My First Blog Post
Welcome to my first blog entry. If I write a blog anything like I keep a journal, you’ll be hearing from me in fits and starts, but perhaps I will be more disciplined about writing to others than I am to myself.
Since my book Motherhood Exaggerated was published in February, the most frequent question I am asked is why I wrote it. My immediate response is that I am a writer, that’s what I do. When my then eight-year-old daughter Nadia was diagnosed with a Ewings sarcoma, I recorded my thoughts nearly every day throughout her treatment and in the years that followed until her survival was something I could count on. But that doesn’t completely explain why I wrote a book, which requires an impulse that goes beyond recording events and ruminations.
My second answer to the question is that I am a writer who has felt the craving to hear stories similar to my own. As the late author Reynolds Price wrote in A Whole New Life, his chronicle of his treatment for a spinal cord tumor, “I needed to read some story that paralleled, at whatever distance, my unfolding bafflement—some honest report from a similar war …” I wanted to read a story like that, as well, but I couldn’t find one. Yes, there were stories that were similar. But the ones by mothers or fathers often had a different ending than my own. As beautiful and poignant and necessary as their stories were, they were shaped by grief. The stories about survival were often written by the child, looking back as an adult at what happened. There’s no doubt that Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face was a must-read for me but it was not my story either. So I wrote Motherhood Exaggerated to provide a mirror for others.
But am I really so altruistic that I wrote my book as a gift to others? No. For the past several years, I have volunteered at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan helping homeless mothers write about their lives. Some of their most profound work lets the reader into their lives at a moment when no one can see them. It could be when a special interaction with a child confirms for them that they are good mothers or when they have conquered a negative impulse or experienced a time of despair. It could paint a portrait of what happens in the middle of the night when darkness and the soul have a private conversation, as depicted in the excerpt below of one mother’s poem.
Life problems stress me at 12 am
Wondering who I am
And where I’m going
Am I the right mother for my baby
At 12:30 I realize there are a lot
Of lost souls like me
Constantly worrying
And hurting inside
At 1 am, what I contemplate is should I live
Or die
1:15 I cry for my pain
I cry for the ones who go insane …
There is a scene early in Motherhood Exaggerated depicting a night of pain for Nadia, which I am unable to soothe with my meager stockpile of tricks and drugs. Near dawn, I’m angry. “I want to wake everyone in the house. ‘See, see!’ I want to holler. ‘This is what I have to deal with while all of you are safe in your beds!’” So I wrote Motherhood Exaggerated not just to be a mirror in which you can find yourself—as a mother or father, a daughter or son, a medical professional or a caregiver. It is also an open door; a way for you to see me and others like me.
Enter.
www.motherhoodexaggerated.com
Since my book Motherhood Exaggerated was published in February, the most frequent question I am asked is why I wrote it. My immediate response is that I am a writer, that’s what I do. When my then eight-year-old daughter Nadia was diagnosed with a Ewings sarcoma, I recorded my thoughts nearly every day throughout her treatment and in the years that followed until her survival was something I could count on. But that doesn’t completely explain why I wrote a book, which requires an impulse that goes beyond recording events and ruminations.
My second answer to the question is that I am a writer who has felt the craving to hear stories similar to my own. As the late author Reynolds Price wrote in A Whole New Life, his chronicle of his treatment for a spinal cord tumor, “I needed to read some story that paralleled, at whatever distance, my unfolding bafflement—some honest report from a similar war …” I wanted to read a story like that, as well, but I couldn’t find one. Yes, there were stories that were similar. But the ones by mothers or fathers often had a different ending than my own. As beautiful and poignant and necessary as their stories were, they were shaped by grief. The stories about survival were often written by the child, looking back as an adult at what happened. There’s no doubt that Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face was a must-read for me but it was not my story either. So I wrote Motherhood Exaggerated to provide a mirror for others.
But am I really so altruistic that I wrote my book as a gift to others? No. For the past several years, I have volunteered at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan helping homeless mothers write about their lives. Some of their most profound work lets the reader into their lives at a moment when no one can see them. It could be when a special interaction with a child confirms for them that they are good mothers or when they have conquered a negative impulse or experienced a time of despair. It could paint a portrait of what happens in the middle of the night when darkness and the soul have a private conversation, as depicted in the excerpt below of one mother’s poem.
Life problems stress me at 12 am
Wondering who I am
And where I’m going
Am I the right mother for my baby
At 12:30 I realize there are a lot
Of lost souls like me
Constantly worrying
And hurting inside
At 1 am, what I contemplate is should I live
Or die
1:15 I cry for my pain
I cry for the ones who go insane …
There is a scene early in Motherhood Exaggerated depicting a night of pain for Nadia, which I am unable to soothe with my meager stockpile of tricks and drugs. Near dawn, I’m angry. “I want to wake everyone in the house. ‘See, see!’ I want to holler. ‘This is what I have to deal with while all of you are safe in your beds!’” So I wrote Motherhood Exaggerated not just to be a mirror in which you can find yourself—as a mother or father, a daughter or son, a medical professional or a caregiver. It is also an open door; a way for you to see me and others like me.
Enter.
www.motherhoodexaggerated.com
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