Don’t Kill The Mother

By Samantha Wilde 

In celebration of my fourth pregnancy (!), a little, fierce, no-holding-back piece I've been working on about mothers, fiction and life....

As my daughter writes, "the famole."

Our age may read like a time of crumbling walls of prejudice, women emerging from the rubble of all the political—and conceptual—wars of the past century to dust off their hands, wipe the soot off their faces and claim their share of freedom (or Facebook), but one bias sticks to us like jam left on a toddler’s face: we don’t like our stay-at-home mothers, in fiction or life. Quick, name one esteemed novel about a satisfied stay-at-home mother. Can’t do it? How about giving me the title of one acclaimed book about motherhood that isn’t also about (choose at least one): depression, suicide, kidnapping, mental illness, abduction or drugs? No, take your time. I can wait.

The articles, arguments, books, conversations, and consensus of the past decade seem to conclude that the much over-wrought issue of working versus staying-at-home motherhood has already enjoyed its five minutes in the sunlight of public awareness. That might be true if the country’s literature didn’t fall heavily on the side of the liberated working mother with an intellectual elitism that continues to diminish the contributions of at-home mothers, the vitality of the role and the absolute possibility that feminism and at-home mothering can peacefully, productively coexist.

I have written two novels about motherhood and my second one, I’ll Take What She Has, made some people angry. Of course any person writing about staying-at-home in fiction must endure the disregard of the greater literary community. Nothing could be more boring or less legitimate as a topic—unless the mother kills herself. Scandalously, I wrote a novel about an ambivalent stay-at-home mother who decides to keep staying home and believes she has made the better choice. Also, she lives.

 The progressive, working mothers—feminists, liberals, reinventing modern motherhood with their incredibly hard labor—stand fervently in literature against the folly (ailment?) of a mother's own full-time care of her children. As Judith Newman wrote in her New York Times review of Anne Enright’s memoir about motherhood, Making Babies: “To be fair, writing well about children is tough. You know why? They’re not that interesting. What is interesting is that despite the mind-numbing boredom that constitutes 95 percent of child rearing, we continue to have them.”

It seems that all people of any importance can agree on this matter. Meg Wolitzer’s novel, The Ten Year Nap, received immense critical attention and it did nothing so strongly as point out that only one world matters, only one world exists: the world of business, commerce, economy, government. The world of a mother and child is a dream-state, a state of sleep and unconsciousness. It has no consequence, no redemptive value, no worth. That means the five million at-home mothers in this country are sleep-walking. (And is Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, who launching her working-mommy manifesto Lean In not so long ago, the one to save them from this condition?)

I have angered a few people for asserting, in a comic novel, that an intelligent woman would recommit to staying with her children—and that for some of us this is the best choice. If, in her misery, I had led her to the kitchen stove to turn on the gas, I would have a bestseller on my hands. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening springs to mind (it should, I wrote my English honors thesis on it), but yes, of course, let’s think of Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar and her protagonist whose road to healing from mental illness begins with a prescription for a diaphragm.

The prevailing assumption that the tedium of childcare drives us insane only stands to reason if we lie to ourselves and say no other profession regularly assaults us with boredom. Then what of filing? Committee meetings? Government paper work?! Is it impossible that an intelligent person could enjoy spending time with children, could find it interesting, creative, rich? Unfortunately, women do write books about the compelling work of mothering, but you have to cross a political divide to get there. The literature coming out of the Right, from conservative, religious women, encompasses a few of these ideas. But no one is paying attention to that stuff. The important novels, past and present, literary and commercial, love to kill (or at least torture) the mother. The happy at-home mother is a source of disparagement and embarrassment—she has wasted her good education on a long, useless and dreary nap.

I’ve been wasting my Smith and Yale education for years on my children, not to mention the waste of writing comedies about motherhood (during nap times, no less). The only people who agree with my personal (I-don’t-care-what-anyone-else-does) stance on motherhood, cancel out my vote on every important political issue. This pro-choice, wildly liberal, feminist enjoyed Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s In Praise of Stay-At-Home Moms, and I’m the only one I know who read it.

