I devoured Polly Rosenwaike’s collection of short stories, Look How Happy I’m Making You (coming out March 19th from Doubleday), in a matter of days. I could have read it in one sitting, but forced myself to slow down because they were exquisite. It’s easy to say it’s a collection of stories about motherhood, but in reality, these stories are so much more than that: they’re about relationships, about loss and creation, about family, about love and ambivalence, and about learning who we are. I was lucky enough to email with Polly about her forthcoming book.
Polly, I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed these stories. They brought me back to those days of ambivalence during pregnancy, those hazy insane sleep-deprived days of early motherhood, and perfectly captured the feelings of desperation around infertility and loneliness of motherhood. So much that’s written about motherhood is saccharine-sweet or filled with glowing happiness—and while there’s happiness in these stories, there’s also sadness, anger, sometimes even regret, and more. How did these stories develop? Did you set out to write a collection about motherhood?
I’m glad (and sorry, too!) to bring you back to those days. The stories developed over the past decade out of the emotions you mention—as I first contemplated having children, then was pregnant and had miscarriages, gave birth, and felt ambivalent about my new role. They also came from proposing to myself a number of “what if” questions. What if women whose mothers had died gathered together on Mother’s Day? What if a woman who wanted a baby with a guy who wouldn’t commit to her secretly stopped taking the pill? What if a pamphlet about postpartum depression told the story of how a particular woman experienced the PPD “warning signs”? “Grow Your Eyelashes,” the first story in the collection, began because I once saw an anonymous “to-do” list with four mundane items on it, and then lastly, “grow out my eyelashes.” I was fascinated by the idea that someone would resolve to do this, and then by the notion of it being a metaphor for attempting to get pregnant—attempting to grow a whole other person. While I didn’t initially set out to write a collection about motherhood, once that organizing principle came to me, I embraced it.
I really like how you encompass so many different aspects of the conversation around motherhood—the woman who doesn’t want kids (and isn’t demonized for it), the woman who gets an abortion (and again, isn’t demonized for it and her life isn’t destroyed), miscarriage, postpartum depression, and ambivalence. Can you speak about the diversity of situations in your collection?
I think there’s a rather simplistic and idealized vision of pregnancy and motherhood out there. If you’re a heterosexual woman, you find the right guy, get married, decide to have a baby, get pregnant, give birth (best day of your life!), and then enter into a state of baby bliss. For a great number of women, the realities of reproduction and new motherhood are quite different. Women have abortions, for all sorts of reasons, throughout their years of fertility. Women have difficulty getting pregnant; they have miscarriages; they have complications in pregnancy that are very stressful; they suffer from childbirth injuries; they get hit with postpartum depression; they struggle to square the physical, mental, and emotional work of motherhood with the glossy magazine image of the breezy, beautiful mama and baby. Though we’re thankfully talking about these things more, there’s still a stigma of shame around abortion, infertility, and miscarriage. There’s the guilt that comes from having a baby and feeling like you’d better not complain if you’re finding motherhood hard, because you have a perfect little baby—you’ve achieved the feminine dream.
It was important to me to present this range of situations in the collection, but at the same time, I was writing from a position of privilege, as a white, middle-class woman who’s had all sorts of advantages. Angela Garbes, author of the wonderful book Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy, wrote an important piece for New York Magazine’s The Cut, in which she notes that work by women of color is highly underrepresented in the recent discussions of motherhood books. “Pregnancy and motherhood are experiences as individual as they are universal,” Garbes writes. “We need books that reflect this, and we lose so much—stories that go untold, readers left unreached—when we allow Mom Books, and the discussion surrounding them, to be the exclusive territory of white women.” While I aimed to portray a variety of situations related to contemplating and having a baby, I’m well aware that my perspective is limited. As writers, readers, and mothers, we need to pay attention to and advocate for more diverse voices.
I really loved Angela Garbes’ book, too. She’s so right.
What have you done to maintain a space for yourself and your work (writing and otherwise) within motherhood?
I’ve been very fortunate in a number of ways: to have a flexible schedule as a part-time writing teacher and freelance editor; to have a supportive partner who’s a writer too and understands what my work means to me; to have great childcare that we’ve been able to afford. These circumstances have been essential to my ability to make time for what I want to do. Beyond that, I’m sensitive to the pressures that women confront trying to measure up to the cultural image of what it takes to be a good mother. Several recent New York Times articles by Claire Cain Miller have discussed what she calls the rising “costs of motherhood,” particularly for working women. “Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s,” she reports—a boggling statistic. I try to minimize both the extra work of motherhood and the guilt I might feel for not doing it. I don’t volunteer at my kids’ schools; I let them watch TV on the weekends so I can get some work done; dinner often consists of fruit and cheese and nuts. There’s a lot more I could be doing to nurture my children and curate their lives, but I also know that work—both writing and otherwise—is fundamental to my sense of well-being in the world. My mother is absolutely dedicated to a (more than full-time) job she loves and has been doing since I was in elementary school, and I’ve always admired her for it. I know my daughters sometimes resent how much I work, but it gives them more time with their dad, who plays games and hangs out with them in a much more chill way than I do; and with babysitters, who are great young women role models for them. And I hope they’ll grow up to value both meaningful work and their own independence.
