calling myself mama

Hi there! I’ve been thinking about you, dear Wonder Farm reader. Of course, I finally get around to writing now, in this U.S. time of waiting and clenching. But hey, maybe you could use some distraction. So here’s a little story.

When H. was born, I decided I would not be Mommy. It’s what I’d called my own mother until junior high, when I made the choice, belabored and guiltily, to drop the diminutive and call my parents Mom and Dad. But as a mother, Mommy didn’t feel right. Too saccharine maybe, too suburban. At first, I simply referred to myself as Mom. And then, when H. was nine months old—according the baby calendar where I recorded his first giggle, his first bite of pizza—I began referring to myself as Mama. I don’t remember what prompted this decision. None of my friends had babies; I don’t recall knowing anyone who called their mother Mama. Hip Mama, a magazine I’d eventually buy at the bookstore on College Avenue, wasn’t published until the end of that year, 1993. Chris and I had honeymooned in Italy—maybe it was that. The big family meals around big tables, the after-dinner strolls, and the matriarchs whom everyone referred to as Mama, the syllables lovingly stretched and sung.

On my first Mother’s Day, 1993, three days before H.’s first birthday, I left him with Chris for a couple hours and went see Anne Lamott at a Berkeley bookstore, for a reading of her new (and now classic) book Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. Back then, Anne was still mostly known as a local novelist; I loved her crotchety mix of humor and heart. At the front of the signing line my own heart stuttered as I sputtered out that I was a fan, and also thrilled to read her journal as the mother of an almost one-year-old myself, and happy Mother’s Day to her, and oh! how the previous Mother’s Day I’d been mad at my husband for not giving me a card even though I was nine months pregnant, and how he’d said you’re not a mother yet and that I’d gone into labor the following night.

Anne laughed and her face shined and crinkled. “For Tricia and H.!” she wrote in my copy. She was thirty-nine; I’d be twenty-eight in a week. She seemed infinitely older and wiser. “Happy first Mother’s Day,” she wrote. “—no second, but first vertical one.”

Operating Instructions was unlike any mothering book I’d yet read—Anne called her baby “a little shit”! As soon as I finished, I flipped back and started over, hungry for the company of this funny, self-deprecating, wincingly honest fellow mother. I remember being both shocked and consoled when she admitted that some nights when Sam had colic, she dreamed of throwing him down the stairs. I remember how she described his hands: “like little stars.” And vividly I remember this, a validation I find now on page 195: “I call myself Mama with Sam, as opposed to Mommy, whenever I refer to myself in the third person. It’s so Elvis, so Jimmy Carter.”

1993, in a world of mommies, we two mamas: Anne Lamott and me.

Over the next twenty years, that world would expand, metamorphose, become something new and unrecognizable. Claiming the name Mama would become a thing. I’m currently working on a book chapter about the rise of “mommyblogging”–a term I’ve always despised–and the online “mamasphere.” I’m starting with this story of calling myself Mama and meeting Anne Lamott. It really was a different world of motherhood, back in 1993. No blogs, no social media, no influencers. And yet, my desire then, the desire of mothers twenty years later, thirty years later was the same: to know we weren’t alone. 

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• I had the delight of meeting Erin Alderson at a reading for her new vegetarian cookbook The Yearlong Pantry–all about grains, beans, nuts & seeds. Sounds dull but I promise it will make you want to eat. Just check out this page with recipes to get a sense of her cooking. (She usually offers vegan options.) Roasted squash with smoked paprika oil, baby!
• Do you ever play with The Wayback Machine, to see what particular websites looked like back in the day? I use it often for book research. Some of you might remember my blog looking like this way back in 2009. (Alas, it can’t seem to pull my older header image.) Remember blog rolls–how we’d link to other blogs in the sidebar? Remember how we called it linky love? *snort* But that connection? I miss it.
• This post on The Culture We Deserve about why college students don’t like to read is fascinating–and really an indictment for how colleges are failing to give students what they need. And it’s also a societal failing that we’ve made young people feel they must be “optimized, productive, monetized.” *sigh*
• If you’re local, I’ll be reading from my book-in-progress along with other readers from my year-long book-writing program, Parakeet, on Wednesday, November 20 at Bird & Beckett Books and Records in San Francisco. I can’t decide what to read. I CAN’T DECIDE WHAT TO READ!!!