A Book About Mothering

I got the call all mothers dread last Thursday--the call from the school nurse saying that my child had gotten hurt while at school--except that it was Walker who called me, because the nurse was taking care of another child with a sore throat. Walker, like his sister (who once went an entire afternoon at school with a broken arm because she thought it was "just sprained") is not a complainer. So when he called to tell me that he'd hurt his (wait for it) arm, I was out of the house and over to the school in record time. We spent the afternoon in doctor's offices and went home with a splint on Walker's arm for what they told us is a "buckle fracture."

It was a good day, as these days go, because he called me right after he hurt himself, I was in town and able to come right over, and I didn't miss any meetings or classes or even picking up his sister, since she was scheduled to be at an after-school activity until late that afternoon.

I wasn't organized or calm enough to bring either of us a book for what I knew would be an afternoon of waiting, so I didn't finish reading Sing Them Home, by Stephanie Kallos, until yesterday, and reflected that it was the right kind of novel to be reading through most of the week. It's about mothering, especially about how to do it in a small town, and for one character-- Hope--about how to do it in a limited amount of time. One of my favorite parts is when Hope thinks about Sylvia Plath's suicide:
"Some people doubt the authenticity of her intent, since she'd prearranged for someone to come to the flat early in the morning. Wasn't she hoping this person would find her and save her? Surely she was bluffing. Weren't her actions a plea for help rather than a real attempt?
Idiots. Of course not. She was seeing to the children, making sure they'd be taken care of when they woke up. I'd do the same. Any mother would."

I identified with Hope more than any of the other characters, which is a strange way of relating to this novel, because Hope is dead before the events of the novel take place, and we know her mostly through journal entries. There are some odd attempts at third-person beyond-the-grave storytelling that don't work very well, but there's some realism in the attempts of Hope's children to remember her and know each other, while the omniscient narrator reveals how little they actually expose to each other. The small-town setting is a fictional Nebraska town settled by the Welsh, and Welsh traditions are a big part of their life (this was an odd segue from The Eyre Affair, which is also set partly in Wales, albeit a fictional version).

The novel was a very slow read for me, and ultimately it wasn't as compelling as the first novel I read by Kallos (reviewed here). Part of the problem is that the novel is about ordinary lives. One of the culminations of the plot is a small-town contest for eleven-year-old girls, all of whom are "mediocre" but patiently watched by parents and neighbors:
These are not foolish people, deluded people. They know that, in the grand scheme of things, their daughters are undistinguished, ordinary, but that their efforts on this day deserve reward, because it takes courage to put ordinariness in the spotlight."

I am not as patient, as a reader or as a small-town parent. I do shift in my chair when a child soprano goes sharp and after "the twentieth cartwheel." So I got impatient with this story. But then there's always some bit of particularly lyrical prose or an image that stays with me. My other favorite part, again from Hope's journal, is another part where I identify with her, when she thinks about herself as a mother:
"It seems to me that there are people in the world who are able to contain their lives, neatly, calmly. They create boundaries that allow them to function in whatever way is called for at the present moment. They ignore their children, for example, when that is an appropriate response. They pay their bills precisely at the same time every month, clean the bathroom on Wednesdays, plan a week's worth of menus.
I am in the other category. There is spillage everywhere....Motherhood is so messy in so many more ways than I expected. A chaos of emotions and laundry. A life without boundaries, splitting at the seams and spilling over everywhere."

I wish this novel made more sense of the spillage, revealed more of the extraordinary. I might even wish that it was shorter, that a good editor had helped Kallos emphasize why these lives are worth our attention, in the midst of our own.

"I hate those guys."

Nazis. The early 21st-century symbol of unarguable evil. (I mean really, who can argue with Indiana Jones?)

After I talked about The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World, I started thinking about Stephanie Kallos' Broken for You, because both involve Nazi-stolen art. Is it just our moment in history, or do we currently have some kind of fascination with how to come to terms with the sins of the fathers?

In Broken for You, people are broken, and china is broken. Most of the china turns out to have been stolen from Jews by Nazis, and one of the main characters uses the china shards to make mosaics. The novel is beautifully written. Early on, one of the main characters thinks:

"No one likes to see something break--even if that thing has no relationship to them whatsoever. Even if they're completely unattached to it. Why is that? I wonder. It is, after all, the inevitable fate of a plate, isn't it? If it's not shut away, that is. If it's put to its intended purpose--as a vessel, something useful, something human hands are meant to handle and interact with. The natural fate of a plate--and therefore the appropriate one--is that it be chipped or cracked or broken. Why should that decrease its value?"

But in addition to that kind of dreamy language, the observations are occasionally sharp:

"It is often said, in consolatory tones, that 'time heals all wounds.' But radiologists, who study and interpret physical proofs of the body's ability to store memory, know that this is a crock of shit."

Also there is what I think of as a commonsense tone of voice, running underneath most of the metaphorical cracking and piecing back together:

"We speak of 'senseless tragedies,' but really: Is there any other kind?"

None of the tragedies of the characters in Broken for You make sense individually, but there is a picture that only the reader can see, in the mosaic that the novel painstakingly reveals, piece by piece. It is as comfortable and old-fashioned as hating Nazis to close the book and believe that God has a plan which requires us to suffer at some point, but that we don't have the perspective to see His whole plan.