my child has been raised on faded picture books, this deficiency doesn’t even register. These books have become our first stop for information, because research here doesn’t seem to suck us into a vortex of inanity as the internet does. And truth be told, our family loves any excuse to curl up on the couch with a book. We’ve learned about clouds (which means we get to say “cumulonimbus”, which is always fun), beetles, human digestive tracks, molluscs, the solar system, and so much else.
That the books are a little out of date is actually useful too. Pluto, Harriet knows now, is no longer a planet after all, and I love what that knowledge represents. She realizes that not everything written down is immutable. That the universe is not static. That the world is ever-changing and wild, infinite in its wonders.
September 24, 2013
The Hang of It
My new office.
Now that we’re nearly three weeks into our brand new life, I’m going to take the risk of saying out loud that we might be getting the hang of it. After a very bumpy first week, Harriet is very happy to be in Junior Kindergarten, and has already acquired some brand new skills, such as being able to sit down and focus on a project for more than two minutes, and also the ability to draw something that actually resembles a thing. She is also enjoying being back at her play school in the afternoons. Stuart is back to work, and quite happily now that we’ve learned he’s got a promotion and begins a new position next month. He’s also taking a college course he’s finding very inspiring, which means I am home alone on Wednesday nights.
The first Wednesday night was surprisingly good–I had two crabby kids and a heat wave, so we all jumped in the bath and had a pool party in the tub. Somehow, I managed to drown no one, we had dinner, *and* I mopped the floor, so I got to feel like Mommy Awesome. There was to be no repeat the following Wednesday, however, as the baby proceeded to cry unceasingly and the house looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. We’ll see how I do tomorrow.
Regarding Iris, who is 3.5 months old: we thought we’d been doing so well tolerating her poor sleeping habits, and then she went and showed us that we’d not seen nothing yet as poor sleeping goes, and so now I’m kind of the walking dead. This time, however, we know it’s a problem to be endured instead of something that we can fix, and so we just tolerate the tireds without feeling badly about the whole thing, and that makes a huge difference. She has a cold and has just got her second tooth in, which isn’t helping matters, plus she is a *baby* and we know what they’re like.
What they’re like though is pretty easy compared to 4 year-olds, which I didn’t appreciate at all the first time. I also think that when I was home with Baby Harriet, I was terrifically bored, but now I’ve got commitments and deadlines, and things to get done with Baby lying on my chest. There is no time for boredom, and so Iris rolls around on the floor while I do my work, and I really am accomplishing so much, though I am having to also train myself to type with one hand while the baby screams in my other arm. In the mornings, she falls asleep soon after I drop off Harriet at school, and so I can’t go home because our apartment is up a flight of stairs and I’ve got her in the stroller, so I go to RedFish BlueFish instead and work for the 30 minutes she manages to stay asleep for. (Iris has about six naps a day, 20-40 minutes. This would bother me, except I had another baby like that once before, and everything worked out fine.)
And the very best thing we’re up to these days is that we started reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which Harriet and I are both encountering for the very first time. And we love it. I’m reading it aloud and once in a while get a sense of where possible criticism comes from, but these criticisms would mainly be about there being too many adverbs, or that characters “hiss” sentences which are not sufficiently sibilant, which are the kind of criticisms you really have to go looking for and be an asshole to make.
September 22, 2013
Oh, My Darling by Shaena Lambert
While I was pleased that Shaena Lambert’s short story collection Oh, My Darling received a good review in The Globe and Mail recently, I couldn’t help thinking that the reviewer had kind of missed the point. That her stories-as-houses metaphor had failed to consider the construction of the book entire, that here the book itself is a house, well-built and with a strong foundation, which is remarkable for a story collection. I mean, it’s what a story collection should strive for, but many collections really do end up being haphazard piles of all an author’s publishable stories to date (and some of the stories not even that) rather than a proper whole, but Oh, My Darling really is, and a most impressive one at that.
