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

Bennett, Deb

English

"I Am Still a Mother": A Hermeneutic Inquiry into Bereaved Motherhood

Rosenzweig, Rosie

126           volume 1,  number 2
Using the metaphor of mother’s chicken soup as a symbol of elder experience, the au-
thor parallels historic events in her life with historic events in her mother’s history. 
Writing enabled the writer to put her mother’s life in perspective with her own. For 
example: her mother walked to a market to find a live chicken, have it slaughtered 
and plucked, and subsequently cooked the soup, while this writer easily drives to the 
supermarket for her cleaned and quartered chickens. Her mother travelled with two 
small children by train and boat through foreign speaking countries, never again 
to see her large family; eventually they were all killed in the Holocaust. This writer 
at a similar age, also with two small children, lost her siblings and father. More 
support, however, through writing and therapy was available. Such realizations 
through writing helped the author to mature, appreciate, and grow compassion for 
the elder mother.
Recently a friend’s husband recalled how sadness overwhelmed me 35 years ago. 
I obviously had recovered from those dark times, because now I was comforting 
him at the loss of his wife. I expressed how his wife’s frequent visits cheered 
me, how she respected my writings, and how she gave me space. He and his 
whole family loyally read a monthly column I wrote at that time.
“I wrote myself out of it, didn’t I?” Unexpectedly, I blurted this out.
“You certainly did,” he agreed with a pat on my back.
This essay will illustrate the benchmarks of this change. Documented by 
memories of past writing and family photographs from my albums, the process 
of transformation from anger and pain is assisted by a maturing self-search us-
ing religion, therapy, and collegial support. Beginning the tragic and successive 
sister, brother, both in their mid-forties, and father soon after the birth of my 
My Mother’s Chicken Soup
Recipe for Perspective
rosie rosenzweig
my mother’s chicken soup
 journal of the motherhood initiative            127 
third child, my sorrow turned to an emerging anger at my mother until her 
death 13 years later, when the anger transformed to a growing compassion. 
Comparing her life to mine as I aged, I slowly came to new realizations, which 
grew out of my writing. Memories arose unbidden and allowed me to grow an 
appreciation of my mother. I went from the mother-blame as an exploration 
in therapy to empathy that a growing meditative practice encouraged.
The first trigger memory arose recently while I was making chicken soup for 
a Sabbath meal, that stereotypical product of Jewish mothering. I was, as was 
my mother’s habit, sucking the over cooked bones, when I recalled my mother’s 
six month fall into dying from a stroke. Nostalgia unearthed the ritual we both 
shared even before I was enrolled in school. My pre-school learning began at 
the Canadian open market in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, close to the Detroit 
River. My mother haggled for the live chicken with a farmer, carried the fowl in 
a wooden basket to the kosher slaughterer, witnessed the quick death required 
by the rabbis to guarantee the least pain, and helped my mother’s friend Peshke 
hand-pluck the feathers to stuff our pillows and blankets. The bald fowl was 
wrapped in newspapers for our long walk home to prepare the Sabbath meal 
with the other food purchases from the market.
Today, I buy kosher chickens in prepared packages from Whole Foods, and 
somehow miss the adventure of the open-air market full of banter, bargaining, 
and local character. As a teenager I was embarrassed at my mother’s energy: she 
could fill any room with her shrieks and geshreis (outbursts), a habit agitated 
and multiplied by her constant anxiety over money. Now I miss the energy that 
used to make me recoil, sometimes in fright and sometimes in embarrassment. 
Coupled with an arising calmness, is a present urge to understand, and with that, 
a poignant longing to understand her more, so I can understand myself. Once 
damned up by the immediacy of loss, I have developed a meditation practice 
that can wait for the storm to clear. My mother’s recipe was more than birds 
and vegetables, and I have developed my own. As I scrape over every vertebra 
of the chicken necks, I desire the bare bone of real memory and wisdom about 
this most important loss, my mother. Writing this will unearth what I seek. 
So is my ultimate faith in this process.
Her life, I now realize, was so much harder than mine. Just witness the dif-
ference in shopping for food. With this frame, I went searching in old albums 
to see what such comparisons could teach me, and how I could glean some 
