As I’ve written about before, the idea that really anything about motherhood is definitely universal is, I think, false. Or more nearly, it’s so close to possibly true that one’s inclination is to make it so. Over and over, though, the more you really talk truth with other mothers, the more you realize that for every single feeling you’ve had, some mother out there has experienced a different one.
I went to Boston over the weekend for an event—I spoke, even—to celebrate Brain Child magazine’s tenth anniversary. Brain Child, if you don’t know it, is a literary magazine about motherhood (sometimes fathers contribute, too, FYI). Although the whole universal question wasn’t on my mind per se, again, as happens in a room filled with people talking about and thinking about and asking questions about motherhood, the range of experiences was great and the speakers’ tones and topics were utterly varied, and I left—a lovely day, by the way, a car filled with Western Massachusetts based mothers yapping both directions—mulling that not quite universal aspect of motherhood.
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The day served to remind me, personally, that I don’t spend enough time talking about writing with my writer peers. Sometimes, I think of Facebook as the office water cooler; that’s to say, as a freelance writer and as a blogging writer, I mostly am on my own with my projects, with a little back and forth between some wonderful editor here and there. I don’t really talk about anything writer-y or writers’ career-esque all that often. I work for a regional arts magazine and I am often in close cahoots with a fantastic photographer, Paul Shoul, and that is one of the true pleasures of what is a truly delightful job (in that I get to meet very cool people and learn about them and write about them, and I do so where I live, so people I know read my articles and people I don’t know—including some who live in other parts of the region—read my work, too, and sometimes we meet and that’s oh so cool).
Being one of numerous terrific speakers, I’d been asked to send a short bio. Listening to other writers’ bios being read, I was impressed and interested. Hearing my own, I felt kind of… embarrassed. I wasn’t embarrassed because my publications are particularly lacking. My goodness, Brain Child is one of my very favorite publications, so I really need go no further. And with my little just-turned-one-year-old blog I’m so very proud of, truth be told, I do want people to mention its name (early, often, and ideally, so the listener will remember to go click at the first opportunity). And yet, I find to put myself up or out or wherever a writer puts herself, I am honestly a combination of worried I sound boastful and wishing I had __ publication, too or the book or the whatever. So a note to self: figure this out! Feel good and keep pushing is probably the right conclusion to reach.
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During the event, I got to hear more terrific writers than I can mention here. I was riding in the car with women who wrote two of my favorite books about motherhood—and let me add, as different in experience and tone as you could imagine—Patricia Stacey, whose memoir The Boy Who Loved Windows about her son’s first years at huge risk for autism is so inspiring I have given away many copies and Catherine Newman whose memoir Waiting for Birdy is so engaging and warm and welcoming it’s impossible to read it without wanting to become her best friend. I loved hearing Katherine Ozment’s essay published in Brevity, Things that will make you cry in the first six weeks of your son’s life. I loved listening to Robin Schoenthaler, a cancer doctor, single mother and writer talk about how she discovered writing through the Internet and especially how much she enjoyed learning that she could make people cry (and laugh). Karen Dempsey, Norah Piehl, Tracy Mayor, the list goes on…
In less than two hours, there were tears and peals of laughter again and again, over and over, and seriously, for every joy a sorrow, for every sorrow a glimpse of silver lining, for every silver lining… It was an experience of the not-quite universal—and even more so, an experience that in all of these experiences of motherhood and from all these writers, there is, actually, a universal: the power of our voices.
