Motherhood is not always appreciated, as writers reveal. Photo / 123rf
Motherhood is not always appreciated, as writers reveal. Photo / 123rf
Mother’s Day looms, with its floral tributes and celebration brunches, its gifts and gratitude. But a number of recent books are more concerned with the perils, shortcomings and regrets of motherhood – not to mention the ingratitude of children of all ages.
In Anne Tiernan’s novel The Last Days of Joy (Moa Press), three adult siblings gather around their mother’s hospital bed, waiting for Joy to die. They had difficult childhoods, as Frances, the oldest, recalls: “One too many and her mother would tip from a childlike playfulness into a jaded scornfulness. You never knew until it was too late which drunk you’d get”. Sinead, the youngest, jokes: “I blame Mommy Dearest”. She’s published a sensational novel – a “barely disguised autobiography” – called Motherload.
Frances remembers Joy, in “a rare moment of drunken insight”, telling her: “No one is ever the mother they think they’ll be”. All Frances could think at the time was, “And no one gets the mother they think they deserve”. Joy herself has been traumatised by her own mother back in Ireland.
The Last Days of Joy is a moving novel about struggling mothers and fathers who leave. But the idea of fatherless children, Frances reflects, “doesn’t contain the same poignancy” as motherless. “Mothers are so integral to everything, happiness or unhappiness. They are to adore. Or to blame. No middle ground.”
In Sue McCauley’s new novel, Landed (Bateman), Briar is newly widowed, trying to deal with the financial mess her husband left, and the troubles of her adult children. “Might it be her fault,” Briar wonders, “that two of her children are, by misfortune or design, jobless adults?” They also have secrets, revealed in the course of the novel: one will have dire consequences for Briar. The story has more than one sins-of-the-mother strand, exploring how difficult it is, across generations, to measure up. Briar “has tried – almost always – to be a good mother. But has she been? Does anyone really know what kind of mother or father they are, or were?”
Landed, by Sue McCauley
Many of the poems Past Lives (Te Herenga Waka Press), the debut poetry collection from Leah Dodd, navigate the highs and lows of young motherhood. In Tether, a mother’s life is inseparable from the child’s, both in mundane and surprising ways: “we’re doing it all together! Eating/brown rice porridge, washing/dishes doing laundry.”
The baby is a “little limpet” who will “cry if I leave”, though Dodd admits, “I love the closeness.” The tether of the poem’s title suggests the umbilical cord: “once we were connected/by a vein and two arteries//ever since/we drift”. Soon, the mother knows, “we will be separate creatures”.
Like Aiwa Pooamorn – “I wish they would serve wine/at playgroup/instead of tea”, she laments in her hilarious poem Thai-Chinese stay-at-home mother – Dodd charts the battling impulses of youth and maternal responsibility. In the poem muscle memory she and a friend “are barefoot and dancing to Gwen Stefani on damp carpet”, drinking peach soju; the next morning the “baby wakes up at 7 and I groan back into the world. I make toast. I wash nappies”.
Dodd lauds “the sweet milky smell of brand-new skin,/those pillowy cloud-nine cheeks,/the tiny hands” ( in clucky) but also – in stone fruit – admits the child is treated as a “little prince” whose “rituals are moon-/bound, ceremonial,//he feasts on peaches/, olives, figs,//he is bathed in a shower/resembling a hot spring//then kneaded/with organic oil”.
The children in Emma Hislop’s debut story collection, Ruin (Te Herenga Waka Press), are neither divine nor delightful, because the dark worlds their mothers inhabit are complex, and motherhood itself is precarious. At the age of 38, Naomi – in the story Missing – is anxious about her “geriatric pregnancy” and then tormented when the baby’s whenua is incinerated at the hospital rather than kept for burial as she requested.
Ruin, by Emma Hislop
The story A Safe Place echoes one of the story threads in Megan Nicol Reed’s recent novel One of Those Mothers (Allen & Unwin). A woman named Vivienne cycles with her daughters to school and is accosted at an intersection by a woman in an SUV who shouts, “I hope he gets a life sentence”. The “he” is Vivienne’s husband, Giles, who has been arrested for “downloading images of children” – he’s “ruined us”, Vivienne thinks.
One of Those Mothers by Megan Nicol Reed.
As Reed writes in One of Those Mothers, “we’re only ever as happy as our unhappiest child”. In A Safe Place, Vivienne’s teen daughter, Ines, develops bulimia, but seems to hold her mother responsible for Giles’ crime. “You don’t really understand depression,” Ines says.
Vivienne stews over her failure to protect her girls from public shame.
She’s not alone in that feeling of inadequacy. “Motherhood is all second guessing and guilt,” says Anne Tiernan’s Joy, whose adult children believe she lacks any maternal instinct. But as teenaged Livvy reminds us, one person’s bad mother is another’s adored grandmother. “I liked hanging out with you, Gran,” Livvy tells a comatose Joy. “Remember that time you took me shoplifting when I was eight? It was the best fun I’d ever had.”
