Literary Mama Blog

"Best of" Editor's blogs

Parting From LM Columns Editor, Alissa McElreath's blog, World Of One Thousand Different Things

There's a beautiful, old cemetery I pass every day on my way in and out of work. It's sprawling, and green, and dotted with the mottled gray and, now and again, sharp white, of the tombstones and graveside monuments. It has that hunched-over beautiful, sad, and eerie quality older cemeteries have--none of that sterile quality of the newer modern and always well-tended ones. Tucked under a drooping bush by the end of the fence closest to the road is a stone angel. You can only see her when you hit a certain curve in the road, and only then for a few seconds. She peeks out from under the branches, hands folded delicately, head bowed towards the dead before her.

This morning I looked for the angel, as I always do, then my car whizzed past, on and up towards the entrance to school. To my right suddenly, directly across the street from the cemetery and the angel and past a corner where prostitutes and drug dealers hang out as early as 5:00 p.m. on a weekday, I passed a large, leafy tree. In the fork of its lowest two, thick branches sat a woman. The image would have been picturesque: a young woman in a floral skirt, barefoot, wild curly hair blowing in the chilly morning air. It could have been picturesque, only it wasn't. Her face turned to me as I passed by--a face much older than her years, and her eyes were vacant and drugged. Her hair was wild because it was unwashed and uncombed, her feet bare because she didn't have any shoes, her skirt torn, her ankles tattoed with scabs.

I wondered if she knew about that angel across from her; the one separated by a chain link face, the one with her back turned, hands folded, praying for the dead.

Best Of......editor's blogging

Nicole O'Donnell blogs about driving with her family and a pony...and being tailgated by a "hog" at Subartic Mama.

Open Adoption Support

Hi all--
I wanted to announce the (second) launch of Open Adoption Support, a social networking site and resource site for families and individuals interested in or living open adoptions.

The site is for all triad members including those who are in closed adoptions but support openess, those who are in reunion, and those whose adoptions aren't as open as they wish. There is also room for those who are in international adoptions with some birth/first family contact.

The site has forums, live chat, user submitted links lists and newsfeeds related to open adoption. Users are encouraged to submit content but lurkers are welcome.

I created the site because over and over again I've heard adoption professionals say that what families really need is post-adoption support. I know from living our own open adoption (our daughter came to us three years ago and we maintain ongoing face-to-face contact with her first mom) that it's hard to find folks who share our values about openess and so getting advice and feedback can be challenging. I hope that this site will help us all find each other.

If you or someone you know would benefit from the site, please share the url with them: OpenAdoptionSupport.com!

It's fall and we're back!

It's the fall. The air is growing crisp, the days are growing shorter and it's the perfect time to pour yourself a nice strong cup of tea, draw the curtains and curl up with Literary Mama. This summer saw the relaunch of our e-zine, the launch of the Mama Sez column where LM editors share what's on their minds, and an Op-Ed page. We've opened up the comments feature on a number of our columns so that Literary Mama site can continue to generate conversation.

The blog is undergoing a revamp, as well. We will be focusing on the issues of the day such as the so-called mommy wars, the frustrations with the mainstream media's presentation of mothering (or should I call it Yummy Mummying) but we will also continue to help promote some of the voices of mothers who are not typically given a platform in the mainsteam media. Each Monday I will introduce you to a different blog. Initially I will be starting with the LM editors and then I will be working my way through some of the unsung corners of the blogosphere. We will also be introducing the voices of some special guest bloggers over time.

As always, we welcome your comments. Or, if you are shy to see your name in lights, you can always send an email to tomama@tomama.com. Just use LM blog in your subject line so that my spam-filter won't mistake you for someone peddling a cure for ED.

Round up the usual conflicts

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!

Alli, revisited

Update: from Ariel Gore's blog, the coroner reports Allison suffered a fatal seizure caused by Wellbutrin.

------

I just wanted to highlight a comment from one of the posts below on Allison Crews. It comes from Alli's partner, Julie, who writes:

[Alli's] cause of death has not been determined. I am the one responsible for the inaccurate statement that she committed suicide. I never meant for people to think she did it intentionally, it was just the only word I had for what I immediately thought had happened, that she had accidentally killed herself. I am Julie, Alli's partner. I posted under extreme distress, as I was one of two people who discovered Alli's body in my home. I didn't mean to set off a tidal wave of assumptions, but I obviously wasn't the picture of clarity or lucidity at that moment (or any of the rest of them since then, really.) Alli will always be loved, missed, and remembered.

A website has been set up for friends to write their memories of Allison for her son, Cade, here.

Alas, I have no time

I promised Andi I would be very helpful with this blog and then suddenly my work blew up and I am actually having to do something to earn my living. So I am waiting for my childcare situation to go from theoretical to practical (my little sister will be coming over and helping out) and trying to hit most of my deadlines.

In short, no time for Literary Mama blogging. Rats.

But here is this. It's furniture made from old books, which -- depending on the book -- might be a good use for them.

