July 7, 2011
It Must Be As Tall As A Lighthouse by Tabatha Southey
If you accused me of being a Tabatha Southey fangirl, I could hardly deny it, because I have made a religion out of reading her columns aloud over croissant crumbs on Saturday mornings. And I kind of intended on liking her new book It Must Be As Tall as a Lighthouse (published by few-of-a-kind outlet The Book Bakery) because we’d read her previous picture book The Deep Cold River Story and really enjoyed it.
But no amount of Southey-admiration could have predicted the response I got to …Tall as a Lighthouse when I read it for the first time, out loud, and it left my husband and I both with tears in our eyes (and note that he is English, and only cries once annually). I think this is a book that will appeal more to parents than to children, although Harriet likes to pick out familiar images from the pictures– her favourite parts are the penguin, the fish, and the shovel. She also likes the rhyme scheme, and I do too, as it puts me in mind of one of my favourite picture books, A House is a House for Me.
And perhaps it’s because this is also a book about a house, about a house a mother will build her son, and she indulges all his impossible dreams–surrounded by ocean on all sides, in deepest outer space, near a good tobogganing hill, his window with a revolving view of jungle and desert (and with stairs made of eclairs). I particularly like “the window at which it is raining/when you just want to finish your book”.
But the house keeps changing as the boy keep changing, and he wants different things all the time. And then the end, oh my, the end– “For you’ve taught me that anything Perfect/ is only a moment of time…” That love so solid (red brick) for something so ephemeral is as impossible as the house itself, and yet that love exists, the most straightforward thing ever. Perhaps the loveliest articulation of parental love that I’ve ever encountered, the entire book is something to cherish.
June 23, 2011
Penguins in the Post
Oh, there are words to describe yesterday, but they’re not very polite ones. They’re the words I was thinking as I hauled my hysterically tantrumming toddler home from a drop-in we visited in the morning, one that was so nice that apparently Harriet never wanted to go home. She was able to contort her body to become completely rigid (this kid would rock at planking) or to become a wet noodle, therefore rendering stroller get-her-inning completely impossible. She wanted me to carry her, and it was raining, and I couldn’t push a stroller, hold Harriet and an umbrella, so we got soaked. And then I could no longer carry Harriet at all, and that was all she wrote. It was horrid. And we won’t even get started on the whole “leaving the farmer’s market” meltdown in the afternoon, which was even worse, totally embarrassing and annoying. By the time Stuart came home from work, I was totally broken, and once again, considering putting Harriet up for adoption. “But tomorrow will be better,” I told myself, believing this to be somewhat naive, but it is June, mind you, and life is good in June, and indeed, better today has definitely been.
And it still would have been better had I not received this incredible surprise from my pal at Penguin Canada. A Penguin tote bag (which would be enough in itself) packed with 24 Mini Moderns. But it would not be possible to receive a package like this, and for a day not to be made. And yes, partly because we’re in our third week of a mail strike and I’ve been missing surprises at my door, and partly because these books are so brilliantly Penguinesque in their design and because I can’t wait to find a place where I can line them all up in a row, and because there are authors I love here, and others still yet to be discovered. But mostly because now I am totally assured that there is such brilliant possibility in never knowing what a new day might deliver.
May 24, 2011
Pickle Me This's Motherhood Library
Pregnancy Books:
– Bear With Me: What They Don’t Tell You About Pregnancy and New Motherhood by Diane Flacks
–How to Get a Girl Pregnant by Karleen Pendleton Jimenez
Birthing Books*:
– Great Expectations: Twenty-Four Stories about Childbirth by Dede Crane and Lisa Moore (eds)
– Birthing from Within by Pam England
– Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
(Cannot vouch for the second and third book, as I had a scheduled c-section. But was definitely all right with the c-section on account of having read the first book, and I will never forget Stephanie Nolen on Ina May Gaskin, ever. So funny and made me feel better in retrospect)
Books About New Motherhood:
– A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk
– Making Babies by Anne Enright
– Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott
Books About Babies/Motherhood/Parenthood
–The House With the Broken Two: A Birth Mother Remembers by Myrl Coulter
–Nobody’s Mother: Life Without Kids by Lynn van Luven
– Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood by Shannon Cowan, Fiona Tinwei Lam, and Cathy Stonehouse (eds.)
