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

Joy Green
					, reviewed by Fiona

304        Volume 10, Number 1
Book Reviews
A Hard Place: Another Long Day Apart 
Written, Directed, Produced by Kate Clere. 
Narrated by Kerry Armstrong. 
Second Nature Films and The Australian Film Commission, 2004. 15 mins.
Reviewed by Fiona Joy Green
A Hard Place: Another Long Day Apart is an aesthetically beautiful and emo-
tionally touching film about the ongoing conflicts an Australian, white, mid-
dle-class, heterosexual mother experiences when she decides to place her two-
year-old son in childcare while she works full-time for a wage. Through the 
melodic and soft-spoken voice of award-winning actress Kerry Armstrong, 
we learn of the intense love middle-aged Kate Clere has for her young son. 
The 15-minute DVD opens with grey, grainy images taken by photographer 
Sarah Smuts-Kennedy of Clere at the seaside, seated on rocks with foaming 
water around her feet. It is here that she confesses to the audience, “I’ve been 
having a love affair for the last two years. I have to tell my husband; I never 
planned it like this. We said nothing would come between us.”
Surrounded by early strains of a piano and a woman’s wailing voice, Clere 
confides her feelings for this new love: “He is divine; I’m in love, drunk in 
love. His eyes are so bright, when he looks at me I melt. He has a great sense 
of humour; he makes me laugh. I learn so much from him. He sees the world 
through such trusting eyes.”
In a soft, sensual voice, Clere speaks of how she adores watching her love 
from a distance and touching him. We see black-and-white still photograph 
images of mother and child at the water’s edge, as she admits, “I love the feel of 
his skin. I love it when he touches me.” She describes the intense and respectful 
moments of falling in love at the beginning of this new relationship. 
The honesty and intensity of these feelings resonate with this viewer, who 
similarly fell in love with her own son over 19 years ago when he first entered 
her world. Like Clere, I marvelled at the gift of my child and wondered, as she 
does, whether all mothers feel this immense love for their children, and how 
strange it is “that more people don’t speak out about this extraordinary love.” In 
making this observation, Clere challenges the taboo of silence that surrounds 
the subject of the depth of love that some mothers feel for their children.
Understanding her intense feelings for her son also provides the context 
for her exploration of the complex tension she feels between her desire to 
cocoon herself with her son and her professional need to work. The imagery 
changes from black-and-white to colour, and the sound score from serenity 
to the clatter and chaos of city life. Mondays mean a shift in relationship and 
activity: “I’m torn from this love as I falter for my own life. I’m torn from my 
child as I earn a wage. I’m torn from his side and I hear him cry. I’m torn like 
brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
provided by Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and...
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        305 
Book Reviews
mothers across this strange city as I leave my greatest creation, my greatest 
love with someone else.”
Clere addresses the need to find childcare while she is pregnant to ensure 
a place for her yet-to-be-born child and reflects on this contradictory situa-
tion: “My child is part of this generation of children with weekend parents.” 
Accompanying this revelation are haunting colour images of her preschool 
son, first sitting in the middle of a colourless street playing with toys while 
grey-coloured adults walk by, and then sitting all alone on a deserted downtown 
crosswalk. Clere further acknowledges, “I’m part of this generation of mothers 
who is torn,” as she is shown standing alone and looking forlorn in the empty 
street. She articulates feelings of guilt, the need for independence, and her 
intense longing to maintain a connection with her son. As a mother she feels 
invisible, yet wants another baby to counter this sense of negation. 
Clere’s film addresses the tension many urban Western women experience 
between the “me who wants to be a good mother versus the me who works a 
40-hour week.” A Hard Place has international status with official selections 
at the Women in the Director’s Chair International Film Festival, Chicago; 
Shorts Film Festival, Adelaide; River Run International Film Festival, North 
Carolina; and St. Kilda Film Festival, Melbourne.
Camille Peri and Kate Moses’s Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Chil-
dren, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves is an exhilarating and vindi-
cating collection of narratives by mothers who are coping with expectations 
for themselves. For instance, Fufkin Vollmayer must disregard her own single 
mother’s rage when she chooses to become a single mother herself. Mary 
Morris has to labour to not be an angry, controlling, frightening parent like 
her father. Karin L. Stanford comes to the decision to reject fairy tales and 
not remain silent about sexism within the Black community in order to be a 
good example to her daughter. Lisa Teasley leaves New York City to escape 
“mental slavery”—the racism that she and her multiracial family experienced 
there—which was hindering her ability to mother.
Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, 
Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves 
Camille Peri and Kate Moses, eds. 
New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
Reviewed by Jessica B. Burstrem


English

A Hard Place: Another Long Day Apart

Duncan
					, reviewed by Sarah
					 J.

