On my newfound trekker, newfound confidence, and the mystery of defensive mothering

Oh, if I could go back seven months, what a lot of things I'd have to say to the me I was then. I would urge that shattered, messed up girl to, "Get thee to a lactation consultant" a week sooner than I actually did, and advocate better for myself and baby whilst in the hospital, and promise myself that life as we knew it was not gone, gone, gone forever more.

I would also tell myself to run out and buy a Baby Trekker. I know why we didn't in the first place-- I thought Baby Bjorn was the end in baby carriage, but that $150 was too pricey. Since then, I've learned that you get your money's worth, and that Bjorn's not where it's at anyway. We've had the Trekker for about three weeks now, and I've used it every day (it's snowsuit friendly!), whether to haul Harriet around the neighbourhood, or to cook dinner with her happily strapped to my back (and this has improved our quality of life more than I can ever describe).

If I could go back about six months, I'd tell myself to START PUTTING THE BABY TO BED EARLY. That she doesn't have "a fussy period between 7:00 and bedtime", but that she's screaming for us to put her to bed then. Of course, I wouldn't have believed myself then, and even once we'd figured it out, it took another six weeks to learn how to actually get it done. This, like everything, was knowledge we had to come to on our own. And most of motherhood is like that, I've found, and it seems to be for my friends as well, which is why all my well-meaning, hard-earned advice is really quite useless to them. But even knowing that we have it in us to do so, to figure it out, I mean, is certainly something worth pointing out.

Even more useful than my Trekker, I think, the best piece of baby equipment I've acquired lately is confidence. I had reservations with Naomi Stadlen's book, but she was right about this: "If [the new mother] 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." Though it actually was the bookshelves of literature that showed me I could go my own way, mostly due to the contradictory advice by "authorities" in each and every volume. (Oh, and I also read Dreambabies, which made it glaringly obvious that baby expertise is bunk.)

Solid food was the turning point though. I have three baby food cookbooks and they're all reputable, and each is good in its own way, but they agree on nothing. When to start solids, what solids to start on, and when/how to introduce other foods, and on and on. It was good, actually, because I found that whenever I wanted to feed the baby something, at least one of the books would give me permission to do so. So I decided to throw all the rules out the window, and as teaching Harriet to enjoy food as much as I have the power to do so is important to me, I decided we would make up our own rules. As we've no history of food allergies in our families, and Harriet is healthy, we opted not to systematize her eating. We've fed her whatever we've taken a fancy to feeding her, without rhyme or reason, including blueberries, strawberries, fish, chicken, toast, cheese, beans, chickpeas, smoothies, squash, broccoli, spinach, spaghetti, and cadbury's chocolate, and she's devoured it all.

Okay, I lied about the chocolate. But the point is that my instincts told me that this was the best way to feed our baby, what made the most sense, and so I tried it and we're all still alive. And it was liberating to know that the baby experts could be defied-- I really had no idea that was even allowed. That as a mother, there could be something I knew about my child and our family that an entire panel of baby experts didn't. And we can go onward from there.

What has surprised me, however, is that confidence hasn't done much to reduce my defensive-mothering. You know, feeling the need to reassert oneself whenever someone makes different choices that you do. How not going back to work, for example, makes me feel like a knob, and moms going back to work feel threatened that I'm not, and we keep having to explain ourselves to the other, in fitful circles that take us nowhere.

It's not just working vs. not working, of course. It's everything, and this past while I figured it was my own lack of confidence that was making me so defensive. The best advice I've received lately is, "Never be too smug or too despairing, because someone else is doing better and worse than you are." And it was good to keep in mind that any residual smugness was due to probably due to feelings of inadequacy anyway.

Anyway, it's not just inadequacy, inferiority. Even the decisions I feel confident about prompt defensiveness when other mothers do differently, and now not because I'm unsure of myself, but because I'm so damn sure of myself that I'm baffled when you don't see it the way I do. And there's this line we're meant to spout in these sorts of situations, to imply a lack of judgement. We're meant to say, about our choices: "It's what's best for our family", but that's the most sanctimonious load of crap I've ever heard. Some things, yes, like me not going back to work, are best for our family, but other things, the other "choices" we've made: I'd prescribe them to everyone, and that not everyone is lining up for my prescriptions drives me absolutely mad.

