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

Cihlar
					, James

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    233 
Claiming a city. Collecting signs.
I am back to say goodbye.
Tidyland 
Laundromat.
Associated Thrift:
Yesterday’s Best.
“Jan”-tiques. Owner Jan Gardner.
A trip to the past with a touch of class.
Blood pressure 126 over 90.
72nd and Dodge. Heritage Village.
New Lady Fitness. Suburban Bridals.
From Here to Maternity.
NW Radial Hwy in Benson.
Omaha Lace Laundry. A fashion cleaner.
Musette Bar. Grampy’s Odds & Ends.
All proceeds go to Uta Hallee Home for Girls.
Tip Top Thrift Shop.
Jim’s Seek & Save.
Enter Through Alley. Buy an antique
that evokes a favorite memory
of a special person in your life
or a happy occasion from your childhood.
My mother sat on the gossip bench
talking to Aunt Honey on the rotary dial.
Animal Ark Shelter.
Return to Willoughby.
Please come browse,
I know you will find
that perfect memory
to take home.
 
Bergen Mercy
James Cihlar
234    Volume 10, Number 2
James Cihlar
“Kathleen in West Omaha.” Photo: Rita Hermann


English

Bergen Mercy

Moloney
					, Sharon

Mothers and Daughters at Menarche: An Indigenous-Inspired Quiet Revolution

Soliday
					, reviewed by Elizabeth

284        Volume 10, Number 2
Book Reviews
Super America: Stories
Anne Panning.  
Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Soliday
In Super America, an award-winning collection of ten short stories and one 
novella, Anne Panning takes us inside the lives of everyday people across 
the continental and pacific United States.  In her stories, we meet characters 
struggling to cope with unexpected events, some of which readers might see as 
touching or poignant, others we might judge dramatic and painful.  Through 
her ability to build tension quickly, write clear and believable dialogue, and 
create evocative moods that linger in the reader’s imagination, Panning unveils 
the hidden meaning of events, both ordinary and extraordinary.         
In “Five reasons I miss the laundromat,” the narrator folds her family’s 
clothing in the spacious laundry room of her home; as she recalls her younger 
self, the reader can almost inhale the warmth of the fresh laundry she remembers 
removing from a coin-operated dryer.  In “Tidal Wave Wedding,” we join a 
newlywed couple on a Hawaiian beach as they search for a lost wedding ring. 
While we feel the poignancy of their desperate and fruitless search, we also 
sense the couple’s awe in the face of unstoppable tsunami waves, which they 
view from atop a mountain.      
Panning builds dramatic tension quickly and believably.  In a few pages, 
she introduces provocative, realistic conflicts.  In “Super America” and “Hillbil-
lies,” her characters struggle with the unavoidable, unsolvable consequences 
of seeking and/or achieving higher social status; in “Cravings,” forbidden love 
takes a contemporary form; the struggles in “What happened” and “Freeze” are 
overtly dramatic and intense, involving death and disability.  Of her characters’ 
trials, both big and small, one narrator concedes, “Life more often than not 
throws you where it wants to” (85).
At times, I found myself hoping for tidier endings, for Panning to conclude 
each story like a cut of meat wrapped neatly in butcher paper and tied with 
string.  Though she eschews closure, her clever conclusions provide unique 
pleasures.  And if we take this assertion to heart, “For you, this is where the 
story ends…. You can go back to your own lives—read and dream, eat and 
sleep” (94), Panning means to show us that even if we were to presume a story 
could end, its essence will linger somewhere outside ourselves.     