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        275 
Book Reviews
children were adopted because they were very much loved” (186). While this 
may be true in many cases, it is not true in all cases.
Robinson claims “adopted people cannot grow and develop to their full 
potential without a connection with their history and heritage.” In fact, many 
children do grow up not knowing their histories. And, while they may long to 
know of their pasts, they are able to succeed in the world. 
Robinson continues to simplify the complexity of adoption: “while birth is 
traditionally considered an occasion to celebrate, adoption is never a reason for 
celebration. Every adoption is a tragedy because it means that there has been 
a family breakdown” (214). Clearly, adoption is much more complicated than 
Robinson implies. A tragedy for the birth mother can mean great joy for the 
adoptive parents, and a chance for adequate food, education, and socialization 
for the child. Adoption triangles are intricate and to describe adoption as tragic 
is only to describe one part of the experience.
Robinson argues that “adoption is ethically and morally indefensible”; she 
envisages a society that is supportive of single mothers, and supportive enough 
of troubled families so they can nurture and educate their children—a society 
in which adoption is unnecessary. Her argument is based on the false assump-
tion that only biological mothers can adequately mother their children. In fact, 
her assumption that biological mothers are always preferable to non-biological 
mothers is not supported by current statistics.
Despite these criticisms, Adoption and Loss: The Hidden Grief makes a 
compelling case for open and honest adoption and the need to change the 
laws and social customs governing adoption. Robinson may tell but one side 
of the adoption story, but it is an important story nonetheless. 
Adoption and Recovery: 
Solving the Mystery of Reunion
Evelyn Burns Robinson. 
Christies Beach, South Australia: Clova Publications, 2006.
Reviewed by Sarah J. Duncan
Adoption and Recovery: Solving the Mystery of Reunion is a companion volume 
to Evelyn Burns Robinson’s first book, Adoption and Loss: The Hidden Grief. 
The author, trained as a social worker, combines her clinical expertise in grief 
counseling with her personal story as a mother who gave up her child for 
adoption more than twenty years ago. 
The book is divided into three sections: Personal Recovery, Interpersonal 
Recovery, and Questions. Robinson conceptually connects the established theory 
and literature of grief and loss to the feelings experienced at the time of adop-
276        Volume 10, Number 2
Book Reviews
tion and, later, at reunion. While she acknowledges that reunion is perceived 
(or rather assumed) to be a joyful event, she rightly pinpoints it as a moment 
of reckoning for many people and an experience that is bound to elicit strong 
emotions in both parties, regardless of who initiates the reconnection.
Robinson organizes her work logically. In the first section, she examines 
the grief and loss of the mother (identified as perhaps the most affected of the 
parents), from the shame and silence of “illegitimate” pregnancy, through the 
decision process, and finally the act of adoption. The birth mother or father is 
consistently referred to as “someone who has lost a child to adoption,” an awkward 
but politically correct term that may imply blame. The traditional term “gave 
up” is almost never used; Robinson believes the decision to relinquish a child 
through adoption is often taken out of the hands of the pregnant mother. She 
also investigates the personal grief journey of the child who is adopted, giving 
simple but helpful suggestions for perspective shifting and personal healing. 
Even for someone not affected by adoption, the information and suggestions 
seem familiar and potentially useful. 
The second section examines the potential for grief, loss, sadness, and 
conflict in the process of reunion. Here is the key to the subtitle; Robinson 
queries why such a seemingly happy experience often results in negative reac-
tions. How can a reunion with a birth mother or father, and/or a biological, 
extended family result in hostility, anger, bitterness, and confusion? Robinson’s 
answer is grief. In fact, the adoption experience often proves emotionally 
overwhelming and a myriad of feelings may surface at the time of reunion. 
Robinson identifies these feelings as steps in the grief journey, from initially 
recognizing the loss and separation through to acceptance and reconnection. 
Her hypothesis is convincing, bolstered by references to the established work 
in grief therapy.
The final section includes three chapters of questions and answers organized 
by category: birth parents, adopted adults, and others (including questions from 
adoptive parents). In her conclusion, Robinson addresses three broad issues, 
also presented in the form of questions and answers: government assistance, 
community assistance, and individual self-help. Again, her answers focus first 
on personal recovery and then interpersonal recovery. In fact, the ideas raised 
here deserve full development in the body of the book.
Evidently, Robinson wrote Adoption and Recovery as a form of therapy 
for herself and her son (Steven, who has a forward of his own in this volume). 
Unfortunately, her audience is ill defined and her perspective is unfocused. 
As a result, the reader is left confused and the value of the information she 
provides—important as it is—is diminished. 


