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

Dunlop, Rishma

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          309 
Primer
Rishma Dunlop
The girl reads neighbourhoods of 
dog, cat, sister, brother, mother, father
houses lit with yellow sunshine and once
upon a time glass slippers, long-toothed wolves.
     ______
 
The girl does not know yet
   the broken world,
that there will be pages for consequence, coercion, fraudulence.
Outside her room
the sky is an x-Ray pinned to light
armies of birds lifting into skeletal shadows.
Softness vanishes in the city
  deformed by contagion, fear, vanity.
News stories convulse
palsied in the laws of speech.
Planes pass over the skyline.
Traffic lights change voltage.
Damage is quiet
  oil slick pools in city parkades
fissured winds, smudge of newsprint.
Elegant hands read the book of lost entries
 trace the red glares of exit signs, writing on tenement walls
            the veined arms of junkies.
         
     ______
310            Volume 11, Number 1
Rishma Dunlop
The girl reads her picture books. 
A child’s garden of verses.
The alphabet sifts into her ribcage
   opens her to stars, grass, abcs
whole sentences whispering dark.
In the open doorway
  something cold and distant
even adult hands are small against it.
The book left on the lectern
brittle yellow pages without context
   lexicons of disclosure
soft imprisonment.
The girl does not know yet how words will
  hiss and tremble on fuller pages
imagined wilderness, insomniac’s tale, seductions, 
remembrances and forgettings, child’s face pressed
against shattered window, wrecked lullaby, fiercely beautiful
derailment, murderer’s knife, deep song of
mouth unnaming the known.
    ______
My hands close on empty testimonies
  until I find that girl—a pocket of held light
ripped corner of one illuminated manuscript.
In my dreams I see her
the pages blowing with dormant
           terror
as she gathers moon and sky 
in her small hands like a mouth 
lovely language
that has no word for harm.


English

Primer

Cooley, Nicole

158            Volume 11, Number 2
Couplets Toward the Future
Nicole Cooley
         September 2001
Now each day is a gasp.  A helicopter stutters
across the blank blue sky, then disappears
into the city’s empty horizon, air clear
of smoke that sometimes rises, sometimes disappears,
jaundiced yellow smell filling our bedroom with fear
of the future.  That day won’t disappear –
it’s always replayed as “America’s New War,”
this century’s lesson: how bodies disappear –
war started in the city where our family began, here,
where the best moment is waking, all dark disappeared,
where the baby lies between us and the two of us breathe her
in, and I pray for the world outside our bed to disappear.
It won’t. But then it shouldn’t. And as we hold each other,
pull our daughter closer, I think of The Disappeared.
I used to ask how my body made another. Last year’s 
question.  Now, I ask you, how can a body disappear?
Your hands hold me. In the unmapped future, 
I won’t let the three of us disappear. 
 


Couplets Towards the Future

Ripley, reviewed by M. Louise

180        Volume 11, Number 2
Book Reviews
Opting In: Having a Child without Losing Yourself
Amy Richards. 
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Reviewed by M. Louise Ripley
Amy Richards has written the ideal book for any woman contemplating having 
children. An underlying theme of Opting In is the long-debated question of 
whether women can work outside the home and successfully raise their children. 
Richards considers whether feminism can help support a mother’s decision 
to work outside the home and offers an historical review of her subject. In 
the end, she contends that women should work—for the sake of themselves, 
their children, and their relationships—but she advocates a new approach to 
the notion of work.
At the heart of feminism, Richards argues, is a willingness to consider 
choices, to push for change before others recognize that change is needed. 
Informing her analysis is the systemic problem of sexism and how it affects 
women’s decisions regarding children. Richards emphasizes, for example, 
that women with money and social status must fight to improve things for 
all women.
Richard’s extensive chapter on who does how much work in the home while 
caring for children emphasizes the importance of choice for individual women. 
She stresses that women must give men a chance to learn the parenting skills 
that, too often, they believe men do not possess. To illustrate her argument, she 
delves into her own childhood experiences and those of well-known feminists 
such as Gloria Steinem. Richards affirms the individual personhood of each 
child and recognizes that no single method of childrearing can guarantee a 
“perfect” child. 
A sad chapter deals with how easy it is to lose friends when one becomes 
a mother, or when two friends, both mothers, disagree on parenting issues. 
Another chapter deals with a woman’s relationship with her own mother and 
shows that our individual experience of being mothered influences how we 
mother our children. 
Richards concludes on a hopeful note, citing examples of women who 
have been open about their own experiences, have made difficult, life-altering 
choices, and have worked to improve societal views of women, mothers, and 
children. 
 


