#15 On a Roll

This is the book I took a hike to get. I've enjoyed reading Adrienne's blog and I have a keen interest in maternal ambivalence based on my dissertation. I picked it up on Thursday (6/5), and finished the next day, but it's taken me a while to write this all down.

I wish I had known Adrienne when she was pregnant. Not that I could have "saved" her, but I could have given her a big pile of books to read to let her know she's not alone. (Rozsika Parker's Mother Love/Mother Hate for one.) Because she had all that time for reading when she was in the bin.

Adrienne's book is smart and funny and incredibly self-aware about a time when it must have been hard to be smart or funny. My favorite line, on the birth of her daughter, "It’s like getting the best Christmas gift ever, but Santa decided to kick the crap out of you before you unwrapped it." I particularly liked her analysis of Marjorie Kempe but wish she had found a few more such examples in her history of ppd/pp psychosis. Her portraits of the places she's lived bring them to life, making them another character in the book. And that's not far wrong because, according to Adrienne, there is something about place that has contributed to the madness in her family line.

My work on this subject takes a different tack. Mothers who are violent or ambivalent are usually labeled mad or bad. And I looked at what was behind the impetus to label the problem an individual one. My argument was that if we made it the woman's problem then it wasn't society's problem, that is it's nothing to do with me if a woman can't handle being a mother. There is an incredible pressure put on women to be "perfect" mothers--despite what some reviewers think. (One suggested that Adrienne just put too much pressure on herself to be perfect, that that didn't really exist.) But that same society refuses to create the safety nets (state sponsored day care, anyone?) that would allow women to achieve this.

It's a good book about a horrible time in one woman's life (though she stands in for many more). It's not for everyone, certainly.

Non-fiction 10.5