10. Lessons Learned

Lessons I learned from my mother (and look, the characters learned them too!)

1. You can't always get what you want.
Characters from so many of our novels this semester had to realize this in one way or another. Hannah had to realize that despite the fact that she had so badly wanted to have Louise, she couldn't.

2. Don't be too scared to go on a big adventure. You'll regret it if you don't.
Katherine from The South definitely valued this one in a big way, but Wayne from Annabel learned this lesson too, figuring out that he could go on an adventure to find his place in the world.

3. Just because you've gotten in the habit of doing something doesn't mean you have to keep doing it forever. Sometimes change is important.
I love this one, and I think Wayne would appreciate it too. Just because you've always been a certain person, or acted in a certain way, or had a certain person in your life, doesn't mean there's any reason not to break free if you want to start over and be the person you know you're really meant to be.

4. Look for friends in people with the same interests as you (but don't disregard those people that are really different from you either, there are lots of experiences to be gained there).

5. Every child is parented "differently," but that doesn't necessarily mean one is parented better than the other.
I think this really comes through in Beloved, although I don't think Denver would necessarily agree that no one is necessarily parented better than the other in her family. However, I think Denver and Beloved are an interesting case of children being parented differently.

6. Family needs to watch out for each other.
Harriet demonstrates this to all her children in Lessing's The Fifth Child. Obviously in that case it's a little arguable whether or not that was what was best for them, and in the end, I think another non-biological family ends up watching out for Ben in a perhaps better way, but lesson still learned.

7. If you get in a fight with your siblings, "work it out yourselves." Also, don't forget you'll love them one day.
Denver and Beloved had to learn how to get along together, as did (in some ways) all of Ben's siblings with him.

8. We're a really lucky family--but it's not just luck. Hard work is important.
The same can be said for many of the families we've read about this semester (but also, unfortunately, not all of them were quite so lucky as mine).

9. Sometimes you just have to do what makes you happy, even if no one else agrees with you.
I think that's true for many of the mothers we've read about this semester. Katherine is the first that comes to mind, but certainly this also applies to many other mothers and characters from these novels.

10. Don't give up.




Thanks, Mom. Happy Belated Mother's Day <3

9. Judy Shepard

Last Thursday evening, I went to see Judy Shepard speak on campus as part of StaND Against Hate week. I had prepared myself all day for a depressing speech, given what I knew about Judy Shepard and her son's murder in 1998, but her lecture was actually really hopeful and empowering over all.

One of the things that I found most interesting about Judy's story that was relevant to her mothering was her description of her reaction when her son Matthew came out to her during his first year of college. She told us how he called her in the middle of the night and told her that he was gay, to which she responded, "What took you so long to tell me?" She described the way she was accepting of his sexuality from the beginning. He had asked her not to tell his father because he wanted it to be a part of his coming out process, but she told him anyway so that he could warm up to the idea. According to Judy, that didn't take long either, and they as parents completely accepting of his decisions from there on out. Perhaps the story has changed over time, or maybe given the events that have passed since then, she paints a more accepting picture of herself, a more flattering picture of herself in her mind. Either way, I couldn't help but think about what a nice story it was, how nice it was to hear this woman speaking so highly of her son in reference to--rather than in spite of--his sexuality. So many members of that generation are so closed minded because of the way they were raised or because it was "a different world back then," and I found Judy really refreshing.

I'm not sure I've ever heard someone who is a. straight and b. not a trained public speaker speak so beautifully and so passionately about gay rights and the importance of fighting for equality for everyone. I am so glad that I went to the lecture, and equally glad that I got to learn a little bit about her family and their story.

http://www.matthewshepard.org/

8. Laura Brown v. Virginia Woolf

After talking in class last Wednesday about Virginia Woolf's struggle with mental illness, I looked into it a little more, and was not surprised to find that her first struggles with depression and nervous breakdowns began after the death of her mother and sister in her early teenage years. We had looked at Woolf's life a little in my Intro to Lit class, and for the most part I remembered her life being a series of deaths of family members and other similar catastrophes leading Woolf to a number of mental collapses. I find, like I'm sure most others do, her death tragic as I always do when an extremely talented author (Austen, Brontë, etc.) dies before their time. What I find most interesting, in the context of The Hours, however, is the comparison Cunningham draws between Virginia Woolf and his character Laura Brown.

