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

Dreuth Zeman
					, Laura

English

Feminism, Child Protection, and Mothers with Psychiatric Disabilities
in the United States

Goodrich
					, Rebecca

252    Volume 10, Number 2
My daughter, Kiya, and I pull off the narrow mountain highway and park on 
a cracked asphalt strip. Below us a ribbon of green water emerges from the 
dry brush, then curves out of sight, exactly where the guidebook said it would 
be. The author assures us it is stocked with rainbow trout we can keep and 
endangered native cutthroat trout which must be released. I especially like the 
name, the St. Mary’s. My hope is that the day will be a respite for both of us, 
an island of amity in a sea of recrimination. Standing side by side in a river 
named for a mother feels just right, and I sense we’ve come to this place for 
forgiveness as much as for fishing. 
Although it’s been a year, I must still occasionally remind myself that 
we’re in North Idaho now. Before this we lived for sixteen years on an island 
in Southeast Alaska with one town and seventeen miles of road. Now we’ve 
moved to a place with no tides and little rain, where water is confined be-
tween the rims of riverbanks, lakes, and man-made ponds. My decision to 
move from Alaska was abrupt. My marriage had dissolved; my second-grade 
teaching job had become a suffocating ordeal. Kiya had just finished eleventh 
grade with friends she had known since kindergarten. I took her away at the 
end of June, just when the weather was warm enough for all-night beach 
bonfires and skiff excursions to far islands. Friends called long distance for 
the rest of the summer describing the adventures they were having without 
her. Small-town kids do not easily accept a new 12th grader, and her senior 
year is a painful ordeal. In Idaho she has no tight group of friends, no history, 
no identity. She is a fish out of water in a wheat-growing place. She blames 
me for her misery. 
This may be the last time the two of us fish together. In a week we’ll 
pack her small, red truck with everything a teenager needs to make it in the 
world: stacks of CDs, shoes, jeans, a tie-dyed beanbag chair. She’s not headed 
for college; her future is more uncertain. A job of any kind, an apartment of 
her own. I’ve tried to persuade her to stay in the area, give the local university 
a try. You could live in a dorm, find friends who are more like you, be on the snow-
board team. Her answer is emphatic—no. 
Perhaps because her day of departure is drawing near, she has agreed to 
fish with me. We stand together in the chilly current, casting small copper 
Rebecca Goodrich
Knee Deep in the Mother of God
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    253 
Knee Deep in the Mother of God
lures towing treble hooks with the barbs crimped down to make the releasing 
easier. Within minutes my line telegraphs the bite I’ve been waiting for. A 
mottled olive back breaks the surface, and I tow it within reach. The colors on 
its side are like a mountain dawn, the crimson slashes on its throat the color 
of fresh blood. This is a cutthroat trout and must be put back. I hold it gently 
in the flow so that I can extricate the hook without tearing its jaw. In spite of 
my care and good intentions the fish darts away with a ragged lip, weakened 
by the struggle.
Here willows and alder grow close to the river. Song-sparrows warble 
from the underbrush; a red-tailed hawk rides high overhead. Our senses are 
at odds: sizzling from the neck up in mid-afternoon heat, numb and senseless 
from the knees down. The more chilled we become, the more often we lose 
our footing on the slick, river-pounded cobbles. We stagger and slip, we laugh, 
gripping each other like pedestrians on an icy street. That algae underfoot, 
I want to explain, is just one filament in a complex web of interactions and 
processes. Green cells bask in sunlight, sipping a broth of minerals and salts, 
working alchemical magic by converting light to sugars and starch. Beneath 
our feet delicate mayfly larvae, snails, and copper-colored water pennies graze 
on subriverine pastures. Caddisflies spin lacy nets and set them perpendicular 
to the current. On a flat rock Kiya finds a dozen dry husks with legs and tails, 
stonefly skins unzipped and shed when the time arrived to leave the water and 
take to the air. I’m hoping we’ll catch a rainbow trout, a fish we can take home 
and eat. Each bite of pale flesh will contain a bit of sunshine, a bit of algae, a 
bit of the river’s spirit. When you leave home, I want to tell her, the St. Mary’s 
will flow in your blood, her riverbed will lodge in your bones.
By day’s end we’ve hooked three cutthroats. We released each one and 
watched it dart away, a spark in the amber-green current. We braided flat 
river grass and made circlets for our hair. We sat on flat stones, ate sandwich-
es, and tossed the crumbs into the river to atone for the crushed and dying 
invertebrates we left in our wake. We spoke without words about childhood 
and how it vanished like smoke.
Twilight has arrived, and the river is a rippling band of lead. Mayflies dip 
and rise. With only moments to live the adult females have no need to hunt, 
to eat. Their bodies have become hollow caverns whose single purpose is to 
hold, then deposit their eggs. I watch them skim close to the river’s surface 
and imagine thousands of microscopic spheres falling into the current. In 
response, trout rise to feed. Mayfly and trout meet at the wavering border of 
air and water, to predate, to procreate. Concentric circles mark the moment of 
each encounter, widen, then drift downstream. Kiya and I could fish now, but 
choose to watch instead. We sit together in the dusk listening to the murmur 
of the river, a whisper from the St. Mary’s that we recognize and accept, a 
time to catch, a time to release.
 