Adoption and Recovery: Solving the Mystery of Reunion

Green
					, Fiona
					 J.

Matroreform: Feminist Mothers and Their Daughters Creating Feminist Motherlines

Leane
					, Máire

Caring for the Celtic Cubs: Discursive Constructions of Mothers and
Mothering in the Irish Childcare Debate

Editorial Masthead

Vryenhoek
					, Leslie

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    261 
Ignace is a coffee shop squat by the side
of the Trans Canada, a bank
of payphones inside the door on the left. 
Dim light, only one phone
working, no answer.
Ignace is seven hours 
east of goodbye; is still raining slick
with the memory of wet blotches 
carelessly left on the shoulder
of your khaki T-shirt; is a hole
in the pit of my gut, the faded postcard 
that looks like it’s been here since last time, 
twenty years ago, when I insisted on driving
your dad all this way just to hold 
on to the hours.
 Ignace was where the railroad 
 took him to work, leaving me 
 nine months pregnant and scared
 senseless — was a dank motel room, a last
 kiss, a stupid idea that turned out okay only
 because I could follow a semi back west
 through the snow, faint twin lights enough 
 to keep up with the highway’s unexpected 
 twists and 
 you hiccupping softly 
 in the dark of me.
Just Beyond Call If You Need Me
Leslie Vryenhoek
262    Volume 10, Number 2
Ignace is another tank of gas; is checking the chains
on the U-Haul I’m pulling away
from the life you will have; is the vacancy 
you will never
stop being.
Leslie Vryenhoek


