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

Dunlop, Rishma

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          319 
All winter in stucco on 65th I learned to love 
what couldn’t speak: what began in milk and 
blood. Baby, cat, the man who worked long weeks
away from home. Forty below. My breath before me, 
snow stiff trees burlapped against processions of 
storms. I shoveled walks, plugged the car into a 
block heater. Nursed the baby, fed the cat. Waited 
for the man I was slow to love. Sometimes I’d ride the
bus to the bistro, only place in town that served espresso–
let it flow bitter down my throat–the bistro where Czech 
brothers in white shirts and black trousers knew all about the 
baby, the cat, the man I was slow to love.
At home, in quiet, I folded laundry, changed the baby’s 
diapers, fed the cat, watched backyards fill with snow.
In spring, green pushing through sidewalk cracks,
I woke, pressed my mouth to your back—
you—whom I was slow to love. And bed and house 
smelled forever of me falling suddenly into love, rappelling
the past in a blaze through decades of renovations, creak 
of floorboards, families coming and going, ledgers of forgotten 
bills, tables laid for supper, someone waving on a front porch,
Rishma Dunlop
Hush
320            Volume 11, Number 1
new brides, the washing of the dead, all the stories 
I never wrote about us, your arms around the baby, 
around me, sealed into cracked plaster with a kiss.


English

Hush

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         375 
Contributor Notes
on her Ph.D. Degree from the University of Alberta. Joanne’s research inter-
est is in Aboriginal women’s health, with a particular focus on maternal-child 
nursing issues. 
Gina Wong-Wylie, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Centre 
for Applied Psychology at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. She is a 
Registered Psychologist and devotes her counselling practice to focusing on 
pre and postnatal issues with women. Wong-Wylie’s area of research interest 
also includes prenatal/perinatal psychology, issues related to mothering, and 
mental health and maternal wellness issues from feminist and cross-cultural 
perspectives.
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Contributor Notes

Cooley, Nicole

168            Volume 11, Number 2
Milk Dress
Nicole Cooley
The crying spills over a shoulder, over the edge of a spoon.
The crying is shaking silver.
Now the daughters downstairs. And I sit
in my room reading. No transport—a book static, open, flat.
While below the girls spin together, rocks in a tumbler.
Who is polishing edges, who is smoothing?
The crying will be given back to me because I’ve left,
because I sit at the window without them in a white dress.
 
 *
Body like fabric turned inside out, not the black maternity suit my friend 
and I shared two separate winters as each body reached the moment when 
there was only doubling when there was just this black suit so much more 
precise than language, that could conceal, expose, black suit we mailed back 
and forth between us, daughters we hold till there is no space between us, 
black suit that was its own landscape.
 *
Corsets kept a woman breathless—
 *
Hospital gown open up the back coverlet of tiny stars to cover—
 *
One in the stroller one in my arms
 *
for Julia Kasdorf
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 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          169 
Folio
Less a breath than a shudder, the baby latches on
and in the dressing room we sink together
below the surface of the afternoon, a heap of
silk and acetate and wool I won’t try on.
Milk under my skin like a gas stove’s low blue
hum, under a too-tight lace and wire bra.
*
Pregnant – as if I shucked a dress off my shoulders and stepped into this 
other, this another 
 *
Or, out on the city street, I say now, forget 
the dress, we walk towards home and I
hold both girls in my arms, none left
in my body, my skin still tight and hot.
I’m all sharp-edged blossoms bordering 
a hem, a sleeve,  I’m a field of white, or
we walk and walk and I clasp them close to me,
so tight that none of us can breathe.


