World's Best Mother
World's Best Mother
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781642860870 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | World Editions |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
NURIA LABARI was born in Santander and is a writer and journalist. She has written for El Mundo, as well as Telecinco, where she was the editor in chief for web content. She is currently a frequent contributor to El País. Her short-story collection Los borrachos de mi vida (“The Drunkards in My Life”) won the seventh Premio Narrativa de Caja de Madrid in 2009. In 2016 she published her first novel, Cosas que brillan cuando están rotas (“Things That Shine When Broken”). World’s Best Mother is her latest work.
KATIE WHITTEMORE translates from the Spanish and lives in Valencia, Spain. She is the translator of Four by Four (Open Letter Books, 2020) by Sara Mesa, and her work has appeared in Two Lines, The Arkansas International, The Common Online, Gulf Coast Magazine Online, The Brooklyn Rail, and InTranslation. Current projects include novels by Spanish authors Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, and Aliocha Coll (for Open Letter Books), and Aroa Moreno Durán (for Tinder Press).
Read an Excerpt
ONE
THE PUNCTUALITY OF PLAYMOBIL BUNNIES
I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I can’t have children, I write. I can’t have children, I’m a mother, I write, I’m a woman. I write, I’m a mother, I’m a woman, I can’t have children.
I like watching the sparrows that sit on the high-tension wire outside my office in the outskirts of Madrid. They perch, equidistant, on the black line. Notes on a staff of music in the sky. I recently learned that birds position themselves like this because it’s their way of being together, evenly spaced at the minimum distance between members of their species. Sometimes, when a bird tires of being with the others, it flies away. That’s being a bird.
I’m a woman, not a bird. And some evenings, just before I dissolve into the traffic jam that will carry me home, I try to determine the minimum distance I should maintain with respect to other members of my own species. Some days—today, for example—I wonder if such a distance even exists. To be honest, all my points of reference were blown sky high when I became a mother. Everything’s up in the air now. Everything except me. Because, unlike birds, I can’t fly.
“They’re doing the tests tomorrow,” I said to MyMother.
Five years ago. The brief flash of her scared-squirrel face.
“I don’t understand what they can tell you from a blood test. I know you think I’m very old-fashioned, but this is something new, all the stuff you girls go through these days. I never wanted to have children. I mean, not like people want them nowadays. I got pregnant without realizing it. I didn’t plan, I didn’t try. Of course, I was younger than you are—twenty-four. Can you imagine? You wouldn’t have been an only child if your father hadn’t died, that’s for sure. It’s different now. My gynecologist told me that you’re not actually very young at thirty-five, that the reason you’re not getting pregnant is because you waited too long. But it’s your insistence that I don’t understand. Babies come when they come, and if you start planning on them, they don’t. I certainly wouldn’t have had you, if I’d stopped to think about it. No, listen. One day, I showered to go out with your aunts, and when I went to put on my green dress with the buttons, it didn’t fit. I thought it had shrunk. It didn’t even occur to me to think that I’d gained weight. But I was pregnant. And I didn’t stop gaining, more than fifty-five pounds in the end. After I had you, I never weighed less than 130.”
“I’ll get the results in ten days.”
“Me! Who never weighed more than 110 pounds and had to eat cornstarch to put on weight!”
I recall many conversations that I had with MyMother when I was trying to get pregnant, all of them immaterial. Talking to one’s own mother is impossible because mothers are like mute magpies: they never shut up, but they don’t have anything to say. MyMother doesn’t stop, words gush from her. The same messages day after day, year after year. The same stories. Her chatter, a music aimed at the back of my head. Like a revolver. And yet, it’s a kind of comfort, too: when I talk to her, I’m not looking for dialogue or ideas, but the hum, her melody. Sometimes I just want the sound of her voice saying whatever it has to say, and what I have surely heard before. It used to drive me crazy. I wanted her to be direct. I thought her ideas didn’t make sense, that she could do better. But now, I think it’s because she’s MyMother, a mother, and that means she knows her music is all I’ll have left when she dies. She doesn’t want to leave me alone.
The medium is the message and the mothers of the world decided a long time ago that it had all been said before. No one ever listened to them, anyway.
The thing is, four years ago I too became a mother. And what’s worse is I still haven’t found my own melody. That’s why we’re here, in this book that will be my failure and disappearance as a mother and as a writer, when I haven’t established myself in either field.
I’m an amateur mother and I’m already done for. I write behind my daughters’ backs, like they aren’t enough. I write when I should be playing with them or telling them a story or making a cake. And when this book is finished they will know.
But I’m not really what you’d call a writer, either. I’ve written a few dozen short stories—one of them won a local prize—a novel I haven’t managed to get published and another I haven’t managed to finish. I make money as a creative director in a digital marketing agency. I’m good at it, they pay me well, and I enjoy myself. I have no excuse for spending my child-rearing days writing, and much less writing about motherhood, which will be the definitive confirmation of my lack of literary ambition. Because I don’t think you can be an artist and write as a mother.
Talented artists are daughters, always their mothers’ daughters regardless of whether or not they have their own offspring. Good writers write about daughterhood, or about any other subject in which their point of view forms the center of the universe. Like Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, an autopsy of motherhood in which she is the daughter, of course, because Gornick is a creator. In contrast, a mother is always the satellite of another more important body. A mother is the antithesis of the creative Ego. “Mothers do not write, they are written,” pronounced the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch around 1880. Arguably, this still stands today.
That’s how I know that if I persist in this, I’ll end up strolling into publishers’ offices with a manuscript under my arm that will sooner or later be labeled “a woman’s intimate journal,” an invisible category that, in book circles, denotes a highly suspect lack of literary ambition.