Stills From the Life of a Writing Mother: A Review of Mothersalt
When I became a mother, after wanting to be one for a very long time, I expected to transform into mother: a role that would bring peace, wholeness, and joy to my life. But what I couldn’t predict was the unsteadiness of getting to know my new self. Before giving birth, writing had given me a way to understand my past self. But for more than a year after giving birth to my daughter, I didn’t write anything other than small notes on my phone. That isn’t to say I didn’t have a desire to sit and write more, but I didn’t understand who I was as a writer who was also a mother. I pondered pieces of writing for weeks on end, the ideas alive in my mind but dead on the page. It was at this time that I encountered Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s poetry collection Mothersalt, and found solace in knowing that other writer mothers experienced the same struggle.
When Malhotra journeyed into motherhood, she sought to define her new identity as a mother, and the shift that occurred in her writer identity. In her poem “On Form,” she writes, “Tell me about the form mothering takes on the page. Why it accumulates so—fragments, notes. A / slow, painstaking assemblage.” Her “lines began to grow less regular, less sculpted” and she “began to build strange, unkempt houses for [her] words to live in.” Throughout this collection her poems appear to meander as the poet ponders on the page, drawing inspiration from ancient Japanese prose poetry. “I felt like I could write with a lot of assurance in this prose-like way because . . . I felt really strongly a part of that lineage knowing that I was raising daughters and adding to that mother line,” she said in an interview with Bay City News. This poetic style invites the reader to walk with Malhotra through giving birth into mothering, accompanying her on her journey to discover who she is in motherhood.
Malhotra organizes Mothersalt into three main parts and an introductory poem: Part One examines pregnancy and preparing for birth, Part Two centers on labor and birth, and Part Three contains the lived experience of motherhood. Three poems share the title “Mothersalt” and five share the title “Dear Body—.” Her “Mothersalt” poems are ruminations on pregnancy and birth, in which she describes the physical and emotional aspects of her own pregnancies and births. “Increasingly, I lose my breath, caught in the close room of pregnancy,” she writes. The “Dear Body—” poems center on the shared experience of motherhood, beginning with Malhotra’s own mother. In the first “Dear Body—,” Malhotra sees her mother’s experience in her own: “The shape of her story, which I lived in but had no words for, though I wore it like a second skin.” The second “Dear Body—” begins, “What if inside this story is another story, just as inside every mother is a daughter—and a daughter / inside her, and still another, nested forms reaching through time.” The final “Dear Body—” conjures kindred “mothers who come from war, who have lost homes and countries. / Mothers who gave birth in the desert behind barbed wire. Who stood in line for milk and put their / babies in empty washbasins to save them from dust storms. / In this other world, they crowd into the room, holding me as I break apart.”
Malhotra ties her poetry to photography—literally and figuratively—throughout this collection. In her opening poem, she ponders “Where Poems Come From,” and uses one frame to tell a full story: “The point is that I saw you seeing / a creature for the first time—paused motionless / on the bridge, bits of debris shifting underfoot.” She captures not just her daughter seeing a duck, but how “language dawns slowly, then all at once,” similar to how her daughter learns to call things by their names, “closing the space between the world / you live in and your name for it.” In her last poem, “Instax: A New Lyric,” she creates a tangible connection to photography through her daughter’s Instax camera. “Her fingers find the shutter button, and the / world explodes in a flash.” Malhotra embodies the spirit of a photographer showing her reader a photo album of her mother life.
Malhotra fills her collection with vivid imagery of laboring and giving birth. In her second “Mothersalt,” her “muscles lit with fire” as she threw her “big-bellied challenge to the sky” during labor. In the third “Dear Body—,” she captures the never-ending care of nursing: “Midday blurred to evening, followed by an endless, milk-lit dawn.” And “Sheltering” captures moments of her daughters as they grow: “Your bodies—so beloved, sometimes / I mistake one for the other—climb into bed beside me.”
Several poems in Mothersalt feature Malhotra’s search to define herself, both in and out of motherhood. “On Collapse” explores how it feels when someone strips you of your identity and your lived experience. She weaves words from Jamaican-American author Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (a meditation on racial tension in America) into this poem, joining a larger conversation on what it means to live in America and be confronted by others who question your belonging and attempt to negate the space you fill. The poem that follows “On Collapse” (titled “On Filling the Space”) is a meditation on finding a home in the space you fill—“In my own mother’s body, I was a fullness”—then, capturing the nourishing feeling of a meal shared with a friend: “What comes to us empty goes away full.” She ends with: “I come from fullness. I am fat with joy.” These poems leave a lasting impression, even more so when read together.
For all mothers, but especially new mothers, Malhotra offers a collection of poetry to turn to when life seems askew and all sense of self has fundamentally changed after birth. When I think back on the birth of my daughter and the many changes she and I have experienced, it all comes back to me in snapshots, just like Malhotra’s images in Mothersalt. I remember, too, the questions I held in my heart in those early days, especially, how does my writer self belong in motherhood? Mothersalt illustrates this collage of memory, while seeking steady ground in the sea of writing and motherhood. How I would have clung to this poetry collection if I had been able to read it again and again in the deep hours of the morning nursing my daughter, finding new wisdom or comfort or beauty each time.