Review by Annamaria Formichella
After twenty years of publishing Literary Mama, a publication dedicated to writing for and by mothers, current and past staff members created a space to share their own stories in Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology. What strikes the reader most powerfully in this volume is the honesty with which this collection explores motherhood in all of its complexity. Thirty different writers, representing various ages, backgrounds, and family histories, express their truth in essays, stories, and poems. In a serendipitous coincidence, I found myself with this book in hand on Mother’s Day, riding the highs and lows of the authors as they sought to reconcile the often stressful but ultimately transcendent aspects of being a mother.
In a range of voices and styles, the mothers in this volume confront head-on the emotional and intellectual overload that can accompany motherhood. Jenny Bartoy, in her essay “Fog of Discomfort,” describes how the personal and political can create overlapping burdens when she writes, “Work and chores pile up, stress creeps in from outside too—climate change and inequality and the ever-encroaching patriarchy. My brain is full. Teetering on the edge of overwhelm, always” (70). Echoing this sense of losing one’s ability to think in the chaos of motherhood, Amanda K. Jaros writes in “Flood,” “That noise pouring out of the creature I loved most in the world drilled tiny holes in my heart. It caused a fog to slide over my brain. I couldn’t rationalize or function properly. Coupled with the lack of sleep that caring for an infant entailed, my understanding of myself was crumbling” (88). This loss of self will resonate for many readers who have lived through the transition from independent woman to interconnected (and at times eclipsed) mother.
What moved me most were the writers’ honest interrogations of their insecurities and self-doubt when it came to their roles as mothers. Carrie Vittitoe doesn’t shy away from vulnerability in “The Things This Mother Carries” when she admits, “It is true that I don’t regret a single moment of my time as mother, and it is also true that I regret many things about becoming and being a mother” (103). It’s hard not to question ourselves, living in a culture that over-determines and idealizes motherhood. Brianna Avenia-Tapper invokes impossible standards in her essay about the pandemic, “Exposed,” noting that her mother had been “’the mother,’ that iconic, mythical impossibility: the caregiver who does not need care. The individual who depends on no one. Before COVID, I was that mother. I believed I should not need care” (107). Carrie Vittitoe acknowledges a similar idealization of the mother in “The Things This Mother Carries”: “I still often don’t know what to do with the complexity of motherhood, perhaps because early on, I bought so completely into the idea of motherhood being only good things that make a person happy, content, and complete” (103).
Through brutal honesty, the volume’s authors ultimately arrive at expressions of the powerful love and connection we share with our children and our own mothers, no matter how fraught those relationships might be. In “Chicken Wine Soup for the Soul,” Lisa Chiu makes sense of the mixed messages she received from her mother: “The soups, the porridges, even the things I won’t eat—that my mother knows I won’t eat—show me that my mom is here to nourish and nurture me. It is through food that she expresses her love” (46). In her poem “Brigid,” Cassie Premo Steele reminds us that even the pain binds us: “All tears are holy/those we hold in and/the ones when we smile like children–/And this is how we make/a family” (176).
Motherhood can be a difficult journey, and maybe the best we can do is to be present through all of its moments, the painful and the glorious. Labor of Love gives us the opportunity to do just that.
Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology, edited by Amanda K. Jaros
Small Harbor Publishing, 2024, $22 [paper]
ISBN: 1957248203
Annamaria Formichella currently teaches in the English department at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. Her creative work has been published in several collections and magazines, including Gyroscope Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, New Flash Fiction Review, and Anacapa Review.