on becoming a parent

Photo by ritagoesaround

Becoming a parent is difficult to talk and write about, not because the words are hard to find (though they are), but because when you find them, they feel too intimate to share. The smells and sounds and stirrings of the heart are individual and holy. There’s a sense in which the universal experience is yours alone when the opposite is actually true. You hesitate to say anything at all, as if staying quiet better preserves the miracle.

from Rose & Crown

I read this a few days ago in a blog I found when I was going down an internet rabbit hole, working from home on a very rainy and foggy day. It’s pretty accurate.

The Fixed Stars [Molly Wizenberg, 2020]

I have been a fan of Molly Wizenberg’s writing for such a long time that my Gmail account is more recent than my following of her blog. Orangette remains one of my favourite blogs, even though it has sadly died down in the last few years.

What draws me to Molly’s writing is how she can craft words to talk about her everyday life, her memories, sometimes her intimate thoughts. Much like a diary, but in a simple, beautiful way, as if her writing was an analogue photograph of life instants. When I read her what she wrote, it felt comforting, reassuring, like putting on some slippers, drinking wine, scratching the cat’s head and knitting. Cliché? Probably. But the simple comforts of everyday life. Almost always, her stories were associated with a recipe, a formula that is very dear to my heart.

In the Fixed Stars, Molly’s writing is just like that, but it not about food. It is about her experience, shifting from a straight, married woman and mother, to someone who is in love with a non-binary person and the ensuing changes in her perception of herself, of what love means for her and of the structure of her life and family.

I felt that the whole book reflected this process. In the beginning, the story is more factual. Towards the middle and the end, it is more philosophical; more questions are raised and Molly writes about her own quest to come to terms with all these changes and to find her own answer to these questions.

The theme of queer sexuality and identity is something that I don’t usually pursue and I mostly read the book because, as I said before, I am a fan of Molly. Hence, I am not sure if the book is a good representation, in general, of what it means to be queer and I don’t really have any insights into how this story would be viewed by the queer community. I do wonder, though, how other experiences are portrayed. It also left me thinking about how little we read about other people’s experiences when they are not relatable to our own (this was something that stayed on my mind after the BLM events a few months ago).

In the end, I do appreciate honest, confessional stories about the human experience, whichever form it might take and, as usual, I felt that Molly excelled at that. It is a story about dealing with something that happens, that transforms life, how to come to terms with it and how to make something better of it.

Too Much and Never Enough : How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man [Mary L. Trump, 2020]

When I heard this book was coming out, I wasn’t exactly interested. I always have a feeling that this kind of tell-all book, launched in specific points in time, has several agendas besides the story and is never free of bias.

Then a work colleague told me about it, and I was curious. I read it, always aware that it is not free of political and social bias. It is also not free of emotional and personal bias. The author is a well established clinical psychologist and the claims around the book suggest that she uses her expertise to analyse her family history. I don’t think that was exactly the case, and I found that the stories and anecdotes were thrown in, sometimes without context, sometimes without reason and often without much of a point. For instance, she tells a story about receiving a golden shoe from Uncle Donald and Ivana for Christmas, but you never get the point about this story (I guess she didn’t either). For me, the storyline was a bit all over the place.

However. This book is about a dysfunctional family, and it sheds some light on the familial and social contexts in which Donald Trump grew up and which gave him the opportunities to be exactly where he is. It talks about his parents, his upbringing and the financial and social scaffolding that he was afforded to turn himself into the mogul that we have always heard about. However, it also tells a much more credible story about his path, which was not at all of the self-made man that he claims to be (shocking, I know). What was even more striking to me was how this story is not at all unfamiliar. There were patterns that I’ve seen in my own family, in the family next door, in the communities where I grew up. It is an inglorious illustration of how far lying, arrogance and cheating the system can take you.

Book-wise, it is not exactly a great book, a great memoir or even a great story. But in the context in which we live, I think it is an interesting exercise to reflect on how families and communities sometimes allow, and even promote, the ascension of corrupt, self-serving and mentally ill people to positions of power and leadership.