![]() ![]() ![]() As she notes in the introduction to the tenth-anniversary edition, in the early 1970s “there was nearly nothing being written on motherhood as an issue.” Rich broke silences by admitting the deep ambivalences at the heart of mothering, the extraordinary love and secret fury. It is easy to forget how groundbreaking Rich’s first prose book was, with its blend of research, personal experience, and theory, and its exposé of the patriarchal expectation that mothers be passive, silent, self-sacrificial carers. I read-or tried to read-while remembering the first time I read Rich’s lucid prose a decade ago, and the way silence stretched, luxurious and free. ![]() I read the book-or tried to read the book-while Miriam, seven, and Pilgram, four, rolled cars on the floor beside me, ran like airplanes, asked me to slice an apple, asked to go to the snow hill, climbed my body like a snow hill, pushed furniture together to approximate a snow hill, and wailed that they couldn’t find their mittens. ![]() I read it sequestered in a suburban house with husband and two children, all of us working, schooling, playing, living within its four walls, hemmed in first by an early Saskatchewan blizzard, then public health regulations limiting in-home gatherings to no more than five. Eight months into the pandemic, I reread Adrienne Rich’s 1976 classic Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. ![]()
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