Grasshopper New Media Presents...

I’ve never smoked a cigarette or gotten a tattoo. I don’t even have my ears pierced. My closet sports no designer clothing or shoes. I’ve never even lived close enough to a major city to be in the know about the hottest nightspots or newest underground bands. My pregnancy, like most other things in my life, was thoroughly and meticulously planned–mapped out and carefully rationalized. On the surface, my life and my experience of motherhood has very little in common with that of Rebecca Woolf, the author of Girls Gone Child and the recently released Rockabye: From Wild to Child. But despite our very different natures, our very different lives, her book exposes the common connections that all mothers have. Beautifully written and at times laugh-out-loud funny, her book recounts the way her unexpected pregnancy at twenty-three changed her entire life and helped her discover who she really wanted to be. To say this book is another mommy memoir, however, is too reductive. As she narrates her evolution from young, unattached single-girl to married mother, Woolf’s book explores the very nature of what it means to be a woman with honesty and humor.

“Holy Shit, I’m Pregnant.” The title of the very first chapter plunges the reader into Woolf’s world, one that was irreversibly changed by two little lines, or in her case, twelve. “I am angry,” she writes, “At myself for being so careless. At my body for being alive, unpredictable, female.” It’s the experience of being female, being a mother that makes Woolf’s book quiver with poignancy. She explores not only what it means for her to decide to keep the baby, to marry her boyfriend, go through childbirth, and to redefine motherhood for herself and her son, but she also explores what the transformation means to her as a woman, emotionally, physically, and sexually.

This is not a book for the prudish, not a book for your church reading group. But then, again, maybe it is. In its most brash and sardonic moments it is often most revealing and touching. For example, in her raunchy and comical chapter, “Childbirth Isn’t for Pussies, It’s for Vagina’s,” she confesses her fear that birth would mean the death of her sexual life. While the chapter relishes in the absurdity of sex education and her sudden transformation into a sexual being, it also uncovers the power of the innate physicality of motherhood. Like much of her book, its power comes from the unexpected link between who she was and who she becomes through the birth of her child; what she thought motherhood was and what she made it for herself. Like much of her book, Woolf’s own experience exposes the myth of the perfect mother that plagues so many women’s real existence and gives even the tamest woman the hope that freedom can come from the biggest of responsibilities.

On the surface, I am nothing like Rebecca Woolf. I’m one of those moms on the playground that has dressed their child in some sort of GAP sweatshirt that she writes about. I read all the books that Woolf tossed out. On the surface, my life as a mother has not changed a whole lot. But the beauty of Woolf’s book is that, really, none of that matters. What she is able to capture is that motherhood is a scary, no… terrifying, transformation. But in that transformation is a sense of freedom. While there are no easy answers to how we balance the sense of our individual self with our self as a mother, Woolf’s book reaffirms that it is possible to find yourself in motherhood instead of losing yourself in motherhood. And therein lies its power.

by Lisa D.

Photo graciously provided by sean dreilinger, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved