Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the “Experts”

gwen — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Laura Camille Tuley, Jessica Nathanson

Given the sassy title and equally feisty cartoon woman on the cover of this book, I expected a bold, yet playful critique of so-called mothering “experts.” Much to my disappointment, what I encountered within was a collection of essays and research papers that were heavy in academic terminology and short on the fun. This is not a book for the lighthearted reader, but rather for those who seek a more scholarly perspective on issues such as the bodily experience of being pregnant, breastfeeding and its associated politics, and how a “good” mother is defined.

The women who contributed to this book share backgrounds in higher education. Many are professors and hold PhDs and other advanced degrees or positions of relative power and prestige. Taking this into account, it makes sense that their writing is at times overly cerebral in its deconstruction of motherhood. One would have to already be knowledgeable about the mainstream critiques in order to delve into this world of advanced analysis.

Some of the authors’ arguments were not new to me, such as that of breastfeeding. The mainstream media has a history of covering breastfeed-ins as well as studies about the benefits of breast milk. The buck usually stops here, and this is where the in-depth discussions come into use. The authors accurately deconstruct breastfeeding as it relates to the idealized image of a mother and the societal expectations that we are all inevitably caught up in. Breastfeed-ins are great and all, but to have the opportunity to engage in this type of activism also suggests a level of privilege. What about working mothers? What about otherwise marginalized women who have more at risk?

Then there is the whole question of how breastfeeding intersects with feminism. On one hand, women are held to impossible standards of motherhood in which the mother never blows up or grows frustrated and fosters a healthy sense of self in her children, quite possibly at the risk of losing her own self in the process. On the other hand, women have worked tirelessly to achieve even a semblance of equality in the workplace and are taught that they should aspire to anything and everything that they dream for themselves. Both of these paths involve a lot of input from outside sources, or the so-called “experts.” These experts tell women how they should feel, how they should birth their children, and how they should raise their children, yet tend to ignore or disregard the ultimate authorities on the subject—the mothers themselves.

At the core of this book, the authors propose that women can be experts of their own pregnancies and mothering experiences. There are many conflicting and compelling lines of reason behind many of the practices supported by experts, but ultimately the mother’s individual circumstances should be considered. Each woman must be her own mothering expert because, after all, she will be the one living it.

Written by: Shana Mattson, February 23rd 2011

Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Jane Satterfield

Demeter Press

The poet and essayist Jane Satterfield writes a hauntingly discontinuous prose-poem about a sort of exile. To those of us with dual citizenship—or, perhaps, to those for whom home is two places, neither tidily reconcilable with the other—Daughters of Empire speaks poignantly to the longing for connection between past and present, mother and daughter, literary inspiration, and career frustration.

The author here teases us with the possibility of a conventional narrative of exile: what will happen when a woman who spent most of her formative years in the United States becomes pregnant and has a child while being cast aside by a prospective employer and emotionally abandoned by a narcissistic and controlling husband? Will she find in this land of her birth and ancestry an escape from the soul-deadening labor of fixed-term teaching in American institutions, and instead find joy in teaching Larkin and Plath and Heaney and Hughes to students who understand and appreciate the value of being taught by a working poet? Will she find in the geography of her own imagination the spiritual bond to the Brontë sisters that she seeks?

Our relationship to place is similarly discontinuous, and home, whatever that means, is an ongoing negotiation. Satterfield’s narrator is unstuck in time, just as she is unstuck geographically, so we get poetically rich spots of memory: “I stand on Charlotte Brontë’s front steps, thinking I’m going to be sick,” she tells us on the first page—either a vertiginous reaction to this confrontation with her nineteenth-century literary forbearer, or perhaps a bit of first-trimester nausea. And then suddenly it’s several years earlier, and she’s a different sort of exile, not quite fitting in to this group of students or that literary community brought together in American college towns. And then she’s a punk, a Johnny Rotten, but with much more ambivalent feelings towards Queen and country.

And then she’s in Corby, a “piss hole in the dead heart of England” where she was born, traveling with her mother through a reconstruction of her own ancestry and her mother’s shared dual sense of place. But then, heartbreakingly, she’s starving emotionally and perhaps physically as a mother estranged from her husband, whose Fulbright Exchange, in the mid-1990s, was in part responsible for this year in England which serves as a potent but unstable center of this narrative.

Because of the evocative power of her memory and the clarity of her language, she draws the reader willingly into this vortex. And yet, she resists closure. Does she find career fulfillment? Can she bridge the imaginative/historical gaps and construct a satisfactory home? Can she free herself from this dreadful relationship? The memoir asks instead that we participate in her desires, in her lyrical remembrance, in her evocative moments that shuttle back and forth through time, woven together by her search for identity, for her discovery of home.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 27th 2010