TBR: Mothers
I get Granta because it was free with my subscription to Salon.com, but I rarely have the time to read it. But the theme of the latest issue is Mothers, so I put it in my bag to read on my commute. I’ve now read it cover to cover, and it’s left me somewhat stunned.
The issue is exclusively about Mothers as seen by their sons, or daughters, or sons-in-law, rather than about the experience of being a mother. (There’s one essay by Alexandra Fuller about her experience of being pregnant and post-partum in Zambia, but even that one isn’t really about her as a mother.) And the Mothers in the stories and memoirs seem right out of a book of archetypes — the idealized recipient of worshipful love, or the evil ogress manipulating her children, the housewife whom the children underestimated or the self-centered career woman. The writing is powerful, but the images are painful.
A very different vision of motherhood is offered by a coffeetable book I bought while I was pregnant with D., Jewish Mothers, by Paula Wolfson, with photographs by Lloyd Wolf. I bought it in part because it was at a reading organized by people I knew, but also because I wanted to study the pictures to see if I could find myself in them, if these were women I could imagine myself becoming, if there was an alternative to becoming the punchline to a bad joke.
Tomorrow is D’s fourth birthday. Today is the fourth anniversary of the day I spent in a hospital room, watching it get light and then dark again. After four years, I’m comfortable and generally confident in my role as his (and his brother’s) mommy, more or less adjusted to being a mother. But I’m still not ready to be The Mother, and I don’t think I ever will be.
