Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Brenna
					, Beverley

254    Volume 10, Number 2
Standing knee deep in prairie sedges, hearing the first meadowlark of the year, 
my mother and I feel the wind tug against our skin, a dry, constant presence 
that scrapes its throat against bare branches and leans across the land, bearing 
witness to all that sky illuminates. Today the wind is heavy with memories, 
pulling from 1916, the year my mother was born, to the present, and I listen 
as my mother’s stories fall into the arms of the waiting evening.
It’s 1921, and she, not yet school-age, is playing on tin-can stilts in the 
yard, when Old Jones, a deaf-mute, strides up the road, dust on his clothes 
and on the hands he uses to gesture greetings and dispense dark chocolate. 
He’ll stay a week, and maybe two, helping Grandad with the chores, until the 
wind pushes at his back and the next farm beckons. 
It’s 1924 and my mother is attending Squirrel Hills’ school. Seven-year-
old Johnny and his immigrant parents had just moved into the district, and 
the students were not being very receptive to him. On this particular day in 
September, a season when cases of peaches, pears, and plums were brought 
home from town to be preserved in glass jars for winter use, the girls are sit-
ting under the shade of a caragana hedge, eating noon lunch. Mary opens her 
pail and gives a squeal of disappointment. On top of her sandwiches there 
is a piece of tissue paper, but the pear her mother had promised is missing. 
Immediately the students think of Johnny. They promise that if he owns up, 
they’ll let him go. Dutifully, he confesses. Someone runs and tells the teacher. 
Johnny receives the strap. That afternoon the room is unusually quiet, except 
for Johnny’s sobs. The next morning, Mary confides that her mother had 
found the pear, forgotten on the shelf at home.
My mother attends Normal School in Regina, the hundred dollar fee an 
obstacle until her grandmother sends a cheque. Without money for paints, 
she sits, embarrassed, in art class, until the instructor roughly arranges a loan. 
At age nineteen, she graduates, and, in January, heads to her first school. The 
train passes brittle fields, gaunt livestock standing hunch-shouldered against 
the wind. As the train slows around a bend, she catches sight of a group of 
hollow-eyed horses pawing the ground for what could only be the most mea-
gre sustenance. But when the train whistles, the animals—transformed—lift 
their heads and run, manes and tails flowing, sun gleaming on their shin-
Beverley Brenna
 Stories in the Wind
brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
provided by Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and...
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    255 
Stories in the Wind
ing sides. This image becomes the inspiration for my mother’s poem “Wild 
Horses,” widely published in Copp-Clark’s Grade VI Reader, All Sails Set.
It’s 1936, and my mother is teaching in Outram, a hamlet near Estevan, 
Saskatchewan. The wind is parched, its voice lost in the roar of the Great 
Depression. My mother’s salary, three-hundred-dollars a year, inspires alarm 
in the Ontario teaching community. The Ontario Teachers’ Federation col-
lects donations, and sends their Saskatchewan counterparts an extra bonus, 
based on current wages. My mother receives ten-dollars. The end of that 
year, wooden barrels arrive from Ontario farmers: relief apples, sent to skinny 
children grateful for the sweet, tart fruit. 
It’s 1942. My mother is spending summer vacation on the farm near 
Indian Head. She is digging potatoes with her father when the station agent 
arrives with the news. Her brother is missing overseas. In a daze, she goes 
into the house to find her mother, sewing at the treadle machine. “I know 
he’s dead, dear,” Grandma says in a small, tight voice. “I had a dream the oth-
er night.” Then comes a letter, announcing Ken is a prisoner-of-war. Three 
years spent in the POW camp, and then, at war’s end, he and his English 
bride return to Saskatchewan. The Americans had found him on the Death 
March south, after the Russian army invaded Germany. Fellow soldiers had 
resorted to eating shoe leather, falling in their tracks.
My parents, who met at Normal School, reconnect at University. My 
mother admires the tall, intellectual man who waits for her outside class. 
“Why didn’t you ask me out years ago?” she asks. “I didn’t have the money to 
entertain a girl,” my father says. Her farming background parallel to his, my 
mother understands. 
At our feet are crocuses, furry sepals drawing in the sun’s faint warmth. 
My mother reaches down and plucks a hoary stem, touching velvet purple to 
her cheek. Kittens in the loft, potatoes in the cellar, Grandma’s saskatoons 
preserved in tall glass jars: in some ways, farm kids had it easy. “I never saw 
her sitting down,” she says about her mother, remembering the slender frame, 
the ragged hands. “She worked from dawn to dusk.”
A bird darts from a fence post: flash of blue, then gone. Snow geese 
circle, bright wings trimming air, then wheel against the slough. Frog song; 
insect hum. My mother’s words settle in this prairie world: Old Jones; Relief 
Apples; Johnny and the Pear. Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, my mother 
illuminates the past, makes and remakes the present. I’m grateful that the 
wind will bring these stories back to me, from time’s dim glass, so that for 
golden moments it is me with berry pails, and stolen fruit, a brother lost—
then found. Biting into wizened apples, it’s me who tastes their tang. I marvel 
at my inheritance. 
Against our cheeks the wind is whisper thin. A few bats hail through 
darkening sky, mosquitoes stitch against my sleeve. We turn towards the 
house, the porch light offering a yellow, faltering path. On Monday, entering 
my classroom, I hear the tapping of her shoes on wooden floors; at the chalk-
256    Volume 10, Number 2
Beverley Brenna
board, she is neatly printing the day’s lessons for eight grades. I see a Johnny 
in the warm eyes of every child I teach and, together, my mother and I resolve 
a different ending to his story.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


