Book Review: Monday Coffee and Other Stories of Mothering Children with Special Needs (Darolyn "Lyn"Jones and Liz Whiteacre, editors)

Reviewed by Ona Gritz

A few months back I cleaned out a desk, a job so long overdue that some of the bank statements I shredded that evening were over ten years old. Among the many things I found crammed in those drawers were drafts of poems I'd forgotten I'd written, love letters from my ex-husband that were much sweeter than I recalled, and a copy of an essay by a writer I admired in which she talked about her life as a mom. This morning I looked for that essay in that same desk so I could say here who had written it–Jane Smiley? Louise Erdrich? –but I must have tossed it in the purge. It's understandable. I no longer need it the way I once did.

Back when I first Xeroxed that essay I was a teary, sleep-deprived, insecure new mother. It takes a village to raise a child, Hillary Clinton had told the country a few years before. I was lonely and could feel the truth in that adage but so far I'd only managed to find acquaintances among the new moms who gathered on the benches surrounding my neighborhood playground. So, I looked for my village within the pages of books and literary journals. Parenting magazines, of course, abounded, as did the how-to books that had me reeling and confused by how they contradicted one another. But when I came upon that essay by one of my favorite novelists, I felt like I'd found a sliver of gold on a floor filled with pencil shavings. It's not that I hadn't known there was beautiful literary writing about motherhood out there. I had read and loved countless novels and story collections on the subject. But it wasn't fiction I hungered for in my shaky postpartum state. I craved something as sustaining and compelling as a good novel but I wanted to feel confided in as I read. I wanted every word to be true.

The year my son turned three I came upon the anthology, Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood , edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses, a best of collection from the column by the same name on Salon.com. The book was a revelation to me. A gathering of writers I hadn't even heard of who wrote beautifully and thought deeply about their lives as mothers. It led me to the work of Sallie Tisdale, Beth Kephart, and my most important find among mother writers, Anne Lamott.

My boy is now seventeen. In a few short months he'll leave for college, but that's not why I no longer need that lone Xeroxed essay I'd tucked away all those years ago. After I read, and reread Mothers Who Think, I discovered other similarly wonderful anthologies. Child of Mine, edited by Christina Baker Kline. Between Mothers and Sons, edited by Patricia Stevens. I also found memoir after memoir about motherhood. Momoir, I came to realize, was becoming a genre and it thrilled me. I began reading Brain, Child: the Magazine for Thinking Mothers, and Literary Mama, the online journal whose writers and editors formed the village in which I raised my child. Somewhere along the way I uncovered a rich sub-genre of momoir: writing by mothers of children with special needs. As a writer and reader with cerebral palsy, I was pulled to these narratives. Seeing how Jane Bernstein, Kerry Cohen, Vicky Foreman, and Rachel Adams (I could go on…) grappled with issues of difference, physical limitations, advocacy and inclusion gave me a sense of what my own mother must have gone through all those years ago. It also helped me see how the world has and hasn't changed since the days I moved through it as a 'handicapped' child.

It takes a village. This is something the editors of the new anthology, Monday Coffee and Other Stories of Mothering Children with Special Needs understand. Darolyn "Lyn" Jones and Liz Whiteacre put a call out to moms who are raising kids with special needs and asked them to share their experiences. The result is an abundant collection of works by caring, generous moms willing to reveal themselves and tell their often wrenching but always hopeful stories. In essence, a community within the covers of a book. The editors even thought to include a selection of writing prompts for those readers who'd like to capture their own journeys on the page. "Just write," the editors urge. "Write to describe, write to be heard, write to heal."

It's a lovely model for starting a local workshop or for adding a writing component to a peer support group. Unfortunately, perhaps because the focus is on being heard and healing, too many pieces in Monday Coffee read more like bibliotherapy than literature.

This is not to say that the anthology is without its gems. Suzanne Kamata's essay, "The Caves of Chattanooga", is a beautifully rendered story of the author and her child Lilia's first mother-daughter trip. They are visiting the Southeast and have come with relatives to Nickajack Cave in Chattanooga to see an endangered species of bats. Lilia is dubious about this venture at first, but is the awed by the sight of the bats swooping in the open sky. Their plans falter, however, when Kamata discovers that, despite what she was told on the phone, all but one small section of the caves are inaccessible to Lilia who uses a wheelchair. Lilia has cerebral palsy and is also deaf, but what differentiates Kamata's story from the others in the book, besides the level of its craft, is that Lilia's disability is not the story itself. Her physical limitations affect what happens, but otherwise, they are merely characteristics we get to see of Lilia's along with her curiosity and her habit of on-the-spot journal keeping. Given that so many of the essays in Monday Coffee follow one thematic structure–the author expects a healthy child; is informed of a startling, sometimes devastating diagnosis; grieves; struggles; and finally loves and learns from that child–it's wonderfully refreshing to read a piece in which disability is so naturally integrated into a broader tale.

