Ha!

So, I finished a book that I did not assign for class (and no it is not the long, complicated David Grossman novel of which I have managed 15 pages a night before falling alseep, book on head).  Alison was writing something about Ayelet Waldman and I asked to borrow the book Bad Mother (you should know, reader(s) that I never buy books at Amazon and yet I always link these books to Amazon, why is that?).  In 18 chapters Waldman recounts her marriage, her life as a lawyer and a writer, and her children -- but more than all of this she recounts her experience of being a mother and her obsession with being a "bad" mother.  A bad mother is a mother who is not perfect; and while I appreciate Waldman's argument that we are often inundated with images of maternal perfection as the only ideal, I also think that this theme gets old fast.  Waldman clearly wants credit (amusing dinner party credit) for being a bad mom.  And her writing is not sufficiently amusing to maintain that tone, but after chapter 10 or so she calms down.  And what is clear from then on is not that she is a bad mother (although she, like all the rest of us is imperfect) but that she is an anxious mother.  She is anxious about how her moods will impact her children, how her expectations will distort them, how her hopes will stifle them, how her desire to be her own person and continue loving her husband as the number 1 chosen person in her life will bring the whole family down.  Waldman is, in part, in love with her own anxiety.  But she is also honest about that anxiety. 

Yet, she has strange perceptions about the universe and its role in her life, while she does recount in detail how she has worked through decisions about aborting a child with a genetic, trisomy related, pre-natal diagnosis, and dealing with a son's struggles in school and a daughter's delayed speaking and another son's palate issues (and yes, as those who know me will recognize, let me say here:  she has one million children....i.e. more than 2).  In all of these decisions (most notably about Rocketship, the name the family gave the child she aborted) Waldman speaks honestly about where she is coming from.   But then there is an odd (to me) shift to the universe.  She says in a later chapter, after the main Rocketship chapter (which is Ch11), "as blessed as we had always been, here now the universe had dealt us a shitty hand" (166). (And here I should link to Alison again for a blogpost on that very subject.)   And this is the point where her often compelling focus on her own mental moment seemed off.  In the Rocketship chapter, Rocketship is a potential person that Waldman (unlike her husband) does not think she can bring into the world.  But now Waldman seems to be presenting a universe that doles out children like blessings and...curses? bits of shit?  What I liked about the Rocketship chapter was that it was really honest and her self-asborption was palpable.  But now (in the throes of CVS testing for child 4) the universe was saying something.

So if I ever wrote a book about parenting it would be titled: The Universe is Silent. 

And the book was lent with a promise that she has a lot of sex with her husband.  Which she may well have, but other than that bare assertion, there is little sex to be had here.

Litany of failures

Ok -- so I returned the Julia Franck book to the library 3/4 read (and overdue to boot -- a 3$ fine and I did not even like or finish the book).  If someone knows what happens to the boy left in the train staion feel free to fill me in -- but since at p. 279 Helene was not even pregnant with him yet I had to give it the heave ho.  Perhaps it would be a better book were I not so tired.  I exchanged it for David Grossman's new book To the End of the Land.  I suspect it will take more brainpower than I have in the last week of classes; we shall see.

And if you want to follow a funny/exasperating set of posts over the worst children's book in the world (The Giving Tree) then go to Andrew Sullivan's blog: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/  It took a while for my view of this as a dangerous piece of blather about a child getting everything to the detriment of the poor tree comes out in the comments.  And my few readers will, perhaps, be relieved that I shall stay silent about the Giving Tree and Jesus. 

And tomorrow is Passover -- I can post on reading the Haggadah.....

True Journey is Return

Or so says Odo, the founder of the principles on which the planet Anarres is organized in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed.  All I know is that there are three weeks left in the semester and time is flowing like Niagara Falls and I am Sam Patch in a barrel (Upstate NY reference -- will have to seek random [or not , wikipedia] internet link.....here!).  I am currently reading Ursula Le Guin's The Telling, but it is not working for me and I just started the quite dark and grim The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck.  So far so good, not much to say yet.  My class starts reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower this week.  This is hardly even a blog post.....