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Overview
What happens when the urge to ditch your family outpaces the desire to love them? The stories in Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, attempt to answer this question, heading straight for the messiness of domestic relationships and the constraints society places on women as they navigate their obligations. Daughters desert their rheumy-eyed elders in dusty museums, steal a mother’s favorite teacup, or consider throwing their dead parents’ nostalgia-riddled belongings out the window. Mothers conclude that they love one child more than their others. Fathers puzzle over a wife’s inability to balance family and career or accuse a partner of blaming their child for her own misdeeds. Women mourn the children they decided not to have and fret over the legacy they’ll leave the children they do have. But sometimes the generations reconcile or siblings manage to rescue each other. Love tears these people apart, but it mends them too.
The emotions expressed in these stories are combustible, both fraught and nuanced, uncontrollable and common, but above all often ignored or hushed because we’re not supposed to be bored by our children or annoyed with our aged parents, even as we love them. The careful shapes of these stories adapted from fairy tales, verse, letters, or newspaper announcements, the surprise of their wordplay, and the blaze of their lyrical sentences allow them to dig into and contain all those messy emotions at the same time. In these works, constraint creates both understanding and fire.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780268203016 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Notre Dame Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2022 |
| Series: | Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction |
| Pages: | 150 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.38(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
She loved him better than her oldest son. Her best friend, who had only one child, said, “I didn’t have another because I could never love anyone as much as I love him.” She, on the other hand, had had a second child specifically because she loved the first so much. She’d wanted to experience that love again, to feel it multiplied. Then, what a surprise to experience a love even wilder, fiercer, stronger, deeper. Her first child was quietly willful, and brilliant, and totally focused on the task at hand. Told to clean up his room, he put the toys away but then also got out the dust rags, the vacuum, and the Windex. He excelled on tests of all sorts, both physical and intellectual, but his mother had to admit that while she found his persistence admirable, she found his fastidiousness trying and his need for approval exhausting. Whenever he brought home a report card, he sat on the front stoop until she returned from work and wouldn’t let her go inside, despite the December snow or June heat, until she had noted every grade and every glowing comment. Neighbors remarked on how proud she must be, but privately she preferred the second child, whose grades varied—high in the subjects he loved (which changed every year), low in those he had no patience for, whose room always looked like a ransacked casino, and whose favorite phrase, gleaned from a self-help book he’d found on his aunt’s bedside table (happy to read that as anything else) was “Sometimes good is good enough.” His memory was terrible and his ability to reason logically was limited, but the minute he touched something he thought of a question to ask about it.
She loved this second child better than she loved her third one too, the one she’d had in an attempt to diffuse the either/or relationship she had with the first two. For a while it worked. It helped that the third was a girl, and that the woman could go out and buy new clothes for her (girl clothes) rather than relying on hand-me-downs, shallow though this might be. This baby destroyed pink though, and knew how to throw herself into a rage for apparently no reason at all. Once she grew teeth, she ate everything: corn cobs as well as kernels, chicken bones, her blanket, pages torn from books—like a beautiful goat. For she was such a beautiful child that strangers stared in the grocery store and told her to sign the baby up for a modeling contract, so beautiful that she, herself, couldn’t stop looking at the little girl’s perfect oval face, her eyes such a light blue they seemed to reflect the sky, her golden curls. The second child had golden curls too, but while the baby’s were lovely ringlets, his were disorderly and knotted, frizzy on one side of his head, loosely loopy on the other. And his nose was bulbous, his lips too thin, his large ears stuck out, his neck too long—the kind of child who prompted relatives to remark that true beauty is on the inside. His mother loved his puppy ungainlyness but also hoped, for his sake, that he was merely an ugly duckling, destined to grow into a swan.
She loved her second child better than she loved her fourth too, the second girl, called Baby, always the baby, who told funny knock-knock jokes, and was so ticklish that she giggled even before your fingers found the sweet spot on the side of her waist, and laughed at everything, even her siblings’ falls and failures—not because she was malicious but because she really and truly saw the humor in everything. She assumed that when they tripped, they did so just to amuse her, and that when they quarreled, it was for her amusement too, like the Punch and Judy show she had seen once on TV. The second child didn’t laugh at the comics, could never remember his own punch lines, and looked blank when other people told jokes. “I don’t get it,” he said until even his kind youngest sister rolled her eyes. “Perhaps his seriousness will lead him to do great things,” his mother thought.
She’d planned her children two years apart, and had imagined them as stair-steps, littlest to biggest, youngest to oldest, separate but equal. She had pictured their photos marching tidily up the wall alongside the real steps in her house. In the heart, though, nothing is separate but equal. In fact, she stumbled up, stumbled down, stumbled among her children. Sometimes she wondered if her great love for her second child grew out of pity, or guilt, or the fact that she most closely recognized herself in him. Of course, she hoped that his lack of ambition, timidity, and imperfect sense of humor wouldn’t make it difficult for him to find his way in the world! Of course, she worried that she was treating her other children unfairly and hoped she hid this as well as her mother had hidden her own unfair feelings. Of course, she worried that she identified with him too much. She too had been dull-witted, unattractive, and clumsy compared to her siblings. All this. But mostly she loved him because he demanded nothing, and her love grew every time his hand slipped into hers, even once he’d become a teenager, and from the berry he left behind, the bluebird feather, the striped pebble, the coin, the glove she’d dropped two blocks back, a meticulously drawn space ship on a scrap of old envelope.
Table of Contents
1. Childhood2. Pink Seascape
3. Dark Season
4. Four Phoebes
5. Moon Child
6. Seventh
7. The Cathedral is a Mouth
8. Return of the Media Five
9. The Other Road
10. Painting Time
11. Hunters and Gatherers
12. The Arches, Our Home
13. Six Views of Seattle
14. Annunciation
15. Disintegration
16. Visitation
17. On Seeing the Skeleton of a Whale….
18. Princess of Desire
19. Bad Mother: A Story in Five Paragraphs
20. Seven Little Stories about 1977
21. Last Week, New Year
22. Inebriate of Air
23. Forest
Acknowledgements