Just Beyond Call If You Need Me

Chorney
					, reviewed by Tatjana
					 Takševa

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        271 
Book Reviews
living a life of daily revolution.”  The revolutionary ideas supported by anarchists 
can be reflected in how we choose to parent our children. As anarchists, we 
can follow the dominant childrearing practices, or we can choose to maintain 
our passion for social change and work to create the kind of world we want 
for our children. 
Parenting a Defiant Child: A Sanity Saving Guide to 
Finally Stopping the Bad Behavior 
Philip S. Hall and Nancy D. Hall. 
New York: American Management Association, 2007. 
Reviewed by Tatjana Takševa Chorney 
This guidebook offers step-by-step techniques and skills that will enable 
parents to transform their confrontational relationship with a defiant child. 
Written in jargon-free prose, the book includes key statements and concepts 
in highlighted boxes, which makes it a particularly accessible work. It aims to 
distinguish itself from other parenting books by favouring a preventative over 
a punitive approach to non-compliant behaviour. I support the premise that 
prevention works better than punitive measures, which focus on consequences 
rather than causes. 
The book is divided into three sections: Prevention, Managing Non-
compliance and Defiance, and Planning for Success in the Community. Each 
section emphasizes practical concerns, and the end of each chapter includes a 
section entitled Applications. The three sections are organized in a linear and 
sequential way, and provide parents with exercises, examples, and activities that 
will help them implement the ideas and proposals presented in the preceding 
chapter. As authors Philip S. Hall and Nancy D. Hall rightly point out, “there 
is no one big thing”(x) that a parent can do to solve the problem of defiance 
in children. Solutions come from consistently following a series of small steps 
and actions that will eventually modify undesirable behaviour. 
The authors define defiant behaviour in descriptive rather than summative 
terms. They pose five questions for parents to answer: “Does my child frequently 
provoke other people? Does my child intentionally defy me? Does my child 
maliciously antagonize and fight with his or her sibling? Does my child throw 
a temper tantrum when he doesn’t get his way? Do I let my child get away 
with things so that I can have some peace and quiet?” (ix). If parents answer 
“yes” to two or more of these questions, and the defiant child is older than 
three years of age, then it is time for action. The authors do not say, however, 
that a child’s defiance is often a justifiable reaction to a set of circumstances 
that may have been exacerbated by parents’ momentary or ongoing lack of 
insight, patience, or energy. 
272        Volume 10, Number 2
Book Reviews
In section one, the authors gesture toward a more nuanced understanding 
of defiance by suggesting that “many children who display excessive noncom-
pliance, defiance and aggression have what mental health professionals call 
Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” but not all children who are noncompliant, 
defiant, and aggressive have this disorder (8). They also argue that a profes-
sional should carefully diagnose a child with serious behaviour problems. This 
section underscores the importance of routine, good communication, strategies 
that strengthen the parent child-relationship, and creating an environment 
where the desired behavioural response is the easiest and most natural one 
for the child. 
In section two, the authors acknowledge that prevention measures and new 
routines do not mean that the defiant behaviour will cease, and strategies are 
provided to help parents guide their child though relapses. Here parents learn 
how to teach children to gain self-control by recognizing so-called “antecedents” 
or “triggers” of emotional meltdowns through role-playing and self-charting; 
that routine removes the necessity for parent-child power struggles; and that 
removing privileges is often the most effective way to encourage the child to 
display the desired behaviour. Here, the authors make the important statement 
that parenting is about teaching children the skills they need in many areas, 
including behaviour (144). 
Section three moves outside the home, and provides advice and strategies 
for parents when it comes to dealing with schools, daycares, and other places 
in the community, including car trips, playing with friends, and shopping for 
groceries. In general, the suggested approach is proactive. For example, with 
regard to school, parents are advised to take the initiative to meet with the 
school principal, to be candid about their child’s behaviour, and to work on 
building a respectful relationship with teachers based on ongoing communica-
tion. The authors also draw attention to special services available within the 
education system, and provide practical suggestions on how to access these 
services. The book concludes with a chapter entitled Parting Advice, which 
incorporates a blank nine-month calendar to help parents manage the systematic 
implementation of the suggested activities at the end of each chapter, taking 
one chapter per month. Application activities can be fitted onto the calendar 
with one assignment or goal per week. 
The authors aim to help parents persevere in their efforts to eliminate 
a child’s problematic behaviour. The book avoids laying blame on parents or 
examining to what extent parents’ own behaviour may have contributed to 
or may be solely responsible for a child’s defiant behaviour. The obvious and 
perhaps justified merit of this approach is that no parent will feel alienated by 
this book. Nonetheless, the authors claim that modifying defiant behaviour in 
children often must start with modifying problematic aspects of the behaviour 
of parents. Finally, I endorse the author’s decision to leave their readers with a 
Chinese proverb: “The longest journey begins with a single step.”


Parenting a Defiant Child: A Sanity Saving Guide to Finally Stopping the Bad Behavior