Me, I'm having book issues. We have a smallish house and like most of you reading this, many many books. We have shifted from vertical to horizontal on our shelves to take advantage of the extra height but there are still three or four boxes (and two or three grocery bags) of unshelved books in our basement. And there are books under the table that I use as a nightstand next to my bed. And my son's bookshelves are literally overflowing. And I have large stacks of random books on various flat surfaces.But what brought us to crisis is that my mom said I need to get her book collection out of her house or off they go to charity. All the Pearl S. Buck books she's been collecting since she was in her early 20s, all of the historical fiction that she read through my elementary school years, and all of the lush coffee table books that graced our living room during my growing up. I. Must. Have. Them.

So I sent my husband to buy brackets and 2x4s and we're shelving up one wall of our basement playroom. I think this will make a dent although we're sure to have at least one extra box at the end of it all and of course we are always getting more books.

I asked my mom when a person quits feeling greedy about books and she said for her it was when her kids were grown because she wanted us to have a library but now she doesn't need one as much. This makes sense to me. Plus since we're homeschoolers, I feel almost frantic about making sure we never lose anything that might be useful later on.

Our new blogger officially a Literary Mama

Just got word that Stephany went into labor on Tuesday morning: Luke David was born yesterday, a month before his official due date, at 9:02 a.m., and weighed in at 4 pounds 13 ounces. Congratulations to the proud parents! And Stephany -- welcome to mother land!

Welcome

Welcome to the Literary Mama blog. For the time being, I’ll be your guide -- even though I guess I don’t yet strictly qualify as one of the "literary mamas" around here. Not just yet. My due date isn’t for another five weeks. But when that day does (finally, finally) come, I feel pretty sure that I’ll fit right in. I’ve always tried to read my way through everything and this pregnancy stuff has been no exception.

When I got pregnant for the first time -- it must have been around two years ago now, although I’ve lost track -- the first thing I did was rush out and buy a stack of books. I bought the standards, of course, like What to Expect When You’re Expecting, The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy, The Mayo Clinic Complete Book of Pregnancy and Baby’s First Year, and child development books, certainly, like The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About The Mind and What’s Going On In There: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life. I read thought-provoking, often disturbing socio-political commentary like Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions and Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood but also more personal offerings like Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, Lauren Slater’s Love Works Like This, and Andi Buchanan’s Mother Shock. I devoured the excellent magazine Brain, Child. And when I miscarried that first time, I went straight back to the bookstore for a copy of Toni Weschler’s Taking Charge of Your Fertility. That particular book, with its implicit, crazy, laughable promise that fertility is something that can be controlled, saw me through three more miscarriages. Still. Books, even when they fell short, or at least fell short in my case, helped to buoy me up. So did, especially, the writing of women I discovered online, voices encountered on sites like this one and on blogs like Chez Miscarriage.

It was only when I’d started researching adoption -- at the time I’d just made my way through Karin Evans’ The Lost Daughters of China, Kay Ann Johnson’s Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son, and Nancy McCabe’s Meeting Sophie, A Memoir of Adoption -- that I found out I was pregnant again. As this particular pregnancy progressed successfully from first trimester to second to third, I reflected on the time of the miscarriages. Often made exhausted, weepy, and slow-witted by pregnancy hormones, I tried to write, fumblingly, about what had happened then and about what was happening now. And as I tried to pin things down in words -- these fragile little floppy, half-winged arrangements of sound and letters not big enough, not powerful enough to carry the emotions and experiences I want them to describe -- I believed, with relief, that I’d never again go through such dramatic swings from euphoria to despair and back again.

I was wrong. A month ago my husband’s mother died suddenly and unexpectedly in her sleep. She was only 59 years old. I have never seen a more terrible sight than David’s face as he shouted "What!" and "No!" into the telephone that had woken us from sleep at 4:30 in the morning, as he hung up and crumpled back onto the bed. I hate that horrible black telephone now. Every time I see it I want to smash it to bits and bury them under the melting snow and the rotting leaves in the backyard. The fifteen minute drive that morning from our house to David’s parents’ place was the longest drive of our lives -- and we’ve driven clear across the country from British Columbia to Nova Scotia with an old, sick cat wailing in the front seat between us.

The day after the funeral, tired of spending almost a week cooped up inside the airless, empty house receiving mourners, David, his father, and I found ourselves standing fuzzy-headed and bleary-eyed in a bookstore. We went first to the shelves of books that are supposed to help you deal with death. We stared at the spines of On Death and Dying and I Wasn’t Ready to Say Good-Bye. Then we went to the shelves of books that are supposed to help you deal with new life. We stared at the spines of What to Expect the First Year, Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, and Maternal Desire.

David’s father burst into tears. "She was so excited about the baby," he said. It’s true. She was. And somehow -- impossibly but also certainly, of course -- through all the grief and the worry and the anger, we still are. Of course we are. But I know better now, I think, this time, than to believe that the worst is over, that things will get easier. The worst isn’t necessarily over, things won’t necessarily get easier, and all those books full of all those words won’t necessarily help. They won’t necessarily help – but, for me at least, they are necessary.