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

Conway, reviewed by Sarai (“Sadie”) Harris

book reviews
 journal of the motherhood initiative            241 
as the culture of motherhood enables women to articulate otherwise silenced 
stories, it also engages in a silencing process of its own, marginalizing and 
devaluing mothering stories that deviate from assumed ideals. Troublingly, 
this struggle exists within the mother herself, who, according to Nelson, needs 
the affirmation of the culture of motherhood—that space that “gives lan-
guage, meaning, and affirmation to what would otherwise be unarticulated 
or inaccurately represented mothering experiences” (106)—even as she resists 
allying herself with that space. 
By examining the culture of motherhood, In the Other Room offers ben-
eficial insights into the complexities and contradictions of maternal iden-
tity. However, I also found myself wanting more. I would have liked to read 
a more nuanced examination of the relationships between the “culture of 
motherhood” and the “mothers’ club,” terms that Nelson uses interchange-
ably, but which would appear, from the interview excerpts included in the 
text, to have very different meanings. There were also some curious omis-
sions. In particular, I was surprised to find no reference at all to the December 
2000 Canadian parental leave legislation which guarantees a minimum of 35 
weeks of paid parental benefits through the Employment Insurance system. 
While this legislation is undeniably fraught with problems, it has neverthe-
less opened up the possibility of transforming the “other room”—not only by 
bringing mothering into the public eye, but also by offering the potential to 
broaden the membership base of the culture of motherhood to more formally 
recognize fathers as well as mothers. Given the anecdotal impact of this legis-
lation (as witnessed through the Vancouver Public Library’s Man in the Moon 
program for fathers and their young children, for example), it seems curious 
that Nelson’s work makes no mention of it at all.
Survival Notes for New Parents is one of the latest entries into the vast market 
of books for parents of newborns.  The book is organized into 100 entries, 
each of which includes a few paragraphs on parenting, an inspirational quota-
tion, and a bible verse.  Each item is self-contained within a pair of opposing 
pages.  Because of its format, the book does not require sequential reading.  
Each of the brief sections defines a scenario and provides suggestions for 
managing the particular situation.  The guide tackles a variety of topics, from 
Survival Notes for New Parents: 
An Inspiration for an Amazing Journey
Robert Stofel.  
Mahwah, nj: Paulist Press, 2009. 
Reviewed by  Sarai (“Sadie”) Harris Conway
book reviews
242           volume 1,  number 1
the seemingly minor (such as “Why Every Parent Should Take a Power Nap” 
and “Picky Eaters”) to the relatively significant (including “Should You Work 
or Stay at Home?” and “The Pain of Divorce”).  While the initial entries are 
specific to bringing home a new baby, the remaining entries are indiscrimi-
nately organized.  
Though the book jacket claims “Survival Notes does not preach,” the author 
also never admits to facing a situation for which the appropriate solution was 
not easy to come by, institute, or enforce.  In this way, the book seems to pres-
ent an idealized notion of parenthood to a population—new parents—that 
could stand to be reassured that there is no single best way to parent.  
The author’s writing style is conversational and the book reads like a com-
pilation of friendly advice.  In one section, readers are told that newborns 
“usually resemble cone heads”; on another page, readers are encouraged to 
“discipline the best you know how.” The author, a father of two, seems to be 
positioning himself as a sympathetic resource on parenting rather than an 
expert practitioner in child development.  
The book’s incorporation of biblical verses and the author’s background as 
a pastor contribute to the work’s overtly Christian focus.  Many of the sug-
gested courses of action seem to promote a particular moral perspective.  
In Stress-Free Pregnancy Guide, mother-daughter team Carol Livoti and 
Elizabeth Topp strive to lessen the anxiety associated with pregnancy and 
childbirth.  Although Livoti and Topp collaborate on the book, Livoti’s is the 
authorial voice.  With over 30 years experience in obstetrics, Livoti’s medical 
opinions permeate the pages of the book.  For women who regard pregnancy 
and childbirth as medical experiences, this book may lessen stress.  Women 
who do not believe in medical intervention, however, may find this book 
increases stress.  
During pregnancy, particularly a first pregnancy, so many things seem ab-
normal.  By presenting a range of normal occurrences, Livoti and Topp put 
readers at ease.  They divide each trimester into a “normal” and “abnormal” 
chapter.  While these terms may be unsettling, the division proves an ef-
fective strategy.  Once women read a “normal” chapter and see themselves 
reflected in the examples provided, they may opt to bypass an “abnormal” 
Stress-Free Pregnancy Guide: 
A Doctor Tells You What to Really Expect  
Carol Livoti and Elizabeth Topp. 
New York: Amacom, 2009.
Reviewed by Roshaunda D. Cade