Knee Deep in the Mother of God

Kruk
					, Laurie

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    263 
for Elena, 8 months
There are birds, flying
out of your throat
birr birr,  birrr  birr
folding diapers, I glance  
at empty window
where moments before
wings whirred, beaks dipped
in seed reservoir, tapping glass, then
flashed
back, into absence
leaving only your words 
newly-winged--
You stick tiny, tenacious hands
right into the heart of things,
like my opening lips, too close 
for a kiss,
touching tongue, teeth and mouth
as if to unlock
  —birr,  birr birr!—
the swallow-starling fountain
of talk. Of feathers that fall 
carelessly all day
from our lips, swept up now into 
nests of naming: 
daughter.  My daughter.
Laurie Kruk
First Birds
264    Volume 10, Number 2
Of meanings
that float, from my mouth 
to yours  Mother, 
your mother 
and write 
the air.
Laurie Kruk


First Birds

LaChance Adams
					, Sarah

Reconsidering the Political Individual: Responding to Carole Pateman’s
Critique of Social Contract Theory with Help from Developmental
Psychology and Care Ethics

Runquist
					, Jennifer J.

Baker
					, Linda C.

Women’s Experience of Fatigue After Childbirth:
Narratives of Ideology and Resistance

Racine
					, Catherine

My Darling Darling: Étude on Muriel’s Body

Brownderville
					, Greg Alan

184         Volume 10, Number 1
Late afternoon, July 1, 1955, in Edmunds County, South Dakota: The sky 
was lovely lemonade. Nine-year-old Sharon Weron, her mother trailing in a 
car, was riding home a freshly purchased pregnant mare. They were 150 feet 
from home when sudden clouds bombed hail. The mother stopped and put a 
puffy black winter coat on the girl and said, “Cut across the field to the house. 
I’ll take the road around and meet you there.” The mother made it first and, 
as her daughter sped across the field on the gray and white horse, there it was 
in a camouflage sky—a clay pot on an unmanned potter’s wheel. The horse 
wheeled and fled, muscling up a high hill, but in vain. The mother watched 
her little girl’s long yellow hair swirling madly in the wind, a drop of food 
coloring diffusing in a glass of water. Still astraddle the horse, Sharon ascended 
from the earth and rode 1000 feet inside a whirl witnesses described as “a bail 
of wire in air.” The mare survived, as did the colt within her womb. Unhurt, 
remembering nothing of the ride, Sharon landed on her belly like an airplane, 
let down easy into the windy italicization of the wheat. 
Greg Alan Brownderville
All of this only fifty miles from 
the former home of L. Frank Baum, 
creator of The Wizard of Oz


