Mslexia

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New Writing

Submit for Issue 54

WOMEN's SHORT STORY COMPETITION

■ Two ideas here: one to spark a new story, the other to reinvigorate an old one.
■ In theatre, we talk of a setting being ‘high-status’ when only one thing normally happens there: e.g. a church. Drama is created when something ‘inappropriate’ occurs. So choose two high-status settings and imagine a story in which characters fall asleep in a squash court, for instance, or play squash in a bedroom.
■ Revitalise an existing story you have written by altering one of the following:
- Reverse the sexes of the characters. See how much more memorable they become.
- Change the setting to somewhere exotic you have visited or researched.
Devised by Margaret Wilkinson

◊ Competition Rules | More Information
◊ Closing date: 19 March 2012

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New Writing: Motherhood

Kate Figes introduces her selection of themed prose and poetry

Good writing about the mixed emotions and realities of motherhood is rarely celebrated. All too often it is either belittled as piffling domestic drama or vilified as being anti-mother. So I was thrilled to be asked to judge this competition, eager to dive into reflections and truths about what it is like to bring up children today.

I am the mother of two grown-up daughters and have written nonfiction books on how women change physically, emotionally and psychologically (Life After Birth), on adolescent development (The Terrible Teens) and on relationships (Couples). Fiction about family life is much harder to write. It is so easy to slide into ‘faction’ – adding different names and details to something which is basically autobiographical. And it is harder still to disentangle specific stories from an entire way of life.

Many of the submissions dealt with anxieties over doing the right thing as a mother and the acute terror we feel at the prospect of something happening to our children. Fathers were noticeably absent, but the presence, character and vulnerability of children seeped through and gave the writing life.

Regardless of the subject, a good short story has to seduce you immediately into an entirely convincing world, full of texture, colour and tension and it has to touch you with an arrow to the heart. Every word matters from the very first sentence. Overwriting or an overuse of metaphor smacks of a carelessness, a reluctance to get to the heart of the matter. I was looking for clear-headed, heart-bearing truth about one of the most powerful, emotional, rewarding and difficult aspects of our lives – and I found buckets of that in my top twelve.

‘Mind the gap’ managed to say so much about the taboos surrounding the empty nest syndrome in little more than 1,000 words. From the first sentence (‘I will pull the construction apart, twig by twig so they cannot return’) I felt I was in the arms of a brave and confident artist. Each platitude and assumption about the bereft mother left at home (‘You’ll be lonely.’ ‘What will you do?’ ‘But what if they want to come home?’) is matched by the exhilaration of a mother liberated from the selflessness of raising three boys.

‘At the market’ is so short it could almost be defined as a poem. The rhythmic voice of a Ghanaian mother, trying to sell anything she has made to a first-world mother, conjures up the colour and the noise of a market. But it is the way the buyer tries to haggle over the price of a doll that hammers home the shame of bartering so hard, when it was so cheap in the first place. Mothers all over the world are trying to do much the same thing, which is to provide for their children. As first-world women we have a duty to support them.

‘Washing up’ brings us firmly back to the domestic, and to a simple tale of an exhausted mother of two young children, who hasn’t slept properly in weeks, and is now ‘on holiday’. She has agreed to let her daughter play at washing up, standing on a chair at the sink, while her partner lies on the sofa browsing Facebook on his iPhone. In crisp, stark prose, noticeably devoid of adjectives, the author manages to capture that excruciating feeling when you know rationally that you should be enjoying these moments – but she is so tired that all she wants to do is weep at the way water gets everywhere and a glass gets broken.

‘Just in case’ is a chilling and heartbreaking tale about the disabling consequences of losing a baby because of ‘complications’ soon after birth. Emma works in a luggage shop and is obsessed with bags, a wonderful metaphor for pregnancy. When her next-door neighbour asks her to hold the baby for an hour because her father has been rushed to hospital, we feel the palpable emptiness in Emma’s life as she takes the baby into her arms.

