Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves

In June 1997, Camille Peri and Kate Moses launched the daily website Mothers Who Think on Salon.com for women who, like themselves, were starved for smart, honest stories about motherhood -- personal and intimate stories that went beyond tantrum control and potty training to grapple with the profound issues that affect women and their children. Like the online site, their bestselling, American Book Award-winning anthology Mothers Who Think struck a nerve across the country not just with mothers, but with all those who shared a vested interest in the raising of the next generation.

Because I Said So gives readers even more to think about. This new collection of fiercely honest essays edited by Peri and Moses captures the challenges of motherhood in the twenty-first century as no other book has. Writers such as Janet Fitch, Mariane Pearl, Mary Roach, Susan Straight, Margaret Talbot, Rosellen Brown, Beth Kephart, Ariel Gore, and Ana Castillo delve into the personal and the political, giving passionate expression to their relationships with their children and to their evolving sense of themselves. Provocative, candid, witty, and wise, their stories range from the anguish of giving up child custody to the guilt of having sex in an era of sexless marriages; from learning to love the full-speed testosterone chaos of boys to raising girls in a pervasively sexualized culture; from facing racial and religious intolerance with your children to surviving cancer and rap simultaneously.

Told in prose that is as unabashedly frank as it is lyrical, this is the collective voice of real mothers -- raised above the din -- in all their humor, anger, vulnerability, grace, and glory.

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Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves

In June 1997, Camille Peri and Kate Moses launched the daily website Mothers Who Think on Salon.com for women who, like themselves, were starved for smart, honest stories about motherhood -- personal and intimate stories that went beyond tantrum control and potty training to grapple with the profound issues that affect women and their children. Like the online site, their bestselling, American Book Award-winning anthology Mothers Who Think struck a nerve across the country not just with mothers, but with all those who shared a vested interest in the raising of the next generation.

Because I Said So gives readers even more to think about. This new collection of fiercely honest essays edited by Peri and Moses captures the challenges of motherhood in the twenty-first century as no other book has. Writers such as Janet Fitch, Mariane Pearl, Mary Roach, Susan Straight, Margaret Talbot, Rosellen Brown, Beth Kephart, Ariel Gore, and Ana Castillo delve into the personal and the political, giving passionate expression to their relationships with their children and to their evolving sense of themselves. Provocative, candid, witty, and wise, their stories range from the anguish of giving up child custody to the guilt of having sex in an era of sexless marriages; from learning to love the full-speed testosterone chaos of boys to raising girls in a pervasively sexualized culture; from facing racial and religious intolerance with your children to surviving cancer and rap simultaneously.

Told in prose that is as unabashedly frank as it is lyrical, this is the collective voice of real mothers -- raised above the din -- in all their humor, anger, vulnerability, grace, and glory.

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Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves

Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves

Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves

Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves

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Overview

In June 1997, Camille Peri and Kate Moses launched the daily website Mothers Who Think on Salon.com for women who, like themselves, were starved for smart, honest stories about motherhood -- personal and intimate stories that went beyond tantrum control and potty training to grapple with the profound issues that affect women and their children. Like the online site, their bestselling, American Book Award-winning anthology Mothers Who Think struck a nerve across the country not just with mothers, but with all those who shared a vested interest in the raising of the next generation.

Because I Said So gives readers even more to think about. This new collection of fiercely honest essays edited by Peri and Moses captures the challenges of motherhood in the twenty-first century as no other book has. Writers such as Janet Fitch, Mariane Pearl, Mary Roach, Susan Straight, Margaret Talbot, Rosellen Brown, Beth Kephart, Ariel Gore, and Ana Castillo delve into the personal and the political, giving passionate expression to their relationships with their children and to their evolving sense of themselves. Provocative, candid, witty, and wise, their stories range from the anguish of giving up child custody to the guilt of having sex in an era of sexless marriages; from learning to love the full-speed testosterone chaos of boys to raising girls in a pervasively sexualized culture; from facing racial and religious intolerance with your children to surviving cancer and rap simultaneously.

Told in prose that is as unabashedly frank as it is lyrical, this is the collective voice of real mothers -- raised above the din -- in all their humor, anger, vulnerability, grace, and glory.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061850240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 10/13/2009
Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
Format: eBook
Pages: 400
File size: 591 KB

About the Author

About The Author

Kate Moses is a former contributing writer for Salon.com and one of the founding editors of Salon's Mothers Who Think. She is also the author of Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, as well as coeditor, with Camille Peri, of Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children.


Camille Peri was a founding editor of the Mothers Who Think website at Salon.com and coeditor, with Kate Moses, of the American Book Award–winning anthology Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons.

Hometown:

San Francisco, California

Date of Birth:

April 9, 1962

Place of Birth:

San Francisco, California

Education:

B.A., University of the Pacific, 1984

Read an Excerpt

Because I Said So

33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves
By Kate Moses

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Kate Moses
All right reserved.

ISBN: 0060598794

Chapter One

The Scarlet Letter Z

Asra Q. Nomani

Ugly whispers about me began long before I found myself, in the summer of 2004, standing before a massive green door that led into the mosque in the town that I have known as my home since I was a girl of ten. The door stood in front of me like an entryway into my own personal hell.

My local community of Muslims -- interconnected via the Internet with like-minded Muslims globally -- had rebuked me for giving birth to a child out of wedlock and living without shame with this fact, then writing about it publicly to defend the rights of women who were quietly punished for similar cultural trespasses in the far corners of the world. From the pulpit of our mosque, a Ph.D. student called unchaste women "worthless." In the grocery store, an elder I had called "uncle" since my childhood days averted his eyes from mine when I passed him in the fruit section. A professor told his children to stay away from me. My family lost Muslim friendships of thirty years, relationships considered solid since we first made this town our home.