– Motherhood and Blogging: The Radical Act of the Mommy Blog by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte (eds.)
– Reading Magic by Mem Fox
– The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik
– The Big Rumpus by Ayun Halliday
– Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood by Cori Howard (ed.)
– Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford by Christina Hrdyment
– Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts by Jessica Nathanson and Laura Camille Tuley (eds.)
– Pathologies by Susan Olding
– The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood by Rachel Power
– What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen (this book is deeply troubling, by a writer with no understanding of maternal ambivalence. Which is too bad because I think ambivalent mothers would benefit most from the book, which explains how those tedious, dreary early days are so important, and so absolutely full of doing, but we just fail to recognize it and credit mothers for it).
–365 Activities You and Your Baby Will Love
Fiction:
– A Big Storm Knocked it Over by Laurie Colwin
– Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner
– Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
–A Large Harmonium by Sue Sorensen
Poetry:
–Joy is So Exhausting by Susan Holbrook
–Hump by Ariel Gordon
–Sweet Devilry by Yi-Mei Tsiang
Books About Sleep (aka The Trajectory of a Downward Spiral)*
–The Baby Whisperer
–The No-Cry Sleep Solution
–Dr Sears’ Nighttime Parenting Book
*Note that none of these books did me any good, except the Dr. Sears’ book and only because it gave me permission to keep not doing anything. One day my daughter just learned how to sleep, without a book, even.
***
“If she feels disoriented, this is not a problem requiring bookshelves of literature to put right. No, it is exactly the right state of mind for the teach-yourself process that lies ahead of her. Every time a woman has a baby she has something to learn, partly from her culture but also from her baby. If she really considered herself an expert, or if her ideas were set, she would find it very hard to adapt to her individual baby. Even after her first baby, she cannot sit back as an expert on all babies. Each child will be a little different and teach her something new. She needs to feel uncertain in order to be flexible. So, although it can feel so alarming, the ‘all-at-sea’ feeling is appropriate. Uncertainty is a good starting point for a mother. Through uncertainty, she can begin to learn.” –from What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen (who I quote because in this, she got at least one thing right)
May 8, 2011
Mothers are people
Before I had a baby, I thought the song “Parents are People” from Free to be You and Me was about the wide range of employment opportunities available to men and women everywhere in this brave new world– that some mommies drive taxis and sing on TV, and daddies play cello or sail on the sea. And then I had a little baby and for a while (in retrospect, a very little while, but at the time I didn’t know this) my entire self was erased, and it dawned on me that the song was about how parenthood doesn’t have to constitute the entirety of a parent’s identity (though I’ve got no qualms about those for whom it does. Parenthood is a noble and worthwhile calling).
Lately I’ve been extending my thoughts on the song and imagining it in terms of a mathematical equation though. (This is the kind of thing that occupies my mind as I push a stroller down the sidewalk looking kind of vacant.) If Mommies=People [with children], therefore People=? The logical answer is that People are People, but even Depeche Mode didn’t manage to get to the bottom of that matter. Indeed, why should it be that you and I should get along so awfully? But it does clear up the matter of why mothers can’t seem to get it together and support each other. Because mothers are people, and people just don’t do that.
Case in point, the story in the Toronto Star this week: “These moms refuse to wear sweats”, which makes the argument that motherhood doesn’t mean we have to stop wearing skinny jeans and motorcycle boots. My initial response is “ugh” for many reasons, chief among them being that I never looked that nice even before I had a child, and also because I don’t have the money, figure or talent to ever look like the skinny jeans moms do.
But I realize that these women are fighting the same mommy stereotypes that I grapple with. “Motherhood doesn’t have to mean 
sweat pants, baggy tops and bad perms” so the article goes, which is analogous to my own crusade, which is “Motherhood doesn’t have to mean being an idiot”. I’m not sure who exactly are these mythical frumpy idiotic mothers we’re all running from, unless we’re all running from the very worst fears we harbour of ourselves. And these selves are so various, and we’re all running so hard that it starts to look like we’re running from each other, but we’re not.
Or perhaps what I mean is that we’re not mothers divided as much as people with children who never had all that much in common in the first place.
I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be out of the first year or so of motherhood. Those months when everything is so urgent, so terrifying, and so unsure that you just cling to something that may be true in order to make sense of a chaotic universe. On top of the practical matters of new motherhood was how threatened I was by other mothers and their choices. I was told that this would lessen as I became more assured, and it’s true. I think we all muddle through, and there’s no one way to do it, and that families are people as much as mommies are, and people are.
