#BlogTour ‘The Best Most Awful Job-Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood’ ed by Katherine May

About the book…

What does it mean to be a mother?

Twenty writers speak out in this searingly honest, diverse and powerful collection.

Motherhood is life-changing. Disorientating, overwhelming, intense on every level, it can leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself. Yet despite more women speaking out in recent years about the reality of their experiences – good, bad and in between – all too often it’s the same stories getting told, while key parts of the maternal experience still remain unspeakable and unseen.

There are a million different ways to be a mother, yet the vision we see in books, on screen and online overwhelmingly fails to represent this commonplace yet extraordinary experience for most of us. It’s time to broaden the conversation.

The Best, Most Awful Job is a deeply personal collection about motherhood in all its raw, heart-wrenching, gloriously impossible forms. Overturning assumptions, breaking down myths, shattering stereotypes, it challenges perceptions of what it means to be a mother.

Pulsating with energy and emotion, and covering deeply personal stories The Best, Most Awful Job brings together a diverse range of bold and brilliant writers and asks you to listen.

Some highlights include:

• Hollie McNish on her trademark outspoken and sane form
• Josie George writing beautifully and carefully about mothering yourself and your child when your body won’t play ball
• Michelle Adams on meeting your adoptive child and learning to be a mother
• Peggy Riley on the lost heartbeat of a deeply yearned-for child
• Mimi Aye on the pain of her children being seen as ‘other’ in their own country
• Leah Hazard – practising midwife and author of Hard Pushed – on the scars our bodies hold as mothers…
• Stories also cover: being unable to conceive, step-parenting, losing a child, single parenthood, being an autistic mother, being a reluctant home-schooler and the many ways in which race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect Motherhood.

”..we need to talk about all the different ways of being a mother. Even when we don’t relate, we can listen. Sometimes there’s strength in knowing that there’s more than one way to get by. Sometimes we see a version of ourselves in lives that might otherwise feel  alien to us. Either way, we learn that complexity is something to be celebrated-Katherine May”

‘The Best Most Awful Job’ edited by Katherine May is out in hardback from Elliott and Thompson from MArch 19th-just in time for Mother’s Day!
Huge thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things for the blogtour invite and gifted ebook copy of the book-each of these essays is a jewel on a necklace that is known as motherhood-I feel it is most appropriate to be reading it today , on Mother’s Day, when I am home with 3 of my children and seperated from the other 2. The eldest is self-isolating after her daughter was born on the 12th March and the second eldest is keeping a social distance due to her and her girlfriend having colds. So waves through a window and deliveries of baby milk and vegan food on doorsteps will have to suffice for now.

There are so many wonderful parts to choose from that I feel whichever part I put in, there will be more I could have picked instead-I want to say that this is a smorgasbord of honest-brutal, sweary intimate honesty-about motherhood the likes of which I have never come across.

”My children are the beating heart of my existence, the dogged bass line to the song of my life. They write the permanent melody and I redraft the lyrics over and over again, snapping my pencil a thousand times along the way because no creative endeavour is without its missteps and meanders-Javaria Alebar”

It’s a beautiful thing, peeling back the layers of what motherhood means to these 20 women in their incarnations as single, co-parenting, mothers to be, step-mothers, queer mothers…all sorts of topics are bought to the table and the main commonality is how motherhood is portrayed versus the stark relity of it, and the checks and balances which perpetuate a fake image of perfection.

From the start of your journey to be a parent-pretty much as soon as you are partnered off the inevitable questions descend-to the process of parenting, the load of the work is the mother’s, it belongs to the woman.

 ”Maternal rage is about more than just the difficulty of raising small children. It’s a consequence of all the things that women have to endure throughout our lives. That we are expected to slot ourselves into a work system created for 1950s men; that, despite legislation, women still have to worry about telling employers they are pregnant, still struggle to get by on maternity pay, and then still have to pay extortionate childcare costs in order to go back to work. That, despite nods towards a more equitable arrangement such as shared parental leave, the reality is still that working mothers’ careers stall or go backwards while their male partners’ prospects might even improve-Saima Mir”

Each writer is unflinching in their description of how mothering feels to them, what their rude awakening moment has been-from Emily Morris’ single parenting in ‘The Abscence’ to Dani McClain’s ‘On Stigma and Stoicism’, can be as random as a seaside trip, or as specific as  spot on national radio which triggers a reaction. Emily’s constant vigilance over her son at the seaside and realisation that she was entirely responsible for another human being is so moving, as is Dani’s empathetic and passionate defence of the successful black mother. It really made me think, as the reader, how the narratives we buy into(single parent=irresponsible, never successful) are so rarely challenged when it comes to women. A single dad, however….

Hollie McNish’s fabulous piece, ‘Can I Touch Myself, Though?’ bought back memories of being pregnant and the shocked faces of fellow midwives when asking ‘what positions are best to have sex in?’ As a woman you are reduced to, and defined by, your sexual function. Reproduction is the aim of the game and the information imparted to Hollie about basically saying ‘yep, you are ready to ride that horse again’ dealt with nothing particular to her. It did not take into account whether she wanted to masturbate, bathe, apply oils. What mattered was that she was good to go, with me being pregnant it was as though I had achieved the act of being pregnant, did I really think being a sexual being was important after that goal was scored?(Newsflash, some pregnant women like having sex a lot)

MiMi Aye’s essay, ‘Misfit’, is beautifully rendered, I love her wordsmithery(not sure if that is a word but it seems to suit) as she details straddlign two cultures and how her children are raised in a land that does not revognise her as one of our own,. And then the identity and culture of her children-where does it belong and who teaches them this?

The act of becoming a mum, the route by which you arrive as a parent is so multi-faceted and so contrived by nature, fate and circumstance that the narratives on motherhood are endless-this collection merely scratches the surface. However, it is curated with love and care by Katherine May who has tonally run the pieces to make a coherent , smoothly flowing whole. Each word is cherished, each experience beautifully framed as it sits side by side by side with it’s sisters. I devoured it whole, eager to read the way others had come to realise what motherhood represents and the different nuances of the shared experience-as I waved to my step-daughter and stood a respectful distance from my other one , the realsiation that parenting and mothering may undergo a paradigm shift due to the strange times in which we inhabit, really hit me.

The burden of work and motherhood are inextricably linked-for many women they will be key workers who are dispatched to care for other women’s children, whilst they , themselves, provide vital services. They may now currently be concerned about educational provision , exam results,university applications and a million other things which contribute towards a happy,healthy child. But for the moment, ‘a day at a time’ seems to be the mantra by which we are living.

Also, I really really love Hollie McNish. What she said hit home so hard and fiercely I genuinely would follow her to the ends of the earth.

I would highly recommend buying this for yourself and any mothers or mothers to be that you know, and following the authors on their social media platforms. What they have to say is deeply, profoundly moving and I cannot say anymore than that.

About the editor…

Katherine May is an author of fiction and memoir whose most recent works have shown a willingness to deal frankly with the more ambiguous aspects of parenting. In The Electricity of Every Living Thing she explored the challenges – and joys – of being an autistic mother, and sparked a debate about the right of mothers to ask for solitude. In the forthcoming Wintering, she looks at the ways in which parenting can lead to periods of isolation and stress. She lives with her husband and son in Whitstable, Kent.

Links-http://katherine-may.com/

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