How do you think the creative community can support women, and mothers, especially?
It’s terrific what organizations like the Sustainable Arts Foundation and Pen Parentis are doing to support the creative work of parents with young children. And of course I think we need to continue to promote art and conversations that question and critique structural inequalities and gendered thinking around motherhood, as well as other aspects of women’s lives. Gemma Hartley’s 2017 Harper’s Bazaar article “Women Aren’t Nags—We’re Just Fed Up” went viral because it struck a nerve about the emotional labor that women are disproportionately held responsible for. On the Dear Sugars podcast, Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond hosted a discussion with Hartley, called “Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work (Most) Women Do.” Women, and the men who love them, should all listen to it.
You’ve written book reviews, essays, short stories—what format feels most instinctive to you? Has this changed over time? What is most challenging, format or genre-wise?
I’ve always wanted to write fiction, but in my twenties, as I wrestled with the short story form, I also attempted to escape it in whatever way possible. I took a few poetry workshops, tried a little creative nonfiction, wrote a draft of a screenplay. I loved theater—how about playwriting? I may have hit rock bottom in my hunt for the genre that would just come naturally when I thought about signing up for a playwriting seminar, but it required a short work sample, and I could not get one line of dialogue down on the page. What on earth would I write that might be interesting enough for actors to speak it aloud on stage? Finally, during the MFA program I attended in my early thirties, I accepted that I really wanted to write stories, and I began dedicating myself to the process of seeing them through. I also began book reviewing around that time, which I continue to find such a satisfying complement to writing fiction. The tidy and elegant container of a review appeals to my desire to work within set rules, as well as to engage with books in both a critical and an artful way.
What are you struggling with, as a parent and as a writer, right now?
It’s pretty nice to have reached the end of the struggle with this book. Soon enough, when I embark on my next fiction project, I’ll be up against the terrifying great unknown. Revising drafts and tinkering at the sentence level—that’s my strength and my pleasure. Figuring out the central things for my characters to do and say to propel a story forward—that doesn’t come at all easy. You’ll never hear me say, as some apparently lucky fiction writers do, that I’m the medium through which my characters emerge, surprising me with the paths they take. No, I’m all too aware that I’m pouring the concrete and controlling the way they move down every road: in which vehicle, at what speed, and for what reasons. With parenting, on the other hand, my lovely, free-willed daughters are wont to flutter about as they like, and I’m always struggling with the challenge of how to get them to do the daily things—like clean up, get ready for school on time, go to bed—without turning into a humorless tyrant or a whiny nag (there’s that horrible gendered word). The fact that my children have minds of their own that are developing at a stunning rate is fascinating and moving and life-affirming, and it also really, really tests my desire for control and calmness and order.
As the mother of a strong-willed toddler (that might be a redundant term), I can relate!
What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?
So many, many books inspire me, but if I had to pick the ones that most influenced my writing of this collection, I guess I’d thank Lorrie Moore for Birds of America, Jenny Offill for Dept. of Speculation, Chris Bachelder for Abbott Awaits, and Alice Munro for everything. I’m in the middle of two great story collections that came out recently: Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s What We Do with the Wreckage and Mandeliene Smith’s Rutting Season. I’m savoring Camille T. Dungy’s book of essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, and looking forward to reading Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah when I have time to fall under the spell of a hefty novel. While endlessly cleaning up the kitchen that never gets clean, I’ve been listening to Mom Rage, Edan Lepucki and Amelia Morris’s smart and chummy podcast about motherhood. It helps keep my mom rage under control.
What advice would you give to a writer trying to juggle parenthood and writing?
In both realms, I find patience to be all. I used to think being patient with children was one of my strengths, and then having my own destroyed that illusion. I’ve always struggled to be patient with how long writing takes me, and of course as a parent, my time is even more limited. But, as many have said, that’s led me to value it more. Before kids, I would often sit down to write with anxiety about how it was going to go. Now, it’s a kind of luxurious relaxation period for me. I’m sitting in a chair without anyone asking me to get them milk, or wipe their butt, or find a missing toy they’re desperate for; I’m not hearing whining or yelling or squabbling about the most utterly trivial matters. (I don’t even bother attempting to write when my kids are buzzing around—deep, respectful bows to anyone, including my partner, who can.) I’m more grateful than ever for the opportunity to think and imagine and fiddle with language, and I’m experienced enough now to know that if parenting—and everything else—makes it impossible for me to write for a while, I’ll always come back to it. So my advice is to aim to be patient with yourself about how both your writing and parenting are going. And to consider that giving yourself time to write will probably make you a happier parent.
What’s next on the horizon for you? You asked earlier which genre I find most challenging. That would be the novel, which terrifies me. But I’m going to try it. The brilliant and prolific Laura Kasischke, who teaches at the University of Michigan—just down the road from where I live—once said something along the lines of, “If you’re going to be depressed anyway, you might as well write a novel.” That may just be the inspiration I need.
Photo credit: Michael Lionstar