What Many Motherhood Novels Are Missing

A conversation with novelist Yael Goldstein-Love about the rich, fertile terrain that is "true maternal ambivalence"

In the past decade or so, the great big mom novel has become a genre of its own. While motherhood was never absent from the literary canon, publishing has never seen this many books, or this much praise for books, about raising kids. I love that motherhood is, at last, seen by literary gatekeepers as a profound human experience worthy of inquiry and many interpreters. 

Still, I have noticed that there tends to be one particular type of motherhood story that makes it to the top of the literary ladder. These are the ones that feature deep ambivalence about whether or not a woman wants to be a mother, or focus nearly exclusively on the ways a woman feels oppressed by motherhood. These are important stories to tell, and I am genuinely glad they are out there. 

What bothers me is the fact that stories in which women rejecting or resisting motherhood are the ones that are generally taken most seriously. For one, this perpetuates the myth, a myth I dig deep into in my book, that care and deep thought and creativity are incompatible. I can think of many examples of a woman turning away from motherhood as proof of her intelligence in recent highly-celebrated books. I can think of very few examples in which a willing and curious woman turning towards motherhood is seen as proof of her intelligence. 

There’s another problem when one type of motherhood book makes it big. We only get to explore a single shade of the vast color spectrum that is maternal existential crisis: whether or not a woman accepts or rejects motherhood. What we are missing is another equally profound and rich crisis: the heady, wild, incredibly difficult struggle to figure out who we are when we become a mom, and how to love and care for our children. Even when we are mostly sure about wanting to be a mom, even when we feel connected to this kid or these kids, the act of caring for them with all of our emotional baggage, and the alignment of the two particular personalities of mother and child, is far from simple. 

When I became a mom—or better put, in my ongoing process of becoming a mom—I never felt like I was living in a nightmare or a fairy tale. Instead, I found myself navigating a vast terrain of feelings and experiences in which I encountered delights, epiphanies, challenges, and boredom, often all at once. There was suddenly a fire, an awesome fire of my choosing, that had the capacity to ignite, illuminate, and consume. And I had to figure out how to tend to it. 

No novel has captured the power of being close to this fire for me like Yael Goldstein-Love’s, “The Possibilities.” The book is as warm as it is smart, paced like a page-turner, but nevertheless bursting with the kind of psychological insights you might expect to find in quieter, minimally plotted novels. It is a multiverse story about a missing baby and a very anxious, very brave mom who must travel through parallel worlds in order to save him. “The Possibilities” was just named as a finalist for the World Fantasy Awards, a very worthy honor for a book that makes perfect use of the fantasy genre: using the impossible to make the strange, rich reality of motherhood all the more comprehensible.

I spoke to Yael, who is also a psychotherapist, about “The Possibilities,” the wide range of motherhood-induced existential and psychological crises, and why new parenthood lends itself so easily to fantasy.

Tell us a bit about your book:

Hannah’s child almost dies during birth. It’s a harrowing experience, but he lives and so she’s expected to just move past it. All’s well that ends well, happy, healthy baby, what’s the problem? But there is a problem and it’s that she can’t shake the feeling that he came too close to dying, almost as though there’s a shadow reality lurking next to her own. In the book I call this the “car swerve feeling”—that sense you sometimes have, or I do anyway, maybe after a near miss on the road, that the other, worse way things could have gone came too close to happening, and that this leaves some lingering danger. 

For eight months, even as Hannah is falling in love with her son, she’s also falling apart because of the weight of this feeling—that he could so easily not have been okay and that she may not be up to the responsibility of protecting him from all the world can bring to bear on something as fragile as a human life. That none of us are. And then, when her son is eight months old, her worst fears are realized. He disappears from his crib. And people start forgetting him one by one—the police who responded to the kidnap call, his own father. It’s up to her to find him and bring him home, which is challenging since it involves traveling to other possible worlds.  

