Great With Child

I found my latest fave book here.






Great with Child, by Beth Ann Fennelly. Each and every moment I can steal away with this book, it simply makes me swoooon. Sometimes I even hold it up to my heart and sigh a little. Somehow, Beth Ann so clearly and wonderfully says the most overly unspoken things about motherhood. She talks about the fleshy, un-nerving, stinging, crunchy, stretchy, goopy, glorious, grateful, lovey, insightful and  soaring aspects of daily life with a child. She honors the pain and seeks to bring light to the otherwise unspoken and darkened rooms of motherhood.

In the non-fiction book, Beth Ann, a poet and teacher and mother writes letters to a beloved younger expecting friend and former student. She leaves no stone unturned. Her open-ness inspires me to be more honest about motherhood and about being a woman in the mix of life.

I was particularly touched by her frank yet honoring conversations about sexuality and marriage. She takes the words right out of my heart and there they are looking at me off the page.

I so very much hope you'll buy this book (and one for a friend...)


It speaks to the heart of what every mother really, truly feels...that she is indeed great because of and in holding and in bearing her child.


This exerpt is a commentary about our current culture, as taken from Great With Child, by Beth Ann Fennelly:

August 2, 2004

Hi Sweet Kathleen--

Sorry for writing this on the back of a House of Asia menu but we're on Highway i-49, headed for Mobile, and I've stupidly put my backpack in the trunk so I have no paper.

We just passed a curious billboard. It features a very tough, very broad shouldered police officer, arms folded over his substantial chest, standing in front of his squad car on the side of the highway. The caption reads "I'm not your mama. Pick it up, Mississippi." an antilitter campaign, with this cop as poster child for the opposite of "your mama", who is a weak-willed, soft-brained doormat, the 3_D version of those garden stakes that show fat bottoms in bloomers.

Funny how a culture that claims to venerate mothers equates them so often with trash.

Kisses,
BA

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