Harriss
					, Clarinda

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         293 
Right up till Ted Koczynski’s arrest, just about all the people I know believed 
the Unibomber was somebody they used to date. Even my old friend Frankie, 
who’s a lesbian. 
“Frankie,” I told her, “the police sketch has a moustache.” 
Frankie snorted. She teaches Theatre Arts. The snort meant “as if a 
moustache is any kind of permanent or necessarily men-only feature.” 
My knowing all these claimants to a Unibomber relationship may be a 
socio-cultural-geographic thing. I’m the Writer in Residence (read ill-paid 
part-time creative writing teacher) at snooty little St. Anne’s College in St. 
Anne, Maryland, a non-town which houses huge, funky St. Anne State Uni-
versity as well. It’s also the county seat, so the adult population of St. Anne 
consists mostly of college teachers and lawyers: people who share a magnetic 
force field with psychopaths.
Crazy Angel was my psychopath. Even his mother and brother and sis-
ter, who were all crazy too, and all named some permutation of Angel, called 
him Crazy Angel as if it was just a regular two-word name, like Billy Joe. I 
thought vaguely about Crazy Angel every time the Unibomber sketch flashed 
on the TV screen, but I started thinking about him in earnest back when my 
car blew up. 
Crazy Angel used to blow up cars just for fun. Or so he told me. The 
one time he tried to demonstrate—using a Coke bottle of gasoline and a 
St. Anne State minibus—nothing happened. But his story about doing time 
for fragging an officer while he was still in boot camp had turned out to be 
verifiable, so when my little hatchback exploded in my driveway at the time 
I usually get into it to go teach my Tuesday night class, I figured it was his 
way of saying Hello. His previous helloes had taken the form of twenty-page 
hand-scribbled letters and the occasional dead animal part. 
The car explosion proved Crazy Angel couldn’t be the Unibomber. 
When, with difficulty, I persuaded the police to investigate the explosion 
(“We only investigate suspicious car explosions,” they told me), they found out 
that Crazy Angel had been locked up in a California prison for the past two 
years. Convicted of felony and assault with intent to maim. 
The car explosion was number one in the series of disasters that I’m now 
Clarinda Harriss
Vynl Recliner
294         Volume 10, Number 1
Clarinda Harriss
working through number three of, hoping and praying the old superstition 
about 3’s holds true. 
Number two may not seem like much, but it holds an integral place in 
the chain of three. Right after the car explosion, with the specter of Crazy 
Angel haunting me, I adopted a pit bull from a friend who was leaving St. 
Anne College to marry her psychopath, a womanizing Australian drunk. 
About a week after Sandy headed Down Under, the pit bull had to have a 
thousand-dollar operation on her left hind leg. 
 The dog’s leg operation led seamlessly into Disaster Three. This hap-
pened just before my mother’s eightieth birthday. Despite her bone troubles 
and herniations, she insisted on helping me load the dog into my car. Both 
she and the dog weigh about eighty pounds. You know that Step on a Crack 
rhyme? Well, I (well, my dog) really did break my mother’s back. An hour 
after the pit pull was stashed in the dog hospital, my mother was in a people 
hospital with three compression fractures in her spine. 
“Goddam old bitches,” she murmured in the ER. And started to laugh, 
till the pain cut her off sharp.
 When I went to see Mother the next day, her hospital bed was empty, 
giving me a very scary moment till I located her in a corner huddled in a small 
plastic chair. 
“I’ve been here all night,” she said in the whisper that has become her 
regular voice ever since her spine broke.
 “My god, how could they leave you like this?” My mind was already cut-
ting to the lawsuit.
“I made them. Getting into bed hurt too much. They tried. But I wouldn’t 
let them.”
I could picture the scene. Doctors, nurses, orderlies, social workers, cler-
gymen, security guards and St Anne herself didn’t stand a chance of getting 
Mother into bed if she didn’t want to go. On the pretext of getting her a fresh 
jug of ice, I took a walk around the seventh floor—the Geriatric Unit, “GU,” 
“Goo,” the staff called it—to see how other people’s mothers were arranged. 
I’d hardly rounded the first bend in the hallway when I spotted what would 
be just the thing for mine.
 It was just sitting there, shaped like a parody of a recumbent human, fac-
ing the wall as if being punished: an immense tan vinyl recliner with so many 
movable parts it was clear a person could sit, lie down flat, get up again, and, 
in short, assume most positions known to human anatomy just by pressing 
buttons. 
I should ask somebody, I said to myself.
Nah, I responded.
Nobody batted an eye when I wheeled the huge recliner right past the 
nurses’ station and into my mother’s room. In fact, an aide came in to help 
me rearrange the furniture so the thing would fit. Within minutes my mother 
was propped in the chair. 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         295 
Folio
“This is wonderful,” she whispered. 
I don’t remember my mother ever saying anything I ever did for her was 
even okay, much less wonderful. I was proud.
Crazy Angel would have been proud too. The thing he said drew him to 
me was that I had significant criminal potential. He felt that, under his tute-
lage, I could have been a contender, so to speak (he actually did sound a little 
like young Marlon Brando). My refusal to accept his invitation to accompany 
him while he knocked over a Seven Eleven “just to see how it’s done” was 
what led to our noisy breakup. During his brief stint working in the Media 
Center at St. Anne’s College, from which many tape decks, slide projectors 
