Woman No. 17, It. Goes. So. Fast. and Writing the Complex Balance of Motherhood

Is any identity more fraught with social expectation than motherhood? Our culture is as filled with images of gooey angelic perfection as it is with bitch queens who betray their children. My generation has put a special spin on the topic, doubling down on mothers who are aware of this duality and embrace the messy darkness (see Revolutionary Mothering and Nightbitch for a spectrum of how this is handled). There’s a freedom to talk about how hard it is to be a mother that humanizes the idols we’ve created, even if we’re not ready to let our own mothers off the pedestals yet. This week I read two books in the space of 24 hours that dove into this charged topic in ways that stretched and comforted me: Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki and It. Goes. So. Fast. by Mary Louise Kelly.

Woman No. 17 and Being the Mess You are Fighting

No one embraces and embodies the complexity better than Edan Lepucki, and Woman No. 17 delves deeper and with more nuance into the mother-child relationship than anything I’ve read in a long time. Motherhood is an obsession for Lepucki. From You’re Not Yet Like Me to California and Mothers Before, everything I’ve read of hers engages deeply with this topic from a wide variety of angles.

In Woman No. 17, Lepucki introduces a range of characters who are struggling with maternal bonds. Lady is a mom of a newly adult son and a toddler, both of whom she adores and both of whom she can’t get away from fast enough. Her own mother is only seen in retrospect, a woman so toxic Lady cut her out of her life except for a brief period of need during which Lady’s mother paid Lady’s lover (and father of her eldest son) to disappear. Lady hires a nanny, S, to care for her youngest while she writes a book that is supposed to be about her eldest son but is instead about her mother. S is a young artist who has decided to pose for the foreseeable future as a character similar to her own alcoholic mother while she explores various angles of motherhood through a myriad of artistic media.

“In those moments, I lost myself, forever and hallelujah, and it was like I was stepping back into the womb, tunneling farther away from that even, to before my mom had anyone but herself to fail.” Edan Lepucki – Woman No. 17

What got me about this book is how well Lepucki portrayed the duality of her characters’ desires. Lady wants to be with the husband she kicked out, while a part of her still craves being the person she was all those years ago with her ex. She’s fiercely protective of the normality of her disabled son and also looking for someone to blame for his disability. S wants to find herself in art by being literally anyone else. The list goes on.

“The thing Lady didn’t get, or the thing she’d forgotten, was that being a child was painful too. She was so wrapped up in losing Seth, in the treacheries of him growing up, that she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be the one on the other side. The burden of that. Sure, Seth had left her womb and never returned, but he was the one who had to do the leaving.” Edan Lepucki – Woman No. 17

What Lepucki captures here the torture of of thinking you should be one thing, living another, and not being sure of what you actually want in any of it. It’s a formula that works for any cultural expectation, but it’s especially charged (at least for me) when it comes to motherhood. For a variety of reasons, I don’t have the relationship I want with my mother (and it’s not an accident I was reading this book on her birthday). For a variety of reasons, I don’t see that changing. I am, however, actively working on my relationship with my son, and books like Woman No. 17 give me something to actively ping my own desires, actions, and expectations against, and I found hints of healing in the dysfunction because motherhood IS messy. Our expectations ARE unreasonable. And parenting IS hard. Sometimes just seeing the truth of that complexity makes it all easier to bear.

Read the book for your own messy parental relationships or just to experience a masterful portrayal of human ambiguity. There’s so much in here I did not describe. You’ll love it.

It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs

I first heard of Mary Louise Kelly’s It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs on the radio, duh, as NPR is often playing in my home and she is the much loved host of All Things Considered. I remember laughing at her anecdote about the school nurse calling her when she was on the tarmac in Iraq, insisting that she come and get her son. I remember also relating to the deep push-pull that inhabited her interview (and this book) between living for your children and living for yourself. That sounds selfish to me when I type it, and maybe that’s part of the problem as I’ve been trying for all these years to figure out how to be myself and a mother and an artist and a wife and sometimes Corporate Barbie. It’s a lot. It’s so much less, even, than Kelly is doing, and I loved having this insight into her world and her thought process.

“It is both a relief and a little disconcerting to realize that your kids are going to turn out the way they turn out, no matter what you do.” – Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.

The premise of the book is that she is trying to double down on being a present parent during the last year her eldest son will be at home. Her family seems loving, her children well supported, and still there is this tension of how impossible it is to get everything you want. I laughed with Kelly throughout this book, and I wept with her as well. Mostly I felt held, supported, guided, by a woman of my generation who is a bit farther down the parenting line than I am.

“This pain is the cracking of the walls as the room grows.” – Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.

It’s been a summer of wrestling around here where my son has been at home for three, camp-free weeks so far and I’m on a bit of a career hiatus while also doing freelance work that could take up most of my time. Each time I’ve been turned down for a job in the past few months (and in this market, I’ve been lucky to have as many interviews as I have), I’ve known that I’m lucky to get to spend that much extra time with him this summer, perhaps the last that he’ll awake with joy, ready to play Legos and “Let’s Make a Movie” in his bed (where we voice play everything from the ideation through the test screening and release of what’s sure to be Marvel’s next blockbuster). I love it.

And also I’ve stopped doing things that I used to do to take care of myself. Instead of the thirty minutes of yoga and Harper’s I used to allow myself in the middle of the day, I pack in one more round of edits so my mind can be free for play when I leave my office. But of course my mind isn’t free, because I allow myself no transitions and I’m simply tired when I get to him. I know better, but it’s hard to find the balance that lets me get done what I need to get done, take care of myself, and soak up every blessed minute of that sweet boy that I can right now. Kelly’s voice was like a balm to me and I was grateful to have saved this book for this time.

“Which choice would you be able to defend to a child? Which choice will allow your eighty-year-old self to sleep at night?” – Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.

I’d love to hear more about the complexities you’re navigating, whether in writing or in life, and what’s keeping you going (books or otherwise). Please leave a comment if you have a story or a book rec you want to share.

If you want to explore the complexity of parenting, pick up a copy of Woman No. 17 or It. Goes. So. Fast. from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.