Preface to

Three decades ago, when I became unexpectedly pregnant with my first child, I felt utterly unprepared to be a mother. I was thirty years old, in a stable marriage, and had a meaningful career I anticipated being able to continue after the baby was born. I had even looked forward to having children someday. But when wand of the drugstore pregnancy test turned positive, my reaction was much less so.

Outside of my own dear mother, I had few models for motherhood. I was the first of my siblings and nearly the first of my friends to become pregnant. I had not spent any time around babies or young children since my limited experience as a babysitter nearly two decades earlier. All I knew for sure as I stared incredulously at that implacable plastic wand was that I had no idea what I was getting into.

As my pregnancy progressed and the baby began to punch my guts like she was training to be a boxer, my feet were eclipsed by the full moon of my belly, and the morning sickness I’d been assured would cease after the first three months continued unabated, I felt as if my entire life were being subsumed by the stranger growing inside me. I found myself wondering with a kind of silent desperation why people ever chose to have children.

The moment my daughter was born, along with my relief at finally being rid of nine and a half months of constant nausea, I was astonished by the vastness, intensity, and constancy of the love I felt. Suddenly I had no doubt why people had babies. All of my former questions and pre-birth trepidations were swept away by my fierce and giddy obsession with the brand-new human being who had been born into my care.

But I quickly discovered that being a mother left me little room to be anything else. Even as my love for my daughter, and later, for her sister and their brother, continued to astound me, I was often floored by the exhaustion, anxiety, uncertainty, and boredom I also felt. I found myself looking at older women–seemingly sane women, who had done interesting things with their lives while also raising children who appeared to have become reasonable adults—and wondering how they’d even managed to survive.

As Adrienne Rich observes in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.” When I tried to get those older mothers to tell me about how they had coped, what they had learned, and how they had been changed by mothering, even the most articulate and self-aware of them seemed to be reduced to clichés. At first their platitudes puzzled me, though I came to understand their lack of eloquence wasn’t because their feelings were superficial or their thoughts were banal, but because those feelings and thoughts were so private and so complicated that they existed in a place almost beyond the reach of words.

Using words to take us where words cannot go is the task of poets. A large number of poets in the English-speaking world, from Ben Jonson and Anne Bradstreet to Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds, and Camille T. Dungy, to name a very few, have written powerfully about pregnancy and parenting. But as much as their poems spoke to me, I also craved the deeper dive that novels have to offer. I wanted to be immersed in other parents’ lives even as I used their experiences to help make sense of my own. However, although a great deal of fiction had been written about the experience of having a mother or a father, there was very little that explored what it was like—and what it might mean—to actually be one.

Raising the next generation of humans is a crucial and relatively universal activity, and it is also rife with potential for the kind of conflict and character exploration that fuels many memorable novels. But even the supremely dramatic event of childbirth was conspicuously missing from fiction. While there are few physical experiences more intense, intimate, and revealing than sex, death, and childbirth, and while fiction offers innumerable gripping accounts of sex and death, I could not find many scenes that chronicled the pain, passion, and life-changing challenges of childbirth. Abortion, sterilization, and infertility are also complex, consequential, and potentially powerful subjects for fiction, and yet, despite all the public controversies surrounding them, in the late 1990s there were few novels that explored their effects on women’s lives.

Some of those omissions may be explained by the fact that, although women have been writing novels since the novel first emerged as a literary form in the eighteenth century, until quite recently, few female novelists have been mothers. As Tillie Olsen observes, “Indeed, in [the twentieth century] as in the last, until very recently almost all distinguished achievement has come from childless women.” Of course there were exceptions. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and the book Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have claimed started the American Civil War, was written by a mother of six. But mothers did not begin to write novels in any significant numbers until the second half of the twentieth century. Even then, motherhood was not a common theme in their fiction. Given the secondary status to which patriarchy had long relegated women’s activities and experiences, perhaps those first novel-writing mothers might have felt reluctant to risk being dismissed as serious artists by exploring such a traditionally-gendered topic. Fortunately, parents’ experiences have become much more visible in fiction in recent years. Authors such as Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Ann Patchett, Brett Bennett, Marilynne Robinson, Perri Klass, Maggie O’Farrell, Celeste Ng, and Pete Fromm, to name a very few, have written novels that examine the impact of parenting on their characters’ lives, and I have every expectation that trend will continue.

