Tag: mom life

Motherhood

Raising princesses

Amanda Gibson

My 4-year-old daughter is going to be Belle for Halloween tomorrow. I’m not surprised, even if every barbed-wire feminist bone in my body scraped the inside of my skin as she tried on the yellow satin dress, as she wore it to bed that first night, as she looked down at herself in wonder and whispered, “I look beautiful.”

“You’re always beautiful,” I barked. Then, “Looks aren’t all that matters, you know.” I swing back and forth, insisting on two different messages that are meant to nudge her off this sickly sweet, gender-normative path, but are ultimately probably reinforcing the same idea that looks do matter, somehow, somewhere beyond this living room.

Either way, I’m tuned out by a little girl who’s already seen too much. The Disney+ streaming service is the real parent in our house, explaining the facts of life in clear terms: be a princess, marry a prince, wear all the dresses. Belle herself has an entire song devoted to her beauty and how weird it is that she reads books. I give Beauty and the Beast the benefit of the doubt in that I think it’s satire, but I suspect that’s lost on a 4-year-old.

I had every intention of guarding my daughter from these things for as long as possible. She hid herself well during the 20-week ultrasound, so we didn’t know what we were having, and most of her clothing for her first year of life was white and gray. I decided this little gender-neutral baby was going to stay that way. I’d buy her Legos and dinosaurs and STEM toys and soft, basic t-shirts without writing on the front.

Any then, somewhere along the way, princesses arrived, as they always do. They were everywhere—not just on Disney, but in little animated YouTube videos, dolls and books she received as gifts, coloring book pages brought home from daycare. Even if I’d been more proactive and banned Disney from our home, I don’t think I could have stacked sandbags high enough to save us from this flood.

And a small part of me, perhaps the lazy and apathetic part, wonders if it even matters. These are movies I adored as a child, after all. I popped those VHS tapes in and sat cross-legged in front of a singing candelabra, a red-haired mermaid, and a magic carpet ride. To this day, I can recall the exact shades of Aurora’s dress as the fairies argued and shot blue and pink sparkles at it. This was my becoming, and I still managed to find myself enraptured by women’s studies courses and feminist publications and Ruth Bader Ginsburg coffee mugs. Granted I did go through an embarrassingly drawn-out love affair with Orlando Bloom after seeing Lord of the Rings in seventh grade and charted a path for myself to meet him, perhaps not as a co-star, but as a makeup artist, costume designer, or screenwriter. I was still plotting in college, but by then I realized it would be more fun to simply become an elven princess and meet-cute the blonde version of him than have to work in the toxic film industry. So as a woman in my twenties, I still carried some unfulfilled, impossible desires that revolved around finding a certain prince.

Is that bad? Truthfully, I don’t know. There are a lot of things in my life I’d like to rewrite. Greasy bangs, ill-fitting jobs, friendships that went sour. This is not one of those things. I don’t mind that I had princess dreams, so why does it bother me that my daughter does?

I had to think about which particular aspect of it bothered me. And it hit me that I didn’t care if she ended up spending too much time dreaming of her prince (or fellow princess). I didn’t care if her real estate preferences leaned toward castles. But god, I didn’t want her to compare herself to these dainty animations, to look in the mirror and hate what she saw. That face that I gave her, that my mother gave me, that we can’t change because let’s be honest, we don’t have nose job money. I think she’s gorgeous now (possibly I’m biased) but I know how this goes. I know that when she’s about twelve or thirteen, she’ll have braces and glasses and patchy goose down that hasn’t transitioned to adult feathers yet. And if she’s anything like me, like most young women, she will obsess over something, or many things, in that reflection that don’t add up to the kind of beauty that gets you adoration from townsfolk and talking housewares alike.

Talk about floods we can’t stop. This will all feel like a misting fan compared to that deluge. I’m having pre-anxiety about a phase that is 8 years away. Perhaps it feels so important because I know from experience that it stays with you well into adulthood. My insecurities haven’t changed much since middle school; I’ve just gotten better at ignoring them.

