Reviews -- What's a Mother to Do?



	What's a Mother To Do?

Association of Mormon Letters, R. W. Rasband
This is a collection of humorous essays by the Deseret News columnist (and incidentally, the daughter of BYU football coach LaVell Edwards). Her subject (mostly) is the travails of modern family life with lots of small children. The voice of this book is plucky, smart—someone you would like to be friends with. Her comedy is unforced and natural; it's closer to Garrison Keillor than the irritating wackiness of Erma Bombeck. For me, her funniest theme is her secret fear that she has white-trash tendencies (a common fear, I think, among Utah expatriates.) This fear is grimly confirmed when she takes a couple of her boys to the doctor and discovers they aren't wearing any underwear. "I can assure you," she tells the doctor, "that I am wearing mine." The quality of her comedy about her imperfect-but-always-trying family occasionally hits "Simpsons" levels of hilarity. But Edwards also shows a touching, down-to-earth, common-sense sense spirituality than can unexpectedly put tears in your eyes. Highly recommened.

Sunstone, Marilyn Davey Springgay
Reading Ann Edwards Cannon's What's a Mother to Do is a trip down memory lane. And, many of us need walk no farther than the peanut-butter-covered kitchen floor to know we are stuck in motherland. Ann's stories remind me of a baby shower, where women regale the first-time, soon-to-be mom with labor horror stories, each one becoming funnier and more true to life than the last.

From the first universal truth of men not asking directions—doubtless Moses wandered in the deseret for forty years because he wouldn't ask directions—but I digress—to the last poignant pleas of keeping Dad with her to play those wonderful old songs for Christmas, I alternately laughed and swallowed to keep the lumps down and the eyes dry. One can't read her book without throwing in one's own hidden past—and who am I to show self-restraint at this age? For example, on our way to the hospital to deliver our third child, my husband, Rob, decided we needed a deck of pinochle cards to make the "labor wait" bearable, so he stopped at Pay-Less. While I was going through transition, for fifteen unforgettable, hard-breathing minutes, he was strolling up and down each aisle looking for a deck, because heaven forbid a man ever asking a "macho" store clerk (4) where the playing cards are. As Cannon told about her idea (and mine, too) of a vacation being a hotel where one ices the sodas, sleeps till noon, and soaks in the hot tub, I laughed at her family's glares and penates of "golf shoes, hiking boots, waders, tennis shoes, and running shoes" (130) —and don't forget those automatic bike snap-on Nike Pooh-Bah Tu shoes, but just give us thongs!

Being a mom is not for sissies. No on else can handle the embarrassment of those Type B viruses stormtrooping your home (94) or the school board calling you up and announcing on the P.A. system: "Yes, it's true. Head lice are growing and hopping all over those well-used, undercleaned sheets and uncombed, unkempt, shaggy, `buffalo heads' (61) at the Springgay's!" As she says in giving advice to neophyte moms who want to live down the plague experience: "Don't write a column [or, I say, a Christmas newsletter] about it" (95).

Ann's book is not only funny but also practical. Where else can one get these realistic New Year's resolution tips?:

1. DO NOT CLEAN OUT MY CLOSET
2. DO NOT PAY OFF VISA
3. DO NOT START A REGULAR EXERCISE PROGRAM
4. DO NOT TAKE UP A NEW HOBBY
5. DO NOT IMPROVE MY MIND (135-6)

Ann reveals our real-life, "white-trashiness" selves—forget the celibate monkfish, and give me that Chuck-A-Rama/Sizzler "all-you-can-eat shrimp and steak meal!" (69-70). Her dazzling and inventive expose on the sex-life of dirty sweatpants would make any voyeur drool (101-2).

As Ann says, "life is an accumulation of small events, most of them supremely ordinary" (47), which makes reading her book so universally appealing. We who have been planning on writing our life histories for years can just grab a tape recorder while reading this book and dictate the name, date, and place changes, and voila! It's done! The nice thing about her writing is you need not be a mother to identify with the main character, you need only to have been born of a woman, preferably a Wyoming Rodeo Queen, to enjoy every syllable.

Should you buy the book?—of a fellow Provo High alumna, for pete's sake, I mean, you know, you bet! Heavens, we should all remove our hats, bow our heads, and give a moment of silent commendation for a full-time mother who took time from solitaire, scrabble, and free cell games to put actual experiences and humiliations on a computer print-out! I just want to know the color of the slip that was dropped on Center Street while she was talking very loudly to her husband and not inventorying her lingerie. I lost my blue one during Preference in front of the old Heaps of Pizza.

BYU Magazine, Richard H. Cracroft
Ann Edwards Cannon's What's A Mother To Do? (Signature, 1997: 170 pp.; $12.95) is a rich collection of hilarious essays about "emotional chaos rendered in tranquility" by an LDS mother. Cannon's mea culpa finger-pointings at her own funny incompetence will doubtless strike a familiar note among readers, regardless of gender. Good reading!