Although we’re long past the Victorian era, motherhood is still romanticized and idealized in much of the popular culture, and the myth that it’s a “sweet vocation,” and never anything more fraught or complicated, has persisted to a frustrating degree. Michelle Ross’s unflinching and unsparing new book offers a welcome corrective to this myth, tearing it apart and devouring it, story by perceptive story. The honesty of the tales is as refreshing as it is unsettling.
Within this myth are many sub-myths—among them, that mothers can and must protect their children at all times and maintain complete control over their behavior, and that love flows reliably and ceaselessly in both directions, from mother to child and back again, for as long as they both shall live. Ross pushes back against these notions with force.
In “Play It Safe,” one mother, Jessie, struggles to figure out how much she can—or should—try to protect her daughter, Ellen, from the dangers and other difficulties of the world. As the story begins, this dilemma is especially resonant for Jessie, who had recently fought off a sexual predator while out for a run.
At a school-sponsored carnival, many of the parents Jessie encounters come across as both patronizing and presumptive in response to the attack against her. When the carnival’s planner tells Jessie, “I guess you’ll probably move your running indoors now,” Jessie, a hater of treadmills, balks at this assumption. And she wonders why someone who seems so concerned about safety is holding the carnival in the “freaking desert,” with its rattlesnakes, scorpions, and tarantulas, putting the attendees (and, more particularly, Ellen) at risk.
Despite her concerns about Ellen’s safety, Jessie has tried to avoid becoming overly protective of her daughter. Over her husband’s objections, she told Ellen, without going into “excruciating detail,” about her assault, insisting that “Ellen needed to know what kind of world she lived in.” This impulse comes, in part, out of a concern that Ellen tends “to accept malfeasance so coolly,” not standing up for herself or what she wants in the face of pushy friends or bullies, who at times seem indistinguishable. In a powerful scene at the end of the story, Jessie must face this tendency of Ellen’s directly, and to her frustration, she must also face the limits over what she can do to change her daughter’s behavior, or to protect her from the cruelties of the world.
In some of the more unsettling stories in the collection, Ross explores fraught relationships between mothers and their children, countering the myth of unconditional love.
“Life Cycle of an Ungrateful Daughter” traces a mother-daughter relationship from the time of the daughter’s gestation to her twenty-sixth year. Speaking of her daughter at the gestation stage, the narrator observes, “She was hope … She was your impetus to free yourself from your own mother for good,” her own mother having been cruel and neglectful.
But as the years pass, and as the daughter becomes her own person—someone quite different from, and often contrary to, her mother—this hopefulness gives way to other, darker emotions. At one point, the narrator observes, “[Y]ou felt sometimes that she was judging you, sizing you up, that she found you utterly disappointing.” And later, she thinks, “What you could say for certain was your daughter was not the ideal companion you’d hoped for, far from it.” Because of what she sees as her daughter’s cruelties and shortcomings, she sometimes relishes the power that she has over her. And at times she also relishes her daughter’s suffering, seeing it as Karma.
Although these observations and feelings are disturbing, they also acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: that in nearly every relationship–even the most loving ones (and not just those between parents and children)–there can be feelings of doubt, regret, and worse. To see these emotions portrayed with such frankness is refreshing, especially given the all-too-common pressures for an impossibility: perfection in motherhood, and unceasing motherly love. (Possible consequences of falling short against these ideals: shaming and guilt, outcomes that in these stories evoke complicated emotions in mothers and, rightfully, anger.)
Shapeshifting also explores the reality that mothers can be alienated not only from their children but also from their partners. In several stories, a big reason for this alienation is that the mothers’ (male) partners don’t come close to doing their share of the parenting, yet they remain blind to, or in denial of, this dereliction of duty.
One darkly funny example of this dereliction plays out in the story “After Pangaea,” in which the main character, Tia, has been camping out for days–along with scores of other parents–across from the school with first-come, first-served admissions, a school that she and her husband, Pete, want to get their older child, Joey, into. Still nursing an infant, Tia has no ready access to food or a toilet, or to a means of keeping herself and the baby clean.
What does Pete do to help Tia and to take care of Joey in her absence? The bare minimum, and only at Tia’s urging. In the greatest of ironies, Pete is a daddy blogger who has become something of “a parenting messiah” (a.k.a., “The Daddy Sage”), dispensing wisdom in the living rooms of the many parents who have become his followers. On the way to achieving this status, he seems to have become as charmed with himself as his followers have, and less and less responsible as an actual parent. Even worse, his “expert” status makes him feel justified in criticizing Tia’s parenting.
With biting humor, Ross gets us to feel Tia’s frustrations. And through all of Tia’s exchanges with Pete, we get a sense of how imbalances in parental efforts might challenge, or topple, a marriage. Or they could suggest that a solid foundation for the union—a foundation including mutual respect and compassion—might never have existed in the first place.
One deeply moving story, “Galactagogues,” continues a thread running through the collection: the limits on mothers’ control over anything connected to parenting. In this case, it’s the loss of a child. The main character, Carla, has come to the meeting place of her prenatal care group for her six-week post-partum checkup, the setting serving as one more painful reminder of the loss of her baby through stillbirth. As Carla waits for the midwife, she can hear the joyous voices of the women from her group. When they speak of breast-feeding, Carla considers how she’s still producing milk for her late daughter, Millie. At one point, she thinks:
This is just one of the searingly beautiful passages in the story. And certain observations, like this one, feel relevant in a larger sense:
Such revision, whether for good or for ill, feels almost inevitable, regardless of the mother or of the narrative she’s been constructing.
Regarding the collection as a whole, I’m grateful that it features so many varied narratives of motherhood, narratives that belong to the mothers alone, and that counter the myths that have so long been a source of judgment, stress, and worse.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Stories about parenting, or about motherhood in particular
￭ Stories about families and family conflicts
￭ Dystopian fiction
