INVESTIGATION
I’ve read so many mother books this year. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy and Everything Nothing Someone by Alice Carriere and Sanctuary and The Still Point of the Turning World, for the third time, by Emily Rapp and Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford and After Birth, for the second time, by Elisa Albert and What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo.
To be fair, none of these are really “mother books.” They are about so much more. They are all complex and wonderful and necessary. I recommend them all.
The noticeable part for me, the reader, was the throughline of where mothers and mothering and becoming a mother and being mothered and our mothers intersect with heartbreak.
So many of our stories center on how our mothers influenced us, and for those of us who step into a maternal role: how we can transform the patterns that our mothers delivered to us. We want to understand our own heartbreak and we don’t want to break our kids’ hearts.
Of course mothers in general are tied, all the way through, to heartbreak. Mothers bring humans into air. It living and dying at the exact same time, for someone else, this business of childbirth, this business of raising children. Like one of my good friends wrote to me the morning after my first child was born alive, knowing that two years before I had a pregnancy that ended in stillbirth: This is your heart on the edge of a knife.
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