English

Stories in the Wind

Craig
					, Lyn

Valuing by Doing: Policy Options to Promote Sharing
the Care

Kinser
					, Amber
					 E.

Mothering Feminist Daughters in Postfeminist Times

Donnellan
					, Sonia

Working with Ambivalence and Loss: Artworks that Explore an Aspect of the Mother/Adolscent Daughter Relationship

Harriss
					, Clarinda

288         Volume 10, Number 1
Boil the livers for one minute.  In  sweet butter
melt an onion, chopped fine.  I’m my mother’s
Jewish mother.  Her life melts. The good gut smell
takes me by the hand to Lombard street, smoked eels
dangling in windows, crated chickens screeching
under awnings, waiting for the kosher killing.
Never observant—of any higher power—she laughed
when I said the dark-bearded hasids, jovial and hefty,
looked like Santa Claus, but younger, in black clothes.
I’d stare at the women in wigs.  She’d whisper, “Low-
class pickle-boat people.”  
                                               But I lie.  This happened
just now, in my head, high on smell.  We were so German  
we went to Hollins Market, over on the west side, not
far from Butcher’s Hill.  There were chickens,  but
pigs were what swung obscenely in shop windows. We
used to polish off a whole pink foot, paring knife in each
traife hand, she and I. Grandmother Marie Naas, cousin
of solid Hamburg burghers Rebeck and Winkleman,  
had to tell me she wasn’t bad just because of Hitler.
She said someday I’d learn to like chopped liver.
I remember I believed the one but not the other.
I remember it as plain as if I could remember.
Clarinda Harriss
Chopped Liver


Chopped Liver

Ripley
					, reviewed by M.
					 Louise

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        279 
Book Reviews
Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices
Ruth Panofsky. 
Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2007.
Reviewed by M. Louise Ripley
Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices is a beautiful volume of poetry inspired 
by the lives of the author’s maternal grandparents. Fictionalized voices portray 
motherhood as a sustaining thread through a story that follows the lives of 
the title characters who flee Russia in the early 1900s and settle in Montreal 
where they marry and raise a family. 
Although she is scornful, Laike’s mother makes room in her flat for her 
daughter and the cousin she must marry due to an unexpected pregnancy. 
Later, when Laike gives birth to a son in the cold of her own rented rooms, 
her sense of loneliness resonates with every mother: “The euphoria / of 
privacy / passes / long hours / alone / with the baby” (38). 
Bearing another five children during the Depression, Laike voices a 
mother’s deepest fears: “[p]alate dulled / plate bare / I struggle to keep / chil-
dren healthy / and sated” (41). With money scarce, Laike takes in boarders. 
When her husband turns down a promotion because his Socialist pride will 
not allow him to assume the “burden of responsibility / for another’s wife and 
children” (41), Laike asks, as the mother of his hungry children, “what pride 
have I, Nahum?” (42). 
The spare, narrative poem follows the couple through years of unrelenting 
poverty and the agony of a tiny son plunging to his death from their tene-
ment balcony, witnessed by five-year-old Hannah, Laike’s only daughter, who 
afterwards turns from her mother, cold and distant. In this deeply personal 
story told in two alternating voices, only two brief poetic interludes refer to 
cataclysmic events taking place outside the life of the couple—“Synagogue 
whisperings / of crematoria” (64) and “Acrid fumes / from Hitler’s ovens / drift 
overseas”(65)—but the book does not suffer for this; it is indeed its greatest 
strength. 
We see some lifting of the burden of poverty as Nahum finds work “at 
union wages” (63) and when the children are grown, Hannah working, still at 
home. She “indulges / a longing / for cashmere” but Laike admits, “without 
her / wages / we could not manage” (70). Hannah marries, but her husband 
beats her children. Laike is distraught – “Hannah’s sobbing / sears my heart” 
(72)—but after years of being shunned, she is unable to tell her daughter what 
she longs to say, “come home” (73), a reflection of the archetypal stubbornness 
of mothers and daughters. When Nahum finally urges, “you must yield / to your 
daughter” (98), Laike writes, “my dear Hannah / can you ever / forgive my silence” 
(84), and mother and daughter are reunited. 
280        Volume 10, Number 2
Book Reviews
The last line of the poem encapsulates the power of motherhood. As Nahum 
describes his daughter seated at the kitchen table having tea with her mother, 
Laike reads her tea leaves and sees a happy future; Hannah turns to her father 
and announces: “you see, Pa / I told you / if Ma says, / it’s true” (101). 
Laike and Nahum is a gentle and moving book that tells a story of mother-
hood, love, and survival. 
 We, The Women
Merle Nudelman. 
Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2006.
Reviewed by Rosie Rosenzweig
Merle Nudelman’s first volume of poetry, Borrowed Light, probed her personal 
history.  Now, in We, The Women, the poet examines specifically female subjects, 
including pregnancy and childbirth (even losing weight after delivery), chil-
dren, mothering, dinner with mothers-in-law, and the inevitable memories of 
her own mother. She also limns the tender vulnerability of a young molested 
girl, as well as the mature career women molested under the corporate guise 
of billable hours. 
The poignancy of “Variations of the Last Time” that she saw her mother, 
and “Mama Loshen,” about the native language of her mother, both rekindled 
memories of my own immigrant mother in Windsor, Ontario. Nudelman 
evokes her mother’s mother tongue of Yiddish:
I fit our words like puzzle pieces
into the sounds I knew,
stored these clues of meaning
inside my own secret cache.
I clicked them on to light your stories –
My lanterns into your Slavic wilderness.
Nudelman ranges widely across poetic form.  Her repertoire includes lyrics, 
sestinas, pantoums, concrete poems, some modified sonnet forms, even a ghazal. 
Her adroit use of repetition showcases her natural cadence and rhythm.
The title poem, “We, the Women,” describes women as
tender repository of people-eggs,
tucked within like so many snug peas.
Calm spheres, each waiting her turn


Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices

Cihlar
					, James

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    229 
My Mother’s Gifts
James Cihlar
I.
What she gave me.
Howard Johnson’s hot chocolate.
Ironstone cups and saucers.
The Center Shopping Mall.
Table heaped with Christmas decorations
Outside Younkers Department Store.
Glitter, wax, holly, Santa.
A & W Drive In.
Tray perched on driver’s window.
Red and white checked wax paper.
Red plastic open weave basket.
Salt and potatoes.
Strand Theatre.
Jerry Lewis matinee.
The Big Mouth.
II.
What she had.
An explorer’s curiosity.
Love of neighborhoods
But not of neighbors.
Weakness for strays.
Cats, dogs, children,
Sisters, mothers, men.
230    Volume 10, Number 2
James Cihlar
Regular observance of holidays.
Poinsettia, lily, fireworks, cake.
Reputation as a clotheshorse.
An urban sense of humor.
Nothing expected in a Midwesterner.
Dismissal of convention.
The ability to draw.
Attention to details.
Love of dime stores
And secondhand shops.
Endurance. Fascination.
III.
What I didn’t know she had.
Letter from her best friend in high school.
If only her mother hadn’t remarried and moved her to a small town.
We dreamt about changing the world.
We dreamt about wearing the highest heels.
Photos of her before marriage.
Dark circle skirt and light beret.
Shoulder-length blonde hair.
IV.
What she bequeathed me.
Being my own parent.
Surviving my mistakes.
V.
What I brought home after visiting her in hospice.
Indigo blue Murano bracelet.
Fifties aqua Brush McCoy Gladiola vase.
Glimpse of her face waking up from medication
Reading the room around her.
IV drip, heart monitor, call button, estranged son,
Middle-aged, gay. 
Stream of daughters, sisters, in-laws.
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    231 
Folio
Long-lost aunts and uncles.
Hostesses at restaurants. European travelers. 
Condo dwellers.
VI.
What I use every day.
Victorian sheet music stand.
African woven basket.
Coir rug in front of the sink.
Clouds in pale blue border.
Inset rectangle of periwinkle sky.
Rainbow fan of kites flying away.
232    Volume 10, Number 2
James Cihlar
“Kathleen and Dylan and Luna.” Photo: Rita Hermann.


My Mother’s Gifts

Harde
					, reviewed by Roxanne

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        311 
Book Reviews
Negotiating Motherhood in 
Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Mary McCartin Wearn. 
New York; London: Routledge, 2008.
Reviewed by Roxanne Harde
Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature focuses 
on the cultural nexus of sentiment and motherhood in nineteenth-century 
America. Mary McCartin Wearn’s project is to consider how the texts under 
examination—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Jacobs’s 
personal narrative, Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt’s poetry, and Nathaniel Haw-
thorne’s The Scarlet Letter—“calculate the power of sentimental motherhood 
and weight it against the cultural costs of invoking such ideality” (11).
In the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Wearn points out how the string of 
mothers throughout the novel engage in feminine, and successful, acts of civil 
disobedience within the domestic sphere and through the approved discipline 
of female self-denial. While she might have made more of Stowe’s Eliza, the 
slave woman “with the natural instincts of motherhood, characteristics at the 
time deemed ‘white,’ even in the North” (20), Wearn offers a detailed discussion 
about how Stowe both used and criticized the regulatory social functions of 
motherhood to make her political points. Wearn draws interesting conclusions 
about how Stowe comes close to equating Marie’s destructive sentimentalism 
with the norm for female subjectivity, and discussion of gothic dislocations in 
relation to Cassie is intriguing, if somewhat disjointed. While Cassie’s libera-
tory movements might seem to contradict her argument that Stowe’s political 
strategies “leave her little room for developing complex feminine subjectivity, 
for the good mother-figures in her novel must be constrained by the limits 
of proper, sentimental maternity,” Wearn makes the case that Cassie ends up 
in as constricting a role as the rest of the mothers in the novel (35). Wearn’s 
readings of the novel’s depictions of motherhood, particularly those overblown 
with sentiment, such as mothers mourning children or those whose children 
are threatened, are first-rate. Overall, Wearn is correct in arguing that even as 
Stowe offers new agency to women, in no way does she suggest they might 
transcend their domestic roles or claim autonomy; however, the text might 
have linked Stowe’s success to women’s general success as abolitionists, which 
in turn engendered women’s rights movements later in the century.
Wearn’s discussions of sentiment and motherhood in Jacobs’s narrative 
and Piatt’s poetry also offer insight into nineteenth-century American culture. 
Wearn examines the political agenda behind Jacobs’s maternal narrative, how 
she exposes the dangers of the maternal role and affection for slave women, 
negotiates between her sexual life and nineteenth-century expectations, and 
312        Volume 10, Number 1
Book Reviews
uses the pseudonym Linda Brent to hide a radical maternal subjectivity under 
the “unthreatening veneer of sentimental motherhood” (80). Wearn aligns Ja-
cobs with freedom-loving and self-reliant male slaves who escaped more than 
traditional female values or the behaviour of female slaves who are mothers. 
Motherly love alone, unlike the case of Stowe’s Eliza, is not enough to save 
Jacobs, Wearn points out as she shows how the text demonstrates the ways in 
which the social codes of maternity, most often voiced by Jacobs’s grandmother, 
serve as a daunting force of oppression standing in the way of her freedom 
and autonomy and function to keep her and her children enslaved: “In Jacobs’s 
imagination, as in Hawthorne’s, individualist pursuits can never be successfully 
or completely reconciled with the requirements of home, family, and society” 
(103). In a series of astute readings, Wearn argues that Piatt’s poems about 
mothering are rooted in, even as they challenge, the “tradition of sentimental 
motherhood” (108). Wearn takes particular care with Piatt’s considerations of 
the negative aspects of lives too narrowly defined by maternity.
While Wearn’s examination of The Scarlet Letter offers an equally compel-
ling reading of Hawthorne’s refusal to sentimentalize motherhood, her study of 
Hawthorne’s elaborations and critiques of sentimental maternal ideologies seems 
at cross purposes with the focus of this monograph. Arguing that Hawthorne 
doubts motherhood’s ability to transform a woman, Wearn points out that he 
complicates “the reigning cultural notions of womanhood that flourished in his 
time; he will render the ‘natural’ bonds of motherhood dangerously opaque; for 
whatever assumptions the Puritan community makes about Hester based on 
her maternity prove, in the end, to be dangerously in error” (49). For Wearn, 
Hester’s “nature as a woman” is not defined by her motherhood any more than 
Dimmesdale’s soul is defined by his role as a minister, and the chapter centres 
on Wearn’s contention that Hester is driven by her love for Dimmesdale not 
her affection for her daughter, and that Hawthorne uses this allegiance to 
complicate maternity as other than simplistic or sentimental. While Wearn 
makes interesting points about Hawthorne’s novel, she seems to struggle with 
making this discussion serve the purposes of her book, and it seems to me that 
The Scarlet Letter might have been replaced with a text more fully centred in 
issues of mothering.
Overall, as Wearn makes clear, Stowe, Jacobs, Piatt, and Hawthorne of-
fer innovative representations of maternity as, more or less, cultural critiques 
and challenges; they question dominant White, middle-class values, and the 
expectations that constrict women’s options and choices. Wearn succeeds in 
complicating the ways in which we think about sentimental literature and the 
expectations of motherhood. While the controlling idea of Negotiating Mother-
hood is not groundbreaking, the text makes a solid contribution to considerations 
of gender and culture in nineteenth-century America.


Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Brownderville
					, Greg Alan

160         Volume 10, Number 1
His mama’s knees looked like potatoes.
The boy caught her praying on them once 
and heard his name.
She didn’t know he was standing there.
He walked over and laid his hand 
on her shoulder, asked her was she sad. 
She looked up, blue eyes like wilted Morning Glories, 
said, No, honey, go help your daddy with the wood.
He walked outside and shivered 
in a blue coat. Dusk.
His favorite time of day. 
Not that he could see any better, 
but he could tell himself
it was just the sun fading.
His daddy sputtered up in the truck
with a rick of firewood
and the two of them unloaded it in a rolling stack.
The boy wished he could lift the big logs.
When he mentioned what he had heard,
his daddy said, Mamas pray for the people they love.
Why’s she crying?
Your mama has a tendency
to love real hard.
A Tennessee to love, the boy heard.
For a couple armfuls, he studied on it.
A whole Tennessee, he said. Must take a heap of love.
The rusted bed chip-empty, 
he smelled pork chops frying in the house.
A Tennessee to Love
Greg Alan Brownderville