Another standout piece is Emily Klein's "Acts of Silence", a lyrical montage of scenes that reflect on the meaning of silence as the author and her husband struggle to understand their daughter Joy's unexplained loss of speech. The writing is understated, the connections subtle, and the piece is left unresolved so that we, along with the narrator and her family, come away still wondering and unsure. Like Kamata's choice to weave issues of disability into a travel piece, Klein's decision to leave us in the middle of a painful and ongoing story shows a kind of trust in the reader and is ultimately much more effective in making the experience real for us than other stories in the anthology that reach for a neat conclusion.

Poet Barbara Crooker shows her fine skills as a prose writer in "The Least of These: Caregiving in America," an essay on the rarely talked about issue of aging out of the role as caregiver. Crooker and her husband have an adult child who, because of his cognitive limits, will never live independently. "Don't die," Crooker was told by a social worker when she confided her concerns about her autistic son's future without her and her husband–-he's seventy, she's nearing it. Her writing is direct and full of candor. She tells us of her increasingly aching body and of the relentless and physically demanding tasks involved in caring for her dependent son. Yet she does this matter-of-factly and without self pity, all while offering a sweet, fully drawn portrait of her son. The result is a deeply affecting work that informs and alters us by so completely allowing us in.

Some of the more successful pieces in the book are the simplest. Christina K. Searcy tells her story cleanly and concisely rather than trying to be writerly, as does Liz Main. This is also true of two enjoyable micro-essays by Robin LaVoie: "Opening Doors" and "Tough Love". In the first, the author is accidently locked out of the house by her five-year-old who has autism. Her verbal pleas are lost on him so she is left to watch him through the patio door. All the while, she is fully aware, as is the reader, of what a perfect metaphor the situation is for their life together. In "Tough Love", a disarming, humorous piece, LaVoie confesses to stealing kisses from her affection-adverse child.

Still another of the anthology's successes is Anna Yarrow's "Melting Clocks", a boldly honest and therefore fully realized portrait of the author's daughter who has Asperger's Syndrome.

"What Max Says" by Alison Auerbach also paints a vivid picture with it's fluid dialogue and relatable voice. In it, we meet Max, a seven-year-old boy who is a classmate and idol of Auerbach's son who has autism. On a long drive with the two boys, the author learns from Max what friendship and acceptance really looks like and decides to expect nothing less for her son.

In another essay by Auerbach, "My Supposed Life", she imagines a second self who leads a soothing life outside of the very real chaos of her household. It's an interesting idea, one that echoes the premise of Jo Pelishek's essay, which gives the book its title. In Pelishek's "Monday Coffee" she dreams of actually having time for a relaxing coffee break on a Monday morning instead of her usual fare of too much-to-do for her demanding family. Interestingly, and unfortunately, both essays are as scattered and chaotic as the realities they describe.

A third essay by Auerback, "Sound, Noise, Music" tells of her son's sensitivity to noise and the surprising discovery of his remarkable musical skills. It's an engaging piece, though the writing could be tighter, and the overall quality is brought down by the poorly rendered drawings that accompany it.

We see this again in "Fragments of the First Five Days" an essay that describes with clarity and immediacy a harrowing night in neonatal intensive care. The addition of cartoonish drawings belie the sensitivity of the piece and the skill of its author.

Sally Bittner Bonn has two moving essays in the book. "Kin" describes the universal yet rarely spoken of experience of seeking a mirror out in the world. The narration consists of Bonn addressing, albeit silently, a stranger she observes in a concert hall whose date, like Bonn's young child, is severely physically disabled. Seeing the couple gives the author permission to imagine a future for her child that includes the possibility of love.

In the author's other contribution, "Instruction Manual", we witness a moment in which she is mired in self-blame for her son's deteriorating condition. "That's it. I'm failing him," she says. "He needs a body jacket because I haven't been doing trunk exercises with him...I'm also failing him because I don't know what to say when he says, 'I wish I could walk with those other guys'…" That critical inner voice is so familiar, so integral to the experience of mothering, reading it made my chest ache. Bonn's clear, solid writing lets us feel her anguish and, at the same time, prevents the piece from growing overwrought. That is, until it's final moment when Boone, who has finally been given the solid honest advice she's been after, tells us she's "soaked in gratitude."

