A young friend writes:
My soon-to-be-wife has expressed to me her frustration that, in most literature she has read, babies always seem to be portrayed as burdens, or at least they focus on the unpleasant experiences of caring for babies. She wishes she could find some “happy baby stories,” stories that depict motherhood — particularly early motherhood and childbirth — more positively. So do any of you have recommendations for such stories? We’d be very grateful.
Please jump in if you have suggestions. Nothing, I admit, comes to my mind right off.
December 2nd, 2010 | 5:28 pm
I seem to remember the protagonist in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy as being happiest when she was pregnant/nursing and loving her babies very much…
December 2nd, 2010 | 5:37 pm
read natural childbirth blogs… these mom’s dig it and they are proud of what they’ve accomplished.
maybe that’s not literature, but…
December 2nd, 2010 | 5:47 pm
Louisa May Alcott. Happy babies and mothers don’t hold much drama, so they only show up in stories where they’re the side show. Young children and a baby, as I recall, integrate nicely into the plot of “Little Men.”
December 2nd, 2010 | 6:13 pm
She’s still writing her book, but in the mean time try kelle Hampton’s blog “enjoying the small things” at http://www.enjoyingthesmallthings.com
December 2nd, 2010 | 6:38 pm
Lauren, your link is bad. Looks like the correct site is http://www.kellehampton.com/
December 2nd, 2010 | 6:50 pm
Thanks, by the way, Lauren. That is a wonderful blog. :)
December 2nd, 2010 | 7:03 pm
Mary Cassett’s paintings are worth many, many words.
December 2nd, 2010 | 7:20 pm
Faith & Family Magazine
various blogs by Catholic moms–
http://www.testosterhome.net/
http://www.elizabethfoss.com
to name a couple.
All-of-A-Kind Family Uptown by Sydney Taylor
December 2nd, 2010 | 7:31 pm
War and Peace, especially the Epilogue which treats of Natasha, which is controversial in some circles for this very reason.
Right on Kristen Lavransdatter. Happy, though not without problems (the character, not the novel).
Also, treat yourselves to Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings in Courtship and Marriage, by Amy and Leon Kass.
Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials.
December 2nd, 2010 | 7:58 pm
I wonder why your fiancee wants to read happy baby stories? It’s not a bad ambition, of course, but if it is because she is scared or anxious about having a baby, perhaps she could spend some time with an experienced mum at Church? I have three kids and, while I’m only a dad, I can affirm that babies are messy, demanding, and loveable; but most of all, they are part of life.
The first one is scary – am I doing this right? Will this damage it? Will the nurses at the clinic think that I’m a bad parent? This was especially relevant when I dropped the “A-M” volume of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on my son’s head (it slipped out of the dust cover, which I was left holding…) and I had to take the poor fellow for his innoculation shortly afterwards. I was very apologetic (actually, I was scared of being reported to child services), but the nurse said, “If little boys weren’t cut and bruised, they wouldn’t be little boys.” And of course she was right.
It gets easier as you go along – that’s the nature of it – and I think that a lot of the fear out there is because families are so much smaller than they used to be these days. Many people stop at one child, and then all the advice that they can offer is that it’s scary and hard! If that’s all the advice that your fiancee has had, it’s no wonder that she’s anxious.
Of course, if her concern is purely literary, the issue is different.
*Rant on* Re the comment about natural birthing, good on them. I have to say, however, that a caesarean saved my wife’s life twice over, not to mention the children, and the moral overtones that natural birthing movement often affects is a dreadful thing. For those ladies who bear children easily, I am happy. For those who are saved by the surgeon’s knife, there is no reason to feel shame. Yet it is routine for women in Australia who have needed a caesarean to be accused of accessing an “unnecesarean” and of being vain about her figure, etc.. The extremes of this movement can be ghastly. “Joyous Birth”, a natural birthing activist group in Australia, vandalises hospitals with slogans about (I am sorry) “mechanical rape”, which is their term for assisted birth, and its founder lost her own baby after a much-publicised intervention-free home birth. *Rant off*
So your fiancee may wish to read their web sites, but she should be well aware that there may be agendas and strong advice offered that is not helpful for all women.
Now I’ve opened that can of worms, I’m going to sit back and watch the responses flood in…
December 2nd, 2010 | 8:48 pm
A story can’t really be about happy motherhood any more than it can be about happy anything — stories are about problems.
December 2nd, 2010 | 9:07 pm
http://www.buildingcathedrals.com/
December 2nd, 2010 | 9:11 pm
This may not be a “story,” in the sense you mean, but the first thing that came to mind is The Incredibles. There’s even a deleted scene on the DVD where the mom defends her decision to stop working (as a superhero) to raise a family, to some obnoxious woman at a BBQ. Jennifer Aniston has a similar scene in Marley & Me.
Of course, there’s the Little House series of books. Young children are adored there.
In a weirder interpretation of your request, consider P.D. James’s Children of Men, which isn’t a “happy baby story,” but is definitely a “miserable absence of babies” story.
