moving toward labor & delivery: the birth of a book

by bam

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this is the part of book birthing where, on one hand, you’re finally breathing, but on the other hand, your breath is beginning to quicken, and you remember you’ll soon be in the part where you feel dizzy nearly all the time.

what that means is that “the book” is off at the printers. the jacket cover too. there’s not a single mark on any page left for me to make, to fix, to erase. it’s rolling off the presses as i type. and, any week now, a big cardboard box will kerplop on my front stoop. when i lug it in the house, haul out the scissors, cut the tape and peek inside, i’ll see the one book i wanted to leave behind on this holy earth.

it’s called motherprayer: lessons in loving, and it’s the deepest work — to date — of my living, breathing motherheart.

all along — ever since the moment (a quarter century ago) when i found out a tiny heart beat inside of me — i’ve been taking notes, scribbling down the lessons learned, recounting the hours when i’d run out of answers, couldn’t quite find my way. my teachers, time after blessed time, have been those two sweet boys whose lives unfurl right before my eyes. and, nearly as certainly, the flanks of wise-souled motherers all around me.

more often than not, in hours glorious or sorrowful, when i shook with loneliness or wrapped myself in joy, i turned to the one sure thing i knew might steady me, or at least get me through till daybreak: motherprayer. those murmurations of the heart and soul that sometimes find no words. sometimes spill in time with tears. or even rise in holy hallelujah (so sweet and rare those moments are).

because part of the birthing of a book means you must practice being brave, stepping out into winds that might blow cold, blow harsh, i’m going to take a baby step here, and share with you the press release written by my beloved comrade kelly hughes, the publicist for slowing time, and now for motherprayer.

her words made me cry (i wasn’t the only one, i’m told). which is a holy anointing, indeed. here, for your eyes, before anyone beyond the publisher gets a peek, the official press release for the one book i most deeply wanted to birth.

(you can tell i didn’t write it, because kelly types with caps, something i seem so disinclined to do….)

***

Journalist recounts her “crash course in loving” in new book Motherprayer

Writer Barbara Mahany’s ability to capture the beauty of small moments, honed as a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune, captivated readers of her first book, Slowing Time. Now, she turns her attention to the sacred mysteries of mothering in Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving (Abingdon Press, $18.99 hardcover, April 4, 2017), with a hope to apply these lessons to the world beyond our own familial bubbles.

For Mahany, who has two sons, “motherprayer” captures the essence of what mothers do: a way of loving that becomes prayer beyond words. “Mothering was my crash course in love,” she says, teaching her how to “love in the way we yearn to be loved: Without end. Without question. Without giving in to exhaustion. Love with a big and boundless heart. With eyes and ears wide open. Love even when it’s not so easy.”

“No other instruction has so captivated or ignited me,” she writes. “Nor so blessed me.”

Before becoming a journalist, Mahany was a pediatric oncology nurse. “Which means I’d spent a good many years entwined with life and death. Paying attention, asking and pondering sometimes impossible questions. And being left, too often, without the faintest answer.”

“Three threads of me—mother, journalist, once and always a nurse—combined in ways I’d not anticipated,” Mahany says. As she kept watch “on the species I birthed,” she kept field notes, gathered here in the book. The arc begins with her first pregnancy and continues on to the present day, written in real time: on the eve of first grade; the first night her firstborn drove off alone in the family car; while grieving a daughter lost to miscarriage; after a crushing baseball loss that broke a second-grader’s heart. These and other moments are extracted from motherhood “to ask the toughest questions, lay bare essential truths, and seize whatever shards of illumination I might have stumbled upon,” such as:

• “The Most Interesting Things Moms Just Know”: a reflection on mothering as “paying pure attention,” spurred by a question from her youngest son. Kids apparently have no clue that moms “live and breathe to map out his landscape; that as he shovels pasta tubes into his mouth, we are studying his sweet face; no clue that we’re listening intently.”

• Mothering Day: Mahany suggests this as a replacement for Mother’s Day, to honor all who practice mothering: “tender caring, coaxing life, leaving mercy in your wake, the art that knows no gender bounds, that the world needs in mighty thronging masses.”

• Teaching Tenderness: on taking her son out on a worm rescue mission, moving those stranded on the sidewalk after a rain. She instructs her sons in “a curriculum of tenderness toward all things living and even those that aren’t.” Mahany’s boys know their mom to be “on a mission from God, perhaps, to let no winged or multi-limbed thing suffer crushing fate or die in a wad of toilet paper.”

• “The Egg that Wouldn’t Take No for an Answer”: Reflections on a most welcome last-chance baby, “eight pure pounds of Dream Come True, Prayer Answered, birthed against all odds, as I barreled toward 45.”

• Food offerings for heart and soul: “Serving up what amounts to depths of heart, to say in mashed potatoes and Irish butter: I love you dearly, and I’m so sorry I’ve been distracted. The hours of stirring, of simmering, of thinking something through, not whipping it off in the last ten minutes before the hunger sirens screech, doesn’t it all find its way deep down in the deliciousness?”

Mahany is Christian and her husband is Jewish, so her family encounters God in the rituals and idioms of two faith traditions. She writes about this weaving together of traditions in the faith life of her family. Since motherprayer can at times be expressed through food, readers will find recipes “From the Cookery Files” throughout the book, such as “Birthday Mac and Cheese (Or for Any Day When Comfort Is All You Need),” “Height-of-Summer Peach Shortcake,” and “Welcome-Home Brisket.”

“Mothering a child is the most sacred calling of my life,” Mahany writes. “It begs all I am and all I’ve got, and then some. Without prayer—the inside line to angels, saints, and Holy God—I’d not have made it, not even close, to labor and delivery. Nor a single day thereafter.”

let me know what you think. 

love, b.

p.s. you have no idea how much courage it takes to hit the publish button here this morning….