the modernity ward

Homage: The Foremothers

Besides the obvious, at least in my own life -- mother, grandmother, smattering of women teachers and friends' mothers -- I owe a tremendous debt to some fine and able women who, even though I never actually met them, made me who I am today.

First up: Betty Crocker.

Hey, I know she's not a real lady. Listing her as a foremother is kind of like putting Mrs. Butterworth down as your child's emergency contact for the school office. Except that unlike the mute, watchful Mrs. Butterworth, Betty Crocker -- or a compendium of men and women laboring under her name -- taught me how to make perfect toffee. And sugar cookies. And provided me endless hours of entertainment in the form of Galaxy Cookies that I never actually made but admired, in their pastel space-age glory, for many years.

Sure, I went on to join the Rombauer-Becker crew in later years, but you know what? The Joy of Cooking has really boring pictures. Betty, you in your orange-checked full-color pineapple-studded-ham glory will always have a place in the test kitchen in my head.

My goodness, what an awkward sentence. Moving on:

Betty MacDonald.

Maybe you read the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books as a child, or maybe you read The Egg and I. If you haven't, I recommend The Egg and I, with the caveat that there are some extremely ugly, ignorant passages about the native people of the Pacific Northwest. Making recommendations like that is always problematic, as the recommender runs the risk of looking like a racism apologist, but in the canon of Things Otherwise Worth Reading there are lots and lots of books whose authors take little side trips into Colonialistland or Misogyny Acres or Boy Can You Believe Those Wily Money-Grubbing Jews Town or whatever, and I'm not convinced the answer is to chuck it all out wholesale.

So with that said, and with full disclosure of unsavory racist bleh and my own personal disavowal thereof, I offer up the finest, most delectably hilarious account of life on a Pacific Northwest chicken ranch you will ever find. Larded with beautifully turned phrases and anecdotes involving outhouses, this book will drive you to outright snorting laughter as it either encourages or squelches any agrarian tendencies you might have.

Also: there is something about MacDonald's voice that calls to mind some of my favorite bloggers. I would venture that The Egg and I, a funny, honest, probably-somewhat-fictionalized-for-the-sake-of-story memoir, is the great-grandmother of that largely feminine contingent of the blogosphere: razor-sharp wit, a blend of high and low language, a self-deprecating first-person heroine whose human failings are laid bare, and the heartbreaking comedy of everyday life when that life involves dealing with feces other than your own.

I can thank MacDonald for a good portion of what I understand about language so well constructed it appears effortless, and how finding the funny in an untenable situation can save your head, and how to weave the two together. The rest of it I can chalk up to:

Erma Bombeck.

If Betty MacDonald is the great-grandma of the blogosphere, I'd put down Erma Bombeck as the grandmother. (The mother, in case you're wondering, is the 'zine.) Mixed in with the weird Bible study books and dry classics at my grandma's house were several Erma Bombeck paperbacks, and when I'd spend the night I'd lie there on the old teal velvet sofa, covered with an ancient, butter-soft sheet that always smelled of Clorox, and finish a book before I dropped off, and start the next one first thing. I'm sure it dismayed my mother that I was apparently in love with these tales of 1950s suburban housewifery -- it was all she ever wanted us to get away from -- but maybe because I recognized something of my present (my mother, after all, stayed home, wrote the Bible school puppet shows, and drove us around in a big white station wagon), or maybe just because they were really, really funny, I adored them.

From Erma Bombeck: Writer and Humorist by Lynn Hutner Colwell, quoted here:

The demands of motherhood amazed Erma. Exhaustion stalked her constantly. There weren't enough hours in the day. She never had time for herself and sagged under a kind of loneliness she had never known. Since no one discussed these feelings in public, Erma thought something was wrong with her, that she was the only woman in the world experiencing them. She thought she should be able to handle her life, but she wasn't doing a very good job and no one seemed to understand.

Her solution was to bury herself in typical fifties housewifely pursuits. She crocheted Santa Claus doorknob covers, stuck contact paper on everything that didn't move and decorated Bill's dinners with miniature roses sculpted from zucchini. It didn't help.

Now you tell me that isn't the forerunner of the mommy blogger. I hate to use the term, but you know what I mean, right? Erma was funny, she talked about these things in the female sphere like housework and mothering and pulled out the universal, she was politically involved -- and she hit the big time without ever forgetting what she was about.

Imagine your favorite blogger dropped into Betty Draper's living room. If you haven't read any Bombeck, give it a try. You'll wish you could leave a comment.

* * * *

Well, there you have it. Two Bettys and an Erma, foremothers of food blogging, mommy blogging, and ever hovering just behind me as I give myself chronic back problems at the computer. If only I'd had a better sense of how to use pop culture as a jumping-off place for thinking and writing, my college years might have been way more interesting, for me and for my professors. (Although I try not to think too hard about my Modern Studies degree or my eye starts to twitch and I involuntarily shout "Horkheimer!") We can talk about literary goddesses Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro later, but for now, who are your unlikely sources of inspiration?