Here’s what I think true intelligence delivers: the ability to hold together seemingly oppositional elements and see how brilliantly they can co-exist. Black and white is for the dogs. There isn’t only one world that matters. Happiness in at-homeness is not a form of stupidity (and that still doesn’t mean everyone needs to do it). Good books can have living mothers. Good books can even have joyful mothers. In literature and in life, you don’t need to kill the mother just because she’s the one folding laundry and changing diapers and singing lullabies. Make her happy. Let her live. I dare you.

Samantha Wilde is the at-home mother of three children, the author of This Little Mommy Stayed Home and I'll Take What She Has, an ordained minister and the author of Strange Gifts,a book about love and faith, a Kripalu yoga teacher, creator of the You Are Loved online radio show, the daughter of bestselling novelist Nancy Thayer, and clearly, quite often, a very tired (but happy) person. She loves to be liked on Facebook.

Ch-ch-ch-changes by Jenny Gardiner

I guess our theme is "transitions" which is fitting for my life right now because it's riddled with transitions, the biggest being my recently becoming an empty-nester. Now, I long dreaded this particular transition; I had no idea how I could morph from living a life that has been all about my kids to releasing control for the most part and letting them take over the reins and having no one for whom to be accountable on a daily basis. But it's a part of life and we all have to go through it, like it or not. I've tried to tell myself this will result in plenty of freedom in my life, though I guess with that comes the potential to simply become unmoored, adrift while you try to figure out how to redefine your life.

Perhaps it was a little more dramatic how this unfolded, because not only did we send our youngest off to college a few weeks ago, but a week before that we sent our middle one off to study abroad in Europe, and then just last week bade farewell to my oldest (who graduated from college in May), who left for a year-long adventure in which he'll be off-the-grid, incommunicado, in remote stretches of the world. So not only are my kids gone, but two of them are essentially unreachable, and sadly I can't just pick up the phone and call, or text or email just to touch base with them. I've sort of gone from immersion in my kids' lives to extrication, in one fell swoop.

As an avowed extrovert, I have been wholly unprepared for this screeching halt to my world of a perpetual buzz of activity. As a mom first, writer second, I learned long ago to pick up and go with my laptop and write when I could, be it soccer practice or pick-up line at school or roadtrips to soccer matches in different cities. At home I worked at my desk in the middle of all the activity, with homework and friends of the kids dropping by and the television blaring. I became used to operating in "putting out fires" mode, jumping from one urgent, pressing situation with the kids to another, squeezing my writing in when I could. On top of that, I never quite realized how much of my social life centered around being at school-related functions, where you're around parents of kids your kids' ages. When all of a sudden you don't have that outlet, you realize you have no one with whom to hang. My close friends either have school-aged kids so are still very involved with their kids at home, or have already departed for the post-empty nest world and aren't even around. Or else they're now stuck in jobs and are completely unavailable. I'm thinking I might soon have to chat up the mailman just to have companionship by day. I was thrilled to have had all the kids (and their respective girlfriends/boyfriends) around much of the summer, so this meant we had much going on, with little free time for writing. Truth be told my life hasn't allowed for much writing at all since last winter, what with my youngest child's travel sports schedule and trekking all over the east coast while deciding colleges for her, and in between that road-tripping to my other kids' schools for various awards and events.