Opting In : Having a Child without Losing Yourself

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          341 
At the Gare Centrale
She fingers the blue 
Of her Canadian passport.
Wears the shoes she bought 
From the marché aux puces.
Crimson, strapped at her ankles 
They once belonged to a dancer 
With the Moulin Rouge.
At each city limit
A border to be crossed.
Every language a new currency.
At the hotel 
She befriends the night porter. 
Tells him secrets,
Intimate stories of her life.
She is conscious of the weight 
Of inheritance. 
The heft of her mother’s rubies 
Sewn into the hem
Of her skirt.
Insured
She knows there is always 
Someone willing to bargain for the past.
Film Noir
Rishma Dunlop
342            Volume 11, Number 1


Film Noir

untitled

156            Volume 11, Number 2
arm 2008/09 photography contest. First prize winner: 
“Mother Watches Daughter Feed - Beijing Refugee Camp, Chad.” Photo: Omar Odeh.
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          157 
from Milk Dress
Nicole Cooley
The cloth mother is heated by a light bulb hidden 
deep inside. She’ll offer comfort but no nourishment. She’ll offer her body wound 
with a towel. And the baby monkey will cling.  The baby will turn from the 
other mother made of mesh, the other mother who is all hard edges who is 
offering her milk.
The macaque monkeys were removed from their mothers after birth for the 
experiment. For this purpose we contrived two surrogate mother monkeys.
Inside the mother the light bulb blinks and warms and casts its shadows.


from Milk Dress

Schwartz-Bechet, reviewed by Barbara

360        Volume 11, Number 1
Book Reviews
Rachel in the World: A Memoir
Jane Bernstein 
Champagne, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2007
Reviewed by Barbara Schwartz-Bechet
One of the strongest bonds that exists is between a mother and a child. But 
can that bond remain strong when only the mother is able to openly express 
love? This appears to be the case for Jane Bernstein whose emotional memoir, 
Rachel in the World, describes her daughter, a spirited, talkative girl with mental 
retardation. In this second book about Rachel, Bernstein presents her experience 
of rearing two daughters, one of whom has a mental disability. Much more than 
a memoir of Rachel, the book also probes feelings of love, grief, and acceptance 
as a mother enables a daughter with a disability to take on the world.
An accomplished writer and professor, Bernstein facilitates her daughter’s 
coming of age, while Rachel tries to distance herself from her mother, like any 
normally developing teenager. Like many young people approaching adulthood, 
Rachel looks up to her older sister Charlotte as an example of someone who 
takes risks and seeks independence. Bernstein’s task, as a writer and a mother, 
is to understand and accept the fact that her child will become an adult who 
will live with a disability.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on Rachel from 
the fifth grade to graduation at age twenty-one. When Rachel is five, her father 
and older sister Charlotte leave the family while Bernstein remains with Rachel. 
Through compelling narrative, Bernstein describes her gradual understanding 
of her own needs and those of her daughter. Bernstein’s aim in this section of 
the book is to help other mothers see the “big picture”—what the future offers 
adults with disabilities. The “big picture” is not presented in negative terms. 
Instead, Bernstein uses the terms “functional” and “transitioning” in positive 
ways and suggests that fighting for the rights of one’s child is never wrong. 
In the second part of the book Bernstein chronicles the frustrations and 
roadblocks, the helplessness she feels as she helps her daughter live the best 
possible life. This is a mother’s journey as caregiver, advocate, and friend: 
“No one would ever search as hard as I had been searching to find her soul.” 
Bernstein allows the reader to enter her world of triumph and heartbreak. She 
finds time to refresh herself on one sabbatical and several brief holidays. She 
finds appropriate placements for Rachel, first in Israel and then in the United 
States. Bernstein’s victories are short lived, however. She learns, for example, 
that Rachel is not washing or changing her clothes, that she is rude to the 
people she lives with, that she does not understand when she hurts someone’s 
feelings, that she is not always doing her job properly.
Rachel in the World evokes empathy for both mother and daughter and 


Rachel in the World: A Memoir

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          335 
In the city where I live
A man is arrested for abducting and
Butchering a ten-year-old girl.
Tonight it rains and I walk
On streets that reek 
Of rust and pitch.
Petitions to any god are uncertain.
The sky is spread with vast wings of lead.
No oracular assurance from the pulpits.
Still I pray
Words coming like blood on the mouth.
That the sweet taste be taken from the violent thought
That in the birdless hours
The mother and father of the ten-year-old girl
Will be granted dreamless sleep
That the lachrymal salt of this rain
Will become original milk.
Psalm
Rishma Dunlop
336            Volume 11, Number 1


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Primer

Couplets Towards the Future

Opting In : Having a Child without Losing Yourself

Film Noir

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from Milk Dress

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Rachel in the World: A Memoir

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Psalm

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