Notes From Labor of Love: Caroline Grant

I never thought I’d write about my mother.

I’ve always been interested in how family relationships are represented in films and novels—and even wrote a dissertation about the subject—but when my first child was born two years after I earned my PhD, I found myself looking at my young, growing family as a subject. Literary Mama gave me the support and structure for a new writing life as I shifted from academic work to creative nonfiction.

For years, immersed in my own mothering and this vibrant community of literary mothers, I explored cultural representations of motherhood in contemporary movies. I anchored my pieces with anecdotes about my kids, and tried to examine how my family fit—or didn’t—into this conversation about families and motherhood. I wrote to figure out my life.

When I did look away from my own parenting to how I was parented, it was my Dad who came into focus, in a movie column for Literary Mama or a piece about berry picking. I referenced my mother in some of my columns but she never struck me as a subject, which I mean as a compliment to her: I was lucky that she was a dependable background presence to my life, unremarkable as furniture. Until, gradually, she wasn’t. Her cognitive decline frustrated and frightened me. I needed to write about her, both to anchor who she had been for me, and to better understand who she was becoming.

My essay for the Literary Mama anthology, “Black Box,” is about her microwave, which makes a cameo in the first piece I ever published about my mother. That first essay, “Fading,” focused on her morning coffee habit; Mom microwaved her mug with a splash of milk before pouring in the coffee, and then microwaved it again halfway through the cup to get it back to scalding. As a kid, I’d thought blazing hot coffee was a requirement of adult life, but grew up to learn maybe it was just Mom.

What else was just Mom?

I published an essay mentioning the toaster oven and her decreasing ability to operate it. Then I wrote two more essays that used cooking—one about scrambling eggs, one about baking bread—as a way to explore her decline. I found that looking back on our relationship in the kitchen helped give me more structure as I faced her mysterious, confusing slow fade.

I chafe against the stereotype of the aproned mother and daughter, comfortably side by side in the kitchen. I think of our time together in the kitchen as contented, but did we talk? Mom wasn’t one for deep introspection; besides, we were there to get a meal made. She was a practical woman who didn’t fuss over a recipe. So although we didn’t rush, we also didn’t linger.

I spent hours in the kitchen, standing at her elbow or sitting on a stool, watching her, and now I am spending hours more, writing about that time.

I cannot get my mother back, but I hope the woman I create on the page will be as vivid to readers as her memory still is to me.

~~~

Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology was released on January 26th, 2024. Edited by Amanda Jaros, this collaboration with Small Harbor Publishing celebrates Literary Mama‘s twenty years of publishing the best writing for and by mothers. We asked the contributors, all Literary Mama staffers from across the years, to share thoughts about their writing process, their inspiration, or their work in the book. We’ll share those musings here on the Literary Mama blog.

Read Caroline’s essay by purchasing Labor of Love, now available on Amazon.