Meaning in Making: A Review of Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Creativity and Motherhood
Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Creativity and Motherhood
Edited by Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee
Book*hug Press, 2022
Buy BookHow do creative mothers balance the responsibilities of motherhood with our call to artistic endeavors? Editors Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee, both authors and mothers, have carefully crafted Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Creativity and Motherhood, an anthology that explores the challenges for twenty mothers making art. In this collection, we witness creative mothers going “beyond clichés and acceptable answers to the question of what motherhood means to creators.”
In the last essay of the collection, novelist and poet Lee Maracle—who passed away before she could title her piece—reflects on the expectations of “good mothers.” Maracle begins, “I would not refer to myself as a ‘good’ anything, particularly not a good mom on paper or otherwise.” She writes that motherly guilt is ingrained. “We do not just carry guilt about not doing enough, we virtually live at the guilt station where the bus waits. We get on board and ride all day under the weight of the guilt we carry.” These two sentences hit hard for me, as they may for many moms. We carry overwhelming to-do lists, the societal scrutiny of our time, words, actions, and sacrifices, and the constant fear of falling short. Maracle shrugs off the ideals: “I pay very little attention to it.”
Author and cartoonist Theresa Wong believes that creative mothers “have a giant load of guilt, which manifests itself in many ways, but almost always comes down to a single question: Will doing this creative work that feeds my soul damage my child somehow?” In her essay, “Tantrum Series,” Wong melds humor with reality. “Part of motherhood is feeling helpless and then sitting with that feeling for…I don’t know…ever, I guess?” She tells of photographing her son mid-tantrum, daily, then turning the pictures into a watercolor series which she posted to her Instagram account. She writes of becoming conflicted as the watercolor series grew, of wondering if her art would harm her son, questioning if her project was actual art or just for social media likes. But then she says, “Or was I depicting something other mothers needed to see in order to feel a little less alone…Was the #tantrumseries an accurate depiction of life as a mom, and therefore an affirmation of sorts?” I’ve never questioned my decision to be a mother. But I have questioned my ability to manage a writer’s life alongside mothering and have struggled with guilt about doing so. Her advice to creative mothers is spot-on: “Keep going.”
“I am mother, wife, Muslim . . .” by editor and educator Amber Riaz, PhD, opens with a right-aligned poem that meditates on the fusion of writer and mother. “I still write, I said, / But now I write only on my heart.” In her essay, Riaz speaks to the spaces she inhabits: mother, wife, Muslim, South Asian/Pakistani, Canadian, writer/poet, academic, PhD candidate/graduate. She details the tensions present in juggling these identities, her persistence over years, and the complicated expectations and sacrifices required. Riaz says, “I grapple with multiple, socially predefined roles that I need to fulfill in order to be deemed successful in every aspect of my life. This means I currently have no mental space for my true passion: writing.” But she concludes that although she has not published the novel she dreamed of writing, she did create magical stories for her children that have become “treasured family lore.” “If I can do that,” she says, “then I also know that motherhood has made it possible for me to become a stronger writer.”
Novelist Heather O’Neill’s personal narrative, “Lite-Brite Times Square,” spans years and details persistence. She tells of parenting her daughter through young, single motherhood. “But part of her having an incredible destiny meant that I had to have one myself,” O’Neill writes. She remembers the years of working on her first novel, often at the public library with her daughter by her side. It’s easy to understand the sentiment of a mother needing a destiny to encourage her child to have one. When my son was born, I realized that I could not advise him to work hard to reach his goals if I wasn’t working hard to attain my childhood dream of being a poet and writer. “It is so hard to balance having a child with doing anything. You have to look for every free moment you can,” says O’Neill. “I didn’t only write that novel in the library. I wrote whenever my daughter was playing or distracted or engaged in something else. I wrote that novel everywhere.” This resonates with me; I write and revise my work everywhere. (I’m writing this book review everywhere–jogging, showering, grocery shopping, driving my son to and from preschool–using my phone as a recording device.)
There is a palpable ache to poet Jónína Kirton’s powerful, cyclical essay “The Turning of the Wheel.” This is one of my favorites from the book. Kirton effectively demonstrates how a creative mother can use writing to communicate pain, circling the reader through difficult memories and thoughts, like a mind caught in loops. “I was going to be a better mother than my mother,” she writes. “Can my son understand the fear that grows in a woman’s belly?” She bares the despair of mistakes and hope of connection with her son, of apologies withheld or summoned, of past domestic abuse. She speaks to her struggle with fibromyalgia, to alcoholism and sobriety, and the cycles of generational trauma, repeating two heartrending lines throughout the piece: “I am afraid his therapist will turn him against me. I am afraid that twenty-four years of sobriety will not be enough.”
Adelle Purdham, author and parent disability advocate, also works through frustration and hope in the essay “The Giving Tree.” She writes with raw vulnerability about myriad moments of misunderstanding between herself and her daughter, who has Down syndrome. Reading her words, we recognize the parent-child tension. We feel Purdham’s guilt over her own grievances. “Mothers are forever getting it wrong,” she writes. I cried through almost the whole piece—for the mother who wrote it, for myself, and for all mothers who understand well the moments of tension, of trying so hard and getting it wrong, or getting it right but still feeling like failure. Purdham clings to her small successes, to her perseverance, as mothers do.
In the vibrant and brilliantly-braided essay “On Strangeness, Swimming, My Mother, and Me,” author Erin Wunker asks, “What does creativity look like when your time is not your own?” Her essay begs us to swim through her musings on creativity and unknowns as she reminisces about her mother’s habit of carving out time from the “blue hours” (as Sylvia Plath called the dark before dawn) to go swimming alone in an ink-black lake. Wunker understands this compulsion after becoming a mother: “Each morning, in the reach for a wakefulness, for the blue hour, I step further into myself.” She writes of experiencing “a kind of uncanny mothering, a keeping company, a silent swimming alongside” her own mother during dark mornings when she seeks solitude for self. This essay is another of my favorites. My own carved-out space for self and writing is the predawn between 3 and 6 a.m., when most people desire to sleep. (Besides, I’m always writing about water, for better or worse.) Wunker resonates for me when she says, “Writing took me out into an inky darkness and left me there to see.”
Poet Meaghan Strimas, in her essay “That Time in Trailer # 289,” says “Motherhood, writing, and suffering: each a lonely business.” This rings true. But in reading the mothers’ words in this anthology, their strengths through struggles, I feel less alone as I strive to nurture both a kind little human and a writing career. Hope glows throughout this collection. Editors Fowles and Lee express that “Good Mom on Paper is grown from the knowledge that mothers are each other’s most valuable resource…” I revisit Good Mom on Paper for the sense of connection with other mother-artists. This book shines like a beacon for mothers in need of validation for their place in the literary and creative arts.