My first novel was published when our youngest child was four. Although Into the Forest contained a birth scene, parenting was not a major theme in that story. My previous book, The Life Within: Celebration of a Pregnancy, had been an anthropological and scientific exploration of pregnancy, and I had written essays and even attempted some poems about my experiences of mothering. However, it didn’t occur to me to try to write a novel about mothers myself until a small article on the back page of a regional newspaper about a young woman’s tragedy happened to catch my eye. I can no longer recall the exact details of the article, but I vividly remember how disturbed I was by that unnamed stranger’s misfortune. As I wondered who that woman could have been and how she might possibly find a way heal, I realized those questions might well serve as fuel for a novel.

I decided to explore the lives of two women with seemingly little in common, women who had born into different circumstance and who make different choices when each of them becomes unexpectedly pregnant. By doing so I hoped to tease out some of the commonalities of their experience, while also conveying how unique a journey parenting always is, distinct to each parent, each situation, and each new child. I wanted to discover how motherhood changes my characters. I wanted to capture their joys, honor their struggles, and celebrate their courage and perseverance. I hoped to suggest some of the challenges that even mothers in privileged situations have to face, as well as show how infinitely more difficult it is for women in less supportive circumstances. I wanted to remind readers—and myself—of how friendship, art, and human kindness can affect our lives in unexpected and often incalculable ways.

The gestation period for novels is often much longer than it is for humans. It took me seven years to get to know Cerise and Anna well enough to tell their story. During that time, I learned about seed banks, dry land wheat farming, and graffiti artists. I interviewed midwives, labor and delivery nurses, and abortion providers. I hung out in darkrooms and photo labs, ate meals in homeless shelters, and spent many hours working as a volunteer in a program for homeless women.

Although I was careful never to use anything my own kids said or did directly in these pages, my ongoing life as a mother was a constant inspiration. Losing myself in the luscious and absorbing challenges of language and story-shaping had always been a profound satisfaction for me. Now, ironically, writing about motherhood enabled me to claim a space for myself inside my own life. I wrote mainly during my children’s naptimes and at night after they’d finally gone to bed. Thinking about mothering in the context of Cerise’s and Anna’s delights, trials, and discoveries helped me to face the frustrations, uncertainties, and doldrums of my own life as a mother with much more grace and equanimity than I would otherwise have mustered.

I hoped to write about my character’s lives without the sentimentality or the cynicism that seemed to characterize most of our culture’s narratives about motherhood. I wanted to find a way to dig beneath those dismissive clichés and capture a fuller experience, express more meaningful truths. By writing Windfalls, I hoped to encourage more honest conversations about what it might mean to raise children in the context of one’s own still-unfolding life.

Once published, a novel can seem like such an immutable thing. The beginning never changes. The end is always the end. The characters’ actions and their fates remain the same no matter how many times we may revisit their stories. But even after its publication, there’s also a way in which a novel is still very much alive. A novel is a collaboration between a reader and its writer, a conversation across time and space that takes place inside the reader’s mind. Each time that inert set of words finds another home in someone else’s consciousness, it is born again. Even for its author, each new reading will yield at least a slightly different story.

After the flurry of bookstore readings, book festival events, and conversations with readers when Windfalls appeared in 2004, I turned my attention to writing other novels, immersing myself in new fictional worlds. When I thought of Cerise and Anna, they seemed more like dear friends I’d somehow managed to lose touch with than living presences in my life. Revisiting their story now not only brings Anna and Cerise back to life for me, but offers me vivid glimpses of that younger version of myself who was driven to capture and explore the story of those women’s unlikely friendship.

