Motherhood and the Body a literary folio There are myriad areas in which motherhood intersects, is contingent on, is affected by, the body–our own, and our loved ones’. Our writers of prose and poetry explore becoming a mother–or not, gestating, the aging body, abilities and challenges, feeding the body, and more, illuminating our relationships with the physical. –Marjorie Tesser Featured Writers Kathy Anne Cowie – My Body Politic Paula Da Ponte – The Woman Who Fed Everyone Sharon Dolin – The quotidian is maternal Robbie Gamble – Hospice Pet Therapy Heather Haldeman – Facing The Music Sarah Herrington…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Kathy Anne Cowie My Body Politic When I married at 34, I thought the doctor was joking, describing me as a woman of “advanced maternal age.” My husband and I eagerly expected at any moment to be expecting. We tried. And tried. Clearly it was not going to go as planned. The process slowly went from cautious anticipation to fear and disappointment. From a question of when, to a question of if. Three long years passed. Inevitably, our thoughts turned to science or adoption. We might be able to afford the science, but were we too old to adopt?…
Paula Da Ponte The Woman Who Fed Everyone People often ask where my complicated relationship with food began. They assume it started with a stubborn child refusing vegetables or turning away from unfamiliar meals. The truth is far more complicated. It began in a home where food meant survival, sacrifice, love, discipline, gratitude, and sometimes fear, all served from the same pot. I grew up in Jamaica in a family where there was rarely enough money, but somehow there was always enough determination. My father died when I was only three months old, leaving my mother to raise our…
Sharon Dolin The quotidian is maternal +++++++++—Fernando Pessoa Dogs barking all night, a faraway rooster crows to outpace the dawn-streaked sky as I sit on the patio with my second coffee, raisin toast topped with peanut butter and slices of summer’s last plum: how close my mother feels when I tend to myself—she who nourished me with her warm embrace, orange juice strained of pulp, followed by cold milk over sugar cereal. As I gave my son the milk of my body for three years—never an embrace so tender. We rose before dawn, euphoric, transported by each other. Now he…
Robbie Gamble Hospice Pet Therapy –for my mother, Anne Conant Gamble, 1932 – 2026 It had been a tiring morning, with two well-meaning visitors, and the energy seeped from her body like oxygen from a faulty tank. So, when the pet liaison from the hospice association knocked on the door, she was inclined to send them away, even though she had been looking forward to this dog visitation for weeks. “Couldn’t you come back another day?” she asked. The liaison looked doubtful. “Our schedule is so full, it might be a couple of weeks. Why don’t you say hello…
Heather Haldeman Facing The Music “Given that you were overweight as an adolescent, what do you think about childhood obesity today?” A question I wasn’t expecting hit a nerve when I was doing a reading for my memoir, Kids & Cocktails Don’t Mix. A stylish woman with large horn-rimmed glasses posed it. Before I could answer, an older woman, with perfectly coifed hair, piped up from the first row. “Look at you now!” She extended and arm full of bracelets toward me as if my body was on display. “No one would ever guess you had a weight problem.”…
Joanna Wolfarth Birth of the Ouroboros Bare skin is fusing with the lime pleather chair, which I’ve turned to face the window. I watch the sky turn orange then pink before it settles into the deep sapphire of late summer nights as an-yet-unnamed baby squirms in my arms. Unsettled, I’m dwarfed by the chair, the sunset, and these new responsibilities. I’ve not been outside since I braced myself against the rough brick hospital wall at dawn four days ago, held fast by my husband’s steady count from somewhere behind me. Now, I am beholden to the rhythms of feeds…
Sarah Herrington They Told Me Not To Write A Body At the writing workshop they told me not to write a body, because a body’s been told before. And if I’m not a mother, I’m a dead body. And if I’m not a child, I left the ark. And if I’m not Venus and tears and winged epiphanies of consumerism, I am just a clang of empty space, Mercury, retrograded into infinity. Not so much siege, but, hologram. This is (apparently) middle age. I told them I lost some decade’s worth of poems in the depression. What happened to…
Nancy Huggett Breathing Lessons –(after my daughter’s stroke) Learning how to breathe — in / out — from the trees. In the park we walk past the bins and you dare me to inhale their fetid scent — in / out — to make you laugh, every time. Like you’ve tricked me. That’s breath. Your power. Once your breath came hopeless as teeth, pulled from your lungs and punched back in. A pulmonary pump —in /out — while I breathed with you — calm / ease — used that magic mantra to tether us back together after you left,…
Rachael Inciarte Olfactory I lost my sense of smell and then things got weird. I didn’t realize before how much my experience of the world was filtered through my olfactory medium. But, on the other side of anosmia, I can testify that it was a lot. During one college summer I worked at a tea shop. My job was to run the shop’s stand at a local farmers market where smells were plentiful. In every direction wafted flowers bouquets, bread loaves, and loam-coated vegetables; our teas of jasmine, lemongrass, and hibiscus. I used to sit there like Ferdinand the…