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A review by shorshewitch
Mothers Don't by Katixa Agirre
5.0
It has been years since I declared my intent to never become a mother, but some of my relatives and friends still haven’t fathomed my choice of not wanting to bear kids. Time and again I get to hear how fulfilling it is, how I will regret at a later age, what will I do when I get old, etc. But I know who I am. There are days I fear myself. I have not had a very frolicking childhood. I have battled madness very closely. But that is not the only reason I don’t want to bring kids in this world. There are layers and layers of thoughts that have gone into the decision.
“Mothers Don’t”, as the name suggests, is about mothers. The book is a translation from the original Basque. The premise is based on a story of a mother who drowns her twins in a tub of bath water and does not feel remorse. Elsewhere, another to-be-mother, who is also a writer, gets this news and recollects that she knows this woman. She feels the need to write about this and embarks on a journey to research and understand more about the child murderer she had once known as a young woman with promise. In that this book is also about the process of writing a book.
Understandably, the book does not offer any answers for the many critical questions it raises. The author accepts that in her closing paragraph -
//Because I have to talk about that muddy territory. It is neither a moral obligation nor a social accusation. It is something much more basic. The muddy land is there, as Everest is there, irresistible. Especially for those of us who are like me.
Defective. We are defective.//
What the book does offer, is a meticulous commentary on mental illnesses in women, the misdiagnosis, the loneliness, boredom and exhaustion of mothers, societal pressures, medical procedures, laws, history, literature, patriarchy and neoliberalism, and implores us to look at mothers as flesh and blood people. It’s a grim book, fast-paced in its narrative, satire is used as a device to assuage the intensity in some places. I am reading another book parallelly that is translated from Thai with a protagonist who was resented by her mother all her life - a fact that continues to define and underline all her future relationships. Mothers are not just capable of great injustice, but also great apathy, just like any of us are. Cultures across the world need to start to either provide structural and systemic support needed to rear children, or stop glorifying non-existent selflessness of mothers, that is often the cause of intense disgruntlement and confusion, not just for them, but also for their offspring. We need to truly keep it real.
Sigh! There is plenty to write, but I need time to process the book.
For now, I am going to give a shoutout to @3timesrebel for being who they are. I hope you all keep doing what you are doing and folks like me get to access books from languages we had never known before. Thank you to Dan from #translatedgemsbookclub for bringing the book to my notice.
“Mothers Don’t”, as the name suggests, is about mothers. The book is a translation from the original Basque. The premise is based on a story of a mother who drowns her twins in a tub of bath water and does not feel remorse. Elsewhere, another to-be-mother, who is also a writer, gets this news and recollects that she knows this woman. She feels the need to write about this and embarks on a journey to research and understand more about the child murderer she had once known as a young woman with promise. In that this book is also about the process of writing a book.
Understandably, the book does not offer any answers for the many critical questions it raises. The author accepts that in her closing paragraph -
//Because I have to talk about that muddy territory. It is neither a moral obligation nor a social accusation. It is something much more basic. The muddy land is there, as Everest is there, irresistible. Especially for those of us who are like me.
Defective. We are defective.//
What the book does offer, is a meticulous commentary on mental illnesses in women, the misdiagnosis, the loneliness, boredom and exhaustion of mothers, societal pressures, medical procedures, laws, history, literature, patriarchy and neoliberalism, and implores us to look at mothers as flesh and blood people. It’s a grim book, fast-paced in its narrative, satire is used as a device to assuage the intensity in some places. I am reading another book parallelly that is translated from Thai with a protagonist who was resented by her mother all her life - a fact that continues to define and underline all her future relationships. Mothers are not just capable of great injustice, but also great apathy, just like any of us are. Cultures across the world need to start to either provide structural and systemic support needed to rear children, or stop glorifying non-existent selflessness of mothers, that is often the cause of intense disgruntlement and confusion, not just for them, but also for their offspring. We need to truly keep it real.
Sigh! There is plenty to write, but I need time to process the book.
For now, I am going to give a shoutout to @3timesrebel for being who they are. I hope you all keep doing what you are doing and folks like me get to access books from languages we had never known before. Thank you to Dan from #translatedgemsbookclub for bringing the book to my notice.