And I love that, that here is a collection where I can tell you about the book, its themes, its shape, rather than just telling you the plots of three or four of the stories I liked best. Oh, My Darling doesn’t actually reference Clementine, which wikipedia has revealed to me is actually a satire (because who would write a song about a drowned girl whose feet were so big she had to wear boxes instead of shoes?) But its preoccupations are just as morbid, and so darkly humorously so at times that I am sure that Lambert knew about the satire. That tireless refrain, powered by blustery, lust-ery, souls laid bare. So much feeling for something seemingly shallow. Sound going nowhere. Just imagine how it would echo in a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mile…
The book is framed by two stories about middle-aged women whose lives are about to change with diagnoses of cancer, though this is a straightforward interpretation of two stories that are very different and not straightforward at all. Each experiences a kind of dissatisfaction with her lot, a sense of dread that is shared with characters in most of these stories. The dread is a beneath-the-bones kind of thing, hard to pinpoint, but it is mortality, it is death. (Everything rustles, and it occurs to me that Jane Silcott’s essay collection would be a fine nonfiction companion to this book).
“Welcome home” is the last line of the first story, “Oh, My Darling”, a greeting to the woman whose cancer is going to make her really aware of living in her body for the first time, an awareness that comes with age even without cancer. Bodies are so thoroughly inhabited throughout all these stories, and fitted with parts–never have I encountered so many vaginas in one text. Bodies are bound and unbound, bodies are revealed, mottled middle-aged bodies with wrinkles and scars and unfeeling abdomens whose nerve endings were never repaired after cesarian sections so long ago. Fragile, flawed and precious. Oh, My Darling.
These are stories of women mostly, usually ordinary, middle-class, each with her own particular tragedies, her own emotions and feelings which can seem so profound and yet are part of a larger scheme, un-grand in its scope. She has a yearning for something just out of reach, but only when she is distracted from day-to-day life. There are things to be done, and she does them, unable to articulate the feeling, the fear in her bones–something decidedly bodily. How do we fit into the world, into our lives, mother-daughter relationships which are freighted and fraught, the awkward symmetry of marriage, the stunning pain of loss. Kitchen-sink stuff, yes, but then there is a drag-queen who is the son of Nazi war criminals and walks on his hands, as well as a death by mountain lion, by which I mean that this collection will surprise you.
And I don’t mean that the stories themselves aren’t worth remarking on either. They are gorgeously, effortlessly crafted, and I particularly admired Lambert’s deftness with chronology, her ability to telescope back and forth through time to consider a moment from all angles, as well as the force of her omniscience. How she is able to zero in on a single detail, a moment, and the rest of the story is a sweeping symphony all around it.
September 18, 2013
Sometimes Love Isn’t a Let-Down
“I just never thought it would be like this.”
This is a line from an essay I wrote a few years ago, an essay whose title and central metaphor was a reference to breastfeeding: “Love is a Let-Down”. The literal let-down though had been the unhappiness I’d experienced during those difficult weeks after my first daughter was born. Not postpartum depression, a label sometimes too broadly applied whose tidiness undermines the fact that becoming a mother is really hard, that new moms are often insufficiently supported, that babies are a lot of work, and the learning curve in those early days can seem impossibly steep. I still maintain that my unhappiness in those days didn’t necessarily mean there was anything wrong with me.
But oh, was my transition to motherhood ever a bumpy one. I didn’t even have breastfeeding problems, and I was having breastfeeding problems. Baby’s latch was fine, my milk was plentiful, and somehow she still managed to lose (or I managed to lose her?) 11% of her body weight, a terrifying ratio for someone so small. I’m not big on mother-guilt, but that 11% is seared upon my brain. It meant that everything in those early days seemed so fraught, perilous. I’d been handed this enormous responsibility and was already doing it wrong just four days in.
Precisely two things would save my breastfeeding life (and allow it to continue for the next two and a half years). The first was my midwife’s gentle care the first day we were home from the hospital after my c-section. “Breastfeeding takes time,” she told me as she helped me with positioning. “And patience,” she said, as we woke up the baby who’d once again fallen asleep on the nipple. And suddenly it became clear to me that this was really going to be work, at least for a while.
