After Birth in The Roundtable

Mar 24, 2015 Lark Benobi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites-21st-century, 2015, houghton-mifflin

I wish people weren't always calling a book "stunning" in the jacket blurbs. Because this book stunned me. I feel like I've been hit on the head with a metaphorical bat. There is a lot here of course about the special way one comes undone after a first child is born--perfect. Even more precious to me was Albert's meticulous attention to the way women can ignore, mistreat, use, celebrate, support, and love one another, sometimes all at once. ...more

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Nov 16, 2016 Janice (JG) rated it really liked it

First off, I want to address the C-section issue in the book. Let me begin by saying that I have friends who had C-sections, which were critical medical necessities. Even so, these women went through many years of secret bouts of guilt and shame because of it. Not because of what other people might think, but because of the doubt they lived with - was it the right thing to do? Did it in some way hamper or damage a child's growth or life? No one knows these answers, and it is absolutely normal fo First off, I want to address the C-section issue in the book. Let me begin by saying that I have friends who had C-sections, which were critical medical necessities. Even so, these women went through many years of secret bouts of guilt and shame because of it. Not because of what other people might think, but because of the doubt they lived with - was it the right thing to do? Did it in some way hamper or damage a child's growth or life? No one knows these answers, and it is absolutely normal for women to have questions like this quietly haunting them. Because I have babies so fast (1 1/2 hour labor, like a greased pig), the doctors decided to induce my second daughter. I have never really overcome the sense that maybe I should not have done that, she arrived kicking and screaming, and unlike her all her other siblings, has had nothing but conflict and unhappiness plaguing her life. Did I have something to do with this, by inducing her and changing everything, including the alignment of stars that may have been her salvation?

How Ari feels about the C-section did not sound so much like a condemnation of the procedure to me as it did a condemnation of herself for having the procedure... and I can absolutely see how that could be a very cathartic read for women who have been harboring these same thoughts and feelings to themselves, letting it eat them alive.

There's no question that the protagonist has issues. Her relationships with women, whom she admits to disliking distrusting in general, clearly grows out of her antagonistic and disappointing relationship with her own mother, who "abandoned" her by dying when Ari was young. Ari hates herself for so many reasons, and this anger and disappointment with herself is made clear and obvious throughout the book. She projects that anger, and that needy desperation for a close female relationship, onto every other character in the story.

For me, one of the main messages of the book was directed to the mothers of daughters - educate your daughters about motherhood, tell the truth about parenting, and don't leave them floundering all asea in terrified ignorance - and to women in general, asking that they become the female nurturers to each other during this most traumatizing, important, frightening, and dangerous passage of a woman's life.

I thought women had gotten better at this with the re-introduction of midwives, new birthing methods, and family-oriented birthing facilities in hospitals, not to mention just increased awareness and information among and about women. But apparently there is still a lack of female support where there should be community, friends, and family willing to share and nurture.

I really liked the book, I liked the author's very perceptive descriptions of the pain of labor, of parental fears and of the awesome obsessive fierce animal love for the child coupled with the desperate need to abandon motherhood in search of self... I liked many of her feminist insights and references, and I liked her relationship with her husband, it felt very authentic - full of love, respect, insecurity, frustration, distance, intimacy, dissatisfying communication, all of it. I liked that she understood how the ego is necessarily crushed in order to survive motherhood, I liked how she called herself out on so many things.

I don't, however, think I would recommend reading this book right after giving birth, or as a brand new mother... it really is probably way too close to the bone. When I look back at my mothering, I think I can honestly say I had almost every exact same thought about all of it that Ari did (including about breast feeding - having had both formula babies and breast feeding, which was shockingly painful)... but I am comfortably distant from the reality of it now, and that perspective makes it a much easier and more understandable read.
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