insights from the process writing.
My recipe for grieving is writing, as I am doing now. I’ve written about it 
for so many years that I can’t tell what is memory and what is wish and what is 
projection. To help I enter a search in Google for “grief and writing.” I find over 
seven million items.1 There are organizations like poetry therapy2 and journal 
therapy.3  There is even art therapy;4 numerous ways to use artistic expres-
rosie rosenzweig
128           volume 1,  number 2
sion to work through 
emotions. As if that’s 
not what artists and 
writers have been do-
ing for centuries. I have 
taught these courses 
and even documented 
how artistic expression 
of the loss of a mother 
has transformed the 
artist.5
However, I have nev-
er written about my 
own transformation, 
documented or undocu-
mented in my life over 
the loss of my mother. 
My first separation was 
in public school, Frank 
W. Begley Elementary 
School in Windsor, On-
tario. I had to be five when she dropped me off for grade one. I stayed at the 
link fence for what seemed like a day watching her disappear from sight. I 
must have been so happy to see her that afternoon when she came to get me. 
Above is a picture of that time of my life, 1942. 
For years I couldn’t imagine such affection especially as I grew older and 
became cursory in my communications with her. Writing and life experience 
colors our perspective of life-altering events, and so much was to happen 
between this doting embrace and affection in the years to follow. My young-
est grandchild is this same age and the loss of his mother’s presence is quite 
profound; symbiosis is so natural and can be quite loving as it was here and 
with my grandson. Both my daughter and my mother gave such unconditional 
love that separation from it in the cold impersonal world is as profound a loss 
as any tragedy. It is more than the writing, but the maturity that evolved, the 
ability to look at the past and realize that, yes I have lived that age, the age 
my mother was when I clung to her and felt that going to school that first 
day was a tragic loss.
I found the oldest picture of my mother at approximately the same age as 
me, when we went scrambling to that Canadian farmer’s market. Here is a 
picture of my mother’s family; she is the youngest girl standing in front of her 
father, my grandfather whom I never met. He was probably trying to hold her 
my mother’s chicken soup
 journal of the motherhood initiative            129 
still for the photography session, which was typically long at that time. This 
had to be taken in the early 1900s.
Earlier in my life, I could not understand her anxiety and her hysteria at life’s 
events. In the years that followed my mother was to lose her entire family of 
83 to the Holocaust to perish by fire in the Auschwitz concentration camp. 
Such an event scars and tears at the heart and can turn a happy person dour. 
I remember the day a letter came and she just stared. That’s exactly what I 
did following the three family deaths decades ago. However, I was unable to 
even speak to my mother without being curt and dismissive. It was too much 
for me. I couldn’t even consider what these three additional deaths did to my 
mother, so lost was I in fear and anger. 
Since then I have published numerous poems about her and each one helped 
to dislodge the defensive anger that protected the heartache and fear of being 
the next in line to go.
My sister had died suddenly when I was almost 30; her kidneys collapsed. 
When I also stared out the window, my children couldn’t comprehend this. My 
sister and I shared the same bed and, because she was almost 15 years older, 
became a mother figure to me as well. My brother died the next year and my 
father followed, probably dying of a broken heart. Even though publishing 
this poem comforted me, I never equated my losses with her larger losses from 
anti-Semitism:
rosie rosenzweig
130           volume 1,  number 2
Family
I feed the image of a sister
Against that one bloated by despair,
Warmed double by the anger round her neck,
Jostled and strung taut by her going,
Burdened by her heartbeats,
Until they stopped.
I look for her in all the women that I meet.
I nurture a brother close by
Against that rack of bones
Sacked and sewn after a cutting,
Bagged into a bed too soon to know himself.
His young dreams blown with him
Over the hills of clouds.
I look for him in every man I know.
But I hold my father, oh my father,
Before that velvet paper box,
Lowered with a faltering crank,
Covered with these handfuls of dark soil.
I grow a memory of him that is not him.
Someone else must look for fathers,
Hear them out in old age homes,
Men who know their silence
And allow me mine....
While with my mother I listen
For the seeding of my own green time.6
My mother, at a similar age, did something far more courageous. She left her 
