A Collection of Essays

When I gave birth to my daughter, my first child, I received many books on mothering as gifts. Some focused on parenting methods, some were memoir-style retellings of the hijinks common to early parenthood. Others, like Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, spoke to the necessity of a mother’s creative life. Her book offered hope in the retrospective. However, as a new mother, sleepless and deeply depressed, I couldn’t yet appreciate Lindbergh’s metaphoric gifts. She lay on the sand, weary but free of childcare burdens long enough to have her unique powers of observation returned to her. I could relate only to the image of having been flattened against the sand, my creative impulses alternately receding from or subsuming me. 

My collection of essays-in-progress, tentatively titled, Elemental, examines motherhood as a threshold between birth and death, past and present, the essential self and the persona, the elemental and the narrative. It considers motherhood both as a construct and as one of our universe’s most fundamental expressions of itself. The collection is less interested in defining or describing motherhood than in observing and commenting on the liminality of the experience through personal narratives in conversation with folktales, creation myths, literature that includes/excludes mothers, scientific concepts, philosophy, and close observations of the natural world.

The essays frequently respond to the specific challenges of identity experienced by the mother-artist, particularly in relationship to the male creative and to dominant conversations about what (and who) defines Art and how this definition frequently excludes the domestic arts. Built into the architecture of the essays is a structural tension meant to mirror the tensions of the subject matter. The methods of writing analogously mimic quilting, or musical composition, for example, in order to mirror the conflict that many mother-artists feel when caught between the demands of domesticity and a yearning to make art (while acknowledging the creative value of both). A series of connective pieces, each with the evocative name of a sewing stitch that thematically and structurally shapes the essay, form a loose narrative arc which explores the hidden role my mothers – loosely defined – have taken in holding together, often artfully, the lives of their children and others around them, at great creative sacrifice. These essays stitch or hold the book together.

Elemental aims to call into the chasm between the predominant literary and cultural portrayals of mothers and the expansive inner worlds of women, particularly creative women, who have chosen to have children. It aims to be the book I needed to read when I became a mother and to be of benefit to others who find themselves in a similar state.