and video monitors disappeared, he came to admire the way I walked in and 
took whatever stuff I needed for my class without bothering to go through 
all the paper rigamarole. To me, doing this had nothing to do with crimi-
nal tendencies; it was the only way to get what I needed when I needed it. 
And I returned the stuff. Yet I suspected I was, if anything, potentially a 
better criminal than Crazy Angel. My few illegal activities—ordinary child-
hood shoplifting from the Five and Ten, copping the occasional nickel bag of 
weed—were, without exception, quietly successful, whereas Crazy Angel got 
caught all the time. I shared this thought with Crazy Angel.
He grabbed me by my ponytail and pulled my face up into his crazy face.
Don’t. Ever. Say. That. Again. 
He had the craziest eyes. They were not quite on the same horizontal 
plane. No wonder the Unibomber wore sunglasses for his sketch.
It may seem odd that commandeering a vinyl recliner for my ailing 
mother would set off Crazy Angel recollections, but it isn’t. I’d seen that re-
cliner before—maybe that’s why I didn’t think twice about walking off with 
it—and where I saw it was Crazy Angel’s mother’s living room. 
Mom Angel’s living room was in another universe. Beulah, Maryland, 
just across the rusting tracks of the defunct Ma & Pa Railroad (short for 
Maryland & Pennsylvania) was not even parallel to the ordered universe of 
St. Anne. Beulah sprang up in the early nineteenth century to house the 
families who worked for a now-defunct mill. Falling-down wooden houses 
leaned against and shared porches with gap-tooth brick houses, fieldstone 
houses, houses whose vinyl or formstone covered who knows what—one 
could imagine straw; Beulah seemed, till recently, to have had the Three Lit-
tle Pigs as its urban planners. Each minuscule house had its own tiny front 
and back yards. Each back yard had its own vinyl pool. And each front yard 
had its own exotic animals grazing placidly behind chain link fencing: burros, 
geese, peacocks. Unlike St. Anne with its militant Community Associations, 
Beulah had no rules. 
Crazy Angel’s front yard held goats. Their number varied according to 
the appetites of Crazy Angel’s rottweiler, Black Peter. Crazy Angel’s brother 
Angie kept a .22 by the front door for when other people’s dogs expressed 
interest in the goats. 
296         Volume 10, Number 1
Clarinda Harriss
Two things brought me to Crazy Angel’s living room. One was that 
Crazy Angel often needed a ride home from the college. He drove a dif-
ferent old car every few days, I used to notice; he explained that his brother 
Angie was in the business of parting out stolen cars and often let him drive a 
car they hadn’t started breaking down as long as it came from another state. 
A lot of times there weren’t any available, though. Besides my reliable old 
Volkswagon, there was a second thing that made Crazy Angel take me to his 
home. He admitted it: I was a mark. A big mark, an important mark. Col-
lege teacher, St. Anne society-chick. He wanted his family to see what a high 
mark he could hit.
Picture it: Crazy Angel’s living room, a rectangle about nine feet by nine 
feet, stuffed with Crazy Angel, me, brother Angie, sister Angelina, Crazy 
Angel’s wife Tiffany, and Mom Angel rocking Baby Angel. Note well: Mom 
Angel was rocking Baby Angel in a tan vinyl push-button recliner. The thing 
occupied at least two-thirds of the room.
It took longer for me to get used to the recliner than it took for me to 
adjust to Crazy Angel’s having a baby and a wife. 
“Hey, better you than me,” Tiffany laughed. “I wouldn’t go out with this 
son of a bitch if you paid me.”
She punched him affectionately in the stomach. She wasn’t around much 
except to check on Baby Angel. She drove a cab during the day and danced 
topless in a Beulah bar most evenings. She lived with the bar owner over the 
bar. But Baby Angel spent most of his time with his grandmother, so I got 
to know him pretty well. He called me Tee-chee, for Teacher. Crazy Angel’s 
whole family seemed truly impressed that that’s what I was, Crazy Angel 
himself most of all. That’s half of what made me fall in love with him.
“Tell me things,” he’d say after we made love.
He liked to hear about the seating arrangements in an Elizabethan the-
atre, and what the audience must have smelled like. He liked to hear about 
the lives of some of the poets. He thought Coleridge and Byron were cool, 
but he had no patience for the twentieth century confessionals. 
“Dumb cunts,” he sneered. “If you’re going to do a job right, you can’t be 
drunk.” I don’t know if he meant the job of writing or the job of committing 
suicide. 
Crazy Angel was never drunk. Said it interfered with his concentration.
Concentration is the other half of why I was in love with Crazy Angel. 
He was the most intent, meticulous, concentrated lover I’d ever had. 
He was so deliberate and—what word shall I use—accurate in his lovemaking 
that he made me that way too, for a time. It used to freak me out to open my 
eyes under him and see that his own eyes were open, calmly serious, black 
with focus—not even close to rolled-back like mine. It was the same look he 
used to get while reading Sartre or Nietsche for the philosophy courses he 
took, free, as an employee of St. Anne College. It was ecstasy, but an ecstasy 
of attention, of analysis. If I’d ever seen Ted Koszynski’s pale, vague, flicker-
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         297 
Folio
ing eyes in the “Wanted” publicity, I’d never have even considered that the 
Unibomber might be Crazy Angel.
“Make something of this boy,” wheezed Mom Angel, looking at me while 
whacking Crazy Angel on the back of the head. If Crazy Angel sounded like 
young Marlon, Mom Angel sounded like the old one, Brando of Godfather 