A Tennessee to Love

Gullion
					, reviewed by Jessica
					 Smartt

270         Volume 10, Number 2
Book Reviews
My Mother Wears Combat Boots: 
A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us
Jessica Mills. 
Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007.
Reviewed by Jessica Smartt Gullion
Punk mama Jessica Mills was tired of stereotypical pregnancy and parenting 
books, so, in true do-it-yourself fashion, she wrote her own guidebook. The 
result, My Mother Wears Combat Boots: A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us, 
offers an alternative to mainstream parenting guides. Through personal nar-
rative, accompanied by sidebars of helpful tips and information, Mills offers 
a different approach for advice-seeking parents. 
While the technical information she provides is adequate, Mills’s strength 
lies in the personal accounts of her own parenting experiences. Her writing is 
raw and honest, a refreshing change from the current proliferation of ironic 
“bad mommy” memoirs. 
Mills covers a range of topics, from the nuts and bolts of pregnancy, birth, 
and early childhood, to the more difficult topics of finding a community of 
like-minded parents, resisting gender-coding, and unschooling. Individual 
ideals are reflected in a personal approach to childrearing, and the best part 
of Mills’s narrative is her discussion of how she incorporates anarchist ideals 
in raising her daughter. 
Subculture parents may find themselves alone when the majority of 
their peers are not having children. Mills shares her experience of forming a 
supportive community of like-minded parents. With a group of subculture 
parents, Mills organized a cooperative childcare centre that reflected their 
personal philosophies. She includes a do-it-yourself guide to forming such a 
cooperative centre and shares some of the materials used in her school. She also 
provides interviews with other punk mamas who incorporate punk sensibilities 
in their childrearing.
Mills advocates involving children in our own political activism and using 
our ideals to create a better world for our children. She writes, “Parenting is 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        271 
Book Reviews
living a life of daily revolution.”  The revolutionary ideas supported by anarchists 
can be reflected in how we choose to parent our children. As anarchists, we 
can follow the dominant childrearing practices, or we can choose to maintain 
our passion for social change and work to create the kind of world we want 
for our children. 
Parenting a Defiant Child: A Sanity Saving Guide to 
Finally Stopping the Bad Behavior 
Philip S. Hall and Nancy D. Hall. 
New York: American Management Association, 2007. 
Reviewed by Tatjana Takševa Chorney 
This guidebook offers step-by-step techniques and skills that will enable 
parents to transform their confrontational relationship with a defiant child. 
Written in jargon-free prose, the book includes key statements and concepts 
in highlighted boxes, which makes it a particularly accessible work. It aims to 
distinguish itself from other parenting books by favouring a preventative over 
a punitive approach to non-compliant behaviour. I support the premise that 
prevention works better than punitive measures, which focus on consequences 
rather than causes. 
The book is divided into three sections: Prevention, Managing Non-
compliance and Defiance, and Planning for Success in the Community. Each 
section emphasizes practical concerns, and the end of each chapter includes a 
section entitled Applications. The three sections are organized in a linear and 
sequential way, and provide parents with exercises, examples, and activities that 
will help them implement the ideas and proposals presented in the preceding 
chapter. As authors Philip S. Hall and Nancy D. Hall rightly point out, “there 
is no one big thing”(x) that a parent can do to solve the problem of defiance 
in children. Solutions come from consistently following a series of small steps 
and actions that will eventually modify undesirable behaviour. 
The authors define defiant behaviour in descriptive rather than summative 
terms. They pose five questions for parents to answer: “Does my child frequently 
provoke other people? Does my child intentionally defy me? Does my child 
maliciously antagonize and fight with his or her sibling? Does my child throw 
a temper tantrum when he doesn’t get his way? Do I let my child get away 
with things so that I can have some peace and quiet?” (ix). If parents answer 
“yes” to two or more of these questions, and the defiant child is older than 
three years of age, then it is time for action. The authors do not say, however, 
that a child’s defiance is often a justifiable reaction to a set of circumstances 
that may have been exacerbated by parents’ momentary or ongoing lack of 
insight, patience, or energy. 


Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Not a member yet

Stories in the Wind

Valuing by Doing: Policy Options to Promote Sharing the Care