So all of a sudden this week I was faced with the deafening silence of being virtually alone. Now, I'm not completely alone because I have this menagerie of demanding pets (two dogs, a parrot, a bunny and a cat). So it's not silent like a normal person's house, but rather silent with a lot of barking, squawking, and still a huge mess even though no one is leaving a trail of dirty dishes and laundry about the place. Instead it's mounds of feather, fur and animal poo, thanks. To top it off my husband went out of town. And I was left to be alone with myself. And I hated it. It's sad because I vividly recall times when my children were young when I probably would have paid to be alone at a Greyhound bus station for a few hours, I craved solitude so much. But now that I've found solitude, I don't particularly like it, and I am anxious to be around people. Which doesn't happen as easily when your office is the desk in your kitchen and the only ones around with whom to converse have fur or feathers. I fear I'll turn into a cat lady.The unfortunate hallmark of my weekend alone were bouts with unbidden eruptions of tears and a half-hearted pity party thrown in for good measure. I guess it's a good thing I didn't resort to watching home videos of my children as babies. I blubbered enough without that, thanks.
As if this week during which loneliness seemed to be defining my life wasn't bad enough, with my husband away I decided to have the dogs sleep with me in the bedroom. Nothing worse than being home alone with a dog barking in the middle of the night downstairs to unnerve you. So I figured I'd keep them nearby to avoid that. So instead, at 3 a.m. Saturday night, I was awoken abruptly by the unmistakable sound of a dog throwing up. I hastened the dog into the bathroom to keep the mess at bay, but she followed me back to the room only for me to realize she was about to have a seizure. Knowing what that would entail, I scooped up my nearly 80-pound dog and lugged her, completely deadweight but for the onset of her seizure starting to overtake her, and laid her on the bathroom floor, trying to settle her in as best I could. Carrying her resulted in my being accidentally scraped up by her claws, and yeah, covered in dog wee wee, which I'd been trying to avoid by sticking her in the bathroom in the first place. Just as her seizure finally ended, I heard my other dog start to throw up. Seriously. So while I have tried to tell myself "Hey, the upside of the empty nest is no kids to wake me in the middle of the night!", the reality is I have animals who somehow can't help but do so. I was up cleaning the dogs and their mess till after 5 a.m. and couldn't fall asleep till 7 a.m. Yep, my first week as an empty-nester left me too tired to even do the one thing I now have all sorts of time to do: write.

I'm hoping week two of my transition will result in a much more productive week. The stress of the past month of preparing my kids for their various departures left me in a state of inertia, just sort of treading water as I clear my head and try to get a grip on my new life.

I know at some point I will relish this newfound "freedom" (bound though I am with these crazy pets, one of whom is a talking parrot who has repeated "Goodnight, I love you" ten times in the past fifteen minutes). I'll be happy to be able to settle down and focus on my writing again, once I actually learn how to focus with no distractions (wish me luck). In the meantime, I guess I just have to ride this wave, see where it takes me, expect to feel sad and at odds with myself and allow myself to be unmoored, adrift in a new world I don't quite know how to navigate. This happens when life is in transition.



  Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Where the Heart Is

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

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No, Really. It's Fiction.

by Hank Phillippi Ryan
My mother was so mad at me. She was reading Face Time, the second Charlotte McNally mystery. She called me, nothing unusual. But it was her tone that was unusual. “I’m reading—your book,” she said. Her tone was more like: “I’m holding—a bug.”

Mom is terrific. She’s almost 80, and is absolutely beautiful. An artist, a reader, a wonderful intellect. (She doesn’t have a computer, so she’s not reading this.) I’m her oldest daughter, and any psychologist will tell you that can cause some friction.

So anyway. I had hoped to chat with her a bit, prepare her, before she started Face Time. But, things happened and life got in the way. Why is Mom mad? She thinks I’ve “used her for art.”

It’s true: Charlie McNally’s mother in Face Time is a bit—persnickety. She’s opinionated. She thinks, for instance, that Charlotte might want to give up her very successful 20-year TV career to marry some tycoon and become a tycoon wife.

No matter that Charlie is happy with the personal life (pretty happy, at least, for a 46-year-old single woman who is married to her job) and happy with her professional life (pretty happy, at least, even though she’s fearful she’s going to be replaced by someone younger). Mom also thinks Charlotte (she refuses to call her Charlie, saying, “nicknames are for stuffed animals and men who play sports”) might want to visit the plastic surgeon for some face time of her own.

Now Mrs. McNally is not, I repeat, not, my mother. But in these days of controversy over whether books that are purported to be memoirs are actually true—I find myself fighting to convince her that my book is truly fiction.

It’s ALL MADE UP, I tell her. Yes, Charlie has a Mom, and I have a Mom. But I’m not Charlie and she’s not you.

Silence on the other end of the phone.

“Of course it’s me, dear,” she finally says. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

I’ve worked in television for thirty years. And yes, I watched Mary Tyler Moore, and did indeed recognize some Ted Baxter qualities in a few anchor people (men AND women) I’ve known over he years. And Murphy Brown, too. The smart but aging investigative reporter Murphy could be Charlie McNally’s older sister. But those characters, though based on qualities real people in newsrooms may have, are fictional. Made up.

