Motherhood, Disability, and Inheritance: A Review of Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation
Sarah Yahm’s debut novel, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, is a raw and fascinating examination of how disability influences parenting, and, specifically, complicates the already fraught relationship between a mother and a daughter. The novel is surprisingly funny at times, interweaving traditional Jewish rituals through the lives of Yahm’s nonconforming, irreverent, often-cursing main characters. In addition, it focuses on a particularly fraught decision: a mother choosing to leave her family rather than let them watch her suffer and die.
Yahm’s novel begins in New York City in 1974, with Louise Rackoff as a young woman fleeing her mother’s shiva, the traditional Jewish mourning ritual, unable to breathe in a room with other mourners. Louise makes her way to a friend’s dinner party, where she meets Leon Rosenberg, an aspiring therapist. They sleep together that night, but Louise is still reeling from the death of her mother, whom she had helped care for during her slow decline from a rare degenerative disease that affects Ashkenazi Jews.
The next morning, Leon says that it was fun “making love,” and Louise starts a fight over the phrase. She tells him, “You just met me yesterday. You may like me, although from your expression I think you’re reconsidering that. But you definitely don’t love me. Euphemisms are a slippery slope.” So begins a relationship in which Leon and Louise bicker, make up, and bicker again.
The novel, which spans 40 years, follows their courtship, marriage, and the birth of Lydia, their precocious daughter. Yahm expertly describes the conflicted emotions of caring for a newborn; Louise is exhausted and drained. One night she whispers to baby Lydia, “I would kill for you. . . .” But the next morning, Louise dreams of leaving her husband and baby: “She saw herself on an airplane looking out the window at the house as it moved farther and farther away, until Lydia was an indistinguishable speck.” In the first part of the book, Louise doesn’t yet know that she has inherited the unnamed illness her mother had. The reference to the airplane also serves as foreshadowing for Louise’s later decision to leave her family behind rather than burden them with her sickness and death.
More than 15 years after her mother’s death, while Lydia is still a child, Louise learns that doctors can diagnose whether she has the same disease that afflicted her mother. She undergoes the testing and is distraught over the results. She asks herself, Do I want my daughter to watch me suffer and die as I watched my mother? While the ability to diagnose the disease has progressed since Louise’s mother was sick, there’s still not much that can be changed about its progression. Louise knows she will be parenting with a disability that will eventually compromise her control of bodily functions. She continues to be a devoted mother for years until she can no longer bear her family witnessing her decline. With carefully rendered scenes allowing readers a peek inside Louise’s head, Yahm helps readers imagine what they would do in a similar situation. Who wouldn’t want to spare their child pain?
In one scene, Louise is with Paul, her longtime friend, and tells him how she can’t forget the experience of witnessing her own mother’s deterioration. “I can’t put Lydia through it,” she says. “I can’t tell whether I’m being selfish for wanting to die on my own terms, or being selfless for wanting to spare Lydia the smell of my rotting body and my graying vagina.” Paul warns Louise that Lydia will hate her forever. Louise replies, “Yes I know. But better she loses me all at once than piece by piece.”
Yahm, who has a hypermobility disorder, said in Lilith Magazine that she wrote Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation while struggling as a new parent when her own mother was dying from what began as a head injury. Her compassion for her characters’ painful circumstances is evident throughout the novel, along with the tension the genetic disease creates for the entire family. In an interview with The Adroit Journal, Yahm said that her book is “acknowledging the reality of death and disease as parts of life and the communities of care and authenticity and honesty that can emerge out of them . . .”
Louise wants to stay with her family as long as she can but is looking for a sign that it’s time to go. The moment comes when she’s stuck in the bathtub, unable to move her naked body enough to get out, helpless in front of her daughter. Lydia yanks her mother up and tries to get her out of the tub. After that, Louise is determined not to burden her daughter with the same daily trauma Louise experienced in caring for her mother: “She didn’t need any magical signs or mystical ceilings to give her the answer. She just needed to remember her daughter hauling her naked body out of the piss-filled water.”
Yahm’s novel allows its characters’ actions and emotions to sit in complexity. Louise’s decision to leave her family and live the rest of her time with her cousin on a kibbutz in Israel is depicted as simultaneously selfless and selfish. On the plane, Louise can’t help but write notes to Leon filled with all the details about their daughter’s life that only a devoted mother knows: “She found herself writing backwards in time, describing the lunch table Lydia sat at in the middle school cafeteria, the cupcake recipe she liked for her birthday, the spot in her bedroom where she dropped her mildewing towels. She looked out the window briefly as they flew over the Mediterranean and then went back to the page with renewed urgency.” After she’s done writing, she’s left with the pain of her choice: “The pilot turned the seatbelt light on as they made their descent, and Louise felt very, very alone. A solitary human in a solitary body.”
Throughout the novel, Yahm explores the heartbreak of an unbearable situation for each family member. She switches among close third-person narratives for Louise, Lydia, and Leon; the change of perspectives allows readers to empathize with each of the three main characters and witness the different resentments and misunderstandings as they take root and flourish. Leon is stoic until his wife leaves, a move he doesn’t understand and struggles to accept. Lydia’s reaction to her mother’s leaving is a mixture of grief, relief, anger, love, yearning, and, at times, understanding. Louise sends Lydia letters from Israel. While Lydia is angry at her mother, she also has moments where she’s relieved that she didn’t have to witness her mother’s decline. In one scene, a college-age Lydia recalls a vacation they’d had when she was younger, a time when her mother was giggling and being silly. After relishing the memory, Lydia allows “herself to be grateful that she could remember that version of her mother, unsullied by trembling hands and dragging feet.”
Yahm shines in her ability to use imagery to elicit emotion and create connection, such as Lydia’s moment of clarity in the kitchen: “When Louise came in and turned on the lights, Lydia saw both of their startled faces reflected in the kitchen window. She stared at the world revealed in the glass, and for a brief moment it didn’t look strange or menacing, it simply looked like their kitchen.”
Yahm’s novel is laced with humor, particularly the scenes in which Leon and Louise bicker, providing a needed relief from the weightiness of the family’s situation. Louise is portrayed as sardonic and brilliant, almost always ready with a biting comeback. The family jokes in a way that an outsider might find inappropriate, but is well within the norms of Jewish gallows humor. In one scene, Leon, Louise, and a teenage Lydia make each other laugh by coming up with terrible last words a person could say before dying. Louise says she wants her last words to be “‘I took a perfect shit this morning, it was in the shape of a—’ and then I die and you and Leon will be left wondering forever what future my shit foretold.” Lydia laughs “in spite of her adolescent commitment not to find Louise funny.” Yahm said in The Adroit Journal that her book is “elementally Jewish because of its dark sense of humor.” She explained, “Historically oppressed peoples are often the funniest because they can’t control the shitshow that is their lives so they might as well laugh about it. But I also think this type of gallows humor is its own form of ritualistic practice, as if performing pessimism and self-deprecation can protect us from the whims of Hashem and the evil eye and the angel of death.”
Yahm also seems to be reminding readers that even difficult situations can be both terrible and funny, and that laughter through pain is one way to celebrate love and whatever time we have left on earth.