I don’t have the answers for how I will equip her with a positive body image. I guess I could read a parenting book or do something else equally exhausting. But I do know that neither of us will gain anything from me digging my heals in about Belle and her gang. Denigrating these girls, or bright young women, as Ariel calls herself, only feeds the cycle of women condemning other women.

Especially during this time when every single issue has become so polarized, I want to remember that everyone, including a four-year-old in a yellow dress, has a million little things inside them—bright, tiny starbursts in different colors and shapes. My daughter is changing so quickly I can hardly catch sight of all of them, much less control their manifestations.

So for now I breathe, and watch, and laugh as she twirls.

Motherhood, Reading, Writing

Some thoughts about forgiving our mothers and ourselves

Amanda Gibson

I unintentionally read two books last month that were both, at their core, about toxicity in mother-daughter relationships. Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game are very different types of stories. TVH is a novel about two light-skinned Black twin sisters who choose different paths in life—Desiree living life as a Black woman, and Stella choosing to pass as white. It moves forward through time until we see how their choices impact the lives of their daughters. Wild Game is a memoir by a woman who, when she was 14, got wrangled into being a co-conspirator in her mother Malabar’s affair with a family friend. The affair goes on for more than a decade, fully absorbing Adrienne in the drama and lies throughout her adolescence.

I might not have dwelled too long on either of these stories if I hadn’t read them back-to-back. But both Stella and Malabar tell extraordinary lies to keep their secrets safe, and it comes at great cost to their daughters.

It’s sort of a given by now that our mothers will hurt us in some way at various points in our lives. Little comments about our appearance, the choices we make, and the people we love can all add up to big, swollen pain. Times when they paid too little attention, times when they clamped down too hard. As we age we begin to see them as human, capable of both vast love and error. Even so, we swear to do better by our own children.

For me personally, sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. My biggest regret so far in my daughter’s short life has been calling her shy in front of another adult when she was about two or three years old. I can’t remember a time during my childhood when my outgoing mother didn’t apologize to others for my shyness, causing me to intuit that shyness was a bad thing, meant to be overcome, compounding layer after layer of anxiety about my anxiety. Even though I now carry with me the knowledge that introverts are important and necessary members of society, I still experience that gut-twisting fear in large groups that I’m not talking enough, not contributing enough.

My daughter has run up to me on a few occasions and asserted that the cats hiding from her in the closet are “a little shy, like me!” I don’t really think she comprehends that she has grown out of her shy phase and is now just a cyclone of wild, talkative energy. But when she claims to be shy, I don’t correct her. Instead I tell her, “And that’s ok. I am too.”

I will surely misstep in a myriad of other ways as she grows. I hope I can find the strength to apologize. So many of my friends have commented on the apologies we rarely, if ever, received from our mothers. An acknowledgment of our suffering, even if it was petty and small. Maybe that was a standard of parenting toward the end of the last century—like a car accident—never admit fault. Or maybe that’s just part of being human, a natural resistance to being in the wrong.

In The Vanishing Half and Wild Game, neither Stella nor Malabar ever offer their daughters the apology or the reckoning they yearn for. But still their daughters love them and chase their approval and try to know them. In some ways this seems sad. As a daughter, I mourn the lack of righteous comeuppance for these women. In other ways, I think thank god. As a mother, I will have room to make missteps and, most importantly, room to atone.

Motherhood, Writing

New essay on Motherwell

Amanda Gibson

I wrote a thing. It’s about the wacky emotions I’ve been experiencing as a one-and-done mother during this pandemic. Are you lonely? Because I’m lonely and my kid is lonely, and I start thinking maybe I should have another baby because my brain is broken and THAT’S WHAT MAKES SENSE TO ME RIGHT NOW.

It’s all insanity, and you can read about it over on Motherwell, which is one of my favorite online mags for thoughtful parenting writing.

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Reading

First Impressions Book Review: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Amanda Gibson

I never thought there would come a day when I wouldn’t make time for reading. It seemed like it would always be part of my daily maintenance, like showering, eating meals, or snacking on gummy vitamins because they’re delicious and good for you and there’s no such thing as too many… right? RIGHT?