Book Review: Spanish for Breastfeeding Support

**Disclaimer: I was not compensated for this review, just got a review copy.

Where to begin with this amazing resource? Spanish for Breastfeeding Support by Diana Glick, M.A., and Tanya Lieberman, IBCLC, is one of the most impressive books I've ever come across in my capacity as a peer breastfeeding counselor -- or as a student of Spanish. For the record, I got a perfect score on my high school AP Spanish exam. Unfortunately, my speech skills didn't match my listening and writing skills, and I found myself sorely outclassed when I got to college and my class was full of native speakers.

If only I'd had this book. Maybe the other students would have thought me a little bit obsessed with calostro and areolas, but maybe they thought that anyway. From a Spanish language standpoint, this book is excellent; you begin with basics such as numbers, articles, gender of words, and a few key glossary terms, and then move on to conjugation and common phrases. Which in this case, instead of the vacationer's guidebook staple "¿Dónde está el baño?" would be "El bebé debe estar 'nariz contra el pezón.'" By the end of the book you're ready for dialogue, both listening and speaking.

The written material is thorough enough that, even as a rank beginner, you'd be able to get through a basic breastfeeding-related conversation. But there's a lovely surprise in the back of the book, and that's two CDs -- every chapter is covered! There's no substitute for hearing a language, and the authors thought of that. Audio files are also available online. Check around their website, too -- you'll get an idea of what the book is like.

If you work with breastfeeding mothers who speak Spanish and need to brush up on your language skills, this book is an invaluable resource. I can't recommend it highly enough -- except to tell you that usually I give away review copies, and this one is staying right here on my bookshelf.

Book Review: The Blue Cotton Gown

(Disclosure: I received a copy of the book to review. And I'm giving it to someone else after I'm done. So as far as the ads go, we're all good.)

When I first found out about The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir, I assumed it was going to be chock full of birth stories and pregnancy lore. (The author, Patricia Harman, is a Certified Nurse-Midwife in practice with her husband, an OB.) I was wrong about that -- but what the book actually is is far more revealing of the state of midwifery and medicine in general than any compendium of birth stories seen through a midwife's eyes.

Harman's clinic has stopped doing births, we learn, because the insurance payments are too much. Indeed, the thread of financial pressures on health practices runs through the book, and by the end it's evident that if anything is the undoing of health care in the U.S., it's the deeply screwed-up system of malpractice insurance and finance in general. Small practices in particular are vulnerable, yet those are often the places that give the best, most personal care. Not to mention the growing numbers of doctors unable to pay the malpractice insurance that lets them attend births...sigh. Here in the book, the problem is rendered in microcosm, on a personal, one-practice level, and the consequences to patients and providers alike are disheartening.

Another issue that surfaces in the book on a personal level is the issue of lawsuits against providers -- again, part of a larger societal shift, but here we see how the threat of being sued affects both a provider's willingness and ability to take on certain types of cases, and what it does to the provider herself (or himself). We ask a lot of our health care providers, especially the ones who are really in the trenches providing ob/gyn care, midwifery services, and (one imagines) general and family practice care; often the payoff for countless hours of exhaustion is numinous as a patient's success. Of course that's the story we as a society tell ourselves about medicine and midwifery -- hey, we're in it because we just LOVE the PATIENTS -- and while that's a beautiful thing, it's not always enough, while insurance companies (both patient and malpractice) are devouring most of a practice's profit.

Unless you're really passionate about the cause, the above issues might seem a little dry and removed -- but in this book they're vividly rendered in an unassuming way.

The most compelling aspect of the memoir, however, is the overarching story of how Harman relates to her patients. We watch them reveal their stories to Harman over the course of visits, we see how the consequences of their actions play out, we wince and hope along with Harman (and are eventually uplifted or crushed, right along with her). In contrast, birth stories look tidy, with a time-limited arc, obvious crescendo, and relatively predictable endpoint -- the stories of lives told here are messy and even shocking, depressing and sometimes surprisingly hopeful. And Harman herself is far from exempt. The story of her life is revealed here too, and she does not shy away from the uglier parts: grown children who screw up their lives, a marriage on the verge of collapse, demoralization and exhaustion. In all it's a frank and unflinching look at the world, and left me wondering if there was any hope for my eventual teenagers. Or my eventually older self.

Stylistically the writing often fades into the background, which works well in a memoir like this; you don't want to be noticing the writing so much as the story. Harman inserts stories of her dreams, relevant, of course, to the unfolding drama, but the effect is somewhere between tiresome and jarring. It takes you out of the immediacy of the real story and deposits you in a place where symbolism is obvious and heavy-handed.

The strength of Harman's writing is in her honest and realistic rendering of life as a CNM. We can interpret the larger significance of events best when we are seeing them unfold on the small stage of one medical practice in West Virginia; we understand the bafflement of how to care for the woman with cancer, chronic pain, an abusive relationship, best when Harman brings us along with her into the exam room.

It's not what I'd call great literature, but in all I'd say it's worth a read, especially if you're at all interested in what's going on with medical and midwifery care in the U.S. today. Even if you don't have a dog in that race, even if you read it from the perspective of a patient, it's worthwhile. What I'd really love to know is what health care providers think about the book. Anyone able to oblige?