Super America: Stories

Gamber
					, reviewed by Cayo

308        Volume 10, Number 1
Book Reviews
As Suzanne Evans explains in her preface, Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Mar-
tyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief focuses on “mothers of the fallen and 
how their stories have been used and modified in different historical contexts 
to create a martyrology”; her purpose is to explicate how these stories, of 
mothers and the fallen, when “used by master propagandists to unite society 
in the waging of war, still maintain their grip” (x). Evans makes clear there is 
a long tradition of religious martyrology, focusing on Jewish, Christian, and 
Muslim martyrologies, including “the Macabean mother” who convinces her 
seven sons that it is better to die for God and religious practice then give in to 
King Antiochus’s demand to defile their faith by eating pork, Mother Mary 
who silently watches as her son is sacrificed in order to intercede for all who 
sin, and Fatima who lived with the foreknowledge that her yet-unborn son’s 
death one day would save his community. Evans demonstrates that the image 
of the mother sacrificing her child “is so powerful that it is not surprising it 
should become a touchstone, a measure of love and devotion to a cause and to 
the divine” (17). Ultimately, she reveals the ways in which this tradition and 
Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: 
World War I and the Politics of Grief 
Suzanne Evans. 
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.
Reviewed by Cayo Gamber
traditional family model of father, mother, and children is the basic social unit 
and should be strengthened; and (iv) only dysfunctional adults divorce and this 
results in dysfunctional children (3). 
A series of illustrative examples drawn from the authors’ practice are 
intended to help therapists and their clients adopt a healthy attitude toward 
the single-parent family and explore unconscious, “covert rules that people 
co-create” to choreograph their interactions and mask their fears (102). 
The section that examines the school system is especially valuable and 
relevant; it reveals that many school officials, guidance counselors, classroom 
teachers, and single parents themselves assume that any academic problems 
that children from single-parent families may face are always caused by the 
absence of one parent. This erroneous assumption is exposed through an 
examination of the academic scores of children in single-parent families. The 
results clearly show that “there is no one academic consequence to living in a 
single-parent family: some children have problems; for some there is no effect; 
and for others there is an improvement” (191).
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        309 
Book Reviews
touchstone was translated into the stories of Canadian mothers of sons who 
died in World War I.
The stories of Canadian mothers whose sons had died in war were used 
to unite the country. From the outset, the Canadian mother was instructed 
to accept the need to sacrifice her son. To that end, early recruitment post-
ers—which posed such questions as “When the War is over and someone 
asks your husband or your son what he did in the Great War, is he to hang his 
head because you would not let him go?” (79)—sought to convince women 
to let their loved ones go to war. Later recruitment posters, which employed 
slogans such as “Fight for Her,” prompted women not only to accept that their 
husbands and sons must go to war, but that they should encourage them to do 
so. Moreover, if her son were to die, the Canadian mother was told she must 
“accept her son’s death quietly—when it comes—whether during the war so as 
not to damage the morale of others, or after the war so as not to damage the 
peace of amnesty that the state then supports” (8). In her close analysis of the 
public mourning of individual mothers such as Mrs. Charlotte Susan Wood, 
public commemoration at monuments such as the Spirit of Canada in Vimy, 
France, and the ongoing role of the Silver Cross mothers in quietly promot-
ing the support of the state, Evans reveals how “by remembering those fallen 
soldiers and their mourning mothers, we give their death and pain a purpose 
and a place in history” (161). Evans also notes, however, that 
[t]he fear in remembering is that the memory will constantly rekindle 
the desire for revenge. The atrocities of war must be forgotten because 
peace cannot be built on the memory of hatred. What helped us to 
forget the atrocities that took us to war in World War I was the post-
war knowledge that many of them, said to have been committed by 
the enemy, never occurred. With this knowledge came a realization 
that the atrocity was the war itself and how it was conducted. (162)
In the end, as Evans argues, the struggle between remembering and 
forgetting is balanced, on the one hand, by the knowledge that war itself may 
be an atrocity and, on the other, that in times of national crisis mothers of 
martyrs and mothers as martyrs may “be resurrected and polished up” in the 
name of the nation.
As Evans notes:
Mothers bereaved in times of conflict have been remembered and 
honoured by their communities and their leaders in proportion to the 
perceived need to support and develop a sense of patriotism, and, if 
necessary, militarism. Commonly, this remembrance is kept in isola-
tion from the stories of mothers of martyrs from other cultures and 
faiths. This isolation helps to promote a sense of the uniqueness of 
mothers who are willing to make such a sacrifice. (4)
310        Volume 10, Number 1
Book Reviews
This study of the role Canadian mothers played during World War I is 
comprehensive and compelling; it would have been stronger, however, had 
Evans shown how concurrent acts of martyrology from other cultures and 
other faiths were kept in isolation, so as to ensure that the mothers of sons 
who died for Canada should not be confused, for example, with the mothers of 
sons who had died for Germany or Turkey. How might the words and work of 
Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz have added to her discussion of how “other” mothers 
grieve? On 22 October 1914, Kollwitz lost her eighteen-year-old son, Peter, at 
Diksmuide on the Western Front. In the months and years that followed, she 
made drawings for a memorial to Peter and his fallen comrades. It was not until 
eighteen years later, however, that her memorial, entitled The Grieving Parents, 
was finally completed and placed in the Belgian cemetery of Roggevelde. The 
parents who grieve are modeled on Käthe and her husband, Karl. They are 
alone, yet together, in their grief, as they kneel side by side, hunched over, each 
with hands cusped under arms, confronting the rows and rows of crosses for 
those who died in battle—among them the cross that commemorates Peter. 
How might Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s speech commemorating the loss of the 
thousands of Turkish and Anzac soldiers in Gallipoli—words that now are 
inscribed on a monument at Anzac Cove, 
Those heroes who have shed their blood and lost their lives … you are 
now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There 
is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where 
they lie side by side here in this country of ours … You, the mothers 
who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. 
Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having 
lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.
—have added to Evans’s discussion of the ways “other” cultures bountifully 
and indiscriminately mourn other mothers’ sons who have died in battle? 
Finally, more might have been said of the ways in which memorial sites are 
constantly being negotiated and renegotiated. Initially, these sites speak na-
tionally, officially, and patriotically for Canadian women who have lost chil-
dren in war. As Evans notes, albeit briefly, these same sites also come to be 
used as focal (and vocal) points for Canadian women’s efforts for peace. The 
heteroglossia of these sites of mourning, commemorating, and negotiating 
would be worth interrogating more fully. While Evans may not have compre-
hensively analyzed the discursive meaning of these sites, her work prompts 
the reader to contemplate the various discourses these sites engender and the 
implications of creating a martyrology of mothers and sons, and for that we 
can applaud her engaged and engaging study of the mothers of heroes, moth-
ers of martyrs.


Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief

Joy Green
					, reviewed by Fiona

302        Volume 10, Number 1
Book Reviews
diverse offerings as Richard Ferber’s Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems (1985), 
Elizabeth Pantley’s The No-Cry Sleep Solution (2002), and the controversial 
but still highly popular work of Gary Ezzo, On Becoming Babywise (1995). 
But Douglas takes a decidedly different approach to a familiar subject. While 
Ferber, Pantley, Ezzo, and others offer distinctive and clearly outlined methods 
for overcoming sleep problems, Douglas offers a smorgasbord of possibilities. 
Not only does she outline and summarize the perspectives of the recognized 
experts in the field, but she also gives equal time to her own panel of non-
experts—a group of experienced parents who all have dealt with their own 
children’s sleep problems. 
It is, in fact, Douglas’s choice to share the stage with a series of non-experts 
that makes her work stand out. By engaging with the voices and experiences 
of more than 170 individual parents “in the trenches,” she rejects one expert 
voice in favour of the understanding of a community of equals, thus reclaim-
ing the fraught terrain of parenting in the name of parents themselves, and 
enabling them, at an individual level, to make the choices that will best suit 
their particular family situation.
Also distinctive is Douglas’s writing style. Eschewing the formal and 
prescriptive language of many parenting books, Douglas prefers an often 
humorous, tongue-in-cheek approach that includes frequent references to 
popular culture and emphasizes not only the challenges of raising children, 
but also the contortions of parenting.
The end result is a positive approach to parenting which respects both 
child and parent, places control in the hands of the parent rather than the 
expert, emphasizes the value of individualized approaches which can more 
fully meet the needs of children and parents, and, finally, encourages parents 
to accept and honour the parenting choices they make.
By The Secret Ladder: A Mother’s Initiation 
Frances Greenslade. 
Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2007.
 