Criticism and condemnation seemed to come from everywhere: a Charleston, West Virginia, man wrote that I should stay in the shadows: "It would have been best if the facts of [your son's] birth had not been so callously flaunted ... Do you HAVE to rub it in?" When a Muslim immigrant said I was unfit to be a leader because of my unwed motherhood, an American convert responded, "... why not just make her wear a big red Z on all of her clothes, for zina, so everyone can steer clear and judge her for the rest of her life, like the adulteress in The Scarlet Letter?" Finally, the men at my mosque were putting me on trial, trying to banish me -- a symbolic exile from our community.

It was my mother, Sajida, strong and supportive and curious, who first sought out Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel. "You are Hester Prynne," she told me when she closed the cover. I read it next, and she was right: the elders of our mosque were like the seventeenthcentury Puritans in The Scarlet Letter who sentenced a single mother, Hester Prynne, to forever wear the letter A on her chest as punishment for the adultery in which she had conceived a child.

Three hundred years later, I was being subjected to the same experience of religious scrutiny, censure, and community rejection in a country that was founded on religious freedom. But could I garner anywhere near the strength of Hester's inner character in the inquisition that I faced? To walk into my house of worship was to invite the demons of hatred into my life. With a deep breath I opened the door, my son scampering inside ahead of me.

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

An assembly of my community sat, mostly men with beards, crocheted prayer caps, and dim-colored pants and T-shirts; others were clean-shaven, intermixed with women hooded with hijab, the head covering of Muslim women. I tucked my jet black hair into the hood of the oversize black, hooded jacket I had won in a beach volleyball tournament in my younger days. Like Hester most of her life, hiding her lush hair under a cap, I was making myself asexual in this world in which my sexuality had become the evidence of my criminality. But my jacket had the label "Six Pack," insider volleyball lingo for the power of a hard-driven spike hitting an opponent's face.

I took a seat at one end of the cafeteria-style tables arranged in a U. At the head of the table, a gray-haired, bearded, casually dressed elder, a university professor, got down to business. He pulled strips of paper with names typed on them out of a plastic Ziploc sandwich bag. He read the names on the slips of paper as if he were the master of ceremonies at a carnival drawing winners for raffle prizes. In fact, these were the names of those who would be the jury for the secret tribunal that the professor and the other leaders of the mosque had initiated against me. The judges at this "Ziploc justice" trial would be the five-member board of trustees that ran the mosque.

My crimes? In October 2003, I had walked through the front door of my mosque on the first night it opened, my infant son, Shibli, on my hip, instead of taking the rear entrance designated for women. I sat in the secluded women's balcony that night, but eleven days later, I walked through the front door and into the main hall, which is reserved for men. Then, when the mosque elders wouldn't meet with me, I wrote about the rights denied women in mosques such as mine, drawing attacks on my family and myself. But questioning the leadership and policies of the mosque wasn't enough to earn the full wrath of my community. My greatest offense was being an unwed mother.

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest, amid the gloom ...

From my first memories, my life has been defined by a search for community. I was born in India but came to America at the age of four to join my mother and father, arriving with my older brother, Mustafa. Our parents had settled in New Jersey so that my father, Zafar, could pursue his academic career. I loved the one-story red house that we called home ...

Continues...


Excerpted from Because I Said So by Kate Moses Copyright © 2006 by Kate Moses. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Introductionxi
The Scarlet Letter Z1
Two Heads Are Better Than Three19
Material Girls23
Prayin' Hard for Better Dayz37
Thirteen55
On Giving Hope66
Harry Potter and Divorce Among the Muggles79
Escape from the Devil's Playground88
Boys! Give Me Boys!95
Why I Can Never Go Back to the French Laundry105
There's No Being Sad Here116
Was He Black or White?136
Motherlove148
Immaculate Conception156
Thin, Blonde, and Drunk165
Fight Club168
Chaos Theory173
Are Hunters Born or Made?184
Wolves at the Door192
Mothers Just Like Us203
Iranian Revelation216
Survivor235
Bald Single Mother Does Not Seek Date248
Natural Mother252
No Blame262
Why I Left My Children269
Invisible Worlds281
The Babysitters' Club286
Ourselves, Carried Forward297
Dude, Where's My Family?304
My Surrogate310
The Belly Unbuttoned324
Mother of the World334
Contributors' Notes363
Essay Credits371

Reading Group Guide

Introduction

From the editors of Salon.com's Mothers Who Think, which led to the American Book Award-winning anthology Mothers Who Think, comes a new collection of essays by women, about women, for women. Elevating the discussion of motherhood above the level of tantrum control and potty training, the essays cover everything from the anguish of giving up custody after the divorce to the joys and heartaches of having one child with autism and one without.

Questions

  1. Which of the essays spoke to you the most and why? Did you disagree with any of the essays or have you had an opposite experience?

  2. Do you find it hard to juggle family, work, and time for yourself? How do you (or don't you) do it? Do you feel that one or two areas of your life suffer for the sake of another?

  3. Several of the essays deal with various cultural backgrounds and their importance in the authors' lives. Do you find that you draw strength from your cultural history? Do you try to make sure that your own children grow up with both knowledge of and pride in their family's history?

  4. The Ayelet Waldman essay has received a lot of media attention, both negative and positive. How did her essay make you feel in terms of your own family?

About the Authors

Camille Peri was a founding editor of the Mothers Who Think website at Salon.com and coeditor, with Kate Moses, of the American Book Award-winning anthology Mother's Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons.

Kate Moses is a former contributing writer for Salon.com and one of the founding editors of Salon's Mothers Who Think. She is also the author of Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, as well as coeditor, with Camille Peri, of Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children.

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