About book Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, And Themselves (2005)
a collection of essays on being a mother. this is in fact the second anthology generated by salon.com's defunct "mothers who think" column. can't pretend that i am crazy about the "mothers who think" moniker. doesn't that imply that there are also mothers (presumably, not salon.com readers) that don't think? while that may be true, it seems unnecessarily judgmental & dichotic, as do more than a few of these essays. i don't think the contributors necessarily intend to come across as smug know-it-alls casting aspersions on other women's parenting techniques...but that is what happens sometimes.as with any book of essays, i enjoyed some entries more than others. i found the first essay in the book, about a young muslim single mother facing expulsion from her mosque due to having a child out of wedlock, nearly impossible to read. i feel for her situation & am on her side & all that good stuff, but jeez louise. this was the most grandstanding, soap boxiest thing i have read in my entire life, which is really saying something, when you consider all the anarchist literature i have read in my life. i almost just put the book down & abandoned it based on that one essay, but i'm glad i persevered because the rest of the book is a lot more readable.there are some misses, including the piece from the smug french lady who spends five pages condemning americans for having nannies (even though most american mothers do not in fact have nannies), only to turn around & admit that she inherited a home in california & hired herself a nanny to boot. she ultimately comes to distrust her nanny because she feels that the nanny & the author's daughter are too emotionally attached to one another. great story. just what i always wanted: to read the nanny diaries from the perspective of the asshole mom. she even includes an aside about how she herself was raised in part by a mexican nanny as a child, & how her mother traveled down to mexico in order to try to sneak the nanny's children across the border. it did not work. her mother spent the rest of her life wondering, "did i do the right thing?" what, get everyone's hopes up for an emotional reunion & a brand new life, only to have them dashed by border guards that any idiot could have seen coming? yeah, you probably did the exact opposite of the right thing. there are other pieces i wasn't crazy about either, but it's definitely a hugely varying collection, & when it's good, it's really really good. it definitely paints a somewhat realistic portrait of motherhood (we'll just leave aside the fact that pretty much every contributer is a professional, published author, or a professional in some other field, benefiting from tremendous amounts of class privilege, but blinkered in that uniquely american liberal way to said privileges--the piece about the wealthy woman who ran an advertising agency but lost it all & had to support her family by running a cleaning & housepainting service was pretty fucking tough to take as someone who actually grew up poor & is not interested in reading about the shame of rich people falling on hard times), & all kinds of different families are represented, which is cool. i guess it was pretty much what i expected.
The founding mothers of Salon.com's "Mothers who think" column and the subsequent anthology of the same name have gathered and edited essays on Motherhood from differing perspectives which makes for an enjoyable and diverse read. I enjoyed this book because I really like the short story form and this book is essentially 33 short stories. 33 different women have written essays on motherhood, all from very different view points and walks of life.You read of the African American Mother who moves from LA to NYC with her white husband where the acceptance of a racially mixed marriage is not so widely accepted as it was in California and where she is continuously assumed to be the "nanny" to her light skinned daughter to the young mother from Guatemala who runs away to the United States and seeks asylum from an incredibly abusive husband, in order to save her own life from imminent death, with the hopes that in the long run, she can slowly, bring her children over to live with her to Mothers who have returned to work but continue to struggle with their decisions. Very diverse stories. I read a story every day or so and loved this format.
Do You like book Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, And Themselves (2005)?
I don't usually read a lot of essay books but I really enjoyed this one. (well worth the one dollar I paid for it) If you ever read it I have madea list of the essays that I thought are worth reading and the ones that are a MUST READ. ask me for it! There were some interesting things about life and loss and mother/teenager relationships and about surrogacy, and some definatly well written ones about race and diversity. I will for sure pick this one up to read again. I think I enjoyed it most because of in my life right now I have a child and I was a child not very long ago so I connected with a lot of the stories!
—MichelleMarie
Supremely excellent collection. I enjoyed most all of these slices of life from intelligent, interesting mothers. I particularly enjoyed the story of Denise Minor, "There's No Being Sad Here" which is a piercingly accurate story of growing up alongside an autistic son, as well as the wry "Material Girls" from Margaret Talbot, a commentary on the American Girls craze. "Harry Potter and Divorce Among the Muggles" "Why I Can Never Go Back to the French Laundry" (where I am clearly destined to eat, since I have now revelled in it from three separate books) and "Mother of the World" were all simply excellent. Thanks for the loan, Cary!
—Joanna
Honestly, I haven't finished this book yet and I probably won't for a while. What I have read has generally been very entertaining. There are some wonderful essays, a couple of which I can identify with. There are, however, MANY esssays about divorced families and I can not relate to those at all. The one essay that touched me most was Mariane Pearl's "On Giving Hope". Silly me didn't realize this was Daniel Pearl's wife right away, but halfway through, it clicked and reading her story of how she faced Daniel's captivity and execution was amazing. I remember wondering how she could possibly deal with it and how she managed to stay so strong through it all when it first hit the news. It is the most tragic love story I've ever known. She is an amazing woman and he was an amazing man, and I highly, highly recommend this book for at least this one essay.
—Liz