The thing is, once you have a baby you sort of forget to do all of those things. Your attention funnels into keeping this one, demanding little blob alive, and everything else blurs away.

I have had to claw my way back to reading (and showering, and eating, etc.) over the past couple of years, which renders this type of me-time even more valuable. It also makes it more difficult to decide what to read because I want it to count. I want it to be something that is equal parts thought-provoking, escapist, funny, romantic, exciting, and lovely.

I realize I’m asking a lot.

Oh, and it needs to prove it will be all of these things within the first chapter. When you’re short on time, you can’t wait around for a book to “get good.”

And I’m not the only one who needs to be wowed quickly — agents and editors rarely read beyond the first page of a manuscript if it’s not immediately snagging them in some way.

With that in mind, I present my First Impressions series: book reviews based on that pivotal first chapter — what it does well, what might be slowing it down, and whether it does enough to keep this busy mom reading into chapter two.

The first installment will be N.K. Jemison’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, an epic fantasy novel that, as an NPR article promised me, contains one of the best romances in modern literature.

The book starts:

“I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore. I must try to remember.”

These lines set the scene for the type of narration we’re going to see throughout the book; a character looking back and narrating her life after a series of monumental events. I don’t typically mind this style, but it bothered me that it kept inserting itself into the narrative.

On page two, she writes, “But I forget myself. Who was I, again? Ah, yes.”

It takes me out of the story and makes me wonder where in time this person is. And who this person is. We still haven’t learned her name (Yeine) at this point.

Yeine proceeds to explain her background and engage in a lot of world-building through our good old friend “telling rather than showing.” There are people who love this sort of thing. Give them all the details up front about the kingdoms and the maneuvering lords and ladies, and they’re set. I prefer a scene, particularly one that displays what the main character wants, and what’s keeping her from getting it. Stakes are so important, and they need to be clear up front.

The scene we’re eventually ushered into is the declaration by Yeine’s grandfather, high lord of Arameri, that she will battle her cousins — to the death — for the title of heir. To be fair, these are very high stakes. Still, I don’t get the sense I know anything about what Yeine really wants or cares about, apart from not dying. Is there something else she wanted to do with her life, is there someone at home she loved and now may never see again?

We get lots of background about her mother, who is now dead and who fled this kingdom to be with a man she loved (Yeine’s father). And this, to me, is the most interesting aspect of chapter one:

“My people tell stories of the night I was born. They say my mother crossed her legs in the middle of labor and fought with all her strength not to release me into the world. I was born anyhow, of course; nature cannot be denied. Yet it does not surprise me that she tried.”

This is a gorgeous paragraph. There is so much history and emotion packed into these few sentences, and it shows off Jemisin’s skill as a writer. These little moments pop up every so often in the course of the first chapter and they do the story many favors.

But I’m still left feeling at the end of chapter one that I don’t really know Yeine, and by know, I simply mean grasping what motivates her. She’s a bit of a mystery, and I do want to know more, but also… I’m starting to struggle to care about her.

My conclusion? I did read beyond chapter one. But not beyond chapter three. The pace picks up and an exciting event transpires (Yeine must run for her life from a god/monster/unclear). But I still don’t get a sense of Yeine’s personality. Perhaps she’s meant to be an everywoman character. Perhaps I’m missing some truly stunning character development by not continuing. But like I said above, that time investment is a gamble I don’t wish to make anymore.

I get the sense that someday I might like to return to this series and give it another shot, maybe when Project Toddler is grown enough to stay out of my hair on the weekends, or at least when she’s old enough to wipe her own tush. I think I’d probably like Yeine a lot once she fights for herself and for any new friends she’ll make in her new home, or once she gets sassy towards grandpa. And the promise of a good love story is always the right hook for me.

For now, THTK stays on the shelf, but if any readers can convince me I simply must pick it back up, I’m open to revisiting it sooner rather than later.