The Little Bookroom

working mothers

Check out these videos--two views of mothers and the work they do. The first one, The Mom's Overture, a compendium of the things mothers say in a day set to music, has been getting a reasonable amount of circulation, so you may have seen it already; the second is a totally funny parody of British police dramas--think Helen Mirren with a daycare crisis (thanks to my sister for this one):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxT5NwQUtVM

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=drYvfcB1l78

coming home

Martin Waddell, Owl Babies. Illustrated by Patrick Benson. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 1992.

"Once there were three baby owls: Sarah and Percy and Bill." So begins this brilliant and beautiful book about being together and being apart. It is so well known at this point that I almost hesitate to recommend it, but I ca't not do so.

The owls live in a hole in a trunk of a tree with their mother. One night when they wake up, she is gone. Each owlet reponds to the situation in characteristic fashion: Sarah thinks things through, Percy expands upon her explanation, and Bill plaintively just wants their mother back. As they wait in the dark of the night and the forest, more frightened than they say, Sarah organizes them: "I think we should all sit on my branch." Then even she begins to lose faith in their mother's return. "And he baby owls closed their owl eyes and wished their Owl Mother would come." When she does, it is with a majesty that her affectionate scolding does nothing to undermine.

There are few picture books that so deeply communicate the feelings of their characters as does this one. Patrick Benson's close focus on the owlets renders their individuality and their samenesses, and when he (only once) allows us to see them in the vastness of the forest, we see their terrible vulnerability.

This is a wonderful book to share with a child who is struggling with the arbitrary comings and goings of the adult world, with feeling small in a very big world, with trusting that people always come back.

Old Mother Hubbard.

"Old Mother Hubbard/Went to her cupboard/To give her poor dog a bone./But when she got there/The cupboard was bare,/And so the poor dog had none."

Last week, to my delight, I found pasture-raised pork at the Portland Farmer's Market. It was a great moment of confluence of interests for me, in local food and in humanely raised food. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you can go to the website of this producer, at www.nwpork.com, to find out who carries their pork. It's funny to me that it mattered so much, since we rarely eat pork, but it did...

In part, this is because food is so integral to the care of children, and so important to them. Our shopping habits have evolved steadily over the years, as we turned to more and more organic foods, and now more and more local foods.

But how to find local foods? It's hard to figure out sometimes--but the local food thing is so hot right now that I thought I'd benefit from expert help. I purchased Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon's Plenty as soon as I could find a copy--and was tremendously disappointed. The book is constructed as a memoir of the year during which they decided to eat from within a 100 mile radius of their home, and it's full of anecdotes of that year, along with smatterings of information about global food production. But I was looking for a different kind of book entirely--one that would really lay out what local food even means, how to find it, how to afford it (since it is typically more expensive to produce and to purchase, for myriad reasons ranging from scale of production to specific forms of government assistance to farmers to cheap oil), how to replace nonlocal ingredients in recipes with local ones, and when to just decide not to try.

Like what am I supposed to do about sugar!!! Honey, which I can buy lots of locally, doesn't act in at all the same way in baking and has much more of a presence. Maple sugar and date sugar, as you may have guessed, aren't produced in Oregon. Neither are maple syrup or agave. Maybe barley malt? Barley syrup and rice syrup? Haven't checked yet... We do grow barley here... And while I have now discovered that beet sugar is grown across the Midwest and that cane sugar is grown in four states (Hawaii, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida), and that some of it is even organic, that's not really local either. So what to do? No helpful suggestions from Smith and MacKinnon, that's for sure. And looking at Barbara Kingsolver's new Animal, Vegetable, Miracle at the bookstore made it seem as if none were forthcoming from that quarter either. So I'm liking the www.100milediet.org website much more than the book itself.

One thing I have found incredibly helpful in my search for local food is shopping at New Seasons online. (If you live here in Portland, you can do this for pick-up at the store or for home delivery.) All items online are marked organic or local, so you can get a quick sense. That's why we've switched to Pacific Village milk and Nancy's cultured dairy products. But you still need to research things more thoroughly--for example, we should probably buy the Noris Dairy milk, all of which comes from Salem... And of course, there's the Farmer's Market, where I also found local walnuts. But dried beans? Flours? Sugar? I still don't know...

"There was an old woman who lived in a shoe./She had so many children, she didn't know what to do./She gave them some broth without any bread,/Then whipped them all soundly, and sent them to bed."

In fact, the most references in children's literature that I've found to mothers of late have been in the context of nursery rhymes and fairy tales--and most of them also refer to food. The cruel mothers of Hansel and Gretel, of Snow White, and of Sleeping Beauty are only the best known, but in rhymes too, mothers feed too much or not enough, the right foods or the wrong ones, as in "Mother made a seedy cake, gave us all a bellyache."

The conjunction, indeed the elision of food and mothering is profound. "I one my mother/I two my mother/I three my mother/I four my mother/I five my mother/I six my mother/I seven my mother/I ate my mother."

wanted dead or alive

Sorry about yesterday--things kept getting in the way.

And today, I'm sad to say, I can't think of any really good books for children in the upper elementary grades about mothers who are still alive, with the possible of Freaky Friday, but to be honest, it seems so dated to me that I hesitate to suggest it. One might also suggest Little Women, of course, but it was never a huge favorite of mine--more like a rite of passage--I'm glad I read it but can't say I really enjoyed the experience. But really, it seems that in many books for kids of this age, all the good mothers are dead.

So instead, I'm posting a link to a fascinating story on the Guardian website about women choosing to give birth alone: http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,2075462,00.html

one angry mother

Jill Murphy, Five Minutes Peace. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1986.

In case you hadn't realized, I'm looking at books about mothers this week, in anticipation of Mother's Day. This is one of my favorites.

Mothers in children's fiction tend towards the angelic--either ever-present and ever-helpful, or actually dead and gone, but much appreciated nonetheless. And when my kids were little, I thought, where are the real mothers?! You know, the ones who get tired and cranky, and are really really mad about the mud on the bathroom floor--those mothers. Me. Well, guess what? Here they are. And they're great company.

"The children were having breakfast. This was not a pleasant sight." Indeed not. Mrs. Large (an elephant in her robe and curlers) looks with dismay at her three children: the baby has turned his bowl of cereal into his head, while his older sister and brother scatter milk and cereal flakes among the musical instruments, cutlery, and books on the floor. Without a word to them, she prepares a lovely breakfast tray for herself, and departs the kitchen for the cleaner and quieter climes of the bathroom. But, "'Where are you going with that tray, Mom?' asked Laura." And caught in the act, Mrs. Large confesses--she wants five minutes peace "from all of you." But some things are not meant to be. The children pursue her into the bathroom, to lay their instruments for her, to read to her, to share their toys, to climb into the tub with her...The loving exuberance of children and the adult desire for a quiet moment alone are a familiar conflict in many homes--this book makes everyone feel good about that charged reality.

What is really extraordinary about this book is that it doesn't upset the children--in fact, they even understand and sympathize with Mrs. Large's desire--which is not always the case with books dealing with maternal frustration. While my daughter didn't much like Janet Wong's Grump, and truly hated Mem Fox's Harriet, You'll Drive Me Wild (so much so that she only let me read it with her once, and never again), even though reading each of them also relieved my feelings enormously, Five Minutes Peace was and has remained a great favorite--funny and true, sad and enlightening, a book to cherish and remember in difficult moments.

running away and following after

Margaret Wise Brown, The Runaway Bunny. Illustrated by Clement Hurd. New York: HarperCollins, 1942.

When a child is first able to walk and to run with ease, the urge to do so overtakes them, and they run everywhere. Adults dashing after the child only add to the delight of this game, the child chortling and running, running, running... But with this newfound ability come newfound fears--what if I run so fast and so far that they can never find me again?

This is where The Runaway Bunny comes in. When a child is caught in this moment of autonomy and its correspondent fears, this book is immensely consoling. A little bunny wants to run away. His mother assures him that she will run after him. But what if I change?, he wonders, what then? For every transformation that he can imagine, his mother imagines another that will allow her to stay close by without impinging on the transformation itself, until finally, he decides just to be her little bunny, and eat carrots with her.

Although the story is often deeply disturbing to adults, with its mother bunny who seems unable to let go, to let her child make his wn way into the world, the truth is that children who are experimenting with running away for the very first time in their lives, who are coming to grips with the notion that they can put so much space between themselves and those who love them as to be lost, it is an enormously comforting read.