Loss is a powerful seam through motherhood: from the cutting of the umbilical cord to the empty nest and beyond, we give up our children in small incremental stages and have to pretend it doesn’t hurt. Inevitably it is only through trial and error that we get better at managing such a delicate balance between protecting their interests and letting them go.

‘A girl on a bike’ moved me to tears. It’s a powerful, vivid description of a mother being first on the scene as a young woman gets knocked off her bike. Bridget has just dropped off her own daughter to school. As she kneels to comfort the victim, face down in the gutter, she realises that this young woman is somebody else’s much loved daughter.

‘Robyn on Tyler’s 17th birthday’ was a rare treat amongst the submissions in that it made me laugh. Teenagers get a bad press. Mothers have a hard time with them and rarely feel they get anything right. It’s those rare moments when a mother can see through the bravado to their teenager’s vulnerability which is so beautifully encapsulated in this story. From the moment Robyn finds condoms in her son’s sock drawer and the certain knowledge that he will now hide them somewhere else, instinctively ‘creating another layer between her and the real Tyler’, to the last dying embers of his birthday party in their garage, she is on the lookout for signs, so that she can be there when he copes with sexual rejection.

If ‘The jar’ is not based on true life, then it is a story which triumphs as a feat of imagination. I was right there in that room with that four-year-old, looking out of the window waiting for the father who never comes to collect her. Her mother has a drink problem, works as a prostitute and is so on edge that her daughter is far more knowing than any four-year-old should be. Even so, the author never judges, but embraces human frailties. I also liked the way that the naïve girliness of the daughter’s Princess Barbie hairband and the pink packed suitcase stands in such sharp contrast to her mother’s reality.

When it came to the poetry submissions, there were five which stood out for their lyricism and their humanity. ‘Infertility’ is a passionate cry about the helplessness of a woman undergoing IVF, ‘my pretty body still unveined,/ still to be spoiled by the loving-soft fat of motherhood.’ I loved the richness of language in this poem, full of words which seem to burst with the physicality of having a child.

‘How to knock 50 years off your age’ was one of the few submissions which tackled having, rather than being, a mother. More specifically, it’s about how having a very old mother can still reduce you to being the child, no matter how old you are yourself. ‘You’re a good girl, she says,/ to my white hair.’ And in just a few words she manages to convey that terrible emptiness that so many daughters feel about never having been loved quite enough.

‘Clothes’ packs powerful imagery. Most mothers find it hard to give away or bin their baby’s clothes as they grow bigger. Imagine, then, the trauma of what to do with them when your baby has died. This mother stuffed them unwashed into a plastic bag and put them in the loft. When she finds herself pregnant again, she takes them down, ‘Vests scabbed with breakfast, crusted proof/ of meals and my shock at dirty things./ But why would I have come home,/numb from intensive care, and set about/ washing what she left behind?’ Why indeed?

‘Girl running’ has a beautiful musicality to the language. Every word fits perfectly as if it was meant to be there. The schoolgirl running to sit on a swing to smoke after one of those useless sex ed lessons ‘and learn/ of the morning-after pill and what not to do/ but not of the unthinkable happening to you’.

My final choice was ‘The school concert’, because of its unashamed celebration of the pride we should all feel about our children’s achievements, whether that’s the plink plonk of their piano playing or the screech of the violin bow. There are few things more touching than watching other people’s children concentrating as they play music. But when it is your own child we do indeed ‘explode’ with such pride that ‘all my love for you/ crescendoed into beats so loud they surely/ drowned out your perfect notes.’

I have so enjoyed reading all of the submissions and it was hard indeed to whittle them down to 12. I have cried, laughed and been reminded of the incredible emotional vortex that is motherhood. There is far more that unites us as mothers than divides us as women.

KATE FIGES is the author of seven books, including two novels, and has worked in feminist publishing at Pandora Books, as well as currently being the Books Editor for the Daily Mail’s You magazine supplement. Visit www.katefiges.co.uk. Her acclaimed recent book, Couples: The Truth (Virago) will be published in paperback in February 2012. Image credit: Charlie Hopkinson

All the stories and poems mentioned are published in the current issue of Mslexia. To read New Writing in full subscribe now.