Reviewed by Fiona Joy Green
“Becoming a mother brings you close to the bone, to blood, to shit, 
to mortality and your absolute worst fears. It may be sweet, but it can 
also be dark and dangerous.” (xxv)
In 2003, Frances Greenslade won the Saskatchewan Book Award for non-
fiction for A Pilgrim in Ireland. I believe she has another winner in By The 
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 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        303 
Book Reviews
Secret Ladder: A Mother’s Initiation. The book grabs the reader with its open-
ing sentence—“Odd things strike you when you find yourself lying on the 
hardwood floor of your own hallway, trying to put together how you ended 
up there”—and it does not release her until the very end.
Greenslade blends autobiography, the wisdom and insights of a thoughtful 
and reflective mother, with current research on pregnancy, birth, and mothering, 
and cross-cultural mythology as she guides the reader through her remarkable 
and challenging first year of motherhood. This beautifully articulate narrative 
details the complicated transition into motherhood, the complexity of family 
relationships, the routine of everyday living, and the changing seasons of the 
Canadian prairies.
The eleven chapters of By The Secret Ladder are divided into three sections 
—aptly titled Departure, Initiation, and The Return—which follow the magi-
cal and mystical internal journey of the new mother. Greenslade gently leads 
readers through her personal process of uncovering what it means to become 
a mother. She speaks bravely and honestly of the powerful taboos around 
motherhood that prevent women from acknowledging the complexity of this 
extrasensory experience. She admits, for example, “When you become a mother, 
you undergo a psychic reordering even more monumental and profound than 
the physical” (xxiii).
While most women undergo an intense reconstruction of the self as they 
transition from non-mother to new mother, this process is complicated for 
Greenslade by a jaundiced newborn son in ICU, and her personal near-death 
experience due to complications associated with the uncommon condition 
of placenta accreta. Unlike most birthing women, Greenslade’s placenta was 
embedded too deeply in the lining of her uterus, a condition that went un-
noticed until the difficult delivery of the placenta. Not only did she experience 
hemorrhaging, within a month of giving birth—following a third emergency 
visit to the hospital—she had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy.
Greenslade’s narrative gift is her ability to move beyond her harrowing 
experience, to write a well-crafted, intelligent, and compelling memoir that 
reflects upon the common transitional experiences of many new mothers. She 
addresses important issues such as the complexities of breastfeeding, self- and 
culturally-imposed isolation and insulation, fearful moments of separation and 
anxiety, and the tremendous pressure to wear the mask of motherhood and 
to act the “good mother.” Greenslade grounds her story in poetry, historical 
and cross-cultural myths, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis, and details how 
norms of motherhood are subtly yet dangerously enforced. She also shows 
how one woman’s experience of becoming a mother is uniquely fulfilling and 
encourages readers to explore their own entry to motherhood.
By The Secret Ladder is a powerful work, lucid, honest, and poetic; I rec-
ommend it highly.


By The Secret Ladder: A Mother’s Initiation

Glenn
					, Lorri
					 Neilsen

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    265 
1. Blood
Something happens late July when the cool wind
gushes through the screen, reminds you the season
has peaked, dandelion and thistle have scattered 
their future in white puffs, and the sun has dragged you
along the days until evening---earlier now, simmered
and drawn, sweet butter. Reminds with each berry
and grasshopper what happens to love and regret, and what
grace can grow in the blue plum of summers that reappear  
each year. Deeper, and you didn’t have to ask. Each 
a cell inside a cell inside--as your mother’s hand,
reaching from your body to cradle tomatoes 
is inside your grandmother’s, searching in the clover 
in Selkirk for a four-leaf, and her mother’s,
gathering saskatoons near Norway House, touches 
a berry as though it were desire, drawing blood
from the soil, drawing still. 
2. You write about your mother
because she tells you the Chautauqua came to Shoal Lake the year
she was nine, and brown-haired Lillian and white-blond Grace sat overlooking 
the stage in the meeting house built by Carson, her grandfather,
and the organizers of the program plucked the two from the oak balcony
Lorri Neilsen Glenn
Learning the Words
266    Volume 10, Number 2
Lorri Neilsen Glenn
to model clothes-- imagine! the Thirties, and the abundance, the burst 
of the moment when the stylish woman from the city turned to her: 
“Dear,” she said, “you need to wear rose and blue.” 
       And because
the year following, after her father died and Grace was sent to the McDonald’s 
while her mother went to the city to train to be a nurse,  Aunt Bell found 
curtains, old clothing sent from Boston, anything to fashion 
something rose, something blue for the white-blond girl from an oak bluff 
on the Western plains. 
3. Separation by Degrees
What? You got boulders in these? No, just books come in your father says this calls 
for a scotch the first one in the family and your mother scowls you’re so thin, I’ll 
put on the potatoes. You wait, poised on the edge of a worn brown plaid chair, 
looking into the cold ripples of the familiar. So, he says, piled higher and deeper, 
right? and places a cork coaster with an Irish castle under the wet circle of glass 
that draws your eyes inward and you open your mouth to ask about your little 
brother the dry spring the heat the tomatoes the dog the latest on the long 
reach of the neighbour’s tree over the backyard fence how the old Chrysler is 
hanging on but you hear a sharp exhale and a snort look up over the ice cubes 
to see the one who bore you leaning heavily on the door frame wiping her 
hands slowly on a tea towel. Chin pointed: well, missy, I suppose this means we 
can’t talk to you now?
4. St. Boniface
Walked out, the four of you, coats unbuttoned at thirty-five below, 
stepped around smokers who stood outside the atrium by the revolving
doors – shots of warmth along with their nicotine—past holiday trees 
triumphantly lit on the boulevard, past taxis,
emergency vehicles, a native couple shielding a child 
and clutching a suitcase, everyone with a hundred yard 
stare, and with your shoes scuffing over ice and salt, you crossed 
over near the park to search for the car you brought –was it
only that morning? Somewhere around here. Snow had blown 
across the diagonal path so you made your own, heads down, 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    267 
Learning the Words
tracking each other’s feet ahead. Nothing now but that 
small focus. Behind you, the cross on the hospital roof 
was a beacon—against cold, despair; or just for salvation perhaps–
and it cast light on your backs as you each, unaware, fell into step in birth
order across the field. One held a bag with a nightdress. You walked
slowly in the dark, like shepherds in drifts, away from miracles.
 
