Literary Mom

Career Girl's Guide to Becoming a STEPMOM

At the moment, I suck as a mother, a step-mother, a wife and a woman in general. I have just come home, at 9:30, after a very long day at work to bark at a 17 year old step-daughter who came home at the same time as me even though my last communication with her was that she would be home at 6:30. Of course, she barked back! Then, instead of thanking the 15 year old for watching the Gaffer so I could work late I barked at her for leaving the kitchen a mess. I would have yelled at the 13 year old boy for leaving the TV on, again! but he was asleep. I didn't read the Gaffer a story at her request because I was too grumpy and that made her cry.  Why is she even still awake? Mr. Husband ordered my favourite take out for dinner - Indian - but none of the dishes I like. I was ungrateful,  ate them anyway because I eat when I am upset and now feel sick and very full.

 
That is why I am happy to have Jacquelyn Fletcher's A Career Girl's Guide to Becoming a Stepmom beside me to remind me of all the things I don't have to be.  I knew I would be intrigued by the book by the title of the first chapter, "Cinderella's Man Didn't Have Any Kids; Why Does Mine?"  Mr. Husband definitely presented himself to me as my Prince Charming and the way he behaved with his children was a huge selling feature. Not everyone gets to see what kind of parent their future spouse will be first hand and there is that bonus in marrying a man who already has children, but there are also many challenges.
I have been blessed with missing much of the movie-of-the-week melodrama of step-parenting. Mr. Husband and his ex-wife have good communication and get along well in their exhanges about the kids. We live 5 blocks apart so the toing and froing seems to work as well as it can.

This isn't true for every step-family and absolutely no two families are alike, but we do have some similarities. Fletcher's book offers great insights into what some of these trials and tribulations can be, and even references research, statistics and anecdotal evidence from other step-mothers and Jacquelyne's own experiences as both a step-daughter and step-mother to three.

The back jacket of the book tells us that Fletcher offers advice, hope, encouragement, and much-needed answers to common conundrums, including:   Why don't I have control over my own schedule? What kind of relationship do I want with my stepkids? What if I want to have a baby of my own? How do we create a budget that feels fair if I make more money than my husband does? A Career Girl's Guide to Becoming a Stepmom is essential reading for the professional woman who has it all--and then suddenly has more than she expected. A weakness of the book for me is its occasional repetitiveness and its emphasis on the step-mom who comes from a highly successful business background. That is not me and I did not relate to all of the business jargon, but I did appear on many other pages. There are 17 chapters that all follow the same format.

Each chapter opens with The Career Girl's Personal Assistant which frames tricky questions and situations in business language and action plans. There is then an explanation, analysis and anecdotes about the situations in other families. Finally the chapters end with Topics for Two which provide discussion points for the step-mom and her husband to work through. My usually cynical husband liked many of the questions and suggestions, but kept asking where the book was 7 years ago when we started on this journey. Jacque and her family are a bit too touchy-feely for me and my family, but her book had many insights and provided a lot of aha! moments for me. She has a personal website on step-parenting with a monthly newsletter to which I subscribe http://www.becomingastepmom.com/ and I highly recommend.

Theft: A Love Story

I will confess from the beginning that I did not really like this book. It was the May choice for my book club, so I had to read it, and left to my own devices I may never have cracked the spine.

Now, that is not to say this is a bad book. Many of the other members of my club did like it and it had some redeeming qualities. I have enjoyed other Carey novels such as  Bliss and Oscar and Lucinda, but Theft is just not up my literary alley.

It may be that I have maxed-out on fiction novels that revolve around art and the art world. In this novel, has-been artist Michael "Butcher" Boone has just been released from prison after trying to steal his own paintings from his ex-wife "the plaintiff" to whom they were awarded during the divorce. He has nowhere to go, no source of income and nowhere to live, so Michael's arrogant and unlikeable patron, Jean-Paul lends him use of his farm in the boonies of Australia where he can tend to the fields and take care of his adult brother Hugh who is not firing on all cylinders.

Carey uses a double narrative that I did enjoy, because although Hugh is cast as the violent and unpredictable half-wit, his narration of the story is much more honest, interesting and entertaining than that of his brother.

The novel opens slowly and the actual love story does not really get rolling until after the first hundred pages.  Michael meets a beautiful woman named Marlene who treks through mud and a creek to visit his neighbour, who may be in possession of a Leibovitz (fictional painter, I did google it). Marlene's husband, Olivier, is the painter Jacques Leibovitz's only heir and as such possesses the droit moral, or ability to authenticate a painting, thus making it extremely valuable.

Unfortunately for almost anyone who comes in contact with Marlene, she is about as scrupulous as she is honest and as Boone falls more and more in love with her, he becomes inextricably duplicitous in her schemes.

In his review in Britain's The Guardian, Patrick Ness refers to Theft as "probably the grumpiest, rudest and stinkiest novel Carey has ever written." He also states, " For these reasons alone - that he frightens those who want their fiction easy and annoys those who want theirs portentous - a new Peter Carey novel is cause for joy."