English

Survival Notes for New Parents: An Inspiration for an Amazing Journey

Snyder, Elizabeth

Engendering Protection: The Case of Women Refugees

Tonkin, Lois

Making Sense of Loss: the Disenfranchised Grief of Women Who Are "Contingently Childless"

Takševa, reviewed by Tatjana

book reviews
 journal of the motherhood initiative            245 
This slight volume is a memoir of Jane Sutterfield’s first return trip in over 
a decade to England. Sutterfield is a dual British-American national. In a 
narrative that moves back and forth across the year she spent in England, 
the more distant past of the writer’s childhood and youth, and the present, 
Daughters of Empire chronicles a failed marriage, struggles with anorexia, and 
the experience of pregnancy and imminent motherhood in the wake of Sut-
terfield’s growing self awareness and emerging identity as a writer. 
The significance and subtle irony of the book’s title does not became evi-
dent until we realize that the narrative of the writer’s past encompasses the 
past of her own mother, Ellen, daughter of Scottish-Irish Catholic settlers 
in England, who lives in America but cleaves to England as the motherland. 
The implicit lesson Ellen absorbed while growing up in England was that 
“England … was the source that gave [her a] sense of reality,” her “sense of 
what was meaningful, [her] sense of what was meaningless” (20). Ellen passes 
this sense of nostalgic belonging and identity onto her daughter. This will 
become the shared sense of identity across three generations of daughters, 
Ellen, Jane, and Jane’s own daughter, Catherine. While cherishing this as-
pect of identity she shares with her mother, the writer places herself and her 
mother’s family among those who possess a legacy of “fluid national identity 
and pervasive sense of loss,” a “too real feeling of dislocation” (55, 59). For 
Sutterfield, personal identity becomes a metaphorical territory to be discov-
ered and pieced together in the knowledge that “we can’t go home again, but 
we will never be at home in our present lives until our memories can return to 
the places from which we have been severed” (52). 
In many ways this is a narrative about other kinds of dislocations and 
doubleness, exploring in personal terms the space of woman and the space 
of mother, and suggesting that the space is “both double and foreign” (26). 
Sutterfield captures a number of creative tensions that inform her sense of 
self. First, she recognizes the “growing distance between [herself ] and [the] 
motherland” England (26) and senses that America is her true home. Second, 
on the one hand, she is aware of her mother’s influence on her understanding 
of conventional womanhood and her belief in the schism between the role 
of mother and writer, a schism “deriving from the domestic spheres of home 
and parish” when the choices for women were “spinsterhood, a life in the 
church, or a husband and home” (23). On the other hand, Sutterfield loves 
Daughters of Empire: 
A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond
Jane Sutterfield.  
Toronto: Demeter Press, 2009.
Reviewed by Tatjana Takševa
book reviews
246           volume 1,  number 1
her mother and feels the need to honour her mother’s brand of “Britishness,” 
which she also recognizes in herself. Finally, although she loves her daughter 
unconditionally, Sutterfield experiences real “divisions” embodied in her in-
fant daughter’s unrelenting demands upon her mind and body that “besieged 
the very notion of self ” and threaten to efface it (14). 
Although this is primarily a personal text, it invokes a series of literary 
mothers. The writing and experience of women writers like the Brontes, Syl-
via Plath, and Angela Carter provide a context for Sutterfield’s own thoughts 
and experiences. Years of schooling did little to expand her understanding of 
motherhood and she lacked role models other than her own mother and the 
“litanies of self-denying, self mutilating saints, anchoresses, abbesses, nuns 
and holy women” (31). For Sutterfield, women writers elucidate the idea of 
motherhood and lead to the realization that the roles “of poet and mother 
were not so opposed” (111). 
At the end of her memoir, Sutterfield suggests that she has come to ac-
cept her complex identity, but this reviewer detects a lingering tension. One 
wonders whether she has been able to achieve a fully integrated life as poet 
and mother. 
Prior to writing this review, I attended my sixth-grade niece’s first music re-
cital. That evening, I could not help but notice the excited anticipation of 
both spectators and performers. I, too, was looking forward to seeing the mu-
sical principles discussed in Tatiana Bandurina’s Voices of Our Children: Stories 
of Music Education come alive. What I discovered, however, by evening’s end 
surprised me. 
While I was busy focusing on the spectators and performers, I did not 
realize that the person who would captivate and hold my interest throughout 
the evening would be my two-year old son Cameron. His delightful expres-
sions throughout the evening transformed my musical experience into one of 
pure wonderment. Cameron engaged in loud clapping as the audience ap-
plauded. He shrieked with delight at appropriate, and several inappropriate, 
musical moments. When he finally escaped from his seat, midway through 
the concert, his body moved in sequence to the music as he ran up and down 
the stage ramp. Although Cameron was kicking and screaming as we left the 
Voices of Our Children: Stories of Music Education 
Tatiana Bandurina.  
Richmond, bc: Quintecco Educational Products, 2008.
Reviewed by Venus Prado


Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond

Herrick, Leigh

30           volume 1,  number 1  journal of the motherhood initiative            31 
leigh herrick
child of the
child of the missing limb     the heart of 
of the world now missing   the child
of the missing garden       the roots of the child
now missing the child of the river
running
the child of the river     broken into sides
into banks     into nightmares the child cannot 
                                                                             climb
who says  
               now i can’t sleep      i try to forget
               i have such difficulty feeling anymore
who is the child of misvisions     who knows
bombs among spring flowers     who is the powerless
child of wishes      of fathers     of mothers
of wanting warm-and-safe-at-home       not
the child of the burning cloud     not
the child of mistrials or freely the large stone
flung one afternoon when thought was simple and 
looking up there was only blue     no      no stone
nothing thrown or born into the heart of the child
who forgot the sound of laughter
who remembers friends
who says which live
                which are dead
who says
               i am speaking to you     will the waiting be long?
Italicized lines are from a 1993 unicef publication, I Dream of Peace: Images of War by the Children 
of Former Yugoslavia, and are used with permission.


child of the

Moravec, Michelle

Another Mother for Peace: Reconsidering Maternalist Peace Rhetoric from an Historical Perspective 1967-2007

Lisella, Julia

 journal of the motherhood initiative            215 
Road to Radiation 
Lift the latch, open the door
or let me do it for you.
And ease into the passenger
seat beside me. Guide me out
the skinny driveway to protect 
the browning lawn on either side.
At the street we dip below the curb. A car
I didn’t see honks and swerves
around your white four door 
you’ve let me drive. You are not disturbed.
Be careful.
 I didn’t see.
Yup. Yup. 
 As I steer
us further into Queens, along the parkway
out to Nassau county, your side-way shortcut
you know every pothole
up, down, around, through.
The intersection, a five way deal,
takes long minutes. We pass through.
At the medical building where 
no one lives the gay nurse
says hello. A receptionist 
writes your name down. I pick up a magazine
to read about cancer. Put it down.
julia lisella
216           volume 1,  number 2
Take out my Mina Loy. Incomprehensible.
You read 
 I cannot imagine anything less disputably respectable than prolonged 
invalidism in Italy at the beck of a British practitioner 
     over my shoulder
and ask me to explain
what I think it means.
Note: Lines from Mina Loy, “Italian Picture” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker.
julia lisella


