Reviews -- With Child: Mormon Women on Mothering



	With Child Mormon Women on Mothering

Western American Literature, Angela Ashurst- McGee
This book began as Marni Asplund-Campbell's "personal search for mother-texts" that were neither technical nor dogmatic, neither vague nor sentimental (ix). She intends With Child to explore the modern context of Mormon motherhood, to break the silence that often surrounds mothers' experiences, to forge a "new language" of motherhood, and to explore even the darkness that is "the twin part" to the joys of mothering (x, xi).

The book's poems, personal essays, reports, stories, and sermon present a confusing mix of genres: readers must guess if a piece is history, memoir, or fiction. While some are masterpieces, many of these writings gush about the physical and emotional wows of motherhood—despite Asplund-Campbell's goal to avoid sentimentalism. The authors tend toward mushy indulgence in their self-exposure. The writing—its language and its content—often feels raw, almost awkward, definitely not polished.

Yet these flaws flow directly into the collection's greatest strength. It's hard to avoid overblown sentiment when describing the variety and intensity of pregnancy, labor, childbearing, and child loss. Each selection pulls its readers into the experiences and feelings of a real mother—and that is an important achievement. As Tessa Meyer Santiago makes it clear in her essay "Mother's Day," confusion and discomfort, as well as real danger, result when our knowledge of mothers' experiences is vague and insufficient.

I panted along with the laboring character from Margaret Blair Young's Salvador. With Julie Nichols and Dian Saderup, I felt the burden and relentlessness of caring for children. I felt part of the pain and loneliness of women who described losing, giving up, or never bearing their babies. An essay's unrefined presentation often heightened the intensity of vicarious experience.

The book's sections—anticipating conception, pregnancy, delivery, child raising, and loss—mark the milestones of mothering and portray an appropriately varied array of ways of looking at, experiencing, and talking about motherhood. These Mormon women variously say the experience of mothering is like a birthday party, like a tutorial in Christian living, creepy and unreal, exhausting, erotic and exhilarating. Their descriptions never congeal into a unified portrait. My mood after reading this book was not entirely unlike my mood after giving birth: I was both energized and exhausted by the expanse of strong and simultaneous experiences and emotions.

Mormonism has long praised and discussed motherhood. Yet neither Mormon sermons nor Mormon studies has yet sufficiently explored the real and varied lives of real, not ideal, mothers—of mothering, not motherhood. Collections such as this, even if unrefined and choppy, take giant steps in developing a study of Mormon women that is firmly grounded in the experiences of those women. Here's to the next step.