“Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”

 

 - Toni Morrison, Beloved

 

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Don’t stick your finger in the ketchup bottle,
Mother said. It might get stuck, &
then you’ll have to wait for your father
to get home to pull it out. He
won’t be happy to find a dirty fingernail
squirming in the ketchup that he’s going to use
on his hamburger. He’ll yank it out so hard
that for the rest of your life you won’t
be able to wear a ring on that finger.
And if you ever get a girlfriend, &
you hold hands, she’s bound to ask you
why one of your fingers is deformed,
& you’ll be obligated to tell her how
you didn’t listen to your mother, &
insisted on playing with the ketchup bottle,
& she’ll get to thinking, he probably won’t
listen to me either, & she’ll push your hand away.

 

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1. Mary

2. Jocasta

3. Eve

4. Mitochondrial Eve

5. Sigmund Freud’s mom

 

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Rock ‘n’ Roll Mom (1988)

 

Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)

 

The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (1993)

 

My Mom Works at Sears (1996)

 

Extreme Mom (2004)

 

Alpha Mom (2006)

 

Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom (2008)

 

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“To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.” - Maya Angelou

 

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A reader sends in “types of mothers in our brave new world”:

 

1. Gestational mother (also known as surrogate mother)
2. Egg donor mother (self explanatory)
3. Clone mother (like Dolly the sheep’s mother, who Dolly was a clone of)
4. Foster mother (temporary caretaker of child)
5. Adoptive mother (also known simply as “mother”)

 

Extra: Mother

 

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“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” - Albert Einstein

 

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“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895
 

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The Daughter Goes To Camp
Sharon Olds
  
In the taxi alone, home from the airport,
I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept
creeping over the smooth plastic
to find your strong meaty little hand and
squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the
noble ribbing of the corduroy,
straight and regular as anything in nature, to
find the slack cool cheek of a
child in the heat of a summer morning –
nothing, nothing, waves of bawling
hitting me in hot flashes like some
change of life, some boiling wave
rising in me toward your body, toward
where it should have been on the seat, your
brow curved like a cereal bowl, your
eyes dark with massed crystals like the
magnified scales of a butterfly’s wing, the
delicate feelers of your limp hair,
floods of blood rising in my face as I
tried to reassemble the hot
gritty molecules in the car, to
make you appear like a holograph
on the back seat, pull you out of nothing
as I once did — but you were really gone,
the cab glossy as a slit caul out of
which you had slipped, the air glittering
electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.

 

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Feasts celebrating mothers have existed throughout the world since the beginning of time. The modern version of Mother’s Day in the United States, was first observed in 1907.

 

Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia decided that it would be a wonderful way to honor her deceased mother. Two years later, Jarvis and friends began a letter-writing campaign to create a Mother’s Day observance.

 

Soon after, in 1914, the US Congress passed legislation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

 

81: Percentage of women 40 to 44 years old who are mothers. In 1980, 90 percent of women in that age group were mothers.

 

How Many Children: Only about 11 percent of women end their childbearing years with four or more children, compared with 36 percent in 1976.

 

2: Average number of children that women today can expect to have in their lifetime.

 

The flowers you buy mom probably were grown in California or Colombia. Among states, California was the leading provider of cut flowers in 2001, alone accounting for more than two-thirds of the nation’s total domestic production ($292 million out of $424 million). Meanwhile, the value of U.S. imports of cut flowers from Colombia, the leading foreign supplier to the United States, during 2002 was $289 million.

 

The value of shipments of Mother’s Day cards by greeting card publishers totaled $147.9 million in 1992, up from $80.2 million in 1987.

 

New Moms: 4.0 million — Number of women who have babies each year. Of this number, about 450,000 are teens, and almost 100,000 are age 40 or over.

 

Overall, 14 percent (504,000) of all births in the United States in 1995 were to foreign-born women; 43 percent of these 504,000 births were to women born in Mexico.

 

24.8: Median age of women when they give birth for the first time – meaning one-half are above this age and one-half are below. The median age has risen nearly three years since 1970.

 

Still, the median age of women who gave birth in 1993 was 26.4 years; those giving birth for the first time were 23.8 years. These median ages were 1.0 and 1.7 years older respectively than they were 20 years earlier.

40: Percentage of births taking place annually that are the mothers’ first. Another 33 percent are the second; 17 percent, the third; and 11 percent, the fourth or more.

 

36,000: Number of births each year attended by physicians, midwives or others that did not occur in hospitals.

 

1-in-33: The odds of a woman delivering twins. Her odds of having triplets or other multiple births was approximately 1-in-539.

 

August: The most popular month in which to have a baby, with more than 360,000 births taking place that month in 2001.

 

Tuesday: The most popular day of the week in which to have a baby, with an average of more than 12,000 births taking place on Tuesdays during 2001.

 

Working Moms: 55, Percentage of mothers in the labor force with infant children, down from a record 59 percent in 1998. This marks the first significant decline in this rate since the Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1976. In that year, 31 percent of these mothers were in the labor force.

 

Among mothers between 15 and 44 who do not have infants, 74 percent are in the labor force.