(I also think that that Tina Fey’s Fuck You to breastfeeding in her book Bossypants should be required reading for anyone who gets upset at the sight of formula fed babies. And I think that anyone who finds breastfeeding evangelicals offensive should consider the innumerable ways that breastfeeding mothers are only superficially supported in our society. And then should go read the Tina Fey chapter and feel better about everything.)
Lately I’ve noticed my failure to find my place in the mom dichotomy. Either I should be always putting my children’s need first (this rarely happens. Harriet is a fairly robust human being, and therefore under normal circumstances, her needs are pretty much on par with my own) or taking time for myself and having a manicure (which has never happened. Because it is very difficult to read and have a manicure, or so I imagine. See notes above about me being frumpy). The great thing about this lack of inclusion, however, is that I don’t have be involved in the mom dichotomy at all. Because, well, mommies are people with children, and people are…
And in such open endedness lies liberation and infinite possibility.
There is a book called The Happiest Mom that I’ve been eager to get my hands upon, most because, like all the best parenting books, it might validate all the choices I have already made. (Also, if you’re newish to this blog, read Dream Babies by Christine Hrdyment, which will teach you that all baby/parenting books are faddish fluff, and you are your own best parenting expert if only you have the confidence to believe it). I love the idea of a book suggesting that happy motherhood is possible (it is!) and that there’s a way to get there (and there are many!).
For me, the way to get there has involved a husband who’s as good a mother as I am, a life that gives me plenty of time to myself, and not having another child anytime soon because I think it would probably break me. An individual path, but it works for me, and so I feel so lucky to be celebrating my second Mothers’ Day (or my third, if we count the Mothers Day I spent having an external cephalic version).
First, because we had a lovely evening with own mom. And because my husband and daughter gave me a basil plant and license to run wild in the bookstore this afternoon (I got I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore by Anne Perdue, and The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk, whose novels I can’t get enough of). They also accompanied me on A Pro-Choice Jane’s Walk around downtown Toronto today in the glorious sunshine, which is fitting because my own reproductive freedom is part of why I get to be a happy mother.
I’m so grateful for the choices I’ve been able to make on the road to here.
March 27, 2011
That annoying thing that women do
This is not so important, but it occurs to me that I’ve been doing that annoying thing that women in my situation tend to do. Making comments about professional tea-guzzling and reading with my feet up, and though these things are practically absolutely true, they’re not the whole picture. I have a tendency toward self-deprecation anyway (it’s just easier that way), and I also don’t find the demands of stay-at-home motherhood particularly arduous, mostly because I have only one child who sleeps a lot, and a small house that requires little maintenance (plus we keep our standards very low). Life for me is very good, though to play the role of the idle hausfrau would be disingenuous (though this does not change the fact that tedious maneuvering really is the story of my life. Let that fact stand).
I thought of an excerpt from a review I read recently of Shirley Jackson’s work (“Dye the Steak Blue” 
by Lidija Haas), and though I’m no Shirley Jackson, obviously, I can understand why Betty Friedan was annoyed by her, and I’m setting the matter straight here because I’m a little annoyed at myself. From the review: “Friedan called [Jackson] an Uncle Tom, one of those women who disingenuously portrayed themselves as ‘just housewives’, ‘revelling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing machines’, affecting to find a challenge in the most routine chores and concealing the ‘vision, and the satisfying hard work’ which went into their proper vocation, as writers.”
So though my washing machine is terribly eccentric (in fact, it would be better termed a “kind-of washing machine” and it sometimes smells like it’s about to catch on fire), and though I do take pride in managing my household (which is no small task, as anyone who’s ever lived in a household realizes), I only do housework when my child is awake, and whenever she’s asleep, feet-up or otherwise, I am usually at work on something related to writing. I work very hard at this blog, on my freelance assignments, at reading thoughtfully and writing book reviews that communicate this, at writing fiction, at creating new projects and at being a part of a wider creative community. At managing to contribute to our household income through my creative work. And I absolutely love all of it. It is tremendously important to me.