Mom-on-mom action continues to fascinate, nonetheless. There are politics like nothing else, like nothing in the world of men, I think. It brings out the best and the worst in me, and I don't think I'm the only one. And I doubt the action is going to be letting up anytime soon.

The very best decision

The very best decision I made all year was to choose Laurie Colwin's A Big Storm Knocked It Over as the first book to read after Harriet was born. Harriet herself and her birth having been that big storm that knocked it (me) over, and did it ever. Like everybody else, I had no clue how hard those days (and endless nights) would be, but somehow I knew that Colwin's lightness and humour would be a kind of balm. That this would be the kind of novel I'd actually get through at a time like that. And what a comfort it would be to read what Colwin wrote about motherhood, and its early days, attesting to the awfulness of it, validating my experience, but with a touch that assured me that things would get better. Underlining the joy that was there, and please, may I quote the passage again that said it all?

"Motherhood is a storm, a seizure: It is like weather. Nights of high wind followed by calm mornings of dense fog or brilliant sunshine that gives way to tropical rain, or blinding snow. Jane Louise and Edie found themselves swept away, cast ashore, washed overboard. It was hard to keep anything straight. The days seemed to congeal like rubber cement, although moments stood out in clearest, starkest brilliance. You might string those together on the charm bracelet of your memory if you could keep your eyes open long enough to remember anything."

Truly, truly, books can save our lives, and make our lives. All the very best for a joyous 2010.

Then the worm turned

"The seventh and eighth grades were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I've ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit. Seventh and eighth grades were a place into which one descended. One descended from the relative safety and wildness and bigness one felt in sixth grade, eleven years old. Then the worm turned, and it was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn't. One was no longer just some kid. One was suddenly a Diane Arbus character. It was springtime, for Hitler, and for Germany."-- Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

Horizontal Parenting

I am very excited about the Parenting Method I have devised, and subsequent book I am going to self-publish about my Parenting Method (via lulu.com). My method is called Horizontal Parenting, and I've been practicing it for about six months now. Its core tenets are the five Ls-- 1) Lie down to breastfeed, 2) Lie down to soothe your crying babe by gently rocking your hips, 3) Lie down to have your baby sleep on your chest (contrary to everything the Back to Sleep people will tell you), 4) Lie down to play with your baby-- a popular game is lying on one's back and throwing a soft ball up to the ceiling again and again. The fun never stops. 5) Take time every day for yoga practice-- but only the savasana pose. (This last tenet doesn't start with L, but that's because it's the exception that proves the rule.)

The jury's still out on the advantages of horizontal parenting on child development, but my child seems to be developing fairly normally (save for her new, disturbing penchant for pinching the fat on my upper arms). For me, however, the advantages are multifold-- I never have a sore back, I get to sleep at night (albeit sometimes uncomfortably on my side), I get to lie on the couch and read or nap frequently throughout the day, and I get many opportunities to breathe in the sweet smell of my baby daughter's head.

As soon as I figure out how to cook dinner from a hammock, then I will really claim to have it all figured out.

All the processes of change

"All the processes of change, imagination, and learning ultimately depend on love. Human caregivers love their babies in a particularly intense and significant way. That love is one of the engines of human change. Parental love isn't just a primitive and primordial instinct, continuous with the nurturing behaviour of other animals (though certainly there are such continuities). Instead, our extended life as parents also plays a deep role in the emergence of the most sophisticated and characteristically human capacities. Our protracted immaturity is possible only because we can rely on the love of the people who take care of us. We can learn from the discoveries of earlier generations because those same loving caregivers invest in teaching us. It isn't just that without mothering humans would lack nurturance, warmth, and emotional security, They would also lack culture, history, morality, science and literature". --from The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik

What Mothers Do

What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen is a very weird book. In one sense, it's actually the most informative book on motherhood I've read yet. It's almost a Scientist in the Crib for moms, decoding their behaviour to show that what goes on all day long is more profound than you'd ever suppose. That all of what a mother might spend her time doing during a day in which she "got nothing done" is full of significance, essential to her child's development and therefore society at large via that next generation.