While writing it, were you aware that this motherhood story had a different energy to it than many of the others published in recent years?

I had never seen a novel directly address true maternal ambivalence before. I don’t mean the ambivalence of do you want a child or not, or are the sacrifices of motherhood worth it, or I love being a mother but the patriarchy makes it so hard and what do I do with all this rage, all of which I’ve seen addressed in some truly brilliant ways. I don’t want to knock any of those ways of addressing the experience of motherhood because I’m so glad they exist and I want many more of them.

What I had never seen addressed directly in another novel, and what I really wanted to tackle is what I think of as true maternal ambivalence, the kind that is baked into even the most deliriously loving mother-child relationship. Motherhood asks a crazy amount of us psychologically. It stirs up all the sediment of our past—how we were cared for, how we regard our own needs and dependency, how we tolerate lack of control and certainty, how we tolerate the threats and seductions of both merger and of separation. 

We all have our own unique histories and personalities and we all have our own unique children, so how this is going to play out is never going to be the same for any two mothers or for the same mother with any two children. But it’s always going to be psychologically complex. It has to be if we’re really emotionally engaged in parenting because what parenting a young child really requires is lending your mind for another mind’s development just as during pregnancy we lend our bodies for another body’s development. 

I wanted to write a book that treated this aspect of motherhood as something interesting and worthy of artistic consideration. I wanted to find a way to explore on the page how this one woman’s love for her son brings her both joy and contentment and also pain and terror and how these can’t actually come apart because they are mirror images of each other; take away one and you take away the other. Our deep love cannot help but also bring deep pain and vulnerability. I also wanted to make visceral and visible that process of lending our mind to allow another mind to come together, what a truly extraordinary and trippy thing that is we do. And finally I wanted to explore the connection between all this and another part of that same process—the way in which learning to be a mother forces us to look at some of the rawest parts of our own history and ways of being in the world, the parts we’ve usually worked hard until then to keep out of awareness. 

Working with parallel worlds gave me a powerful tool for getting at all these different aspects of what it’s like to become a mother because parallel worlds are not just a great metaphor for the terrifying uncertainty of human life—all the many ways things can go. They are also a great metaphor for all the worlds within worlds within ourselves, those secret histories and fears and desires that we mostly keep out of awareness but that are always with us, invisible but making themselves felt in our reactions and choices moment by moment.

You’ve spoken about how this was inspired by your personal birth trauma. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened, and also why you felt compelled to process it through novel writing?

My son very nearly didn’t survive his birth. He had the cord wrapped several times around his neck and also a plug of mucous in his airway that it took the medical team ten minutes of futile CPR to finally locate and remove. For over an hour afterward they couldn’t tell me whether he would live or die and so I lay in the recovery room not knowing whether I was in the midst of an unfolding tragedy. It turned out, after days of tests in the NICU, that he was fine. But by this point his durability was very hard for me to trust. I did not believe I was going to be able to keep him. My son’s birth had also been his near-death, and I was certain that something unexpected and terrible would once again occur, and that this time my instincts would not kick in to save him. (He’d only lived because of my insistence on an emergency c-section against the doctor’s advice. Without it, his brain would have been starved of oxygen for too long.)

I told the story of his birth-and-almost-death a lot in our first days home from the hospital. Friends and family would stop by to meet the baby, and instead be subjected to a monologue by an unwashed woman: the plug in his airway; the CPR; how they’d whisked him off to the NICU as soon as they got him breathing. How my instincts were all that had separated this tiny person from oblivion.

People assumed the upshot of my story was relief and responded accordingly—How right I’d been to trust my instincts! A good mother from the start! Their encouraging responses disturbed me. I did not want praise. I felt trapped inside a life-and-death puzzle, and I wanted help putting the clues together so that I would be able to solve it again the next time I was called upon to save my son. This felt impossible to explain. Every aspect of my experience felt too complicated to articulate. ​​And so I existed in my own reality, which I pictured as a bubble. It was a bubble of terror, and it always surrounded me, hidden to onlookers, but never invisible to me.