Part I. She was not bothered by the fact that I was almost ten years older than 
Crazy Angel. 
“God sent you to take this boy off my hands.”
She showed me where he had taken a big hunk out of her shin by kick-
ing her with his high school football cleats on. Angelina pushed up her dark 
bangs to show me the scar from where Crazy Angel stabbed her with a fork, 
aiming for her eye. They seemed to be bragging. I wondered, but never dared 
to ask, about Angie’s missing index finger joint.
Until I met Crazy Angel’s people I never thought a family like that could 
exist outside a bad sit com. I never thought so much yelling and physical 
battery could fit into a house the size of theirs. I never thought people really 
had recliners like that in their houses. So many things I never thought, before 
Crazy Angel.
 Which brings me to another thing I never thought, never thought I’d 
have to think about: my mother, infirm. The hospital more or less threw her 
out after about five days. Said there was no point. She couldn’t sleep in a 
bed, or wouldn’t, and she wouldn’t take her medicine. They gave her a big 
bottle of Percuset to take home. She started to give the Percuset to one of the 
aides, but just as the aide shot out an eager, furtive hand to accept the gift, I 
intervened.
“Do you have any idea the street value of that?” I whispered.
“What? Oh.”
Mother tucked the bottle in her big alligator purse. 
“Well, it’ll make a lovely present for Mildred.”
Mildred being the old hophead Mother plays bridge with on Thursdays.
What I had to think about, long, hard, and fast, was how to get Mother 
something to sleep on. I explained to the hospital social worker there was no 
use sending a hospital bed to the house; Mother couldn’t sleep in a hospital 
bed even in the hospital, for god’s sake. I tried to rent a chair like the one I’d 
found for her in the hospital; Medicare wouldn’t pay for it and all the places 
that theoretically carried such chair said they couldn’t get us one till sometime 
around Thanksgiving. It wasn’t even Labor Day. One place said they could 
get a chair delivered to her house within the week—for $230 a month. The 
doctor said she’d need it for six months.
“Mother, I’ll buy you one. Okay? Then you’ll have it. We’ll save a pile of 
money in the long run. And it’ll be yours.”
“I’d die of shame,” Mother whispered.
Die of shame to own such an object, obviously.
I’d considered just wheeling the hospital chair right onto the elevator, out 
298         Volume 10, Number 1
Clarinda Harriss
the automatic glass doors of St. Anne General and down the leafy boulevard 
to my mother’s house, less than half a mile. Looking back, I’m sorry I didn’t 
give it a shot when I had the chance. 
Mom Angel didn’t die of shame that day in about 1977 when the men 
from Sears and Roebuck came to her house to collect her recliner. The two 
men shifted from one foot to the other and eyed the rottweiler. Crazy An-
gel told the men the dog wouldn’t attack them unless he told him to. The 
men politely helped Mom Angel out of the recliner with Baby Angel still in 
her arms; took apart the recliner’s back and foot sections; and, in three trips, 
loaded the thing onto the truck waiting outside with the motor running. The 
living room looked a lot better without the recliner. I figured Mom Angel had 
phoned Sears & Roebuck to come take the thing away. 
“Kids bought it for me last Christmas,” Mom Angel told me. “Extended 
credit plan.” 
“Never paid a cent on it,” Angie put in.
“Took ‘em six months to repossess it,” Mom Angel beamed. 
 As for dying of shame, clearly I was the only person in that living room 
who was. 
I felt less shame, but still a twinge, rummaging through Mother’s alliga-
tor pocketbook. Either it was the same one she’d had since I was a small child 
or she’d managed to find a chain of exact replicas. Either way it was sacred. I 
found her credit cards in a small Ziploc bag under her Raven Red lipstick and 
Dusky Violet eye-shadow. I flicked them front to back till I came to an old 
Sears & Roebuck charge card. It bore a shockingly short customer number 
and no expiration date. Revolving charge, it said. Okay. 
A guy named Ken in Furniture at Sears & Roebuck told me by phone 
there was a sale of La-Z-Boys going on that very day. When I got there, I 
sat in all the recliners, great and small, plastic, velvet and leather. The Ladies’ 
Model #10683 was on sale for less than three months’ rental of a chair lift, 
and it had just as many up-down buttons. 
“You deliver?”
“This Friday okay? Extended credit plan, right?”
“Deal.”
My handwriting looks just like my mother’s. Ken said he’d never seen 
such an old charge card, but it was okay, all the store cared about was the 
number. The number never changes. I knew my mother’s credit had to be 
perfect. Using a Sears card was something she’d have died of shame before 
doing. 
Friday the recliner arrived at Mother’s house. Two delivery men, whose 
extreme good looks were not lost on Mother, deftly put it together, put her 
into it, and demonstrated the controls. When it first came in the door, she 
had raised her hands to her temples in the Die of Shame gesture. But now, 
sinking down into its discreet blue-green narrow-wale corduroy recesses, she 
mouths “It’s wonderful.”
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         299 
Folio
“How long do I have to keep the damn thing?” she adds, louder.
“Six months is what the doctor said, remember?”
I drag the ancient portable Zenith out onto the sun porch where she 
already reigns from the recliner. Mother looks at a news-feature clip of Ted 
Koscynski and shakes her head.
“I used to think the Unibomber was Bob Hart,” she says. “You know, that 
geezer Mildred dragged into the bridge group a while back? Remember how 
he was always lending me weird books?”
Now, all I have to do about the recliner is not pay for it. A gift from the 
angels.