Road to Radiation

Smith, Katherine

 journal of the motherhood initiative            281 
katherine smith
Tangerine
The private moments of Jesus
come to Laura in a dream
she jerks awake from as if in a free fall,
body curled around her goose-down pillow,
head throbbing. Once, in Appalachia
Laura saw a woman throw
a shuttle across a loom, 
sway back and forth
as a few inches of the cloth’s stylized pattern
took shape slowly as the latticed shadows of trees
across the wall of her bedroom at dawn.
The lamp on the night table still on,
her memory reaches back like a child’s hand
into a bag of candy to extract a sweet.
Laura sits up, sips a glass of water,
comforted by the thought of nurses, firemen,
waitresses serving bitter coffee, tender doughnuts 
at all night cafes not far from her house. 
She wants the smallest saviors:
china plate of fruit, vanilla
scented lotion, glass of water
on the bedside table. Tonight Laura’s 
children breathe in their bedrooms,
beautiful, trusting, their need for her
almost outgrown. Finished
with raising them this evening, 
Laura smoothes cream into her throat, 
swallows a section of tangerine.


Tangerine

Kasdorf, Julia Spicher

 journal of the motherhood initiative            143 
I would have lived more fully if I’d memorized 
more verse, wrote the dying Richard Rorty—pragmatist  
to the end—as I would have lived more fully
if I’d made more close friends.  Just married, 1986,
typing labels for art slides, which by now must all 
be digitized, in a basement of the Doris Duke mansion, 
Fifth Ave. and 78th, I committed a poem each week, 
hopeful and afraid Galway Kinnel would call on me 
to recite for the workshop. That day—Margaret 
are you grieving—I raced to Lexington, late, 
leapt down the steps, token poised, as a graffitied 6 
rumbled into the station. Of course the doors 
before me didn’t open, so I leapt to the next, slipped 
between their closing, and snaked through the crowd
as we pulled from the platform.  Only then I looked 
 
back:  empty benches and an unmistakable continent 
of fresh blood on the floor of the closed car.  
No one spoke as we tunneled under the East Side 
with whatever had happened sealed up behind us, but 
someone must have met my eyes in irony or solidarity 
as New Yorkers do—as the heart grows older it will 
come on such sights colder—I got out at Astor Place 
like any other day, climbed into clear September air 
and, still rehearsing that verse, strode past the parking lot, 
now luxury apartments, where sidewalk vendors 
Gerard Manley Hopkins on the 6 Train
julia spicher kasdorf
144           volume 1,  number 1
hawked books, clothes, house wares, heroin—worlds 
of wanwood leafmeal—this was before Giuliani 
cleaned up the city.  Naturally I was called to recite 
that night—the blight man was born for—
and must have in some forgettable way.  Alive 
but alone now, I wonder if that poet priest 
of long ago would make my story close so tightly, 
too:  it is everything and just myself I mourn for. 
julia spicher kasdorf