family with many more siblings than I, to join her husband in North America. 
She would never see them again, never have the warm support of her large 
extended family in rearing her children in a foreign atmosphere.
Now as I am over 70, I look back and see a different perspective. Loss makes 
one lose the present life because the feelings are so overwhelming. I neglected 
my life, as she sometimes did not connect with me. However, the therapy that 
my mother’s chicken soup
 journal of the motherhood initiative            131 
followed was directed 
by searching for the 
answer and had some 
mother-blaming in 
it. Unreasonably, I 
thought my mother’s 
hysteria drove my sib-
lings to distraction so 
that they died. I was 
afraid that I was next 
if I allowed myself 
too much contact 
with my poor moth-
er’s overwrought 
state of mind. My 
conversations with 
her were short and 
never chatty. I did 
her a great dis-
service because I 
was overwhelmed 
with the losses first 
of my surrogate 
mother and then 
my brother and father. 
She mustered up the 
courage at this same 
age of 28, to leave 
her family and home, 
to travel over land 
to Gdansk, through 
England, and across 
the sea, ill at the un-
familiar food. 
However, something changed in me as she lived out her next 20 years as a 
widow. She needed me to help her with surgery. By then I had weathered the 
losses with therapy and a new career. My poetry appeared in various prayer 
rosie rosenzweig
132           volume 1,  number 2
books, in healing anthologies, and I was rewarded when I heard my poetry 
read in houses of mourning. This was now 15 years after the original three 
losses, and when my mother needed cataract surgery, I was very willing and 
eager to nurse her through her recovery. This was 1978 when recovery from 
the long surgery took six weeks and involved some pain. Now I was amused 
at her drama, and here is a picture of that time.
She’s a bit older than I am now, and I have just scheduled my own cataract 
surgery. However, today’s technology allows for fewer traumas and a shorter 
recovery. But once again my perspective changes as I live through the ages she 
has lived and through my own similar events. My eldest daughter visited her 
in the years that followed and her photos document her grandmother’s final 
years ravaged with old age and loneliness that I can still feel how my chest 
became gripped with exhaustion and heartache.
Now I always refer to her as “my poor mother” and realize what a life of hardship 
and loss she endured to bring me to this country that I might have a better life. 
Betsyanne Duval. “Tzivia Lipunski”, 2010, encaustic 12" x 12."
my mother’s chicken soup
 journal of the motherhood initiative            133 
And I have thanks to her. I also can make, because of her, a dynamite chicken soup. 
Postscript
I seem to understand my mother much better through these maturing ex-
periences in my own life. Curiously enough, my imagination becomes quite 
activated when I wonder what she would think of this event in the family and 
that event in the world. At these times, it would not be uncommon for her 
to materialize when I am waiting for a red light to change and I am paused 
in traffic. Even though I know I am conjuring up dialogue, I find it amusing 
that I am getting along with her so much better than at any time in my life. 
Strangely enough she seems to be with an escort, a young, intelligent man with 
glasses. I recall that her first-born died, or so the midwives told her in Poland 
when she was barely 20. Perhaps she has found him in this imagined afterlife, 
and now her first tragedy is being healed, just as I am in these later years of 
my life. Beyond petulance and blame, somehow purged through writing and 
ageing, I now remember her brave spirit as someone who had the courage to 
leave family and friends with her two small children to come to this continent, 
live in a foreign place like Windsor, Ontario, and give me a beginning to life 
there. On the previous page is a picture of her fresh from a painful operation 
in the days when the doctors held one’s head down with sandbags to perform 
a cataract operation that would take six weeks’ recuperation. It makes me want 
to go make a good pot of chicken soup for my family.
1<http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=writing+and+grie
f&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8>.
2<http://poetrytherapy.org>.
3<http://arttherapy.org>.  
4<http://journaltherapy.com/index.html>.  
5Rosenzweig, Rosie. “Mother Art and Maternal Health.” Journal of the Associa-
tion for Research on Mothering 11 (1) (Spring/Summer 2009): 224-238.
6Rosenzweig, Rosie. “A Search For Community.” Voices: The Art and Science 
of Psychotherapy: A Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists (Winter 
1971-72): 18-21.