Milk Dress

Smith Silva, reviewed by Dorsia

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        191 
Book Reviews
ing to the office, she receives “a severe blow to my working woman ego” (3) 
when she is laid off, yet quickly consoles herself with the idea that (thanks 
to unemployment compensation) she can now enjoy a paid vacation. Leisure, 
however, will prove elusive.
At her neighbour Bibienne’s house, Pauline sips Mai Tais and visits an 
Internet Tarot site. The reading there shows her “the Queen of Cups, the 
good woman card, seated in the terribly auspicious Position One” (5), rep-
resenting Pauline herself. The specific site she visits is not mentioned, but a 
similar online site describes the Queen as “a woman who has more feeling and 
imagination than common sense” [http://www.biddytarot.com], a description 
that fits Pauline all too well. Although she has been trained in the military as 
a wilderness survival expert, she seems unlikely to survive the travails of work 
and family life.
Cups of coffee, cups of laundry detergent, even bra cups define Pauline’s 
life. She veers from fitful job hunts to make-over misadventures with henna 
powder to an encounter with a bear while camping with her two younger 
children, Jack and Olympia, to troubles with dog-sitting, to bridesmaids from 
hell when her old army friend Regina decides to get married. Motherhood 
brings her more exasperation than joy. She regrets abandoning her youthful 
motto: “Never have kids, pets or plants” (13). She worries that her husband 
Donald may be straying, envies the freedom of her teenaged daughter Seren-
ity and her own widowed mother, and yearns for an affair with Michael, the 
handsome teacher with whom she shares “coffee and Camus” (82). With her 
worry about “fanny size” (11), her crush on Michael, and her daydreaming, this 
sardonic anti-heroine is like a much-married version of Bridget Jones, only 
funnier. She is aware of the women’s movement, without getting much benefit 
from it: “I adopted a radical feminist perspective on doughnuts and gained two 
sizes” (35). It is a tribute to her pluck and wit that she remains a sympathetic 
character to readers throughout her few triumphs and many misfortunes. Let’s 
Seven Floors Up 
Cati Porter. 
Bay City, mi: Mayapple Press, 2008.
Reviewed by Dorsía Smith Silva
Cati Porter’s volume of poetry, Seven Floors Up, explores events of everyday life 
and meditates on the details of women’s diverse experience: raising children, 
caring for parents and pets, and balancing the responsibilities of household 
tasks. While most of the poems in this collection focus on domestic experi-
192        Volume 11, Number 2
Book Reviews
ence, several address such issues as sexual abuse, the aftermath of rape, and 
the ability of language to transform meaning and perception. The collection 
consists of three untitled sections which probe the common themes of individual 
identity, marriage, mothering and motherhood, sexuality, sexual assault, death, 
and nature and art. Porter’s belief that life is a complex blend of overlapping 
events is revealed in “Marriage as Board Game.” As Scrabble pieces build 
and rebuild words, they also convey the thoughts of the speaker, her mother, 
stepmother, and mother-in-law: “My mom / spells out divorce. I shake / 
my head. My stepmom lays sex / on the board. I shake my head again. / My 
mother-in-law giggles, sticks an M / before emptied’s unencumbered E, / 
spelling, at last, me.” The linguistic word play continues in the poem “mum,” 
in which Porter focuses on the different meanings of the word (“sound made 
with closed lips,” “abbreviation of chrysanthemum,” “pet word for ‘mother,’ 
short for mummy,” “mother,” and “mother tongue”) and links them to various 
reflections on the mother-daughter relationship. The most memorable poems 
show how daughter and mother alike repress their experience of sexual abuse 
and rape: “my cousin announced that it happened to / my mother, too, she 
said it as though / I already knew” and “In my room in the dark I think about 
it every night, won- / dering if it would have ever happened to me had my 
mother / told me it had happened to her first.”
“The Mum Bell” and “Drawing the Name” explore touching moments 
of motherhood. In “The Mum Bell,” the speaker recalls being eight months 
pregnant and feeling the weight of her belly. As she joins her toddler son in 
touching her protruding stomach, she senses life moving—her “mum bell” 
ringing. “Drawing the Name” expresses concerns about naming one’s child. 
The speaker feels burdened by this responsibility and hopes the name she 
chooses will suit her son: “to begin the invention / of an identity, is harder 
than imagined.” 
Porter saves her most notable poems for the last section. “Administering 
My Dog’s Cancer Therapy, I Think about My Sons” connects the sacrifices 
the speaker makes as she cares for her sick dog and the even greater sacrifices 
she would make for her children. While she feeds her dog chicken breasts, she 
would be willing to cut off her breasts and feed them to her children if they 
needed them to survive “through the night.” In “The Game We Play,” Porter 
revisits daughter-mother tension during a Scrabble game. Here, daughter and 
mother use “cute” words to avoid the mother’s impending death. Inevitably, 
the Scrabble words do not mask the daughter’s grief: “You let me win, your 
score just shy. / And I let you continue to hope that I won’t fall apart when 
you die.” 
Seven Floors Up is a memorable collection of impressive poems that evoke 
day-to-day life and women’s manifold experiences.