All of this only fifty miles from the former home of L. Frank Baum,
creator of The Wizard of Oz

230             Volume 9, Number 1
She Said 
On the phone she said, I have a friend who’s got a problem, but she couldn’t 
get to a phone so I’m calling for her.  Do you know what I mean?  Is this the 
right place?
When she lay down, she said, Are you a doctor?
Then she said, Aren’t you afraid you’ll get caught?
When we were putting in the speculum, she said, Oh, I had breakfast before I 
came.  I know I wasn’t supposed to but I was so hungry I just ate everything 
in sight, is that ok?
Later she said, I think I have to throw up.
Or, I have to go to the bathroom right now.  Stop.  I just have to go to the 
bathroom, and then I’ll come right back.
Or, on a different day, I don’t feel so good, should I do it anyway?
The next week she said, Infection?  I don’t have any infection.  Oh, that.  That’s 
not really an infection.  That infection’s nothing, I’ve had it before, it’s noth-
ing, go on, go ahead and take that baby out.
Sometimes she said, Can I see it before you throw it away?
But another time she said, I don’t want to look at it, ok?  When it comes out, 
I’ll just close my eyes, and you take it away, ok?
Once she said, What do you do with it all at the end of the day?  Boy, you 
people are gonna get in trouble sometime, this’s against the law.
And when we were done she said, What if it happens again?  You know – this. 
Would you do me again?
—before 1973
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         231 
Folio
She stood on the back steps outside the counselor’s apartment and said, This is mi 
prima, my cousin, from Mexico.  Can you talk Spanish to her? ¿Habla un 
poco? ¿Un poquito? ¡Si, gringa!  We will do this.
No, I’ll keep it on, I’m not hot, it’s ok, I’m fine.  She was wearing her boyfriend’s 
baseball jacket in the kitchen.  She said, Just tell me what I have to know.
This is my husband, Ed.  He’s going to sit here with me.  She leaned over, 
touched his arm, and said, Ed, honey, this is Julie, she’s my counselor, the one 
that got assigned to me when we called the number.
When we told her she should pay whatever she could afford, she was quiet a minute 
and then said, I think I can get nine dollars.
My father brought me here today.  He’s paying for this but he’s really mad at 
me for it.  She took a hundred dollar bill out of her pocket and said, He thinks if 
everybody got liberated, like with civil rights, that there’d be a lot of trouble, 
and he says I prove his point, because look what happens when you just do 
what you want.  He says that’s why we have to have so many laws on every-
body, because if you let people be free and do what they want they’ll just do 
evil things.
When the sister-in-law was asked why she called the police, she said, It’s a sin, she 
can’t do this.  She has to have it, we all have to.  Jesus doesn’t want her to get 
rid of this baby, that’s why I did it.
He doesn’t like me to talk to my mother.  Him and his mother, they don’t let 
me go home to visit.  She put the tiny baby in her mother’s arms and said, We 
sneaked to come for this appointment. He doesn’t know I’m pregnant again. 
My baby is so new, I can’t have another one right away.  He wouldn’t even 
want it really, he thinks this one makes too much noise.  He doesn’t like me 
to do anything without his permission.
Holding her purse, wearing her gloves, the girl clinging to her coat sleeve, she said, 
You take good care of her, she don’t know no better, she’s just a baby her own 
self, she don’t even know how this happened.  She don’t know what it’s all 
about, this whole thing.
My mother told me I couldn’t keep it, she told me she’d get the baby taken 
away from me right away if I had it.  She cried, loud crying with snot and chok-
ing.  She wiped her nose and said, She knows I want to have it.  I could be a 
good mother, I’ve taken care of babies and I know what to do.  But I’m only 
fifteen so she’ll get them to take it away from me, I know she will.  That’s why 
I’m doing this!  I’d rather not even see it!
232         Volume 9, Number 1
Judith Arcana
After the cervical injection, she said, How did you learn all this?  Did you read 
a book?  Is there a book?
Every now and then, she said, How come you let us bring our boyfriends over 
