This week’s blog is more of an announcement. I am now a published author, as my story “A Real Mother.” is part of a newly released anthology of memoir called: Take This Journey    With Me edited by the author Rachel Manley. I haven’t been published before, except for my unedited weekly self published blog which is often “maudlin and full of self pity” but also equally “magnificent,” so this is a big deal for me even if it isn’t for other people 🙂 This piece was written about my experience before I had Eva before I discovered that a real mother is actually a derelict mother. I hope you enjoy a little preview below, and will join me at an event that is free to the public, a reception for the book launch on May 15th at 5:30pm at the Bermuda Society for the Arts where you can hear me and a few other contributors read excerpts from our work. Hope to see you there! Must sign off before Eva smears my entire body in butter.

A Real Mother excerpt:

As a child my vision for my future looked like something out of a Merchant Ivory film: romance, drama and lots of horse riding. There were no jobs or children or responsibility but then somehow I woke up married, 35, pregnant and working full time. Real life had dawned and another person’s life was soon going to take priority over mine and I was in both shock and denial. I was able to waddle through life quite happily thirty plus pounds overweight, but every day when I picked up my prenatal vitamins I was relieved by the sound of the pills rattling around inside representing all the time I had left before her birth. On one particular day I looked down at the mother and baby on the bottle and was sure of only one thing: that was not what was happening to me. Call it a premonition, but I knew what I was facing would not be the vision of smiling maternal bliss on the vitamin label. My fingernail picked at the corner of the picture hoping it would peel off. Did the woman have to look so thin and perfect, be dressed nicely and have perfectly straight hair? The mother looked like she had been eating lettuce leaves for nine months not chocolate milkshakes. I brought the bottle up really close to my eyes, and squinted at the detail; I was horrified to realize that she was a model. It was a lie; this woman was posing; she was getting paid; she wasn’t the babies’ real mother. She wasn’t real like me. I wondered what that meant, what made me a real mother? Swollen ankles, cellulite, chocolate milkshakes, a scowl and the other speechless things that happened to you in pregnancy? Then I looked at the baby in the picture and down at my stomach, and realized that part of the picture wasn’t real yet either. I had no idea what a real mother was.