December 2nd, 2010 | 9:16 pm
Jared mentions War and Peace. Anna Karenina also portrays children in a positive, though realistic, light. To skip to a different continent and a different literary universe, I would also suggest the Anne of Green Gables books by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
December 2nd, 2010 | 10:08 pm
Just about everything written by Dickens: the Bagnet family in Bleak House, the child borne by Bella in Our Mutual Friend; the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol; A Tale of Two Cities …
Kristin Lavransdatter portrays the pain and the joy of pregnancy and childbirth and mothering.
Silas Marner — the baby girl changes that bitter man’s life.
Browning’s The Ring and the Book …
December 2nd, 2010 | 10:21 pm
True, Mary, but any good story contains elements of both happiness and unhappiness — and the element of motherhood can be portrayed as primarily either the former or the latter within the context. “Little Women” is a great example of this (if not great literature, it’s still fine reading); the characters have their ups and downs of all sorts, but the experiences of motherhood are consistently portrayed as positive even when they are difficult. On a more complex and literary level, motherhood in Kristin Lavransdatter is similarly a consistently positive element despite having its griefs, and despite all manner of other problems going on concurrently.
December 2nd, 2010 | 10:24 pm
Benrard, I agree with you that the best solution to concerns about future motherhood is to interact with real-life Christian role models of motherhood. However, seeking solace in positive literature is also a valid means of encouragement — filling the resting mind with good pictures rather than bad ones has genuine value, apart from “purely literary” concerns.
December 2nd, 2010 | 10:25 pm
Drama requires conflict.
December 2nd, 2010 | 10:41 pm
Amen to Kristin Lavransdatter. I would rank it equal to or better than War and Peace or Anna Karenina. I actually first heard of it right here at First Things when Fr. Neuhaus recommended it. If I remember correctly he said his mother thought it was the best, or maybe most realistic, depiction of a woman’s life she had ever read.
December 3rd, 2010 | 12:48 am
I don’t know about “happy,” but Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year was a book I turned to for moments of levity, comfort, and uncontrollable laughter during low, exhausted moments in my own son’s first year. She’s painfully honest, but her love for her son and her joy at being a mother always shines through.
December 3rd, 2010 | 6:20 am
To follow up on Jeannine’s mention of the Anne of Green Gables books, try Anne’s House of Dreams. Anne is grown up and married, and eager for children. Her first birth experience ends unhappily: the baby dies. The second baby lives. Throughout the sorrow and joy, the experience of motherhood is positively and wonderfully portrayed.
There’s no childbirth in Cheaper By the Dozen, but obviously these parents think it’s a great thing.
Alexander McCall Smith, the Scottish author of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, also has a series about Isabel Dalhousie, an Edinburgh philosopher who takes up with a younger man and has a baby at a somewhat late age. Her amazement and joy at having a child in her forties are lovely (and mirror my own experience, though I bothered to get married first).
December 3rd, 2010 | 8:02 am
Well it’s a poem, not a story, but I’ve always loved Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song.” (Try the Poetry Foundation’s website for the correct line-breaks; I’m not sure the cut and paste below will get them right.)
*
Morning Song
by Sylvia Plath
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
December 3rd, 2010 | 8:51 am
In addition to Kristin Lavransdatter, I also thought of Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding as a novel with family and motherhood at its heart, in a loving and happy though complex way.
The mother, Ellen, is no longer young, but is expecting her ninth child as the family prepares for the marriage of an older daughter. Darkness and death underlie the novel’s action, and on many rereadings I begin to worry that these undercurrents point towards Ellen’s not surviving this childbirth, but that’s outside the novel, and she consistently appears as a woman whose love for her children has overshadowed many difficulties.
The liveliness of the family enchants the lonely cousin, Laura, who has come for the wedding and wants nothing more than to be one of that many. The children are beautifully drawn, funny and real. Like children in a real-life large family, collectively they are overwhelming, yet each is given the novelist’s attention, from the angry eldest daughter Shelley (who is not the one getting married) to the two-year-old, Bluet. Like children in a real-life large family, there’s not one you’d want to do without.
This was my favorite novel in high school, and now it’s one of my oldest daughter’s favorite novels. I don’t know for sure, but it may have had a lot to do with why I never considered not having children: because this was *life.*
December 3rd, 2010 | 8:59 am
Your friend and his wife can always write their own with their lives. Then it would be non-fiction.
December 3rd, 2010 | 9:26 am
Also lovely is Galway Kinnell’s “After Making Love We Hear the Sound of Footsteps.” Rueful and funny and wise is William Matthews’ “A Happy Childhood” – but that one will move you toward contemplation of your own childhood, not at all a bad thing when dealing with a fresh one delivered into your hands. The Poetry Foundation’s website has lots of wonderful stuff and various ways to search its collection.
December 3rd, 2010 | 9:40 am
Conflict and happiness are not exclusive concepts.
