So I'll share with you here the words of Elise at After School Snack by way of the always wonderful Bitch Ph.D.:
- Vaginas are scary!
Giving birth: it's a traumatic process, long and drawn out, often resulting in scars and emotional trauma that can make it difficult to be interested in sexual intimacy for some time after the child is born.
Not for the woman, mind you. For the man.
Or at least that's the situation according to Dr. Keith Ablow, in an article he wrote for the NY Times titled "A Perilous Journey from Delivery Room to Bedroom." Where many of us might be tempted to focus on the difficulty of, say, the expectant mother squeezing something the size of a watermelon out of a hole the size of a dime, Dr. Ablow wants to remind us that there's another person suffering in that delivery room: the male partner forced to view his woman's cooter in a way he never wanted to see it.
I'm not going to the writing conference I was thinking about in the spring. I'm not sure about this. It's expensive but I was hoping the investment would be worth it to get me all inspired and stuff. But then I was thinking that what with buying a new house and all the homeschooling activities coming up and then the high holy days and then the regular old American and Christian holidays, I'd be lucky to get any extra time to write before the New Year. So I came to the conclusion that ambition and inspiration is not something I need more of right now since what ambition and inspiration I have is actually a terrible burden that makes me feel put-upon and bitter.
But I'll admit to a good bit of yearning.
All of this is to lead into this month's Your Commentary at Literary Mama. Please weigh in over there!
The State published the following article on Literary Mama on the Sunday edition's front page. We have the wonderful Claudia Brinson to thank!
From the article:
This is a new generation coming to terms with the demands of motherhood, says Cassie Premo Steele, 38. A mother and stepmother, Steele edited nonfiction for Literary Mama, teaches at Midlands Technical College and most recently published the chapbook “Ruin.”
Steele says women of the baby boomer generation believed working was required for liberation. She adds, “I think we’re having different lives than our mothers thought we would have.”
Among those differences is the opportunity to write about motherhood, without an office or office hours, and hear back from thousands of mothers in other time zones, in other lands.
“This is the first generation to gain such a strong voice — in depth, breadth and loudness,” Hudock says. “This is the first generation online.”
That, and Hudock’s 3½-year-old daughter Sarah, create a sense of mission.
“The writers I work with have never read Adrienne Rich’s ‘Of Woman Born’ or Jane Lazarre’s “The Mother Knot.’ They think they are the first. But I can trace mother-writing back to Anne Bradstreet, 1650, America’s first poet, a mother of eight children.
“Each generation of mothers has to retell the story. Because, who keeps it alive? Not the publishers, reviewers or literary critics, the professors or librarians. The mother-writers of past generations aren’t passed on.
“My goal is to keep this generation alive and to reclaim previous generations so we don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.
“We want to make it different, so this generation of mothers isn’t forgotten.”
Check the whole article out here.