Digression: You know those ‘something meets something’ descriptions authors are supposed to come up with for their books? (Like you’re supposed to say: “My book is about a crime-fighting but fashionable deep-sea fishergirl—sort of Jaws meets The Devil Wears Prada.”) Because of the success of the secret-code element of The Da Vinci Code, I wanted to characterize Prime Time, my first Charlie book, as “Dan Brown meets Murphy Brown.” A bigwig in the publishing biz told me that was no good--because one knows who Murphy Brown is. Oh. Dear.

Anyway. Then there’s the husband situation. My dear Jonathan, a criminal defense and civil rights attorney, is nothing like, looks nothing like, behaves nothing like, the possible love interests in the books. Still. He can’t bear to read the “mushy parts” and can’t bear to hear bout what Charlie does or even thinks about, when it comes to men.

IT’S ALL MADE UP, I tell him. There have to be men involved, this is romantic suspense. But Charlie’s men are not you.

Silence. “Of course they are,” he says. “Or even worse, old boyfriends. And I don’t want to read about that.”

And finally, there’s the “Is Charlie McNally you” question. And I must admit that one stops me. Yes, Charlie’s an investigative reporter for a Boston TV station. And I am, too. And it would be silly to waste thirty years of TV experience—that’s what (I hope) make Charlie’s life seem authentic. But she’s younger. More confident. And fictional. And yes, okay, things that happen to Charlie have happened to me--in a—way. But she can say things I could never say, reveal things I could never reveal, and I must say, I’ve never actually been in the life-threateningly frightening situations Charlie has. Chased? Yes. Threatened? Yes. Punched? Almost. That stopped when I said to my photographer: “make sure you’re rolling on this.”

It’s hard for the bad guys to get away with it if their assault is caught on camera.

And, like Charlie does in AIR TIME, I've wired myself with a hidden camera, put on a disguise, and gone undercover. All to get a good story. But my TV stories, of course, are true.

Anyway. So I’m wondering, do any of you have a problem with this? Do people “recognize” themselves in your books—and you have to convince them it’s a fictional character they’re recognizing? Would you “use” someone for “art”?

Or if you’re a reader, do you assume fictional characters are real people just put on paper?

And as it turns out—as Mom will find out if she’ll just get to the end of the book—Face Time is not only a mystery, and a romance, but kind of a love story between mothers and daughters. My editor said she had tears in her eyes at the end. One reviewer told me she cried. (Which is odd, you have to admit, in a murder mystery.)

Yes, as authors we take elements of reality. Then we polish, and tweak, and exaggerate, and accessorize. But the fun is making up something completely new. Creating a new world. New characters and new relationships. And it’s ALL MADE UP.

Okay, Mom?

Do you have a contentious relationship with your mother? (or daughter?) Do you understand each other?

PRIZES!--A copy of the TIME book of your choice to four lucky commenters!
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Award-winning investigative reporter Hank Phillippi Ryan is on the air at Boston's NBC affiliate. Her work has resulted in new laws, people sent to prison, homes removed from foreclosure, and millions of dollars in restitution. Along with her 26 EMMYs, Hank’s won dozens of other journalism honors. She's been a radio reporter, a legislative aide in the United States Senate and an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone Magazine working with Hunter S. Thompson.

Her first mystery, the best-selling PRIME TIME, won the Agatha for Best First Novel. It was also was a double RITA nominee for Best First Book and Best Romantic Suspense Novel, and a Reviewers' Choice Award Winner. FACE TIME and AIR TIME are IMBA bestsellers, and AIR TIME was nominated for the AGATHA Award for Best Novel of 2009 and is now an Anthony Nominee for Best Paperback Original. (Of AIR TIME, Sue Grafton says: "This is first-class entertainment.") DRIVE TIME, February 2010 from MIRA Books, just earned a starred review from Library Journal saying it “puts Ryan in a league with Lisa Scottoline.”

Hank's short story "On The House" won the AGATHA for Best Short Story of 2009, and is now an Anthony nominee and a Macavity nominee.

Hank is on the New England Board of Sisters in Crime and the national board of Mystery Writers of America. Her website is http://www.hankphillippiryan.com/

She and her husband, a criminal defense and civil rights attorney, live near Boston.