Stadlen posits that we lack the language to articulate what it is that mothers do. What mothers do badly, of course, we have all kinds of words for (overbearing, possessive, over-involved, negligent, narcissistic, heartless, cold, etc.), but no way to express anything between these two extremes. And it is this lack of vocabulary that undervalues a mother's work, that she has no way to express what she has accomplished at the end of every day.

"People ask mothers: 'Is he sleeping through the night yet?' 'Have you started him on solids yet?' 'Has he got any teeth?' No one seems to ask: 'Have you discovered what comforts him?' Yet the ability to sleep through the night, or to digest solid food or to grow teeth, has little to do with mothering. Babies reach those milestones when they are mature enough, whereas being able to comfort depends on a mother's ability."

In her book, Stadlen points out what mothers' do do. How their worlds are so completely shaken by the birth of their babies, cut off from matrilineal traditions that might have prepared girls for eventual motherhood. But how this "shaking up" opens up the mother to all the knowledge she will have to come by in order to get to know how to take care of her own specific baby. She expresses that to be a mother is to be "constantly interruptible", which mothers begin to take for granted, which outsiders might find obnoxious or unhealthy, which is hard for a while not to resent. What mothers do as "comforters", learning to soothe their babies through trial and error and after a while are able to do it without thinking. Tiredness that is absolutely uncurable. That it's hard, terrible, and wonderful, and changes the way you relate to the world-- to your partners, to your own mothers. Also to one another-- Stadlen does a stunning job at pointing out the competitive and defensive dynamic in mothers' conversations, the cycle of desperate talk which leads to a word of advice, and then mother recounts the reasons that advice won't work which makes her sound more desperate and receive more advice and so it goes...

Stadlen claims to write without agenda, and I could read her book without throwing it out the window because her lack of agenda agreed with mine, but come on: "The literature on crying babies tends to focus on technique. However, responding to a crying baby involves more than technique. Underlying what a mother does is her philosophy of human nature... Her basic choice is either to see her baby as good, in which case she trusts him, or alternatively to see him as the product of evil human nature, or of original sin, which requires her to train him." Parents who insist their children must sleep through the night, suggests Stadlen, are the product of a generation who were sleep-trained themselves so to be inflexible and now are unable to accommodate the basic needs of their young.

Unbelievable! As someone who is just too tired at 3:00 am to do anything but feed the baby whilst sleeping, I eat this stuff up with a spoon, but it's terrible! And perhaps what I get for reading a book by a psychotherapist.

Her chapter on maternal love is also problematic. She cites recent literature challenging notions of maternal love, and new ideas of "maternal ambivalence". Stadlen is troubled by assertions that all women actually experience these feelings, because she hasn't found this in her years of working with new moms. She is troubled further by the idea of "maternal ambivalence" itself, but this (I believe) is because she understands it as women feeling hatred towards their babies. From what I've read on the subject (which is everything I can get my hands on), it's far more complex than that-- rather that whilst loving their babies, women can be amazingly unfulfilled as mothers, or rather not completely fulfilled, and yet the all-consuming nature of motherhood makes other ventures difficult. Also, that spending a day alone and exhausted, hormonally jacked up, being puked on and cried at, is utterly horrible, full stop.

Stadlen seems to think there is no end to what a mother's comfort can provide. She also thinks that babies always cry for a reason, and that these maternally ambivalent women just couldn't get past their own selves to figure out what that reason was and tend to it-- I'm not convinced. Stadlen is right to counter the "bad mother" trend that is too ubiquitous in current writing about motherhood, but I don't think all women are naturals when it comes to mothering. Part of this is because mothering is not valued in our society, as Stadlen sets out in her book and as she seeks to rectify with her explanation of mothers' doings, reclaiming the art of it all.

So it's a shame, because the women who'd probably most benefit from the fascinating and wonderful things she has to say about motherhood will find themselves attacked here.