He begins the novel with a brief glimpse into Virginia Woolf's suicide and throughout the novel explores possible reasons for it. However, what he also explores is the unravelling of Laura Brown despite the fact that on the surface, her life as a mother and housewife seems relatively problem free. Nevertheless, Laura suffers from what Betty Friedan calls "the problem that has no name" in her Feminine Mystique.*

The fact that Cunningham chooses to parellel these two woman shows his deep understanding of just how far the "problem that has no name" can unravel and distress a woman. While unlike Virginia Woolf, Laura has no concrete problem, no nameable depression or event in her past that can be pinpointed as the spark for her melancholy and sense of hopelessness. Nevertheless, after finishing the novel one can see that Laura's concerns are no less real than Woolf's (even if they do not manifest themselves in suicide). The first time I read the The Hours, throughout the first half of the novel I was not sure I was entirely convinced of Cunningham's portrayal of the three women; after all, it was quite an undertaking for a male to try to write a book from the perspectives of three troubled women. I am still not always completely sure his portrayal is flawless. However, one of the things that I am noticing most this time through is that Laura paralleled with Virginia Woolf was a great choice in showing the real problems women can face without the ability to name them or even completely understand them.




*Fridan, Betty. "The Feminine Mystique." The Essential Feminist Reader (2007): 269-82. Print.

7. Sing You Home

When I got to Florida on Tuesday, I made sure to get the book I had carefully planned as this break's "fun reading" right away--Jodi Picoult's latest, Sing You Home. I've read all of her books (starting when I was 13 or 14), and they're really hit or miss for me lately. I couldn't pass this one up though with all the topics it promised to confront: homosexual relationships, adoption by a homosexual couple, the ethics surrounding embryo use, religious issues around those issues, alcoholism, and even the ideas behind music therapy--all things I'm interested in learning more about. One of my favorite things about reading fiction is the chance to learn about new things through an interesting, fast-paced plot, and my research of Picoult tells me she is quite well-researched.


It was not the most amazing book I have ever read. It was not even the most amazing Picoult book I have ever read. But it was thought provoking on a few levels. Without giving too much away, I'll list some of the "can you imagine's" that I found myself dealing with as I flipped through (so quickly, eating up the chance to read for fun) the novel.

Can you imagine...
...trying to get pregnant for nine years, only to have multiple miscarriages and a stillbirth?
...after those nine years your husband deciding he no longer wants to be a father? or even your wife?
...someone making a public case to say you should not have rights to frozen embryos containing your DNA, purely because of your chosen sexuality?
...someone questioning your abilities to be a good mother based solely on your sexuality?
...having the most painful secret about your past brought to light in a public setting as well as in front of all your family and friends?

I came up with many more "can you imagine" scenarios in my head, but I don't want to give too much away here at the risk of ruining the plot for anyone. Surely everyone's list of "fun reading" books are pretty long at this point, but I'd recommend this one because, at the very least, you can flip through it in two days (I'm living proof), and it's entertaining as well as thought provoking. In typical Picoult fashion, it's got your basic court scenes and plot surprises, as well as a list of well developed characters. As I said--worth reading even just for the issues it attempts to take on.

6. Re: Where are all the smart girls?

Recently, Anne blogged about an article called "The Trouble with Bright Girls" by Heidi Grant Halvorson and about why girls were recently found to be so much more likely to give up on a difficult task than boys. Anne summarizes the article, which explains: "this occurs because young girls are taught through early socialization that their abilities are innate and that, should they encounter a problem they can't immediately solves, they might as well give up; boys, on the other hand, are encouraged more frequently to learn through experience and power through failure, thus making them more resilient in the face of it in later instances." I, like Anne, sometimes wonder just how much it matters that women are beginning to outnumber men in academia and other positions if they aren't speaking up, but I'd like to offer an answer--it matters. To me, at least. Regardless of how true the stats from Halvorson's article are, regardless of how many women aren't speaking up because they are judging themselves too harshly or lack the confidence to completely display their intelligence and abilities, for each woman that does speak up, there's another out there proud of her and inspired at least in some small way to do the same thing for herself. For every mother that stands strong and confident in a world that still seems too often to be run by men, there's a daughter learning that she can do the same. I'll bet that's where that adorable five-year-old learned to be so sure of herself.

Anne makes a good point. Too many women at Notre Dame and too many women everywhere are reluctant to admit to their own intelligence, and I'm guilty of being a part of that group at times. But just to cap off my soapbox speech I've started to make a little here, I'll close with this. Little by little, we're getting better at recognizing that we as women know we can make a difference and we know we're powerful. You wouldn't have seen that little girl ten years ago--and not just because there weren't as many cute kids on youtube. We're making progress. We just can't be afraid to realize that, stand up for ourselves, and not be afraid to be a little full of ourselves, if the situation warrants it.