It also invites me to compare their experiences with those of young mothers now. Although cell phones are much more ubiquitous than they were in the early 2000s when Windfalls is set, at least in America, disappointingly little else has changed. As the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed, the brunt of childcare still falls to women, daycare is still precarious, and most parents still face struggles and dilemmas very similar to those that Cerise and Anna had to confront. A woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices is still being challenged, untreated mental illness, chronic homelessness, and the terrible inequities of late-stage American capitalism persist. The temperature of the Earth continues to rise, and one sad but understandable byproduct of that existential threat is the growing reluctance on the part of many people to consider bringing children into this endangered world.

And yet the news isn’t all grim. Parents’ love, courage, and devotion to their children persists. Inspired by their concerns about the world their children will inherit, many parents are committing themselves to addressing global warming and promoting social justice. The increasing involvement of fathers in the duties and delights of baby-tending and child-rearing is another promising change, as is the growing visibility of stepparents, gay parents, adoptive parents, trans parents, non-binary parents, and other sorts of co-parents. Thanks to the Biden administration, the shocking rate of childhood poverty in the United States is finally being addressed, and all but the richest American families will soon begin receiving a monthly stipend for every child.

Windfalls recently gained a powerful new resonance for me, nearly two decades after I’d finished writing it. Last August, half a year into the COVID-19 lockdown, my family’s home of thirty years was destroyed in one of California’s apocalyptic wildfires. It was the house where my husband and I had raised our children, deep in the forest that had inspired the setting for Into the Forest as well as the novel I am currently completing. Now, suddenly, my vibrant forest was little more than grey ash and black charcoal, and the rooms that had housed our family’s life as well as our heirlooms, art, mementoes, and a library of over 7,000 books had been reduced to a painfully small pile of rubble.

In addition to our cat and a few portable treasures, I had managed to save the laptop which contained the most recent draft of my novel-in-progress. But all of my research materials and previous drafts, as well poems, essays, journals, letters, and drafts of my unpublished books were destroyed. Although we received an astonishing outpouring of “socially distanced” support from family, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers, especially when added to the grief, anxiety, and isolation caused by the pandemic, there were days I despaired of ever being able to move beyond those losses.

A few weeks after the fire, my husband, cat, and I were driving across California’s Central Valley to take up residence in the twelve square meter room my stepdaughter and her husband had heroically thrown up for us as—we hoped—a COVID-safe shelter in their backyard. Halfway through our trip, when we pulled off the freeway for gas, I noticed a well-kempt white-haired man standing at the edge of the truck stop parking lot holding a hand-lettered sign that read: Paradise Fire Survivor. Clean and sober. Please help.

Recalling that the Paradise Fire had destroyed over 620 square kilometers and two northern Californian towns less than twenty months earlier, we felt an immediate sense of connection with that lone stranger. My husband pulled our car up alongside him, and I rolled down the window to speak to him and offer him some cash. After he thanked us for that small kindness, I explained that we were especially sympathetic to his plight because we, too, had recently lost our home to a wildfire.

He instantly grew solicitous, and then asked the question that has haunted and helped to heal me ever since, “Did you lose anyone?”

When I replied that, thankfully, we hadn’t, he told us that he’d lost both his sister and his seventeen-year-old son in the fire that destroyed his home. He spoke matter-of-factly and without rancor or self-pity. Hearing that snippet of his story instantly put my losses in perspective in a way that other reminders of my good fortune had not. In retrospect, I consider it a near-angelic act of kindness for that stranger to have shared the bare facts of his appalling calamity with us so calmly in a truck stop parking lot.

Helpless in that moment to do anything more for him, my husband and I wished him luck and drove off. But as we merged back onto the freeway, I thought of Cerise and her journey along a similar Californian road. I recalled her endurance and her perseverance, and how, thanks to the kindness of strangers and her own fierce resolve, she somehow finds the courage to keep moving toward the things that matter most. I remembered Anna, who also loses a beloved home which had been source of inspiration for her, and how she, too, is still willing to take the risks that may help her and her family continue to grow. I was grateful for how those two women’s struggles and their triumphs continued to illuminate my own.

Chicago, Illinois
April 30, 2021

This essay first appeared as the Preface to Apaiser nos tempêtes, the French translation of Windfalls, translated by Nathalie Bru, and published by Éditions Phébus in 2021.