Gerard Manley Hopkins on the 6 Train

Harde, Roxanne

 journal of the motherhood initiative            57 
Best described as a lyric essay, “What I Hold and What I Give Away” examines my 
memories of miscarriage and bereavement. After giving the broad outline of what 
I experienced more than twenty years ago, I draw on Derrida to reflect on the work 
of mourning as an ongoing process, one that continues to matter to my mothering, 
and to others as I share my experience of loss and grief.
What I Know, What I Believe
I know that in the fall of 1981, a few months before my daughter Erin’s second 
birthday, I became pregnant with my second child. Wayne and I had been trying to 
conceive for a year, and we were thrilled that our family would soon be complete. 
As I entered the second trimester, we decided to celebrate: I would accompany him 
to a convention, and Erin would stay with friends in a small city further north. 
The convention was to take place over the Valentine’s Day weekend, the perfect 
time to renew our commitment to each other and our growing family.
 I know that when I arrived at my friend’s house, I was bleeding. Now four 
hours away from my family doctor, I went to the local hospital, where I was 
examined and admitted. It was the weekend, so I saw the rotation of physi-
cians on call. Each gave me little information and simply kept me on bed rest. 
I was terrified and bewildered; young and completely unworldly, I lacked the 
personal resources needed to challenge the professionals who kept secret what 
they knew or guessed about my baby’s health. Furthermore, there was little 
pain or cramping, just an inexorable regular spotting and a heaviness in my 
abdomen, below my barely noticeable baby bump. I was torn between fearing 
the worst and hoping that this minor bleeding meant nothing.
What I Hold and What I Give Away
Miscarriage, Memory, and Mourning
roxanne harde
roxanne harde
58           volume 1,  number 2
 I know that when Wayne came to get us, I wanted only to see my doctor. 
The doctors examining me continued to tell me nothing about the condition 
of my baby other than that I was still getting positive results on the pregnancy 
tests, and that I should stay on bed rest. I remember them hinting that an ul-
trasound, not available there, would tell me more, but that I would have to sign 
myself out of the hospital if I wanted to leave. There seemed a monumental 
wall of silence between their profession and my needs. So, I left. I remember 
the long drive and being frightened that each bump on that winter road would 
force the spotting to become a miscarriage. 
 I know that by the time we got to the hospital, the pressure in my abdomen 
had become definite cramps. By the time I saw my doctor, I was having pain 
that threatened to turn into contractions. I remember wanting desperately to 
be left alone, to curl into a ball around my baby and stay like that forever. I 
went to the bathroom to hide, and when I sat down, I felt a heavy pain, and 
then I felt my baby slide out of me. I remember standing for some minutes, 
looking at my loss, understanding what had happened and that if I told any 
of the medical professionals they would take my baby out of the water and to 
the laboratory. They would not, however, be able to tell me anything that I 
would want to know. So I cried, and prepared myself for the next few days of 
tests, for the ultrasound that showed an empty womb, and the surgical scrap-
ing meant to return me to health and prepare me for another pregnancy, and 
then I flushed the toilet.
 I believe that there was something wrong with my baby from the start. I 
believe that the reason it took us so long to conceive the second time, when 
it had been so immediate with Erin, was because an ill-advised intrauterine 
device had moved and become embedded in my womb. After it was surgi-
cally removed, we conceived our second child, but the pregnancy, while 
seemingly normal, never felt right. I believe I wanted to celebrate the end of 
the first trimester because I felt that the pregnancy was not a healthy one. 
Mine is a family of mis-carriers: we do not have early or sick babies; we have 
miscarriages and, more rarely, stillbirths. Our babies are born fullterm and 
perfect, or they are not “born” at all. At the time, mine was a family that did 
not speak of these lost children; they seemed part of a silenced narrative of 
failed motherhood.
 I believe that the doctors were only waiting for the inevitable to happen, 
for “nature to take its course.” I feel my body understood this as well; there 
was something wrong with my baby and he was dying. And, yes, I feel that 
this baby was a boy. I also believe that the nurse who asked me if I didn’t 
“want to run around the hospital a few times and just get it over with” only 
wanted me to understand what was happening. She was both compassionate 
and realistic in pointing out that my situation had only one outcome, and 
what i hold and what i give away
 journal of the motherhood initiative            59 
when it was finished, I could return to mothering my little girl. And, like 
everyone else, she was quite certain that once it was over, I would go on to 
have as many children as I wanted. Then, and now, I felt that my second 
child mattered, in and of himself, that the loss of him needed to be discrete 
from the child that came before, and the children that I hoped would come 
after but did not.
 I believe that the reaction of the people around me, of my husband, fam-
ily and friends, was not the callousness that it appeared to be. They were 
