June 21, 2006

Growing appeal for ‘mommy lit’

By Vickie Aldous
Ashland Daily Tidings

Forget about the glowing, soft-focus images of motherhood celebrated in baby shampoo commercials.

In the past several years, a veritable explosion of books about mothering has offered a new set of images. These books take an honest look at the frustrating, funny, bittersweet, exhausting, wonderful, infuriating and joyous job of being a mom.

Of course, there were precursors to the new mommy literature. Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” could even be seen as one example, since it challenged the myth that all was bliss among the stay-at-home moms of suburbia.

The current wave of books on mothering began in the 1990s and is still growing, proof of a strong market for nonfiction about what it’s really like to be a mom. Examples include Ayun Halliday’s “The Big Rumpus: A Mother’s Tale from the Trenches,” Anne Lamott’s “Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year” and Muffy Mead-Ferro’s “Confessions of a Slacker Mom.” Even Jenny McCarthy of MTV fame has written “Baby Laughs: The Naked Truth About the First Year of Mommyhood.”

You would think motherhood wouldn’t be such a mystery, since we’ve all been kids and watched our mothers at close range for so many years. But there’s a big difference between being the little person who’s catered to, and being the person who has to do the catering around the clock, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

I’m ashamed to admit that before I became a mom, I thought my own mother was a little lazy, even though she did all the housework, had a part-time job and took care of me and my sister alone while my dad’s job took him out of town Monday through Friday.

When I went on maternity leave just before my first child’s birth, I naively planned to make serious inroads on learning Spanish during those three months.

Little did I know that averaging three hours of sleep a night for months would temporarily destroy my short-term memory, leading me at one point to throw out batch after batch of cornbread batter because I couldn’t even remember what ingredients I had put in the bowl.

When my son finally did start to sleep for more than an hour at a time and I found time to read again, I wolfed down books about this new job I had begun despite a complete lack of experience and credentials.

I read Andrea Buchanan’s book “Mother Shock” in a single day. Buchanan likens the life-changing experience of becoming a mother to the culture shock people experience when they land in a foreign country where everything about daily life is different. She is also editor of the anthology “It’s a Boy” and the follow-up, “It’s a Girl,” as well as the magazine Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined.

“There’s a new sensibility that motherhood can be the stuff of literature,” said Jennifer Margulis, a Tidings columnist, creative nonfiction editor for Literary Mama magazine and contributor to It’s A Girl.

Margulis said that in the past, motherhood has been equated with a loss of intelligence, or at least interest in intellectual issues. But she added that the new books have elevated the discourse about being a mom.

An older generation of parenting books were basically how-to books that frequently offered conflicting advice. But the range of books and anthologized essays available now show that each child and each parent has a different temperament and experience, according to Ashland writer Emily Alexander Strong.

“Something resonates in the stories. It helps me laugh when I feel like screaming,” she said. “Being a mother can be a really isolating job. It’s a way to connect.” Women can feel like something is wrong with them or their children when they see other, apparently composed mothers with well-behaved children in public.

But reading about what goes on behind the scenes can help, according to writer Gabrielle Smith-Dluha.

“You can think, ‘They have it together and I don’t. What’s wrong with us?’ But you realize, ‘We’re not monsters in our house. We’re just trying to do the best we can,’” she said.

With many moms working and ferrying kids around to more activities than ever, it’s hard to find time to meet with a group of other mothers and talk. The new books help create a sense of community, Smith-Dluha said.

“Nothing is done communally around kitchens — or the fire.We need that. We need the stories and feedback from other mothers who are going through the same experience,” she added. “We’re hungry for that group of women.”

Staff writer Vickie Aldous can be reached at 479-8199 or vlaldous@yahoo.com.