Clichés like this can be found throughout Monday Coffee, which is one reason the book, overall, doesn't satisfy. It seems the editors made a choice to collect the pieces for the anthology but not to offer line edits or otherwise help their writers refine their work. Bonn's would have been an easy fix--the deletion of a single sentence. The same is true for Heather Kirn Lanier's "The Beginning: Four Pounds, Twelve Ounces", an essay about the author's undersized daughter who has Wolf-Hirschorn Syndrome, a condition more rare, Lanier tells us, than getting hit by lightning. It's a touching piece, at times quite poetic, but I nearly passed over it due to the clumsiness of this sentence in the first paragraph: "I couldn't see my child, and as a first-time mom I couldn't differentiate between small newborn and really freaking small newborn, of which my daughter was the latter." Where's the editor? I found myself writing in the margin, and not for the first time. I felt the absence of a discerning editor when I read the confusing sentences in an essay that begins, "When life gives me lemons, a pie was my weapon. It wasn't always this way." And the even more baffling, "I am honest to admit there was a slight misdirect in personal confidence, empowerment, and focus" in a snarky, convoluted essay titled, "The F Word." Then there's the grammatically questionable: " My husband, myself, and my four-year-old daughter would stand" in the essay, "Stopped Holding My Breath." And the most glaringly unedited sentence of all, "She was super tiny and had the cutest kitten-like cry that sounded just like a kitten" in a piece titled, "Joy Comes after the Mourning":

Fact checking is also remiss in Monday Coffee. For example, in a poorly thought-out piece that takes issue with Emily Perl Kingsley's well known essay on special needs parenting, "Welcome to Holland" the author refers to the famed prose piece as a poem.

Some of the essays in Monday Coffee have genuine potential but ultimately suffer from a kind of unwieldy ambition. In Linda Davis's "This House", the author attempts to contain her lax writing by forcing it into a poetic structure, using section headings named after the parts of a house. It's not a bad idea in itself, but in the case of Davis' essay, the device neither truly fits nor enhances the story. Davis's piece does have lovely moments of candor as when she confides that after her son's diagnosis of autism she had to work to fall in love with him again. But ultimately the artificial structure and the unevenness of the writing overwhelm the essay and detract from its strengths.

A piece with similar problems, and even more potential, is "Torso of Clay" by Christy Spaulding Boyer. Much of the writing in this heartrending memoir is lyrical and lovely, but an equal amount is journal-like and unpolished. The author's son Clay, dies while only a teenager, and while we're made to understand that he was profoundly disabled–nonverbal, immobile, and completely dependent–I long to see his presence. To understand something of who he was in the author's eyes. An image, a scent, something to show what it was that his mother loved about him, for clearly she loved him deeply. But, though the piece begins with his birth and moves through various scenes in his brief life, Clay is never more than simply there on the page.

Another troubling aspect of the essay is a sudden and unexplained change of form. From the beginning it is written in narrative prose. Yet midway through, the piece breaks off and is replaced by a brief, surreal theatrical scene for two players: a speaker known as Clay's Mother and another known only as Poet. Their dialogue adds nothing to the essay, which after this odd interlude, continues as before.

"Torso of Clay" ends with a beautiful, descriptive passage in which the author is a young woman, filled with longing, riding beside the young man who will father her child. "More of this!" I want Darolyn "Lyn" Jones and Liz Whiteacre to exclaim, just as I want them to discourage Spaulding from breaking her contract with the reader by changing forms willy nilly. But here again there is no evidence of an editor's hand.

Monday Coffee also includes a smattering of poems, though two, "My Daughter Sings" by Dee Thompson and "Much is Given" by Jamie Pacton are not really poems but prose broken into lines.

"Show & Tell" by Anna Yarrow, is a poem in short sections in the voice of a child, presumably the author's. It's a promising idea, and the piece offers some sweet glimpses into the life of the family, but ultimately the simplicity of the voice, necessary for the intended portrayal, prevent the work from finding deeper insights. Ellen E. Moore's "Skye Won't Wear Shoes" is another sectioned poem that paints a child's portrait in scenes and, because it is written in an adult voice, it can go a bit further.

The two most skilled and interesting poets represented in Monday Coffee are Kimberly Escamilla and Heather Kirn Lanier. Escamilla has several poems in the book and I find her writing to be clear, vivid, and often very moving. Her endings, however, tend to be abrupt, both musically and narratively, so that her poems can seem abandoned rather than resolved. To me, the finest poem in the collection is Heather Kirn Lanier's "Your Eyes, My Daughter, Are Genius Caliber." The piece uses rich, rhythmic language to portray a mother and infant taking one another in, each in their own way, wonderstruck.

Ultimately, while Monday Coffee offers some truly worthwhile reading, the collection is too uneven for me to recommend as a whole. I picture a reader like the one I had been as a new mother, desperate to see her experiences affirmed on the page, hungry for literary company that feeds her intellect as well as her heart. She'd meet some terrific women in Monday Coffee, and read a few truly memorable pieces. But because she'd have to sift through quite a number of works that are poorly edited and lacking in craft, in the end I'd steer her to the anthology's forerunner, Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, edited by Monday Coffee Contributor, Suzanne Kamata, (Beacon Press, 2008) where the literary quality is consistently high.

 

Ona Gritz is a poet, columnist, and author of two children's books. She has two books of poetry: Left Standing, was published by (Finishing Line Press, 2005) and Geode (Main Street Rag, 2013). Gritz's essays have been published in The Utne Reader, More magazine and The Bellingham Review, placing second for the 2008 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. Gritz's monthly column on mothering and disability can be found online at Literary Mama . She has received nine Pushcart nominations.