December 3rd, 2010 | 10:28 am
I’m sure my reading has been too confined to academic syllabi, but what came immediately to mind was Hester Prynne and her baby daughter Pearl in _The Scarlet Letter_, especially Chapter 6. I don’t know if it qualifies as “happy,” but the mother-infant relationship is depicted with remarkable vividness in all its mingled joy and anxiety. Hawthorne’s account of an adulterous mother in Puritan New England is surprisingly universal, all the more so in our culture of death, in which having a family (particularly a large family) is like wearing a badge of shame.
December 3rd, 2010 | 10:44 am
Oh…..”To Kill a Mockingbird!” There isn’t even a mother in the story (in fact I can’t think of even a minor character who IS a mother other than Tom’s wife), but genuine pleasure in one’s children is all over that book. Even though it’s written from the child’s perspective, it’s hard to miss that coming home to his kids is part (most?) of what keeps Atticus going.
December 3rd, 2010 | 11:25 am
Not fiction, but Marie Killilea’s two books on her family and their daughter with cerebral palsy, “Karen” and “With Love from Karen” clearly and lovingly recount the desire for children and the joy of having them even amidst loss and serious illness. Second the recommendations for Anne of Green Gables books. Also would recommend the writings of Jean Kerr, Erma Bombeck, and Teresa Bloomingdale . . . the humor of family life and the joy of children blend to near perfection!
December 3rd, 2010 | 11:49 am
The mention of Jean Kerr etc. reminded me of one very, very funny book about motherhood: Aloise Buckley Heath’s Will Mrs. Major Go to Hell?.
December 3rd, 2010 | 12:29 pm
Kristin Lavransdatter jumps to my mind, too, but don’t forget how terrifying a childbirth scene it contains! On the other hand, it does have some of the most beautiful and insightful depictions of a mother’s relationship to her very young children. All part of being one of the world’s great novels, I suppose.
December 3rd, 2010 | 12:33 pm
It is hard to think of stories about babies and pregnancies (positive stories, that is). Here are some more about families in general:
Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS is a wonderful book. Durrell was about 10 years old when his mother sold their house in England and moved the children to Corfu. He intended, I think, to describe the flora and fauna of Corfu as seen by a budding naturalist, but he also succeeds in painting a delightful, funny, and loving portrait of his eccentric family.
Someone else has mentioned CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN by Frank and Ernestine Gilbreth. I’d like to add THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON by Johann Wyss.
December 3rd, 2010 | 1:35 pm
There are actually 2 Cheaper By The Dozen books, both of which depict children in a positive light and are very funny as well!
Maria Von Trapp also has one, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers.
While on a kick of reading the original book for different family movies, I also read Who Gets the Drumstick?, by Frank and Helen Beardsley (Yours, Mine and Ours).
December 3rd, 2010 | 10:33 pm
Another good Sylvia Plath mother-poem: “You’re”
December 3rd, 2010 | 11:08 pm
Oh, and there are Shirley Jackson’s short stories based on her own mothering experience — I forget titles, but there’s one very funny one in which her kindergartener keeps bringing home tales about the class terror, who turns out to be himself. Again, all her child characters are wonderfully drawn, dimensional, and real (probably because they’re based on real children, but still . . . )
December 4th, 2010 | 11:16 pm
This is not a book recommendation but I would like to suggest that you visit the website of elizabethfoss.com. She is a mother to 9 children as well as a writer (she writes for the Arlington Catholic Herald). I think you may find in her writings the joy and love for babies and child rearing you are looking for.
December 5th, 2010 | 6:06 pm
I vaguely remember one of the last scenes of Willa Cather’s “My Antonia” giving a warm feeling about a bunch of kids surrounding their mom (Antonia), and that Antonia turned out, after hardships, happy being a mom.
December 6th, 2010 | 7:16 am
I would add “The Little House” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which begins with “Little House in the Big Woods.” It’s non-fiction, but in our day it reads as if it were an exciting fiction story–in fact, more interesting than fiction. This of course is the series on which the TV series “Little House on the Prairie” was based.
The books are, of course, written as children’s books. Which makes them doubly valuable. Aspiring parents can read them with delight (and instruction!) in advance, and later let them provide many hours of joy with their own children, reading to them before bedtime. Some of my best fatherhood memories are from sitting on the couch with my kids, all enthralled by the adventures of the Ingalls family.
December 7th, 2010 | 9:34 pm
I’ve loved Little House, Anne of Green Gables, Cheaper By the Dozen and Yours, Mine, Ours.
I’ve also found appreciation of marriage, babies and children to be explicit in Amish romance novels–they’re a nice light read without the worry of the pornographic tendencies of mainstream romance–and implicit in the works of Orson Scott Card (especially his Alvin Maker, Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow series).
Shannon Hale is another good choice. Try her The Actor and the Housewife. Madeleine L’Engle’s books also appreciate children and family, though only a few have actual pregnancies and birth in the books (I recall A Swiftly Tilting Planet does).
I understand that all great stories depend on conflict. However, I’ve read too many stories that take for granted that babies and parenthood are a burden, and rarely come across stories in which people lament the burden and trial of having a large home, several new cars, a broad education, or various other blessings that can be viewed as trials by jaundiced ingratitude.
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