 

To help juggle motherhood and careers, many mothers turn to one of the more than 67,000 day-care centers across the country. Among more than 10 million preschoolers, about 2 million were primarily cared for in such a facility during the bulk of the mothers’ working hours.

 

Single Moms: 10 million — The number of single mothers living with children under 18, up from 3 million in 1970.

 

For more info and sources for these figures, please visit:

 

 

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Mom Jeans
http://youtube.com/watch?v=KTl6aJDlDiY

 

Mother’s Day – Barats and Bareta
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/115533/mothers_day_picture_aka_birth_control/

 

Painfully cheesy GotoMom.com Music Video
http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=824098577&channel=307758099

 

Mr T. – Treat your Mother Right
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7_rBidCkJxo

 

Bonus Folly
www.comedycentral.com/motherload

 

 

 

http://my.videoegg.com/video/dsxIrN or view it at www.adleyfleming.com

 

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http://www.classiccafes.co.uk/excelsior_special.htm
 

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1. Aliens (1986)
2. Not Without My Daughter (1991)
3. Stella Dallas (1937)
4. White Heat (Top o’ the World, Ma!, 2005)
5. Mommy Dearest (1981)

 

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The Lanyard
Billy Collins
 
The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
 
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past –
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
 
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
 
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
 
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
 
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift — not the archaic truth
 
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

 

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Bottle feeding: An opportunity for Daddy to get up at 2 am too.

 

Family planning: The art of spacing your children the proper distance apart to keep you on the edge of financial disaster

 

Feedback: The inevitable result when the baby doesn’t appreciate the strained carrots.

 

Full name: What you call your child when you’re mad at him.

 

Grandparents: The people who think your children are wonderful even though they’re sure you’re not raising them right.

 

Hearsay: What toddlers do when anyone mutters a dirty word.

 

Impregnable: A woman whose memory of labor is still vivid.

 

Show off: A child who is more talented than yours.

 

Sterilize: What you do to your first baby’s pacifier by boiling it and to your last baby’s pacifier by blowing on it.

 

Temper tantrums: What you should keep to a minimum so as to not upset the children.

 

Top bunk: Where you should never put a child wearing Superman jammies.

 

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“Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.” - Arnold Bennett

 

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Mag Awards Snub Frequent Faves:

 

 

 

Book Reviews Aren’t Dying – They’ve Just Moved:

 

 

 

“What is it about book clubs that turns us all so evil? They may parade themselves as grown-up gatherings, but they bear far more resemblance to a club formed by a cluster of girls in a playground; exclusion and bullying are rife”:

 

 

 

“Why is it that ‘flatlined’ may be the best term to describe the state of discourse in librarianship?”:

 

 

 

“The novel is constantly pushed by the culture towards worthiness, towards Aristotle’s Poetics, towards tragedy. The next great novel will do to the contemporary literary novel what Cervantes did to the chivalric romance. It’s not that contemporary literary novels are bad. Line by line, book by book, they’re often wonderful. But in the same few ways. Who needs more of that?”:

 

 

 

“The European Union is issuing a directive that will prohibit theatre producers from printing misleading quotes to hype their shows. ’The legislation, which will come into force in December, will make it illegal to extract a positive word or phrase from a theatre review if that paints a misleading picture of the article as a whole’”:

 

 

Philly Crowd Demands 10 Encores From Kissen:

 

 

Looking Forward To The Death Of The CD:

 

 

 

“Lives and minds can over the years intermingle. Thus will you live on after your death. Or so Douglas Hofstadter has it”:

 

 

 

“Stand aside, chick lit: the big thing now is mis lit, misery memoirs, traumatic tales of childhood torture and suffering. Usually, daddy did it. Maybe mommy too”:

 

 

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“A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.” - Agatha Christie

 

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“Sweater, n.:  garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.” - Ambrose Bierce

 

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E-Verse Radio town you really have to visit:

 

Intercourse, Pennsylvania

 

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You can’t pour a gallon into a quart.

If someone invites you to leave, just leave.

Never think anyone’s too good for you.

Be glad you’re not too stupid, or too short.

Never wear your hopes on your sleeve.

Don’t slow down, but never rush a debut.

You may be brighter than some of your teachers,

But don’t count on it, and don’t piss them off.

Even if you do dumb things, don’t get caught.

Never trust one who’s cruel to small creatures.

Don’t be a pig, even when you’re at the trough.

Someday, you’ll remember less than you forgot.

And the biggest one of all, if you care:

Despite what is promised, life is not fair.

 

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PEEL Reading Series: Poetry, Excerpts, Essays, and Letters Please join us for a special PPEE edition of the PEEL reading series. The short-format reading will feature a seat-wetting double dose of poetry by Bronwen Tate and William Hubbard, short fiction by Jennifer Cooke, and Richard Grayson with an essay on the personal and political sides of Roe v. Wade.

 

About the authors:
Bronwen Tate, a native of Portland, OR, lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word For/Word, Kulture Vulture, Lungful!, HOW2, Typo Magazine and horse less review, among others. She received her MFA in Poetry from Brown University.