My Mother's Chicken Soup: Recipe for Perspective

Watson, reviewed by Alison M. S.

book reviews
238           volume 1,  number 1
the elemental importance of adventure, humour, fun, light-heartedness, and 
laughter in raising children. Overall, this is a book I will recommend to cul-
turally similar middle-class parents, teachers, clients, or practitioners working 
with families interested in enhancing child development and engendering 
psychological health in children.
Insane Euphoria Speaks: Diary of a Late Pregnancy 
Katherine Dickson. 
Bloomington, in: Xlibris, 2007.
Reviewed by Alison M. S. Watson
This is not an advice book for the growing number of women seeking to 
give birth later in life. Instead, it is an account of Katherine Dickson’s third 
pregnancy during the period 21 May 1971 to 9 March 1972. In recount-
ing her personal journey, the author is unflinching in the way she lets the 
reader into her home and her private thoughts, with her emotions veering 
between joy and frustration over the course of a single day. This sometimes 
leads to an uneven writing style that nonetheless adds to the force of the 
narrative.
The author’s relationship with her husband, Frank, is fraught; as she ad-
mits, “you can almost make it heaven or hell” (20). On the one hand, she is 
very much in love with him and believes he treats her well; on the other hand, 
she is frustrated with his work and home habits, believes he is undermining 
her and makes her feel unwelcome in her own home. Her relationship with 
her children (her two existing children, and the one she is carrying) appears 
similarly uneven. She either loves her children completely or seeks solitude to 
discover a suitable outlet for her own creative energies.
What is particularly fascinating about this book is the way it stands as a 
representation of the changing place of women in society in the early 1970s. 
Feminist thought and philosophy have immediacy and substance for Dickson 
and her friends. Not only is she faced with the everyday demands of being a 
wife and mother—and indeed of being a “good” wife and mother—but she 
feels the need to meet societal expectations for women.
Although this book was published in 2007, readers do not learn what hap-
pened to Dickson and her family in the years that follow her diary entries. 
Readers yearn to know more about her relationship with her children, for 
example. Did her marriage to Frank succeed? The blurb on the back cover 
would suggest that it has, but Dickson experiences so many frustrations in 
her marriage that one wonders whether they were resolved, especially in light 
of Frank’s own reservations about his role as husband.
book reviews
 journal of the motherhood initiative            239 
Ultimately this is a book that addresses a fundamental dilemma: how to 
carve out an intellectual life—which appears to require a certain ascetic sen-
sibility—from within the midst of an active family life. Ironically, Dickson’s 
third pregnancy and the creation of new life are catalysts for intellectual dis-
It will come as no surprise to readers of this journal that motherhood and 
the maternal body for years fell short of serious consideration in feminist 
art and art history. Perhaps because artists and historians alike viewed the 
themes as sentimental or the role of motherhood as constricting, prior to 
the 1990s only Mary Kelly and a small handful of other artists successfully 
bridged art and motherhood to critical acclaim. Andrea Liss’s book, then, 
is a welcome and high-quality contribution to a recently burgeoning field, 
primarily for the ways in which it expands the discussion of art and the 
maternal. Liss not only re-examines bodies of work by well-known mother-
artists and highlights the work of lesser-known artists, she also challenges 
stereotypes of maternal sentimentality by exploring themes of trauma, loss, 
and sensuality, and broadens the scope of the discussion to include art that 
addresses “maternal care,” the invisible domestic labour so often performed 
by women and mothers. 
As an opening, Liss presents an extensive and elegant re-reading of Mary 
Kelly’s famous Post-Partum Document (1973-79). Her positioning of Mierle 
Laderman Ukeles’s “maintenance art” as maternal, while initially surprising, 
is well argued and greatly enriches the term. Liss’s best chapter, “Mamas Out 
of Place,” details work that pushes against the boundaries of maternal con-
ventions, bringing much-deserved attention to a number of artists along the 
way. Ellen McMahon’s extraordinary artist’s book, No New Work (1993), for 
example, directly responds to the academic repression of her double identi-
ties as artist/faculty and mother, while Judith Hopkins’s 1994 activist project, 
Stretching It: Surviving on AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), 
chronicles the degradation of mothers who seek governmental assistance yet 
refuse victim status, giving voice to “maternal acts that defy passivity and 
enforced poverty” (83). Photographer Gail Rebhan explores her sons’ experi-
ences of learning about gender and race, and Los Angeles artist collective 
m.a.m.a. (Mother Artists Making Art) intervenes in public spaces to bring 
attention to the cultural politicization of breastfeeding. 
Feminist Art and the Maternal 
Andrea Liss
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 
Reviewed by Rachel Epp Buller