Not a problem requiring bookshelves

"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

She loves the library

No one takes things personally like a new mom, I've found. Any advice I'm given, I take as a slight: "Oh, she sounds hungry!" I translate as, "You don't have a clue what your baby needs." "Perhaps you'd sleep better if she was out of your room" means, "You suck and you're depriving your baby of the opportunity to develop positive sleep habits." It never ends. Everybody thinks they have the solutions, and I know I have no solutions, so I'm sensitive, you know?

Yesterday, however, my reaction was a bit over the top. I was at the library (picking up my reserved copy of The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems. Which is a titular lie-- apparently I still have to solve them, and she just tells me how to via methods I am far too lazy to implement. My husband says we have no problems anyway and we're doing just fine. [We do practice the EASY method already, by mistake, and it's excellent]. Anyway, today I believe him and I'm returning the book to the library because it's making me crazy) and the baby was squawking in her stroller.

"Oh," said a fellow patron, not supposing who she was speaking to (naturally, as I am no one), "I guess she doesn't like the library."

And I flared up like a rash. "Of course, she likes the library. She loves the library. It's her favourite place to come. We come all the time. She loves books, and text, and print media of all kinds." Poor fellow patron looked frightened. I continued, "She's just sick, bit of a cold. And she's tired. And the sun's been shining in her eyes. It's close to her nap. We've been running errands and she's sick of her stroller, plus, I've been depriving her of the opportunity to develop positive sleep habits. But she loves the library. Loves it, she does."

Patron had disappeared by the time I was finished this tirade. Perhaps she'd slipped out the door while I was in the midst of my passion, and had sought hiding in a locked bathroom cubicle, I don't know. But I am pretty sure she was a candidate for kind stranger most sorry she'd come across me yesterday.

And maybe Harriet just hates Tracy Hogg.

On Mem Fox's Reading Magic

I starting this book thinking it was preaching to the choir. I already knew that reading aloud to my child would point her in positive directions. I've long delighted in picture books, we live in a house full of books, and those of us already literate are reading all the time. We also both love reading to Harriet, because she's a baby, and there's not much else to do with her (because "Pattycakes" gets old quick, and there's only so many times you can play "The Grand Old Duke of York" without being spat up on from up at the top of the hill). As Harriet's library was ready before she was, she's always been well placed to reap the benefits of books, but since reading Mem Fox's Reading Magic, I feel more confident than ever. Which, as a parent, is really quite novel.

Of course, we were on the right track already, but it's always nice to have that underlined. And then to learn even more about how to foster not just literacy, but also a love of books-- Fox teaches the benefits of reading aloud from birth (and not just at bedtime!), how to read aloud effectively, how to make games out of books to enhance the opportunities for learning, why having the child read aloud might stifle a love for reading, and also the three secrets of reading: an engagement with print, with language, and with the world. I also liked her list of twenty books children will love, which is available on her website.

I came away from this book so absolutely inspired, and excited by the opportunity to have a positive effect on my daughter's life (and on our relationship-- Fox mentions the together time of reading, and cuddling together it requires, which is so important to young kids). It also underlined a hunch I've had about being a parent for a while-- that however much we fret and feel guilty and unsure, the most essential things that children require are those we give them without even trying.

Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner

All right, I wasn't planning to blog about this book, because I was reading it for strictly fun, but it turned out to be a fantastic novel worth mentioning. The book is Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner (and three cheers to whoever gets the literary reference in that title!). It was a little bit Tom Perotta's The Abstinence Teacher for suburbia satire, a little bit The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer for a take on the politics of mothering, but it was a thousand times better than both these novels put together. A murder mystery that had me guessing until the very end, amused and intrigued throughout, and reading like a madwoman to uncover whodunit. Her take on the "mommy-wars" manages to be well-considered and hilarious.

My impression of Weiner's work is that it's somewhat formulaic (though I could be wrong-- I've only read one other of her novels and seen a movie of the other) and she has made herself somewhat of a spokeswoman for chicklit (on her own very excellent blog and elsewhere). She is incredibly articulate and great at arguing her cause, though the problem with this is that most of the chicklit she speaks for is not remotely as good as the stuff she writes. Nevertheless, I get the impression from reader reviews that Goodnight Nobody was something of a departure for her, no matter what its cover looks like, and as a lover of good books, I must say Weiner pulls it off with aplomb.

