Motherhood in the Multiverse: A Review of The Possibilities
Speculative fiction is an ideal genre for exploring themes of motherhood: many of the stories are weird, otherworldly, frightening—just like being a mother.
As a fan of speculative fiction, I wish more stories paired the genre and topic. It provides an excellent lens for viewing and interpreting the world around us, as Sarah Johnson LaBarbera eloquently presented in her review of The Women Could Fly. Not only can we use speculative fiction to interpret what is going on around us, as Sarah outlines, but to process the emotions and thoughts within us.
In The Possibilities, Yael Goldstein-Love uses a multiverse to explore postpartum depression and the “what if” moments that plague motherhood. The story opens with Hannah giving birth to her son, Jack. It is a difficult birth, but he lives. However, Hannah has a frightening vision that he did not survive. Eight months later, the vision still haunts her. And on the same day her husband Adam says he is leaving her, Jack disappears.
Usually when a child goes missing in a story, I’m out. Kids disappear in real life, and I prefer to escape reality when I read. Knowing The Possibilities would have an explanation that couldn’t actually happen made continuing with the story feel safe. This safety is a key reason speculative fiction is a welcoming method to deal with some unpleasant, real-world emotions.
In the story, Hannah is seeing a therapist, Dr. Goodman, who explained her diagnosis of “adjustment disorder, postpartum onset,” as “an insurance-friendly way of saying I was having a normal, human, difficult time in response to a difficult situation.” Giving birth is tough enough—adding a terrifying vision on top of it is even worse.
Unable to shake the memory of what she saw at Jack’s birth, Hannah cannot bring herself to leave her son for an hour to go to therapy on her own, much less hire childcare so she can return to work as a writer. She tells Dr. Goodman the memory comes with a “car-swerve” feeling because there is no simple yes or no answer to whether it actually happened.
Instead it seemed, in those moments, that the way things could have gone had some lingering reality, some awful stickiness that clung now to the moments carrying you away from when you might have crashed, but didn’t.
Or maybe, instead, it was as though what could have been was right there beside you for a while, separated by the thinnest of membranes, a shadow reality, a mirror reality, but still a kind of real. This sense, for as long as it lasted, could kind of fuck you up. That was the car-swerve feeling.
Mothers—especially mama writers with overactive imaginations, like Hannah—are all too familiar with this car-swerve feeling in the many “what if” moments.
Goldstein-Love uses these moments to splinter off alternate timelines, creating a multiverse that Hannah must traverse. Once Hannah pieces together her ability to switch between the different versions of herself, she learns she is running out of time in all timelines to save her Jack.
As Hannah goes to different timelines, she meets different Adams. In some, she recognizes her husband as he used to be pre-Jack and wonders why her Adam became so rigid and rule-bound in her reality. She realizes his rules for all things baby-related are his response to the terror of almost losing Jack at birth. He is trying to protect Jack. I appreciated Goldstein-Love including a different coping mechanism, because people deal with trauma and stress in various ways—healthy or not.
When considering Adam’s behavior, Hannah wonders if her own response is the cause of Jack disappearing.
. . . what had I ever found to help me through the terror? An impossible solution. To protect Jack with my perfect love and presence at all times. An idealized mother, constant and unreal. No one could live up to that. I had failed to contain my terror, and it had turned into an ambivalence so unwieldy that reality couldn’t contain it either.
Most women I’ve talked to haven’t felt like they live up to being an ideal mother. And trying to be perfect exacerbates any shred of self-doubt, angst, or depression. Working through these feelings along with Hannah is cathartic for those who have shared them and insightful for those who perhaps have not struggled with them. One of Hannah’s mommy group friends, Ash, shares her thoughts about idealized motherhood:
It’s all a lose-lose anyway, isn’t it? If you’re not all gooey maternal devotion then you’re a cold and unnatural bitch. And, if you are all gooey, then soon enough you’ll be called out for your smothering failure to separate. Motherhood gets idealized, mothers get shit on. That’s how it’s always been and probably how it’s always going to be.
At the climax of the story, Hannah faces a major decision about what kind of mother she will be—ideal, selfish, somewhere in between—that will affect many Hannahs and Jacks. And it is gut-wrenching to read. I found myself playing through the scenario wondering what I would do in that situation and being comforted by knowing I was safe from ever having to make that decision.
Throughout the story, Goldstein-Love maintains a well-paced clip while helping readers navigate through the multiple realities with Hannah. The first-person point of view draws in the reader, allowing them to feel Hannah’s emotions more intensely; I found myself holding my breath in anxiety with her at a few points in the story. When I went to prepare for this review, I noticed I had stopped taking notes for the last third of the book because I was so engrossed.
One aspect I have enjoyed about my involvement with Literary Mama is getting to read books in genres that normally wouldn’t interest me. In expanding what I read, I have found it not only makes me a better reader and writer, it provides a new opportunity to examine and process my own life through a different lens.
For our readers who do not usually venture into speculative fiction, I encourage you to give it a try. Being a mother is hard. Having additional tools at our disposal to help us process what we are going through makes it better.