Once the book was out in the world I heard from so many other mothers how common this feeling actually was, whether or not there had been anything traumatic about their kids’ entry into the world. I don’t think I’d realized when I started writing the book just how common an experience I was really describing because for me it had all been tied up with this traumatic birth. But really what I was writing about was just how utterly terrifying it is to love.

Now I will ask you to put on your psychotherapist hat—or shall we say scarf, because your kind always have lovely scarves. Can you dive deeper into the psychological underpinnings of this experience? 

I’m laughing at this because a secret shame of mine as a psychotherapist is that I have no idea how to wear scarves.  

I think there might be no single common human experience that asks more of us psychologically than parenting a young child. They are utterly dependent on us, not just for the obvious things like food, warmth, medical care, safety, but also for helping them to come together as a person in the most basic ways. When we are infants, learning to make any meaning at all of our experience requires an adult caregiver processing our experience alongside us. 

An infant cries when something feels bad. They don’t know what feels bad, only that they don’t like what’s happening, and so they scream out their displeasure. We as adults take in that displeasure and the scream feels awful to us too; their distress resonates in us if we’re receptive to their communication. We feel their displeasure, especially if it’s the middle of the night and we’ve been yanked out of sleep for the third or fourth time. But then we take our adult minds and make sense of this distress: oh, she’s hungry. Oh, he’s cold. And we do something about it. We give them our breast, a blanket, maybe pick them up. That’s how the baby starts to make sense of their own experience, through that happening again and again and again in relationship with another human. Or think about the rage of a toddler - or for that matter a teenager - and the way we have to process that for them, again in part by feeling it ourselves (you will get in these pajamas right now so help me god), experiencing and then (more or less) regulating our own emotions in order to help them regulate their emotions and develop the capacity to do so without us. 

In other words, we are not observers standing outside of the intense emotional drama of being a tiny human bombarded by confusing input from the world; we are in it with them and we have to be for the process to work. When we’re with children we are pulled back into a far more chaotic and primitive emotional world than the one most of us inhabit as adults. And that can be difficult and draining and also thrilling and enlivening and a million other things besides. 

What parenting stirs up for each person is utterly unique because we and our children are utterly unlike any exact person who has ever existed. Honestly this is my favorite part of being a psychotherapist (and a novelist, for that matter)—that inevitable moment that comes in any treatment when all your attempts at categorizing give way and you think “wow, I’ve never known a mind exactly like this before.”

As I type this I’m also realizing it’s also what I like best about being a mother. Seeing this utterly unique person emerge before your eyes is so nuts. And I think it’s another part of what gets short shrift when we focus too much on certain categories of maternal experience, whether that’s in literature or in life. I mean, damn, if no one has ever parented this exact kid before what a mind-bending honor to get to do it. But also what a problem because no one could possibly tell you how to do it well. There is absolutely no available data. 

GET A COPY OF “THE POSSIBILITIES” HERE.

FOLLOW YAEL ON INSTAGRAM HERE.

Please share your favorite messy, wild, non-fairy tale, non-nightmare motherhood books, TV shows, and movies in the comments.

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One more thing:

I will be joining the podcast How the Wise One Grows for a community conversation on care & parenthood. Host

Holly Zajur

is requesting 60-90 second voice memos answering one or more of these questions which we will engage with on the show. Please send by 10/2.

1. How do you personally view care?

2. Where do your ideas and stories about care come from?

3. Do you feel care is valued both intrinsically and socially?

4. What beliefs about parenthood did you hold before becoming a parent that turned out to be untrue?

5. What’s something you wish someone had told you before having your first child?

6. What do you think every new parent needs to know?

7. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received as a parent? What’s the worst?

8. Has anyone ever framed parenting as a spiritual practice to you?

Go to www.howthewiseonegrows.com/voicemail to submit your voice memo and join the conversation!

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