to your house to wait?  Aren’t you afraid they’ll tell?  And, Jeez, who are all 
these little kids?  What’re you guys doing, running a kindergarten on the 
side?  Are those doughnuts for us?
When we finished talking and gave her our phone numbers, she said, What if it 
comes out alive?  What should I do then?  I can’t have it be alive.  Should I, 
you know, should I...?  Can I do it by myself?  It could be alive, right?
Now and then she said, Oh I’m so sick, what a mess, oh I’m so sorry, I really feel 
fine but this just happened oh oh here it comes again.  Oh god I’m so sorry, I 
can’t help it, I’m such a mess, oh thank you. 
She rang the bell, and when we buzzed her in she said, My girlfriends are down-
stairs.  They brought me over when I called you about the cramps.  Should 
they come back for me or can you give me a ride home?  How long will it take 
for it to, you know, all come out?
Another time, waiting to miscarry, she said, I’m sorry it’s taking so long.  I’m 
sure you’ve got other things to do, I know a lot of women are waiting.  But 
thank you so much, thank you for letting me come to your house.  I couldn’t 
have done this at my house, for sure.  My parents think I’m at my girlfriend’s 
house, I just hope they don’t call to check on me, ‘cause my girlfriend’s mother 
could say something wrong and then I’d really be in trouble.
Ok, it’ll take me about an hour and a half to drive home - I live over the line 
in Indiana - and here’s what I’m going to do, she said one winter weekend.  My 
father’s a heavy sleeper, so if the cramps come in the night while he’s sleeping 
he’ll never hear me; I’ll just go in the bathroom and lock the door.  I’ll do it 
all in there.  He won’t even hear the toilet flush, he never does, even when it’s 
just ordinary, you know, flushing for regular reasons.
She looked at the clear plastic sheet on the mattress, the speculum and the syringe. 
Then she laughed and said, You ladies somethin, doin this up in here; you 
somethin, all right.
Why do you do this?  She looked around the small bedroom and said, You’re not 
rich.  With what you charge, you can’t be doing this for the money.  What’s it 
all about?  Are you a bunch of women’s libbers?  Is that it?
I’m not nervous.  I think you are good women.  I’m never nervous, maybe cuz 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         233 
Folio
I’m always tired.  She was so tired that when the woman beside the bed rocked her 
shoulder softly to wake her up, she said, It’s over?  I’m sorry, I just closed my eyes 
after the shot you gave me down there.  I’m sorry, but I was real tired, I had to 
work a double shift and din have no time between work and here.
Ohmygod, does this happen all the time?  This bleeding?  She gasped and said, 
The blood is so dark.  Ooh!  Ice?!  Ay!  Make it stop!  This ice tray is too cold! 
Ohmygod!  You better not be scared, I’m the one scared, not you.  Orange 
juice, are you kidding?  Ay, what if I faint?  I know people faint when they lose 
blood.  Can you still do me?  Did you finish?
She leaned over to the woman driving and quietly said, My daughter’s in Chil-
dren’s Memorial, she’s only two, she’s having an operation on her stomach 
valve today – it doesn’t work right, since she was born.  My husband’s over 
there, with her, for that, while I’m here, for this.  Could I leave right after I’m 
done?  Could you take me back right away, so I don’t wait ‘til everybody is 
done?  Would that be ok?  Would the other women mind, do you think?
She gulped some water in the kitchen and said, Oh thank you, you’ll never know 
what this means to me. Thank you so much.  I could never thank you enough, 
I’m sure. I know some people say it’s wrong, abortion, that you shouldn’t take 
a life.  And maybe we did take a life.  But it’s all give and take, isn’t it?  My 
mother always said that everything comes down to give and take.  So I think 
the baby, today, that was the taking – and me, me in my own life, I think that 
was the giving.
234         Volume 9, Number 1
Judith Arcana
Acknowledgments
“She couldn’t be sure what he’d say” first appeared in Women’s Global Network 
for Reproductive Rights Newsletter #71.
“Jocasta Interviewed in Hell” first appeared in Family Reunion, Chicory Blue 
Press, 2003.
 
