Adrienne Gruber, Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood

 

After I became a mom, stuff began to fall on me.
            It took a few years for me to notice, a few more years before it became a regular occurrence, and even more time before it felt like a hazard. Eventually, I thought that perhaps I should be wearing a helmet or a hard hat around my apartment, or that I should outfit myself with a chest and backplate to allow for optimal protection.
            I compiled a list of things that fell on me.
            Tools. A measuring tape. A giant brick of Parmesan cheese that Dennis bought from Costco. A bottle of Shout. A jug of laundry detergent. Packages of instant noodles. The handle of the vacuum. My kids’ puffy jackets, and other clothes shoved in the bedroom closet. Shoes. The circular blades of the food processor. Paper towel rolls. Bottles of bubbly water. Individual containers of applesauce. Picture frames. That tiny fucking Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom castle. Cans of tuna.
            Puttering around my apartment became a contact sport. I needed to anticipate falling objects, slow down time in order to have the chance to react, to pull my body out of the way. I had to be on high alert at all times.
            It was also my job to heal quickly and efficiently and quietly if I happened to get struck by something. To not make my daughters wait a single second longer for their Goldfish crackers, their cut-up apples, or their TV.

I’m amazed by the writing and shape of Vancouver writer Adrienne Gruber’s hybrid essay collection, Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2024), produced as “Essais No. 16.” If you aren’t aware of their “essais” series, titles produced over the past decade or so include Erin Wunker’s Feminist Killjoy: Essays on everyday life (2016) [see my review of such here], Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir (2018) [see my review of such here], Margaret Christakos’ Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016) [see my review of such here] and River Halen’s Dream Rooms (2022) [see my review of such here]. Moving through the titles-to-date, the series, edited by Toronto poet Julie Joosten, appears to focus on prose works (a handful of which attend threads on mothers and motherhood) that aren’t straightforward to categorize, offering stunning and in-depth, deeply personal works of lyric/hybrid prose by numerous Canadian writers at the top of their game. If you seek personal essays composed by writers unafraid of blending genre, poetic language and twisting expectation, these titles easily include some of the most powerful writing I’ve read in years.

Following Gruber’s three full-length poetry collections—This is the Nightmare (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown Books, 2008), Buoyancy Control (Book*hug, 2016) and Q & A (Book*hug, 2019) [see my review of such here]— Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes feels a direct extension of some of the concerns of that third poetry title, itself described as “a poetic memoir detailing a first pregnancy, birth and early postpartum period.” Gruber explores and articulates the dark elements of pregnancy and mothering, from depression and exhaustion to whole swaths of anxiety across wonderfully astute, unflinching and absolutely devastating lyric and hybrid prose. She attends the beautiful moments, certainly, but digs deep into the physical, spiritual and psychological difficulties she endured surrounding motherhood, from the tantrums of her firstborn, ongoing mental health challenges and watching her mother’s cognitive decline. Gruber writers of and through numerous elements so often dismissed as the messy business of motherhood, acknowledging the blood that accompanies this kind of beauty. “An ache radiates from my tailbone and becomes like white noise,” she writes, to open the essay “How She Runs,” “humming and flickering in the background. When I change positions, bend over, or go from standing to sitting, my lower back twinges. Sometimes the pain is simply a feeling of tenderness, as though I’d just finished an intense workout. Sometimes it's deeper, sharper. Occasionally it disappears momentarily, usually when I shift position, and for minutes, and sometimes hours, after I go for a walk.” Gruber’s essays push deep against the straightforward narratives of the beautiful and effortless ease of motherhood, digging into the realities of just what kind of journey she’s been on, from the moments and myriad clusters of chaos, serious depression, physical changes, and the unexpected and expected delights through the absolute and spectacular.

Ancient navigators thought the sea was filled with a number of dangerous sea monsters, but the Kraken, a legendary cephalopod-like beast in Nordic folklore was, by far, the most terrifying. So large as to sometimes be mistaken for an island, the danger was not simply the creature itself but the whirlpool left in its wake.
            When I gave birth to my daughter, I became the Kraken. Forty hours of unmedicated labour followed by five hours of pushing will do that to a person. I grew extra limbs that flailed and thrashed. With each contraction, I rose from the birth pool like a colossal mollusk, ready to crush and consume.

Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes exists as a curious montage of literary panache, from more traditionally-straightforward essays to a pregnancy journal to sections that lean more into the lyric, such as an accumulated essay on smell (pregnancy heightening certain of the senses, after all, including the sense of smell). Gruber writes openly and honestly about a wide range of fears, anxieties and experiences on pregnancy and motherhood across and around her eventual three daughters. She writes of her grandmother, and the challenges of her mother’s increasing requirement for care, allowing the book to attend to generations, from her grandmother to her mother, down to her daughters. Gruber writes of the presumption, both culturally and her own, of maternal invincibility: something she long saw in her own mother, until that, too, began to deteriorate. “After the breakdown,” she writes of her mother, “and a combined diagnosis of catatonia and psychosis, my mother’s health begins to decline. It’s slow at first, the erosion, then a landslide rushing over exposed soil, dragging bits of it away. The meds dull her personality, make her tired. As a new mom, I’m tired too, with little energy to help build back up what had already been washed away.” There are passages that feel entirely composed as a ball of anxiety, but the writing is clear, even propulsive, and provides such clarity, and, above all, such a deep and abiding love.

Toward the end of Quintana’s birth, every second contraction was less intense. It was during those less excruciating spasms that I moaned the loudest, that I felt the most sorry for myself.
            There is a difference between pain and suffering.
            I tell people I used a birthing tub, that I birthed my first baby at home in my own apartment, that Dennis put a note on our door apologizing to our neighbours for the noise. I say I ate Popsicles and took hot showers, that I squatted on all fours like an animal and screamed in the privacy of my walk-in closet.
            All of this is true. None of this is true. (“Catalogue”)