5. Hemlock Ravine: Spring
Walk the path where old 
trees slapped down by high winds
are now lying in grey huddles
praying with their brittle hands,
broken arms. Inert, their memories
of earth cracked apart in the fall, 
their reaches, once psalms against 
rain, are sawn in angles, left
to dry. Climb over a trunk to pursue 
something green, your legs like a spider’s
crawl slowly, spiny-limber with
   life. Oh, it was
so sudden.  You had much more 
to say to one another; you were
just learning the words. 


Learning the Words

Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering
Fall/Winter 2008, Vol 10, No 2, 330 pages

236    Volume 10, Number 2
The color pink
Rotted bananas
Black Galaxy
With fins
Josef ’s Originals
Lefton wall pocket
Pearl Drops Toothpaste
Herman Miller sunburst
Fridge, oleo
Her son
Paper dress
Trailer in her driveway
My mother’s cut glass
And linens
Pot of chili she flung on the wall
Of my mother’s apartment
What My Stepmother Used
James Cihlar


What My Stepmother Used

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    245 
The lady across the hall
smoked, and her cigarettes trailed
through the plumbing into my apartment.
As Bill and my sister and brother-in-law
moved my stuff out of the Soviet-bloc-
style apartments in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, 
she opened the door
and yelled drunken gibberish at my sister.
Rita lived in a Wisconsin cabin outside the cities
for three seasons of the year, with Binks,
a pet turtle, and Chippie, an uninvited
chipmunk. The sign outside Richmond reads,
The City Beautiful. Neither of these places 
was home. When Rita turned sixteen,
our mother set fire to her sheets
as Rita slept in bed. Through the flames,
she sang to her, Happy Birthday
to you, Happy Birthday to you.
Six blocks down from the Capitol
in Nebraska, I once soaked in the tub
with my headphones on, Paul
in bed, the phallic deco building
glowing in the flood lights 
as cars circled its base,
men cruising
in what was known as the fruit loop.
That was my apartment. Long story short:
House Beautiful
James Cihlar
246    Volume 10, Number 2
James Cihlar
I later moved in with him, then I moved out.
Okay, back up: I came home from the party
just noticing the rips in my shirt from the fight,
and he had pushed the furniture in front of the doors
so I couldn’t get in. 
Later, by myself in my own apartment
on thirteenth and “B” Street, 
I sat in front of the speckled mirror tiles,
free Gevalia coffee-maker brewing its first pot of coffee,
watching myself eat a delivered pizza,
with Hiroshima, Mon Amour playing
on a UHF channel. Believe it or not, 
that was the closest to home I’d gotten by then.
(Originally published in Prairie Schooner)
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    247 
Folio
“Playing Tea Party with Dylan.” Photo: Rita Hermann.


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

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Bergen Mercy

Mothers and Daughters at Menarche: An Indigenous-Inspired Quiet Revolution

Super America: Stories

Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief

By The Secret Ladder: A Mother’s Initiation

Learning the Words

Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering Fall/Winter 2008, Vol 10, No 2, 330 pages

What My Stepmother Used

House Beautiful

The Global Restructuring of Care: The Third World Nanny Phenomenon

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