Seven Floors Up

Dearest Rachel

Kruk, Laurie

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        355 
Book Reviews
with insight, compassion, and offers a practical, focused plan for developing 
different patterns of self-care. Similarly, this book will be a good resource for 
the practitioner who wants to support the growing numbers of non-resident 
mothers eager to write their own healing stories. 
Regrettably, the book’s index is thin and less helpful than the more com-
plete table of contents. The book lists additional resources for finding help 
and advice in the uk, as well as some internet resources. The short list of ad-
ditional readings is comprised mainly of books on topics such as self-esteem 
and anger management, along with six books for children about divorce. With 
a few exceptions, the reference list is dated, with many citations over ten years 
old. While this may speak to the dearth of comparable books on the subject, 
Hart omits contemporary texts that may address the needs of practitioners 
and scholars interested in this important mothering issue. 
Full Frontal Feminism: 
A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters
Jessica Valenti
Berkeley: Seal Press, 2007
Reviewed by Laurie Kruk
As a professor, I frequently find myself arguing for the relevance of feminist 
criticism with young women of eighteen who see my concerns as quaint. As a 
middle-aged mother of daughters as well, I find myself confronting a genera-
tion gap. So when I came upon this book, its objectives clearly appealing to 
my pedagogical and personal interests, I was intrigued. Jessica Valenti, founder 
of Feministing.com, is obviously speaking for, and to, “Generation Y.” From 
the teasing glimpse of a nude female torso on the cover, to the use of chapter 
graphics (T-shirts with feminist slogans to embody the “frontal” approach), and 
pop-culture-infused rhetoric, this book is designed to appeal to the younger 
generation. In defending feminism against its popular reputation as “anti-men, 
anti-sex, anti-sexism, anti-everything,” Valenti responds to the concern that 
“there’s something wrong with us…. Too fat … dumb … too smart … too 
slutty … not slutty enough” with the terse riposte, “Fuck that” (6). Her mix-
ture of earnest intelligence and street-wise argot keeps this book from being 
“academic.” Indeed, if “the personal is political” slogan still applies, Valenti sits 
nicely within mainstream feminism, drawing on her own experiences to make 
her case. Her journey from confusion to commitment hooks the reader and 
356        Volume 11, Number 1
Book Reviews
offers a portrait of a complex personality. This is what makes her feminism so 
twenty-first century—a refusal to settle for simple answers.
Valenti is at her best when discussing the “pornification of pop culture.” 
Dealing with the recent media frenzy that has been packaged for profit as 
“Girls Gone Wild,” for instance, she is careful not to come down either on the 
anti-sex or pro-porn side. She mulls over the ramifications of stripping for the 
cameras with a lot of hard questions about power politics. Admitting to her own 
youthful indiscretions helps support her sisterly perspective, so after surveying 
a number of viewpoints, she concludes “I guess what I’ve come to—and is what 
works for me—is that you have to find your own middle ground. There has to 
be space for young women to figure shit out on their own. And I think most 
times young women do figure it out” (48). Valenti is also very persuasive on 
sex education campaigns in the United States, her main audience, and the rise 
of “abstinence” programs and virginity pledges or chastity balls. She provides 
sources for these disturbing trends (many stories are found online) to ground 
her anger in current statistics. This is eye-opening stuff for mom/profs who 
do not have time to watch much television or surf the web.
Valenti also discusses abortion rights, politics, the U.S. women’s movement, 
the wedding industry, women and politics and the “third wave,” or multiple 
identity positions within feminism. Perhaps because of my own position, I found 
these chapters to be a bit thin. But in some ways, this book is an antidote to 
academic feminism/feminists, as chapter titles like “I promise I won’t call ‘Her-
story’” suggest. Nevertheless, I read it with admiration for Valenti’s websurfing 
research skills and punchy style. Valenti makes her case for feminism with a 
compelling mix of girl-talk and up-to-date indignation. I think I’ll recommend 
her book to my students—and in a few years, to my daughters.
Obsession, with Intent: Violence against Women 
Lee Lakeman 
Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2005
Reviewed by Deborah Davidson
I received my review copy of Lee Lakeman’s Obsession, with Intent: Violence 
against Women just as Aqsa Parvez was murdered, allegedly at the hands of 
her father and brother in what has been called “an honour killing,” since the 
15-year-old Aqsa was said to have refused to wear her head covering and to 
be engaged in behaviours typical of teenagers in the Western world. Debates 
emerged as to the place of culture in this teen’s murder. I would argue that 


Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters

Hunter, Linda

Supporting the Mothers: An Exploration of Maternal Health, Well-being and Support Service Needs for HIV-Positive MOthers

Swanke, Jayme

Dreuth Zeman, Laura

Doktor, Judy

Discontent and Activism Among Mothers Who Blog While Raising Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

170            Volume 11, Number 2
Nicole Cooley
A sliver of dread. A slash and then the baby is small enough to fit underneath 
the surface of my skin where I can keep her safe forever.
The dye they injected was pale purple. The dye was green and I was not 
allowed to hold her.
The baby was lost then found under a cabbage leaf, silky as a gown on a wed-
ding night, white as spilled milk
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          171 
Folio
Notes
Text in the italicized untitled poems is borrowed from Harry F. Harlow, 
“Love in Infant Monkeys,” Scientific American 200 ( June 1959).


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Hush

Contributor Notes

Milk Dress

Seven Floors Up

Dearest Rachel

Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters

Supporting the Mothers: An Exploration of Maternal Health, Well-being and Support Service Needs for HIV-Positive MOthers

Discontent and Activism Among Mothers Who Blog While Raising Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

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Masquing Well-Being: "Negotiating Space" and the Self-Concept of Poor, Black Women

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