On the other hand, in his review in the New Yorker in May 2006, John Updike seemed to have a more kindred experience to mine: "Peter Carey is a superb writer, whose prose is always active, and who infuses his characters, however eccentric, with a warmth that lets them live in our minds. But "Theft" is not a superb novel; there is something displaced at its heart."

Two brilliant reviewers, one neighbourhood mom. Brilliant novelist ? absolutely...Brilliant novel?...you be the judge. 

 

A Room of One's Own

It is official.  I have bitten off more than I can chew.  I have always had a tendency to over-subscribe to activities, projects, groups, clubs.  I signed up for everything and then cried at the kitchen table while my mom reheated my tuna casserole because I couldn't do it all.

I feel like crying tonight. I am missing both my book club (is there any worse admission from a literary mom?) and a gathering of some of my favourite women in the neighbourhood for what I know will be an ex-rated conversation after a few glasses of some yummy red wine.

And why am I missing these two events? Because I am too exhausted to move, I am on the verge of a major cold, I have 20 essays to mark, another friend who has just been diagnosed with breast cancer, an exam to prepare, a toddler bed to build, the first attack of the black crayola monster all over the beautiful yellow bedroom wall to clean, groceries  to buy and at this hour I'll have to hit the 24hr Dominion, bills verging on obscenely late to be paid, a living room covered in toys, a husband who usually pays no attention to the real estate market - all of a sudden keen on getting our real estate agent and me out looking at homes - cause that's not too time consuming, and my eyes fall on one of my favourite books of all time and I think, if I only had a room, all to myself, where I could hide away and lock the door occasionally, all would be well!

Those of you of a certain age and stage may remember Claire Huxtable, recently named TV's greatest mom by MSNBC.

She was the matriarch of the Huxtable family on the Cosby and show and the kind of mom I had always hoped to be - so far, not even close.  One of my favourite episodes is called Claire's Place (if you can find it on youtube, please let me know, I gave up in the 200's) where Cliff builds Claire a room of her own. Demonstrating just how enduring good literature is, this concept of a room of one's own was not fresh to the Cosby writer's rather an homage to Virginia Woolf's 1929 extended essay.

 In 1928, successful Modernist writer, Woolf was invited to Newnham College, one of two women's colleges at Cambridge, to discuss the topic of women and fiction. A Room of One's Own, one of the original arguments for independence for women, is  the printed collection of those talks. Woolf's thesis examines the idea that a woman "needs money and a room of her own to write fiction." This idea has been extrapolated by feminist literary critics over the years to include the concept that women need time and space of their own in order to learn, discover, appreciate and develop themselves. 

For a formal essay, the book has great literary merit with the use of symbolism, motifs and some short plot narratives to keep the reader's attention while fully nodding her head in agreement with Woolf's theories.

In one chapter, Woolf creates a fictitious character in Judith Shakespeare, William's twin, in order to demonstrate the gender inequities for women in general and writer's specifically. Judith, who is more talented than William but robbed by society and its rules of an opportunity and outlet for those talents, commits suicide.

In another, Woolf discusses the careers of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and George Eliot. Eliot, a pseudonym for author Mary a Evans, who knew she could not get her fiction published as a woman, wrote Middlemarch, the first quintessential trashy summer novel in 1871.  It is set in Middlemarch, the fictional town of Coventry in the 1830's.. Although the story revolves around the unfortunate marriage of Dorothea Brooke, her friendship with Dr. Tertius Lydgate, the trials of his social climbing wife Rosamund, and all their friends and acquaintances, it is also a treatise of the limited power and subservient role of women in the early 1800's.   Their only access to money is through marriage and inheritance and any time spent alone would be considered suspect and cause for scandal.

Now that I am a mother/step-mother myself, I believe that what Woolf suggested through the plight of the women who wrote before her almost a hundred years ago is truer of mothers than anyone else.  Sometimes a wife, a mother, a woman needs to be able to close a door behind her and just be. At the moment, my quiet place is in the laundry room and with the dryer running, I can't even hear the fights over the computer and tv. At the moment I can't fit a chair in there, but I can lean against the washer and breathe deeply for a few moments before I go back into the fray.


Here's a little reading quiz I wrote for my Grade 12's a few years ago, if you're so inclined.  Answers next week.
A Room of One's Own
Reading Quiz

Fill in the blank:

1.    "A woman must have ? and ? if she is to write fiction."

2.    The imaginary narrator of Woolf's essay is ? (write any one answer)

3.    Who is Shakespeare's fictional sister?

4.    At the fictional university of Oxbridge, where Woolf sets her essay, women are not allowed to a) b) c)

5.    At the British Museum, the narrator realizes that most books about women are written by ?

6.    Three reasons why Shakespeare's imaginary sister cannot become a writer are:

7.    The novel is the best form of literature for 19th century female writers such as Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot because they were trained in the art of?

8.    Aphra Behn was the first woman writer to be ?

9.    Why would "Chloe liked Olivia" be a good title for Chapter 5?

10.    Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that a good mind is "_______________________", meaning "it transmits emotion without impediment; it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided."

11.    What is the first word of Chapter 1?