 

William Hubbard is the editor of CapGun, a journal of arts and letters based in Brooklyn, New York. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Mantis, and Red Line Blues, and his chapbook, A Suggestion Regarding Vacations, will be published by Third Class Press in July. He lives in Brooklyn, and is currently working on a screen adaptation of Robert Creeley’s only novel, The Island.

 

Jennifer Cooke lives and writes in New York City. She has been published in a few literary magazines and newspapers. When she’s not writing, she’s taking care of her two kids and husband.

 

Richard Grayson is the author of the story and essay collections With Hitler in New York, Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz, I Survived Caracas Traffic, The Silicon Valley Diet, Highly Irregular Stories, And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and the recently-published WRITE-IN: Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida’s Fourth Congressional District, based on his 2004 feature on the McSweeney’s website. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The Orlando Sentinel, The Arizona Republic, The San Jose Mercury News and People. A retired
teacher and lawyer, he lives in Brooklyn.

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“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.” - James Joyce

 

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E-Verse Radio collective noun of the week:

 

A pride of stage mothers.

 

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“Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.” - Oprah Winfrey

 

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Medusa
Sylvia Plath

 

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea’s incoherences,
You house your unnerving head — God-ball,
Lens of mercies,

 

Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel’s shadow,
Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center,
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure,

 

Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.

 

In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.

 

I didn’t call you.
I didn’t call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta

 

Paralysing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from blood bells
Of the fuscia. I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,

 

Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,

 

Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!

 

There is nothing between us.

 

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“Motherhood has a very humanizing effect.  Everything gets reduced to essentials.” - Meryl Streep

 

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Reports from the E-Verse Universe

 

 

“Tootsie.”

 

 

 

“While I agree with 1, 2, and 4, I would argue that La Femme Nikita (the French original), should replace either Grease or Lady for a Day in a top five of makeover films.”

 

 

 

“I’m not embarrassed to add ‘She’s All That’ to that list. I totally freakin’ loved that movie, as ridiculous as it is.”

 

 

“What about Anne Sexton?”

 

 

 

“I find it offensive to connect the suicide of poets to the splendor of their work (see the list of greatest women poets who committed suicide). Sappho said: ‘There should not be weeping in a poet’s home. Such things do not become us.’ I take her to mean by this, not that one should be unfeeling, but that a poet’s sensibility allows you to view the sorrows of this world with a little compassion and wisdom. Suicide is not poetic. It’s pathetic in every sense of the word. I am referring to the romantic notion that to be a great artist you have to suffer and that the suicides clearly having suffered are therefore great artists. A list of ’Greatest Poets who Committed Suicide’ just seems as inappropriate as making a list of ’Greatest Poets who screwed up their marriage’ or ’Greatest Poets who were kleptomaniacs.’”

 

[I would love to see a list of Greatest Poets Who Were Kleptomaniacs. - E]

 

 

 

 

“Towards the end of last year I became concerned about the amount of reading/TV watching I had done on all things Third Reich. I think I became really worried when I actually set the VDR to record a documentary on the pets of Hitler’s inner circle. So I made a vow to go cold turkey on all things Hitler for as long as possible. I had just managed about 8 months, when you had to include your top five alternate histories in which the Nazis win. I am currently fighting an irresistible urge to order at least two of them on Amazon this very evening, knowing that this will be the equivalent of having ‘just a couple of cigarettes’ when drunk. History is full of examples of tyranny, warmongering and genocide, just what it is about the Nazis that makes them so endlessly fascinating to so many people like me? I would love to hear E-Versers’ theories on this one.”

 

 

“Ira Levin, Boys from Brazil would qualify. Although the plot is revealed and the culprits are held accountable, the story ends with intimations of bastard Hitler spawn growing up undetected around the globe.”

 

 

“I don’t know about the doctors Theodore Dalrymple was thinking of. Perhaps his statement is true in England or the U.S. or of the staff in the modern clinics and hospitals he has frequented. In my own limited experience, I would say that doctors throughout the lesser-developed world are the opposite of conservative, in that sense of ‘leave well enough alone’ that you might use to characterize the best instincts of conservativism. They are instead insistent advocates of change and improvement. Perhaps the editors of these journals he speaks of are more internationally minded and sensitive to the slights of language our imperialistic and paternalistic culture visits upon those less florid in their consumption. I wouldn’t be surprised. A global cast of mind does make one mindful of the contemptible treatment of the have-nots that spawned the counter-movement of PC (the term and knowing umbrage with which it’s cited are themselves a dodge to ignore the real issues by focusing on the superficial aspects of the matter). He mocks these doctors for being PC instead of being shamed by the matters that this attempt to be language-sensitive acknowledges.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“X.J. Kennedy has excellent rejoinders. Regarding classic works that might be cut, here are some poetic suggestions he offered in last summer’s Poetry humor issue:
 

1.

Of man’s first disobedience and its fruit

Scripture has told. No need to follow suit.

 

2.

Once upon a midnight dreary,

Blue and lonesome, missed my dearie.

Would I find her? Any hope?

Quoth the raven six times, “Nope.”

 

5.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

Shall I just sack out in the snow

And freeze? Naaaa, guess I’d better go.

 

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