But not so much work, and here we come to the second thing that saved my breastfeeding life. The lactation consultant who took a mother-centric view of my situation and determined I didn’t need to be up all night long while my baby suckled away with an excellent latch I was loath to break considering the recent fact of her 11% weight loss. Quite unfashionably, at least in some breastfeeding circles, the consultant weighed my daughter before and after her feed, and took in the fact of my copious milk supply. “She gets everything she needs in five to ten minutes,” she told me. I would be free to cut off the feed when I saw fit, and so for the next week I did, and my daughter still gained weight. It began to occur to me that I may have had some mothering instincts after all.
“Love is a Let-down” I wrote in my essay, because my milk letting down was something I was never able to feel—at least not until it had leaked all over my shirt. In fact, I wasn’t able to feel anything the way I thought I should have, love in particular, certainly not in the ecstatic manner supposed by the rows of congratulatory cards on my window-sill. (“I just never thought it would be like this.”)
But what I eventually learned was that in those early days, love was doing instead of feeling. Love was every time I changed a diaper with tears streaming down my face, every time night turned into morning while the baby screamed, those early evening walks through our neighbourhood with the baby asleep in her carrier, a tiny, gentle reprieve.
It is a bit of a mystery though, how I went from that desperate woman crying over the change table to being somebody who was pregnant again. On purpose, even! Part of it was that four years had passed, and while the vividness of my newborn memories hadn’t faded, I’d had time to get over the trauma. I’d also always known I’d want a second child, which had underlined all my despair the first time: that I’d one day have to do it all over again. And while I was quite conscious that having another baby would come with its own challenges, I’d learned a thing or two the first time and I was hoping that what I’d learned would prove worthwhile.
When my second daughter was born in June, I didn’t dare to imagine that we were prepared, but we had bought a queen-size bed so we could sleep comfortably with her, I had paid a woman $200 to made capsules out of my placenta in an effort to combat the baby blues, and my husband had taken 3 months off work to ensure that when I cried over the change table, I’d never cry alone.
And much to my surprise, relief and pleasure, these measures worked miracles. More, this time I was not so lost in new motherhood—I recognized the landmarks, was accustomed to the topography. It was so strange to encounter this world again, but this time not to be out of my mind.
“I just never thought it would like this.”
Because this time, everything was different, except the parts that were the same, but these were more easily weathered when I was feeling supported and strong. And the best thing of all, which no doubt paved the way for my easier experience—from the time she was forty minutes old and I was lying in the recovery room, immobile from my repeat c-section, my new baby breastfed like a champion.
As her new life began to be measured in days and then weeks, I kept waiting for the hiccups (metaphoric ones), for inevitable bumps in the breastfeeding road, but they never arrived. I never knew how much weight she lost after birth because the number never mattered. She was back to birth weight at one week old, and the road has been smooth ever since then.
So these were my two experiences, shockingly disparate and I am one woman, suggesting a remarkable diversity in the experiences of new motherhood for women everywhere. If I’d had my second experience first time around, I’d have no idea what women were talking about when they talked about difficulty breastfeeding, though I would imagine that I understood. There was a part of me before that just assumed that having a newborn was as terrible for everyone as it had been for me, and that anyone who said otherwise was lying. So often, we might think we’re talking about the very same things, but they aren’t actually the same things at all.
It’s been a revolution, I think, they way we tell our stories now, and not just in hushed tones over coffee in suburban kitchens, but in print and out loud. But while I realize how important it is that these stories are being told, I also recognize something useless in this endeavour. I understand now how unhelpful was so much of the advice I offered to (or rather forced upon) friends who had babies not long after I did. I remember pronouncing like a sage that no one ever need wake a sleeping baby to feed, not considering matters of milk supply, for example. I feel a twinge of regret when I consider the women I might have terrified with “Love is a Let-Down”, women who might have imagined that my experiences would necessarily be their own.
So I think what we have to keep in mind as we’re sharing our stories is that stories are stories instead of facts or even destinies. That “I just never thought it would be like this” isn’t always a bad thing. The great thing about stories is that sometimes you get to write your own. That love is a let-down, and then sometimes it isn’t after all.
(From my presentation at last Friday’s launch of the anthology Have Milk Will Travel: Adventures in Breastfeeding by Rachel Epp Buller)
