August 3, 2009

No one told me how crazy

“No one told me how crazy you can become in those first few months, when your body chemistry is changing, when your entire life has been altered from the moment the baby was born and nothing will ever, ever be the same again. People don’t talk about these things, perhaps because they don’t want to scare you. Perhaps they don’t tell you because these things fall away so quickly after the baby arrives that those who would tell no longer remember. And if they do tell you these details before you have had a child, they have no meaning, and no context. These are truths you must seek and know alone, in the quiet late-night hours when you are rocking the baby, breathing in the tender newborn scent.”– Christy-Ann Conlin, “Wired at the Heart” from Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood

July 25, 2009

Going to get a quart of mik with William Blake

“Part of the Romantic sensibility, a part we inevitably share at least a little, was to grieve over the loss of this childlike clarity and its replacement by the more mundane duties and obligations of adult life. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; the things which we have seen, we now can see no more. It may seem that the Romantic view we are articulating sees ordinary adulthood as a loss, a falling off, only briefly stemmed by a few adult geniuses.

But that neglects the other half of the equation, the part that is our uniquely adult gift. In particular, when we take on the adult obligation of caring for children, we don’t give up the Romantic project, we participate in it. We participate simply by watching children. Think of some completely ordinary, boring, everyday walk, the couple of blocks to the local 7-Eleven store. Taking that same walk with a two-year old is like going to get a quart of milk with William Blake. The mundane street becomes a sort of circus. There are gates, gates that open one way and not another and that will swing back and forth if you push them just the right way. There are small walls you can walk on, very carefully. There are sewer lids that have fascinatingly regular patterns and scraps of brightly coloured pizza-delivery flyers. There are intriguing strangers to examine carefully from behind a protective parental leg. There is a veritable zoo of creatures, from tiny pill bugs and earthworms to the enormous excitement, or terror, of a real barking dog. The trip to 7-Eleven becomes a hundred times more interesting, even though, of course, it does take ten times as long. Watching children awakens our own continuing capacities for wonder and knowledge.”– from The Scientist in the Crib, Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl

July 19, 2009

Something Amazing

Something amazing happened during these last couple of weeks, as our baby girl began a transformation from rage incarnate into an actual person. What is even more amazing, however, is the way in which her parents have actually begun to figure out how she works, what she needs, how to respond to her, and keep her happy for as long as possible (which is sometimes up to an hour or two). And watching her explore to the world now is absolutely one of the most fascinating experiences I’ve ever had, and I really can’t get enough of it. Baby can get enough of it, however, and at this moment, due to having been horribly overtired to the point of hysteria, Harriet is comfortably asleep in her swing. For now…

And so today is a good time for me to start reading The Scientist in the Crib (as recommended by Steph at Crooked House). I am looking forward to a book about babies that does not purport to be a “guide”, except perhaps one to understanding. And, of course, because man cannot subsist on non-fiction alone, I’m also reading my former classmate Lauren Kirshner‘s novel Where We Have to Go, which fits in well with all the rest if I regard it as a parenting anti-guide.

The best news is that I own a computer again, and so this week’s project is a little life here at Pickle Me This. Though I really can’t be held to anything these days at all.

May 18, 2009

A country where you don't know the language

“The first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don’t know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it’s just the horizon– and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it’s suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you’ve had the right shots.”– Emily Perkins, Novel About My Wife

May 15, 2009

On mommy blogs, maternal ambivalence, and my worst tendencies

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing and motherhood lately, as I put one on the back burner and prepare for the other. I reread Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work yesterday, which is such a complicated, dark and beautiful book. And two ideas glared at me from her introduction– first, the inevitable backlash to any mother who dares to put her experiences down on paper (or blog). Cusk found herself taken aback, but reasoned the response with that “in writing about motherhood, I inevitably attracted a readership too diverse to be satisfied from a single source. The world has many more mothers than an author generally has readers.” So many people read her book because they were interested in motherhood, because of “the desire to see it reflected, to have it explained, all that love and terror and strangeness, even if it is immediately repressed by the far stronger desire for authority and consensus, for ‘normality’ to be restored: to me, the childcare manual is the emblem of the new mother’s psychic loneliness.” But more on this in a minute.