Just a Sidenote

Today I was cleaning my betta fish's bowl, and I always worry about it because she gets all uncomfortable looking while she explores the new water and rocks. I caught myself saying to my roommate, "It's so hard to do what you have to do to keep them safe when they seem so sad about it." She laughed at me for "being a mom."

5. A Hometown Momstrosity

I can't believe it's taken me this long to blog about this, but honestly, it makes me so sad that this story took place in my small hometown outside of Detroit that it probably explains a little of why I've stayed away from it. However, today I wondered what progress had been made in this case, and I decided I could fill anyone reading this in on it as well.

Last semester, I read a very disturbing story online that unfortunately happened just a few blocks from my parent's house in Trenton, MI. A 33 year old woman named Jennifer Petkov had been taunting her neighbor, a seven year old girl named Kathleen Edward. If taunting a seven year old girl does not seem problematic enough, Kathleen had also been diagnosed with and in the late stages of Huntington's disease. Jennifer posted pictures of Kathleen's mother who had died of the same disease on Facebook, edited together with pictures of the grim reaper, and had also posted pictures of Kathleen herself edited with a skull and cross bones. Jennifer admitted to the taunting, and explained that at its root was a feud among the families, specifically she and one of Kathleen's caretakers, her grandmother. The feud reportedly started from something so small as who was or was not invited to a child's birthday party, and has somehow progressed to this.

The incident was not Jennifer's last appearance in the news. Since, she has also plead guilty to battery and assault for her attempts to run over a different neighbor with her car.

When I was thinking about it today, I came across this article which explains that Jennifer has been ordered to move out of her home and sentenced to eighteen months probation as well as many different evaluations.

I am glad to see that action is being taken against Jennifer Petkov, and especially that she has been given a restraining order so that Kathleen can continue her life in peace. I think one of the things that bothers me most about this story is that Jennifer is a mother herself--I can only imagine growing up in a household with Jennifer as a mother. I cannot understand how anyone can have so little compassion as to actually taunt a young, dying girl, but I think the part that makes me so sick about this story is that Jennifer has her own children as well. Furthermore, the fact that part of Kathleen's tragic story includes losing her own mother and Jennifer did not hesitate in attacking that as well makes the story all the more horrifying.

4. [Lack of] Nurture in Dahl's Matilda

In working through my ideas for my essay for Monday, I was thinking back through the different levels of nurturing the mothers (or mother figures) we've read so far and the results the different levels of nurturing produced. In Frankenstein, for instance, a possible reason the creature becomes so out of control is the lack of nurture or companionship Victor is willing to give him. Similarly, one stance on why Ben in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child is the way he is comes from the way his parents reject him in many ways immediately following his birth. Even in Patricia Powell's Me Dying Trial, arguably many of the children struggle in part because of Gwennie's inability to be there for them throughout much of their childhood.

This got me thinking about examples of children who lack nurture growing up that we see in pop culture, which quickly led me to think about one of my favorite books/movies from my childhood: Matilda.


Matilda stands as a very definite example of a child who lacks any nurture or companionship from her parents. However, in Roald Dahl's story, Matilda is somehow able to find the nurture she needs first as a very small child in books and as a bit of an introvert, and eventually Miss Honey steps in as her mother figure.¹ I suppose I am just looking (or maybe stretching is a better word here) for examples of children who do not seem damaged from a lack of nurturing mother figures. Is Dahl's story too romanticized? Essentially, it is similar to Me Dying Trial, in which Peppy rises above a troubled childhood with a less than nurturing mother to become valedictorian of her high school class. To some degree, both of these young female characters seem to speak volumes for the nature side of the debate. Unfortunately, this just makes explaining the behaviors of Victor's creation and Ben all the more confusing.





¹Dahl, Roald. Matilda. Ed. Quentin Blake. New York: Puffin, 2004. Print.

3. The Fifth Child - Another Frankenstein?

I think this is a very interesting cover image for Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child,. It is not the cover I have, but this one, mine, and many of the covers I found images of display Ben or "the fifth child" as a relatively cute toddler rather than as the monster he is always described as in the book. I'm interested in why the editor of those versions chose not to go with a more... controversial? cover, like this one:


One of the reviews on the back of The Fifth Childcalls it "a moral fable of the genre that includes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein."¹ While I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to place this on the literary level of Frankenstein, I agree that it fits into the genre the earlier novel set. There are certainly very distinct similarities to Frankenstein's creation sprinkled throughout the work that makes me wonder how much Lessing took from Shelley. For instance, like Frankenstein, when Ben is born, he is described as "muscular, yellowish, long" (48). Much later, toward the end of the book, it almost seems as if Harriet is implying that Ben is some sort of descendant somehow from Shelley's creature himself. She questions: "How do we know what kinds of people--races, I mean--creatures different from us, have lived on this planet?" (106). Harriet explains that she thinks Ben is one of these nonhuman creatures, and somehow a descendent of these creatures. What I suppose was another standout connection to Shelley's novel for me was the trouble both Victor and Harriet had with admitting that they had had a part in bringing these creatures into the world, and the way they had both essentially abandoned a loving relationship with the "newborns" from the very start of their lives, even though they had been initially responsible for the birth. It seems to me a lot of blame lies with both Victor and Harriet, but that their situations also warrant an exploration of nature vs. nurture.




¹ Lessing, Doris May. The Fifth Child. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.

2. "The Online Mom"

I stumbled upon this blog in an...interesting way. LinkedIn emailed me and asked, "Have you Googled yourself?" and I thought to myself...not recently. So I did. My recent USA TODAY College Blog came up, and then a blog entry about it on The Online Mom. After reading through the entry about my blog, I decided to explore the rest of the site.

The site markets itself as "Tech Tools for Parents," so most of it is based around the internet, phone, video games, etc. and how to use those tools either as a parent or how to use incorporate them into your children's lives. They discuss the ways you can "protect your children" from problems that arise from this generations fascination with the internet and other technology and also debate issues of what is appropriate for children of which ages. One of the recent posts that I found really interesting was actually somewhat in opposition to my Facebook blog--it was a post about why you should let your children set up a Facebook profile. Essentially, they discussed the number of "teachable moments" available to parents for their children via Facebook, and I found that to be a really interesting perspective. Check out the whole post here.

Frankenstein's Monster

As I was browsing the internet on this snowy evening, I found this book review, for Frankenstein's Monster, a novel by Susan Heyboer O'Keefe, and I think the book sounds like it would offer a very interesting (and definitely relevant) take on what we're discussing/will be discussing more tomorrow in class about the way Mary Shelley's Frankenstein works with the conventions of motherhood. I'll be posting more on this book and on my thoughts on Frankenstein in general tomorrow or later this weekend when I'm not so GRE-crazed, but I wanted to make sure I remembered to post the link for my reference and for anyone else who might be interested.

1. Beowulf: Grendel's Mother

I think it's very appropriate to kick off this semester's discussion of "monstrous mothers" with Grendel's mother from Beowulf, so I think it's only fair to start my blog off the same way.

What really stuck with me from the passages of Beowulf and the writing about it that we read was the idea that Grendel's mother is unable to be identified in the context of the poem as anything other than a monster. Heaney's afterword notes, "As for Grendel's mother, there is no clear way to visualize her on the basis of either the text of Beowulf or the illustrated manuscripts of the early Middle Ages. Even more than Grendel, she remains shrouded in mystery as a 'swamp-thing from hell' (1518) that is part beast, part human being, and part she-devil."¹ I was really intrigued by the idea that Grendel's mother was unable to be represented, and decided to quickly look into how she is represented by my go-to "let me see what the public/the media/'my good friends at Google'" think this might look like source: Google images. Imagine my surprise when I remembered that Grendel's mother was recently portrayed by none other than our very intriguing mod-mom Angelina Jolie!

I suppose I just picture Grendel's mother looking a little bit more like this, since the story lends itself to characterizing her as a monster, both figuratively and very literally:



However, who knows? Who's to say that Grendel's mother in the story wasn't just as misunderstood as some other mothers we might jump to labeling "monstrous?" Maybe her true inner self did look a little more like Angelina...



I suppose what I find most interesting about this is just the immediate and stark contrast in the way Grendel's mother is portrayed through the very first images that come up on a .186 second Google Image search. Not only does it really concretely capture Heaney's point that there is no concrete way to portray the monster-woman from the story, but it also illustrates the fine line between which women we might want to label as monsters and the perhaps sometimes out of control images of them we have in our heads. If we can sometimes employ someone who is thought to be so beautiful as Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother, and in other instances draw a grotesque picture labeling it with the same name, it seems no surprise that we also have trouble labeling Angelina herself as either "good" or "bad" mom. Since we will spend the rest of the semester looking at that fine line, it seems now is the perfect time to really strongly grasp that most "Monstrous Mother's of Literature" will probably make their mark in some uncomfortably close proximity to that line.




¹Heaney, Seamus. "Selections from Beowulf: An Illustrated Translation." Beowulf: An Illustrated Translation. W.W. Norton &, 2008. Vii-xxiv, 87-107, 138-145, 211, 238-239. Web.