solicitous of my physical health, clearly concerned about my psychological 
well being. But their uniform silence about my lost baby, about what I could 
only see as a death in my family, hurt and disturbed me at the time. My grief 
garnered only assurances that I was young and healthy; I could have another 
baby right away. My insistence that I needed to mourn for this child was met 
with either silence or comments that I had lost a fetus, not a child. This was 
a spontaneous abortion, not a death. Even my aunts who had miscarried and 
my mother whose full-term second pregnancy ended in the stillbirth of my 
sister had difficulty with my mourning. I understood that my husband did 
not have the resources to understand our loss as a death. Erin was not real 
to him, not part of him, until her birth. Pregnancy was a medical condition 
involving the mother and the professionals. My society, I believe, had trained 
all of us to see pregnancy and birth as clinical, miscarriage and stillbirth as 
a condition, a syndrome, an illness, a minor medical event to be gotten over 
quickly. In short, what I saw first as disregard of my grief and indifference 
to my loss I came quickly to understand as socialized reactions to events 
that had been ripped out of the domestic sphere where they belonged and 
were now entrenched in an institution that had changed what it could and 
shrouded the rest in secrecy. We are now, finally, returning to the midwife, 
the homebirth, the recognition of reproduction as a family matter. In 1982, 
I yearned for a woman to coach me through birth and through miscarriage, 
through my baby’s death.
What I Hold and What I Give Away
I hold that life inside me still, as a memory, a secret, a life that was invis-
ible and intangible to the world but alive to me. I hold that child encrypted 
inside me; my womb was the site of both his life and death. Like the deaths, 
the memories, of everyone I have lost, his is a death that inhabits me. Never 
really present in the world, he continues to be present to me. He is a closed 
cipher, but I continue to hold the experience of him inside me. This is not 
to say that I imagine him at the age he would be now, had he lived. I do 
not: to me he has never existed, even in my dreams, as a toddler, a child, an 
roxanne harde
60           volume 1,  number 2
adolescent, a teenager, a young man; he has not taken life in my mind or 
heart as Erin’s little brother, a boy who plays hockey with Wayne or baseball 
with me. He is what he was: a baby who died some seventeen weeks after 
conception, unnamed, unheld. But I hold him nonetheless, and I hold him 
in the fierce light of my mourning.
Because it is all that was left to me, I hold mourning as a means of 
mothering. Mourning is, as philosopher Jacques Derrida notes, a sign of 
fidelity. It is an act of love, of “keeping alive,” and a way in which I remain 
faithful to the baby I could not hold; mourning became the only means 
for me to mother this child. The force of mourning has the power to open 
up the possible, Derrida suggests, to enact birth. Mourning my second 
child is the only way to give birth to him, to bring him to life and light. 
And, even as I hold onto mourning, I share my experience: I speak of my 
lost child. In speaking of my miscarried baby, I perform, over and over, a 
funeral oration; I both call out to the child and I bear witness to my loss. 
In sharing my sadness, I faced up to my loss and found it conjoined with 
a new responsibility. As I recovered physically and emotionally from los-
ing my baby, I refused to engage in the economy of secrets surrounding 
miscarriage. I began to ask the women in my family about their experiences 
of miscarriage and stillbirth. How can an expectant mother cope with 
what she does not expect? My mother, aunts, and cousins were gracious in 
sharing their stories with me, in reflecting on their lost children, revisiting 
their mourning, and comforting me as I worked through my own. 
And so, I give away mourning even as I hold onto it. Derrida refers to 
mourning as a reckoning, as a force that gathers only by dispersing. He writes 
of the duty to speak of loss, to speak of the dead. Early on, I learned to reckon 
with my lost baby, and my mourning is both forceful and dispersed. I speak of 
my dead: families with only one child are not common in Canadian society, 
and I am often asked about mine. To those I don’t know well, I say that I had 
a second-trimester miscarriage when Erin was two. To those I know better, I 
offer more details, especially to women who want children. And I tell them that 
I was glad I honoured my baby by immediately announcing my pregnancy, by 
knowing him as my child right away, and by mourning his death. I give them 
a gift; I give them the story of my mourning. I think my insistence on the 
necessity to recognize the weight of my own loss and to mourn my child fully 
helped my friends engage with the work of mourning their own. Along with 
them I mourned their losses, and they gave me back a gift, as I remembered, 
and continue to remember, my second child, and to hold him with me as I 
mourn his death.
I want to thank the Augustana Women’s Writing Circle—Yvonne Becker, Kim 
what i hold and what i give away
 journal of the motherhood initiative            61 
Fordham, Anne-Marie Link, Paula Marentette, Sandra Rein, Lynda Ross, and 
Janet Wesselius—who make my writing better and the work more joyful.
References
Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael 
Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 