“Talking about Suzie, 1959” first appeared in Hurricane Alice, 13/2-3, 1998. 
Judith Arcana. Photo: Jonathan Arlook. 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         235 
Folio
“Sheila’s Deposition, 1997” first appeared in pms: poem/memoir/story #4, 
2004.
“Celia Finally Responds, 1998” first appeared in The Oregon Review, Spring/
Summer 2001.
“Noreen’s Phone Calls, 1999” first appeared in pms: poem/memoir/story #4, 
2004.
 
“For All the Mary Catholics” first appeared in POOL #4, 2005.
 
“In the Service We Said” first appeared in pms: poem/memoir/story #1, 2001.
 
“Here Is What Happened” first appeared in Reproductive Health Matters, 
Summer 2002.
 
“She Said” first appeared in Calyx 17/3, Winter 1998.
All work by Judith Arcana except “Celia Finally Responds, 1998” appears in 
her book What if your mother, published by Chicory Blue Press in 2005.


She Said

Alexander
					, Meena

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         257 
                 —for Svati Mariam, one year old  
My child is rain
on the tamarind tree
She is an enemy 
to burnt grass,
to fruit sieved
with metal
Struck
from a stunted branch.
She is my mother’s
mother who cries in me,
my line of blood
our perpetuity.
When wild deer
track the mud
for buried roots
I’ll grip my blouse
and loosen it 
I’ll show her how 
my throat can hang
a woman’s weight.
In the sky’s bowl
after a season of storm
we’ll watch girls
with antlers in their hair
  Blood Line
258         Volume 9, Number 2
Meena Alexander
Dance, confounding
ancient hunters
who stumble westward
broken bows in hand.
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         259 
Zarina, “Home is a Foreign Place," series of woodcuts, 
detail “Fragrance,” 8 x 6, 1997. 
260        Volume 9, Number 2
Zarina, “Home is a Foreign Place," series of woodcuts,
 detail “Rain,” 8 x 6, 1997. 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         261 
Zarina, “Home is a Foreign Place," series of woodcuts, 
detail “Dust Storm,” 8 x 6, 1997. 


Blood Line

Legault, Danielle

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         195 
Always and Forever
since the day 
I first laid eyes on you
I knew that 
you were too good to be true 
the love I felt 
in my heart 
I didn’t know where to start v
I knew that being a young single mom
would have its ups and downs 
a lot of people are around 
to help me get through hard times
such as long sleepless nights 
money was also tight 
when I think of it
I know it’s worth everything I sacrificed
for a bond so strong 
that can never be broken 
I would give my life for you 
I know that one day you would too
even when things 
are not going my way 
I know that you are here to stay
I don’t know how else 
to express myself 
I guess that no words
can describe how I feel 
about this little angle I have created
I love you so much 
being your mom 
has made me very strong
I love you little Mathieu
always and forever 
Danielle Legault
Always and Forever
196         Volume 9, Number 1
Natalie Gilbert and Mickenzie
Natalie, Nathan and Mickenzie


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Feminism, Child Protection, and Mothers with Psychiatric Disabilities in the United States

Knee Deep in the Mother of God

First Birds

Reconsidering the Political Individual: Responding to Carole Pateman’s Critique of Social Contract Theory with Help from Developmental Psychology and Care Ethics

Women’s Experience of Fatigue After Childbirth: Narratives of Ideology and Resistance

My Darling Darling: Étude on Muriel’s Body

All of this only fifty miles from the former home of L. Frank Baum, creator of The Wizard of Oz

She Said

Blood Line

Always and Forever

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