Far enough on the other side...

Though I'm far from out of the woods, I think I'm far enough on the other side to look back with a little perspective. I went through a phase of claiming that no one had warned me how awful the first few weeks of motherhood would be, but that wasn't true-- I'd read Anne Enright's Making Babies, Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work, I'd seen a good friend go through it eight weeks before. It just never registered, there was no context. I have to say now that the best pregnancy/early days book I read of all of them was Diane Flacks' Bear With Me: What They Don't Tell You About Pregnancy and New Motherhood. I'm not sure why I focussed so much on the birth part (and read so many other books on the subject, because birth's going to happen anyway, and you'll have so little to say in choosing how), but the afterward was so absolutely accurate, that I'd be struck by lightening if I claimed one more time that I wasn't warned. Particularly when she says that you should just mark three months off on your calendar and take a seat on the sofa. Though I got off mine more than once, remembering that I didn't have to was tremendously helpful.

Now that baby is here, however, the very best book I've found is 365 Activities You and Your Baby Will Love. Now that my baby can hold things, hold her head up, roll over (!), smile at me and engage with the world, it means a little less, but when she was smaller, this book gave me some insight into how to interact with her. I really had no idea how to do so-- I'd never met a newborn, and imagined she'd be born three months old (if only...). With this book, I began to have some fun with her, gained some confidence in my mothering abilities, and she responded to every activity. The ribbons in particular, long dangling ones hanging from a coat hanger that continue to be one of the most fascinating sights she's ever seen.

Anyway, I got this from the library and then bought myself a copy and have given two as shower gifts since. I'd definitely recommend it, and we do continue to enjoy the ideas they suggest.

Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte (eds.)

First, a note to everyone who now lands here after google searches regarding "maternal ambivalence", particularly those who google "ambivalence about the baby's birth"-- fear not. I am the one who cried on the operating table before my c-section because I'd decided maybe I didn't want a baby afterall, but it really did work out okay in the end, and it will work out for you too. Ambivalence, I like to think, just means you're just considering all sides, and really, you'd be stupid not to.

Anyway, those readers land here because of my post from last spring "On mommy blogs, maternal ambivalence and my worst tendencies", a post in which nothing was resolved and I talked around in confusing circles. Since then, I've come not closer to conclusions, I'm still troubled about both "mommyblogs" and my feelings toward them, and even having become a mommy myself hasn't changed my perspective so much at all.

Perhaps resolution is not the point, however. Mommyblogs contain multitudes, and so to think just one thing about them is sort of limiting, which I'm quite sure about now, having read the excellent collection Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog, edited by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte. A collection of academic essays containing multitudes itself, and reflecting the wide range of responses that mommyblogs prompt. A microcosm, perhaps, of "the mamasphere", with dissenting voices, personal stories and experiences shared, academic discourse in an accessible way, these various points of view in a heteroglossic rabble.

I come away from this collection entirely comfortable with my lack of conclusions, understanding really that it is thinking about these issues that is the point. I'm still not convinced that most mommyblogging is a radical act, but just considering why or why not is important, and that there are many issues at stake here. Stand-out essays including, Jennifer Gilbert's "I Kid You Not: How the Internet Talked Me Out of Traditional Mommyhood", Lisa Ferris' "Kindred Keyboard Connections: How Blogging Helped a Deafblind Mother Find a Living, Breathing Community", Jen Lawrence's "Blog For Rent: How Marketing is Changing Our Mothering Conversations", and "Schadenfreude for Mittelschmerz? Or, Why I Read Infertility Blogs" by May Friedman.

I'd never considered mommyblogging marginalization, or the politics of the mamasphere, the implications of corporate marketing, or-- for a form so built on self-identification-- what it would be read from the perspective of a lesbian mommy in a multiracial family, for example. This is some can of worms.

I see now that whatever my feelings about mommyblogs, to dismiss their importance would be wrong, and that so many bloggers tend to write for themselves and each other, so it doesn't matter much what I think anyway.

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

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

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.

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

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. I suppose we are to make of that what we will.)

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."

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

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

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.