Second, Cusk writes “with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers.” Which I’ve been conscious of also here, as babies have become such a preoccupation of mine lately. As my personal experiences, the books I’ve read, the way I’ve been reading, and everything I’ve been doing have been so framed within the context of our baby’s imminent arrival. Though Pickle Me This has never been a particularly serious literary blog, it’s certainly become even less so lately. I’m not saying my hard-hitting criticisms of picture books aren’t worth noting, but there are some readers, I’m sure, who are less than enthralled. And I really don’t want to alienate any of my five readers.

Here’s the thing: I have read mommy blogs. (Note, I didn’t say “I read (present tense) mommy blogs”. But now I’m getting all Brian Mulroney pedantic.) The term mommy blog is a slur, as is “chick lit”, neither “genre” (let’s say) helping itself by mainly comprising compost. Stephany Aulenback recently remarked on the ubiquity of parents chronicling their children’s lives online: “I think when our children are grown up, they’re going to have different notions of “public” than we do now.”

My derision of women writing about their domestic lives (“compost”) sits uncomfortably with me, because it’s so easy to deride women’s domestic lives– everybody does it. By existing within the domestic sphere, these stories really serve to undermine themselves, which certainly bothers me when it comes to fiction. When with aesthetics as an excuse, fiction about women’s lives is so often deemed less than literary, as craft is less than art, etc.

The problem I have with mommy blogs, however, is that I watch them in the same way I’d watch a train wreck– even the incredibly well-written ones. I don’t necessarily admire these women’s “honesty” and how they “put themselves out there”, but sometimes I really do have to tear my eyes away. Their deliberate provocations are often horrifying, my knee-jerk response is catty, and I’m not the only one. As Cusk says, “The world has many more mothers…”, each one with her own opinions, and then fights break out in the comments section, commenters accusing other bloggers’ “followers” of being sheep, and then baa-ing themselves. Controversial topics include diapers, breastfeeding, reproductive rights, between working moms who work at home or out, and these are controversial topics, but it’s all handled a bit grade five. No one ever shows up to have their minds changed or expanded. My problem with these blogs is less with the blogs themselves, but how they feed on my worst tendencies.

(Though I also hate the smugness. The current trend is to embrace your inner bad-mom, and let her all hang out, but at the root of this is the sense that badness is in fact best. That anyone embracing domesticity has something up her ass, that liberation lies in the anti-domestic after all, but I’m really not so sure. I think a lot of these people might be misled. For all they’re anti-mom, they not beyond-mom, and they certainly define themselves in relation to their [albeit messy] homes. And this is a bit dangerous, can all go very wrong– I read one blog by a defiantly proud bad mom, and then her baby died.)

Which is not to say that maternal ambivalence, the experience of which these women are trying to project, is not real, or a subject deeply worth pursuing. It’s just not very often expressed in a particularly thoughtful way within these forums. Whereas I’ve found the idea explored well elsewhere, in the experiences of women artists in particular. Perhaps because these women have a medium with which to convey their experiences, because they are well-accustomed to expressing themselves. Because it’s a complicated issue requiring a high level of articulateness. We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Divided Heart, Who Does She Think She Is, Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Anne Enright’s Making Babies, and I was recently introduced to Marita Dachsel’s Motherhood and Writing Interviews (by writer Laisha Rosnau, who is the subject of one).

So somehow I find myself saying that inarticulate people have no business writing about their lives. Hmmm. (Or perhaps that they should, but I just shouldn’t read them because I’m not very nice). For your own interest, please do check in in about two weeks times to see how articulate I’ve become with a newborn, and then again six months later when my house is a mess and I’m smashing my head against the wall and the stove is on fire. When I’m just as bad a mom as any of them, reality sunk in. Don’t think I’m not aware of this, but it’s still scary to consider.

But it’s not simply black and white, good mom/bad mom and I appreciate the writing best that reflects this. How Rachel Power (author of The Divided Heart) wrote recently: “maternal ambivalence is not a state of being torn between love and hate for our children (meaning not them so much as what they’ve done to our lives) — but is a state entirely borne out of love. It is precisely this love for my children, being so excruciating, that I can feel has ruined me. This acute tenderness and sense of responsibility is something us mothers are never free of, and almost impossible to imagine until you’re in it.”