So this is not to be the writer’s equivalent of those wretched Facebook statuses that made me hate mothers just as much as the rest of society does (“So you ask, do I work? Uh yes, I work 24 hours a day. Why? Because I am a Mom… I don’t get holidays, sick pay or days off. I work through the DAY & NIGHT. I am on call at ALL hours. re-post if you are a proud Mommy “). I just think I was selling myself short before, affecting a little too much, which isn’t surprising– there is unease that comes with being a stay-at-home mother. But I am also a feminist, and I’d never want to let Betty Friedan down.
Also, I much appreciate the friends who’ve been so supportive about last week’s news. Since the shock has worn off, we’re very positive about things, and even grateful that the right decision has made, in particular because it’s one we might not have been brave enough to make on our own.
March 24, 2011
The original chronicler of motherhood
Lately I’ve been turning to Shirley Hughes’ Alfie books whenever I’m in need of parenting guidance. (I am also reading another book called Toddler Taming that recommends spanking and tying up children with rope, quite unabashedly, but then it was written in 1984 when that sort of thing was de rigueur. But actually, casual cruelty aside(!), it’s a great book. Just let me explain… Review to come.) I love Shirley Hughes, and I really love Alfie, and Harriet loves him too, so we’ve read his stories an awful lot.
And I don’t think the experience of parenthood has ever been better articulated in literature than with this one paragraph from Alfie Gets in First: “Mum put the brake on the push-chair and left Annie Rose at the bottom of the steps while she lifted the basket of shopping up to the top. Then she found the key and opened the front door. Alfie dashed in ahead of her. “I’ve won, I’ve won!” he shouted. Mum put the shopping down in the hall and went back down the steps to lift Annie Rose out of her push chair. But what do you think Alfie did then?”
This kind of tedious maneuvering is the story of my life, and if you’ve ever lived such a life, you understand that Mum has spent ages strategizing the perfect order in which to perform the tasks that will deliver her children and groceries into her house with maximum efficiency. I absolutely adore that recognition. Never mind Rachel Cusk as chronicler of motherhood, no, Shirley Hughes absolutely did it first.
I love her illustrations, and am fascinated by the interior of Alfie’s house. Harriet likes to comb the pictures for teapots, and I love to spot what else is cluttering the corners: discarded shoes, soccer balls, old ties, umbrellas, toy teacups, tennis rackets, folded strollers, and acorns.
Though Alfie’s mum, however rumpled, is a far better mum/mom than I am. Which I’m absolutely fine with, having chosen to take Alfie and Annie Rose’s dad as the parent upon which I model myself. He’s not around as much as Mum (and there I fall short. I never seem to go away), but when he is around, he’s usually behind a newspaper. I love that when in Alfie’s Feet, he takes Alfie to the park, he takes care to bring his book and his newspaper. A parent after my own heart, I think, and Alfie doesn’t seem any less content as he splashes through the puddles, his dad reading the paper on a park bench behind him.
More:
March 8, 2011
Now I'm dying to know what stroller she chose…
“Life with small children means you can’t be too picky or precious about how you read. I need solitude and silence to write but can read anywhere. My main concern, when buying a stroller, was finding one I could manoeuvre with one hand, so that I was able to push the sleeping baby and hold a book at the same time.” –Maggie O’Farrell, on mixing reading with domestic drudgery (which is the story of my happy life, incidentally).
February 15, 2011
More on the motherhood narrative
Lately, reading Susan Olding’s book Pathologies (and in particular, her essays about infertility and her daughter’s adoption) and Charlene Diehl’s Out of Grief, Singing (as recommended by Alison Pick), I was struck by how various is the motherhood narrative. And yet the universality of these stories– these women, with their extraordinary experiences of motherhood, managed to articulate so much that I’ve only been gesturing toward since I became pregnant two and a half years ago. Partly because the writing here is so remarkable. This might also be because I’m self-absorbed, and project myself onto everything. But still, how these stories resonated, and also taught me new things about the motherhood experience, added the possibility of additional dimensions to my journey.
I also can’t help thinking about how I would critique Diehl’s memoir if it were a novel– during most of her daughter’s brief life in the NICU, Diehl was suffering from a variety of post-birth complications and hardly saw her before she died. In a stupid workshop, I would insist on moments of connections, on the impossibility of these parallel storylines (mother and baby both in physical trauma), it doesn’t unfold like a story (but then, from what I’ve heard, death rarely does). We have to bend life a certain way to make it work in fiction, but real life doesn’t bend, does it. And how Diehl makes something so beautiful of it still, the unbendingness of real life. There is such generosity in her story, such grace, and though I’ve sobbed off and on today as I’ve read her book, so often I’ve been crying because of the joy.
