There's Something Missing from Mommy Lit

By Deesha Philyaw, Bitch Magazine. Posted June 28, 2008.

Shortly before the birth of my first child nine years ago, while browsing the bookstore for mommy wisdom, I discovered Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year and fell in love with the author and the book. More than any parenting truisms the book might have contained, it was Lamott's writing style -- funny, self-deprecating, and brutally honest -- that kept me reading. The big mommy insight I gleaned from Operating Instructions was that I wasn't quite as neurotic as Anne, so my kid and I would probably be all right.

This was the only book of its type that I read all the way through back then because, like a copy of a copy, subsequent mommy memoirs just weren't as sharp. I found them to be one-note and lacking in whatever essential quality that had drawn me to Operating Instructions in the first place. In the absence of top-notch writing, I really needed to see myself in those pages. In other memoirs, I saw college-educated stay-at-home moms who felt equal parts gratitude, mental fatigue, and boredom, but I didn't see any women who were black like me.

Now, with two kids and a freelance writing career under my belt, the current mommy memoir offerings whose titles I skim on bookstore shelves are even less appealing. A sample: Surrendering to Motherhood: Losing Your Mind, Finding Your Soul; The Second Nine Months: One Woman Tells the REAL Truth About Becoming a Mom -- Finally; Let the Baby Drive: Navigating the Road of New Motherhood; Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life: Or How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child. A "funny" mommy memoir subgenre has emerged (notably Mommies Who Drink: Sex, Drugs, and Other Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom, and Jenny McCarthy's Belly Laughs and Baby Laughs). Some of these books reference alcohol in the title (Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay; The Three-Martini Playdate) in an attempt to differentiate these authors as the fun-time gals of the momoir world. But I'm still not buying.

A cursory look at the descriptions and reviews of post-Operating Instructions mommy memoirs reveals that the messages espoused in them hasn't changed much over the decade: Childhood is fleeting, so cherish every moment. But don't lose yourself in your kids. Know what's really important (which varies depending on which author you ask). Cater to your husband. Don't cater to your husband; make him help with the kids. Ignore the parenting experts -- but listen to my story.

And, it appears, these books are still written almost exclusively by white women.

A few years ago, Lori L. Tharps, author of the combination travel memoir and racial coming-of-age story Kinky Gazpacho: Love, Life and Spain, approached her agent with the idea of writing a mommy memoir. The response was less than enthusiastic, Tharps recalls: "She told me, 'Please don't do that.'" The market was glutted with these books, the agent lamented -- and Tharps, who admits the idea came to her in the midst of her postpartum hormonal haze and love affair with her first child, let it go.

I can see the agent's point about the glut, but in the 15 years since the publication of Operating Instructions, why weren't black-authored mommy memoirs part of that oversaturation? Did publishers think no one wanted to read about a black mommy with a Yale degree like me gritting her teeth through endless games of Candyland? Did they presume that a minority of middle-class and upper-middle-class married white women could speak for all mothers? Or was Tharps an anomaly -- were black women just not interested in penning these types of books?

The absence of black mommy memoirs mirrors the relative absence of black women's voices in mainstream U.S. media discourse about motherhood in general. In particular, this discourse is concerned with how women balance the demands of family and careers, and with the decision by some college-educated women to opt out of the labor force altogether and remain at home with their children. When this discourse ceased to be polite, the explosion was dubbed "the mommy wars."

The genesis of the mommy wars can be traced back to the "cult of true womanhood" (also known as the "cult of domesticity"), the 19th-century view that delicate white women bore the sole responsibility for housekeeping and childcare, and were to be placed on pedestals at home and kept out of the public sphere. By contrast, since 1619 when the first slaves arrived on the shores of what is now the United States, most black mothers have had no choice but to work. Instead of being placed on pedestals, black women watched as our babies were placed on auction blocks. And yet, we pressed on through the most dehumanizing conditions, working on the plantations, and caring for the children who remained.

See more stories tagged with: media, race, motherhood, fairness

Deesha Philyaw is a freelance writer based in Pittsburgh, Pa.

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