When I was pregnant, I read every parenting book out there—I studied for
motherhood like it was a Ph.D. exam—but even so, I was unprepared for what
it would really be like to become a mother, which is much weirder and wilder
and deeper and funnier than hinted at in any book by any pediatrician.
I wrote Tender Hooks because I wanted to figure out what I was
experiencing. I wrote not to provide answers but to understand the questions.
I wrote because I wanted to capture the complexity of the parent-infant
relationship which, until recently, has either been left out of our great
literature or sentimentalized. I wrote the book I wish I could have read when
I was pregnant.
The great danger in writing about motherhood is the danger of sentimentality.
But I detest the kind of pastel sentimentality that sweetens and simplifies
and therefore lessens our understanding of the complexities of human nature.
The book's title comes from one of the poems but also strives to convey the
sharp/sweet experience that lies at the heart of motherhood (and, perhaps,
the whole human endeavor.) So while some poems express a pure joy at the
thought of my daughter, I wanted also to get in the other, less pretty emotions
that naturally arise, and it was important to me that the book also be funny,
because being a mommy is funny.
Many of the poems in Section I explore the experience of giving birth and how
motherhood changed me and my relationship with my husband. Section II opens up
a bit, introduces the themes of place and also the intricacies of language.
Section II is more expansive and includes some longer, looser poems, and in
this section the poems gets a bit more serious; several meditate on death,
particularly miscarriage (my pal David Baker called this section "the dark
heart of the book"). Section IV returns to my relationship with Claire but in
these poems she's leaving infancy for toddlerhood and so the issues of
language acquisition, separation anxiety, and independence are investigated a
bit.
Lately there seems to be beginning a renaissance of birth literature, with a
few books and anthologies and magazines presenting this subject matter honestly
for women don don't want to be spoken down to—for example, the new magazine
called Brain, Child, billed
as a "magazine for thinking mothers." These texts are the first drops of water
on a parched field.
When I've read the poems from Tender Hooks, I've been amazed by how
visceral people's responses have been—how grateful they seem to feel that
someone has gotten down part of the truth. Perhaps the only drawback to
reading from Tender Hooks is that usually, when I'm done, at least one
of the people who rushes up to me subjects me to photos of her kids! But I
appreciate the reaction for what it is: the human impulse to share with someone
who'd just shared with you, and whose experience resonates with your own
photo by Katie Barthelemy
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