February 13, 2011
Doubleness and Happiness
Oh, the things I could tell you about my daughter. Like how she strums her guitar and sings the song she wrote, which is the word “Bunny” over and over; how she learned to say “CN Tower” last week; how when I say, “Slow snow falling”, she says “Deep”, and when I say, “Cars dogs babies”, she says, “Sleep”. How she says “sleep” like “seep” and does a fair amount of it herself. How she’s totally into colouring these days, and she has learned to say her name, except she says, “Ohra” instead of Harriet. Her favourite colour is purple (thanks to Mable Murple), she has to have a sticker on her hand at all times (and best if it’s purple), she loves The Wheels on the Bus (in particular “Swish swish swish”) and Skinnamarink. She loves any book by Marisabina Russo, and Alfie and his sister Annie Rose. How much fun she has with her best friend Margaret, especially when they’re being silly together (and seriously, is it ever fun to wear playdough on your ears.
We love love love her (except when she is having a tantrum at the ROM, and arching her back as I try to put her into her stroller so that the stroller rolls across the atrium at top-speed and everybody is staring at me as she’s screaming, and then we go through the same routine later that afternoon in front of a packed waiting room at the doctor’s). Just as I loved loved loved Sarah Hampson’s wonderful piece in The Globe last week about parenthood and happiness. Which I read with Carol Shields on my mind, and it underlined the line I’d already actually underlined from the novel: “doubleness clarifie[s] the world.” Yes, that’s precisely what it is.
Having a child is very much like everything about being a person who is alive: it’s wonderful and it’s terrible. It’s also very much like being alive in the sense that I’d rather do it than not do it, even though sometimes it isn’t very fun.
I loved this, from Hampson: “I realized that while it was hard not to compare my efforts to those of other mothers, I should see my approach to parenthood as an investment in penny stocks no could predict the outcome of.”
These days, as things have come together in a way that makes sense to me, I spend much less time thinking about “parenting” than I did a year ago. I was obsessed with books then, trying to discover some kind of methodology, but lately we’ve been doing just fine at “making it up as we go along”. Though I have put a book called Toddler Taming on reserve at the library. I have a feeling now is just the calm before the storm.
January 18, 2011
This is Harriet, who
This is Harriet, who can say tutu. Today she said sun for the first time, as well as soap and snow. And while we were reading Madeline, she pooh-poohed to the tiger in the zoo on cue. When she reads Madeline, she goes and gets her Madeline doll, and then goes and puts the doll away when the story is finished. When she sings I’m a Little Teapot, she goes and gets her teapot. When we’re at toddler time at the library and sing Twinkle Twinkle, Harriet goes over and points to the star on the door. Similiar with the clock on the wall during Hickory Dickory. She says boom whenever anything falls on the floor, which is often, but she pronounces it bum. She demands that our radio be playing music at all times, and gets frustated when I won’t turn off CBC, so then I have to. She is totally into Skinnamarink, and alligators, and Dennis Lee’s poem Alligator Pie. Her interests include being flung through the air, and looking out the window. Last week, she learned to kiss properly (as opposed to slapping her mouth against my face and saying “mmmbah”) and I don’t know that I’ve ever loved anything as much as that tiny smack. She loves reading books as much as she loves throwing them on the floor, and she’ll sit reading stories for ages, so she’s the toddler of my dreams. She likes Olivia, and Shirley Hughes’ Alfie, and any book about babies, and Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie, which she laughs at as she leafs through it by herself. She loves If You’re Happy and You Know It because she likes any excuse to clap her hands. She puts her arms in the air and says, “Uppy” and there is no choice but to comply. Every day she has more hair, and her big brown beautiful eyes are unfathomably lovely. We really love her. Every night around 11:30, we mention her for the first time in three hours, and it’s obvious that we miss her. Conversations about what Harriet likes, and how Harriet is, because it’s Harriet, you know. But not that we miss her so much of course that we’d want to hear a peep out of her before morning, oh no. There’s what Harriet likes and how Harriet is, but we’re very content to meet her again with the sun.