May 14, 2009

Reliving my own evolution

“I begin to relive at high speed my own evolution towards language, towards stories. Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar; prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like the pots and pans, the hoarded gold of a precious civilization, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly, without misunderstanding.” –Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

April 7, 2009

Worry is the work

“In the years to follow, my midwifery practice taught me that for some women, worry is the work of pregnancy. In fact, an over-confident first time mom who thinks she has it all figured out worries me. I worry she will not be truly prepared for what awaits her.”– Pam England, Birthing from Within

April 1, 2009

Books can be practical

My non-fiction lately has been baby-oriented of late (for how else does one learn anything, if not through a book?). I’ve written already here about the fascinating books I’ve been reading about pregnancy and motherhood, but made little reference to the more practical texts I’ve been reading. (I don’t mean to imply that the other books aren’t practical. In fact I’m sure they’ll be the more referred to once baby ceases to be kicking on the inside, but in the meantime let’s delude myself with the idea I can get prepared).

I was fortunate to have dear friends on the other side of the Atlantic send me over a copy of Yummy Baby: The Essential First Nutrition Bible and Cookbook. The book is pretty, full of babies as delicious as the food they’re eating. I’ve learned a lot about nutrition, weaning, avoiding fussy eating habits, encouraging good family food culture, and how to create meals the whole family can eat together. We’ll see how it works in practice, but right now in my pre-baby state, the whole system seems do-able.

One book I’ve been referring to throughout my pregnancy has been What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which is pretty standard. I’ve found it really helpful, though I’ve heard a lot of negativity about it. Mostly referring to the book’s negativity, which I hadn’t picked up on, and I suddenly realized why. I like What to Expect…, because every time I looked up a symptom I thought I had, the book would say, “This is normal. You’re fine. Unless you’re hemorrhaging, then go to the doctor. Otherwise…” and I’d rest easy. Normal women, however, probably hadn’t considered these numerous ailments until they consulted the book, which they might credit with making them crazy. I, however, was crazy already (though much less so lately. It’s nice).

Others… I liked Raising Baby Green so much, I bought it. Stuart is currently absorbing The Birth Partner by Penny Simkin. And I just managed to borrow a copy of Birthing From Within, so we’ll see how that goes. Ina-May’s Guide to Childbirth was also worthwhile.

Having read all these books, and never actually having spent much time with babies (or birthin’ babies), I’m pretty sure I now know everything there possibly could be to know.

March 18, 2009

Dispatches

Via Crooked House, I came across a post about pregnancy at Moonlight Ambulette with an excerpt from the short story “Another Marvelous Thing” by the wondrous Laurie Colwin. “For the past two months her chief entertainment had been to lie in bed and observe her unborn child moving under her skin. It had knocked a paperback book off her stomach and caused the saucer of her coffee cup to jiggle and dance.”

My unborn child is not yet so mighty, but staring at my fascinating stomach has already become a kind of pastime, and I don’t think I’ve really come across any other literature yet that so encapsulates the experience of being pregnant. Or at least in a way that doesn’t border on the nightmare, and I’m aware that pregnancy can indeed border on nightmare, but so many of these books and stories exploit pregnancy for its literary effect rather than capturing the moment for itself. I’m thinking even of very good novels– Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins, for instance, The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, or The Edible Woman does a bit of it. Of course there are also numerous books in which woman dies in childbirth or botched abortion (which I seem to keep picking up unknowingly), or where she miscarries at three or four months (or whatever month I happened to be at when I was reading said story or book [writers beware: a miscarriage is not a plot device.])

Oh, but Laurie Colwin. I should go back and read A Big Storm Knocked it Over and Happy All the Time, both of which depict pregnancy, I remember. The baby kicks punctuating The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant managed something of it too. Perhaps Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, but there pregnancy was more a metaphor than anything else.

Anne Enright has called motherhood “the place before stories start”, describing her surprise at finding it was not the sort of journey that one could send dispatches home from. Is this the problem then, I wonder? Who else has managed to send home some dispatches all the same?

March 6, 2009

Who Does She Think She is?

Because Rachel Power’s book The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood hasn’t been far from my thoughts since I finished it a few weeks ago, I was very intrigued to discover the new documentary film Who Does She Think She Is? Addressing the same divided heart that Power does, the film is directed by Academy Award winner Pamela T. Boll, and explores the lives of women artists who’ve managed to combine motherhood and artisthood, as well as the question of why they stand out as such anomalies in this experience.

Showing at the Revue Cinema in Toronto tonight, tomorrow and Sunday.