Original Essays on Becoming a Mother
“Powerful stories … The strength of these essays lies in their honesty and their focus on a variety of experiences, which will validate many women’s feelings of both joy and ambivalence in the early months of motherhood.”
-Publishers Weekly
From mothers-in-law to obstetricians, advice for new mothers is not hard to come by. But fellow voices – new mothers who talk frankly about doubting their own sanity, obsessing over their newborns’ health, wondering if they’ve made a mistake – are moving and rare. Candid, compassionate, often laugh-out-loud funny, the thirty writers in this unique collection create a community of shared experience no childcare manual can match. Here are women who know the secrets, triumphs, and inexpressible longings hidden in a mother’s heart … and reach out a caring hand to all of us as they speak their minds.
Take away the pink glow of diaper commercials and what is motherhood about, anyway? In this collection of original essays, thirty five writers talk about their expectations and experiences of new motherhood. The writers range widely in age, race, and cultural background, and so does the tone of their essays — from heart- wrenching to thoughtful to laugh-out-loud hysterically funny. What they have in common is their strength of voice.
From mothers-in-law to obstetricians, advice for new mothers is not hard to come by. But fellow voices – new mothers who talk frankly about doubting their own sanity, obsessing over their newborns’ health, wondering if they’ve made a mistake – are moving and rare.
Child of Mine (Hyperion 1997) is a collection of candid, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes devastating, narratives in which mothers from all walks of life tell about how they struggled, survived, and thrived during their first year of motherhood. Each of the contributors to this book – such as Susan Cheever, Mona Simpson, and Naomi Wolf – has a distinct voice and a unique point of view. These essays cover everything from adoption to colic, but even in cases where the topics overlap, the mothers’ perspectives are as distinct and memorable as each baby’s first smile.
Child of Mine shifts the focus from the newborn to the mother with essays that address questions beyond the cradle to the person rocking it. Mothers express fears of becoming neglectful or smothering, careless or neurotic, obsessive or regretful. As Christina Baker Kline herself confesses in the book’s introduction, “No one could have told me, when I found out I was pregnant for the first time, how overwhelming, exhilarating, and lonely becoming a mother would be.” And her attempt to alleviate that feeling of loneliness was to establish the community of mothers’ voices in this collection.
The experiences the new mothers share are as compelling as they are diverse – with contributors ranging from a poverty-stricken mother in rural Vermont, to an accomplished career woman in New York, from a single African-American journalist in Los Angeles to a stay-at-home mother in San Diego. Yet throughout the collection there is an overwhelming sense of the beauty of change – the idea that a mother is something you truly become.
Excerpts
“I take my baby on the subway in New York City. I snap her into her spit-up soiled carrier, sockless, and set off, licking my finger to wipe the banana off her chin. I let her touch the greasy metal pole. I pick up the toys she tosses onto the subway floor and offer them up to her, a gift wrapped in grime.”
“Confessions of a Lazy Mom,” Katie Greenebaum
“When friends dropped by unannounced with their toddler, it was all I could do to be civil. Their child, earlier a sweet baby, was a huge unwieldy creature teeming with germs from daycare. What were they doing bringing him into the same room with my pure, untainted, vulnerable newborn?”
“A Dangerous Thing to Hope For,” Gail Greiner
“Indeed, Jake and I have nursing down to an art form. He can, and does, nurse in almost any position imaginable – standing up, sitting down, lying prone, feet flung to one side, under the computer table as I pound out an assignment on deadline. In trains, planes and automobiles, he has latched on.”
“The Last Nursing Mommy Tells All,” Teri Robinson
“Before I stopped breast-feeding – after the nine weeks – I would get mastitis three times. I would swallow a small landfill of antibiotics that couldn’t possibly be good for my kid, and spend endless hours massaging, soaking, pumping, and applying ice packs and heating pads to my throbbing breasts. I would bare my chest to the midwife and the gynecologist, the pediatrician and the breast surgeon who finally convinced me that, being literally not built for this, I should quit.”
“Breastfeeding: The Agony and the Ecstasy,” Cathi Hanauer
“When I think back to those days, what I recall most vividly is the enormous amount of rage and frustration I fought to suppress. While trying to maneuver around the guilt and resentment to access the love I knew I had for my daughter, my own potential for abuse was exposed, and to my surprise, I had been engaging in a constant and precarious flirtation with it.”
“Negotiating Violence,” Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
“What no one ever told me and what I have never told anyone is that something drastic occurs with childbirth, and even though a woman may look the same soon afterward, sound the same, laugh at the same jokes, she is not the same. The change is ineffable. It has to do with the power of magnetic attraction. It has to do with the demonstrations of inhuman strength that you read about in the National Enquirer, a woman lifting a car that has rolled on top of her child.”
“Metamorphosis,” Constance Schraft
Reviews
Child of Mine is a resource unlike any other. It offers no instructions about how to care for your child. Rather, it presents tales of survival – experiential, real, straightforward, personal accounts from one mother to another. “Vivid and moving … This collection of essays is as useful a guide to motherhood as the ones that offer diagrams for swaddling and instructions on giving a sponge bath.”
– Rocky Mountain News
“The breadth of experiences shared by these women show no secret formula to motherhood exists … The bond of motherhood is woven throughout the book.”
– The Indianapolis Star
“A useful and reassuring gift … A painfully honest, often lyrical collection.”
– New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Powerful stories … The strength of these essays lies in their honesty and their focus on a variety of experiences, which will validate many women’s feelings of both joy and ambivalence in the early months of motherhood.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Candid narratives that reflect the varying experiences of new mothers. They are distinct, but all share a common thread as each writer expresses her own joys and fears, triumphs and defeats.”
– Chattanooga Free Press
“A refreshing essay collection. For those who find pregnancy books disingenuous and friends with children too knowing, this book offers an alternative community – skeptical, worried, reflective, and grateful. Think of it as you sneak your two-month-old into the Cineplex.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“This collection of accounts, beautifully and movingly written, covers the spectrum of feelings women go through as new mothers. It catapulted me back to the incredible first year of my own motherhood – the happiness, the unbelievable pride, the sense of achievement, the fears and anxieties, all the ambiguous feelings that seem to occur simultaneously during this chapter in a woman’s life.”
– Elizabeth Bing, author of Laughter and Tears: The Complete Guide to the Emotional Life of New Mothers
“A map of motherhood, full of joy, ambivalence and isolation.”
– The Arizona Republic