Insane Euphoria Speaks: Diary of a Late Pregnancy

McCarthy, Pattie

62           volume 1,  number 2
the apex of babble, your steepled
thinking fingers, future piano
(without you it’s a waste of time).
it’s a shame we aren’t nearer to water.
all of a sudden — here you are (this
division, this terrible division).
consider this (precipitous) — labor,
repetition, metronome — turns out
there is such a thing as repitition
(for that matter, there is such a thing
as insistence too). everything begins.
 [stop pushing, try to stop pushing]
sooner or later, every language loses
its sounds. there is nothing to be done about it.
_____________________________
1. Roman Jakobson, qtd. in Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language.
13-14. Heller-Roazen, Echolalias
(on maternity, 3/30/09)
2:00 a.m. be happy silent moony beams. 3:40 a.m. drinking water while
you nurse makes me feel like a ventriloquist. 7:00 a.m. watch little butter.
nice baby. achoo Asher. 8:30 a.m. typing one-handed. make explicit
the caesura. lovely, that. (8:45 a.m. pump. nothing to say, not a squeak.)
pattie mccarthy
from Oyer
 journal of the motherhood initiative            63 
10:10 a.m. left right left—& uneven all day hereafter. 10:55 a.m. welcome
to the weather. 12:55 p.m. winter came up under the house. 4:50 p.m.
as a coda to winter, add a coda to winter. 6:45 p.m. your mouth opens,
shiny & whitewashed. Asher pillow. in the grammar of gestures, that
means I am hungry. that means I am sleepy. that means I am a warm
loaf of bread. 8:15 p.m. stay quietly inside the house. it expands to meet
you. true, that. 9:50 p.m. the baby turns his face into a bright penny.
the baby turns his face into his brother’s face, into sleep, into no sleep.
the baby turns his face into his face. 11:00 p.m. small things that have
no words.
_____________________________
1. William Blake, “Cradle Song.” 
4. Samuel Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape.”
13-14. Margaret Wise Brown, A Child’s Goodnight Book.
(tangent on paternity, 4/9/09)
watch cable with me, I’ll grow out of this grief
eventually. it’s a nice little
bottle of wine. he was a great talker.
& so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
(this really is what I was teaching when he died.)
you put a foot to my ribs (from inside)
& closed debate on whether you, not yet
born (at that time), & he, recently
dead, were in the same place. consider this,
this precipitous division.
a mark is the opposite of space.
everything begins. every language loses its sounds.
it was a strange conversation, between someone who knew nothing but
a great many words & one who knew everything but not a single word.
_____________________________
1-2. Anselm Berrigan, “Zero Star Hotel,” Zero Star Hotel.
4. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants.
13-14. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
from oyer


from Oyer

Smith, Katherine

 journal of the motherhood initiative            275 
katherine smith
The leaves still cling to thin trees here
though across the valley below, the oaks
are crimson and gold near the James River.
If  I walk fast, I’ll get to the old schoolhouse
before sunset. I’ve come here often, my
mind full of the kind of trouble a woman 
who’s raised children on her own can feel, 
to search the mountains for resoluteness. 
The unpopulated Blue Ridge face me
without a scrap of self-pity, shadows 
falling like hands into the lap of valleys
as if to say “we have worked hard;
now we will sit here quietly 
forever.” They look at me as the sun drops 
behind Priest Mountain, where I breathe
with a little more dignity than I came with, 
surrounded by what won’t change or break—
no vein of ore, nothing men might obtain
by destruction—the only richness the wind 
in wild wheat and the hawks circling above me.
Woman Alone on the Mountain


Woman Alone on the Mountain

McCallum, Shara

 journal of the motherhood initiative            123 
shara mccallum
1.
We are the body moving toward demise;
we are the soul, remnant of another life.
And always, rain tapping on a zinc roof
is the sound of fingers thrumming flesh.
Always, I return
to the things of this world, tethered.
You, who have come to me
from something, somewhere, I cannot name;
you who have a voice that does not speak
any language I know yet unfurls bright wings,
alighting in each corner of this house;
you who are mine and not mine,
tell me the answers
while there is time.
2.
At Rosh Hashanah, I dip apples in honey,
bargaining for a happy New Year.
I use my teeth to separate bitter from sweet.
I chew on hope, insist its name is faith.
Dear Hours
shara mccallum
124           volume 1,  number 2
The weight of stones thrown into the river
to cast away sins,
this fruit in my palm whispers ripening
in the same breath as ruin.
Apple, I say to my daughter, meaning
the thing I wish to be that is not.
Apple, Apple, Apple, my one-year old parrots,
demanding I place it on her tongue.
3.
Tired, the toddler tip-toes on padded feet.
She pitter-pats on feeted pads.
She whistles and warbles.
She burbles and bobbles.
A slug on its trail of silver,
she slooches down the hall.
A spider dangling from its last thread,
she pauses at the staircase edge.
At eighteen months, what does she know
of danger, the possible fall?
4.
Today your mouth, cheeks, the single curl
escaping your woolen hat 
conjure a snapshot of me at your age:
bangled baby, head in a kerchief,
propped on a dark green lawn,
inscrutable gaze taking on the camera.
dear hours
 journal of the motherhood initiative            125 
My snowflake-eating bundle of mischief
and yet-to-be-learned grief,
squealing tangle of two-year-old limbs,
spinning galaxy of self-self-self,
you totter off your sled,
only to resurface a moment later,
as if buoyed by invisible waves.
5.
From the garden, my three-year-old
plucks a zinnia,
almost snapping
the ring of petals off its stem.
At her age in a different place
I picked ixoras,
gathering the small blossoms,
one by one, to build a crown of flames.
If I could read my life
backward, or hers forward,
it might begin
the moment the future is written
in a child’s need to possess
such a red,
or in her offering
of a flower that will not last
the hour I stand it in a vase,
propping its neck.


Dear Hours

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