Vinyl Recliner

Kirkman
					, Maggie

Letherby
					, Gayle

Some “Grimm” Reflections on Mothers and Daughters: A Fairy Tale for Our Times

Cihlar
					, James

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    243 
Go to Hell
The verge
Of a nervous
Breakdown
Aquanet
Her palm
On my sister’s backside
Next time
It’ll be
Bare-assed
Derf
Fred spelled backward
Fold out 
Sofa bed
Dickie Doo
Cascio’s on 10th
More of What My Mother Used Later
James Cihlar
brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
provided by Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and...
244    Volume 10, Number 2
James Cihlar
“Mom’s Hands.” Photo: Rita Hermann.


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

Not a member yet

A Hard Place: Another Long Day Apart

Adoption and Recovery: Solving the Mystery of Reunion

Matroreform: Feminist Mothers and Their Daughters Creating Feminist Motherlines

Caring for the Celtic Cubs: Discursive Constructions of Mothers and Mothering in the Irish Childcare Debate

Editorial Masthead

Just Beyond Call If You Need Me

Parenting a Defiant Child: A Sanity Saving Guide to Finally Stopping the Bad Behavior

Vinyl Recliner

Some “Grimm” Reflections on Mothers and Daughters: A Fairy Tale for Our Times

More of What My Mother Used Later

1,574

1,824