Souvenirs of Motherhood

a review of The Blue Jay's Dance, by Louise Erdrich

Before I was a third of the way through The Blue Jay’s Dance, by Louise Erdrich, I had already planned on adopting one of her ideas. Not that Erdrich’s memoir of her babies’ first year (she says at the onset that her “child” is a composite of her three natural children) is full of lessons about how to be a good mother or worry less or stay strong; it isn’t, really. It’s about artfulness. It’s about how not to lose oneself when the person growing inside you becomes a separate but completely dependent being. It is self-ish.

Erdrich spends a lot of time establishing the fact of her writer-ness, as if the reader doesn’t know that a writer needs blocks of time for composing and pondering, sitting, listening. She laments this lack of writing time while gathering the luxurious fodder for her essays: deer watching, kitten saving, feral cat breaking, bird luring, woodchuck training. “So here I sit, with a peanut on my foot, as though I’m not a writer, as though I’ve got nothing to do but watch these careful nuisances steal toward me one muscle at a time. I should be working because our baby is asleep, but I am too busy training woodchucks.” Of course, this is writers’ work, and that’s the beauty of it. And it’s also what makes it hard to find sympathy for a writer who’s lost her time. Most people don’t have a second to spare for this nonsense. They are straightening their ties. They are in board meetings. If they have something on their shoes, they will curse as they try to scrape it off with a stick.

When I awoke the morning after reading the chapter on "Nests," I gathered my daughter’s hair from her brush and put it in an envelope. Like Erdrich, I collect nests: hives, honeycombs, deep wells of twig and brush. But I was never such an active collector that I would gather all the nests visible through the bare limbs in the winter. And I would never have thought to insinuate myself into a bird’s birthing room. Erdrich’s mother, a knitter, would hang leftover scraps of yarn from trees in the early spring, and the birds would gather them up for nests. That’s where she got the idea. “All last winter, just before breakfast each morning, I brushed the dark brown, the golden, the medium brown hair of our daughters smooth, and all winter I saved the cleanings from the brush in a small paper bag that I emptied by the stump in the yard last spring.”

Sometimes, though, I wonder whether we are more in love with the souvenirs of our motherhood than we are with the act of mothering. We languish in self-reflection. We hold our kids’ pasts as if they were the fragile eggs of a bird. In truth, they are empty things, like the abandoned nests Erdrich gathers in winter. Our children grow long legs in front of us, and we so lament the loss of their last year that we often neglect to enjoy the current one. “It is almost too painful to hold the nest, too rich, as life often is with children. I see the bird, quick breathing, small, thrilling like a heart. I hear its song, high and clear, beating in its throat. I see that bird alone in the nest woven from the hair of my daughters, and I cannot hold the nest because longing seizes me. Not only do I feel how quickly they are growing from the curved shape of my arms when holding them, but I want to sit in the presence of my own mother so badly I feel my heart will crack.”


And just as we treasure the trophies of our children’s youth and prize each milestone more, perhaps, when the childhood is gone, we sometimes make more of our own love of motherhood than we really feel. Holding a nest, “longing seizes” her, and she has to put it down. In “The precious no,” she romanticizes the word that mothers really hate (she’s right, though; no is infinitely more valuable, but we can’t—maybe shouldn’t—see this until our kids are teens and on a date). She applauds their tempers in “Rage”: “How I admire their tantrums, what awe! How do we lose the ability to pitch such magnificent fits?” I can't appreciate a tantrum unless it’s coming from someone else’s kid; even then I pity the mother.

The essay’s job is to work out a problem—often a universal one—right there on paper, so we can see the inner workings of the writer’s brain, so we can watch the puzzle-fitting as the writer tries each piece. We get a good sense of that in Blue Jay as she thinks and tries and decides.

This book of short essays is driven by thought, rather than scene, its underlying message one of feminist pride that can be a hard sell at times. For instance, in “Rose Nights, Summer Storms, Lists of Spiders and Literary Mothers,” she lists the best and most famous of women writers and their offspring. It’s not necessary information to have, though the list is artful and poetic. But she ends the piece with an awareness of what “many male writers from Thomas Mann to James Joyce describe with yearning—the mystery of an epiphany, the sense of oceanic oneness, the great yes, the wholeness.” She continues with Keats and Hemingway and concludes, “Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn’t understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies.”

But we mostly get poetry. Erdrich hand picks each word, each description, with such control. There’s never a cliché: an oriole nest is described as a “long grey sack with a bottleneck”; turkeys are “bundles of rags on stilts”; a group of moms, like a flock of geese, is called a “panic of mothers”; and when things, like fireflies, go about their business, she notes, “each night, the fireflies flash out a Morse code of desire.” Like a mother who cleans and changes linens and diapers for a newborn, she cares for the reader, making the words and phrases crisp and sharp and fresh, clean smelling.

Sometimes, though, that beauty is tiring. Some of the essays veer off toward the mundane, as they are so heavy on thought and pretty description and so spare on scene and action. A chapter on love, “Fairy tales. Love, grief, and invisible seeds,” is packed with metaphor and never comes close to meaning. A piece called “Sleepwalkers” seems to serve only as the sound of itself and would be better as a poem. Only a few essays—like the description of the rape of a duck or the time a skunk slept on Erdrich when she was a teenager or when she tried to tame a feral cat or find a days-old kitten under her house—have such good action that they revive us.

The best of Erdrich’s scenemaking is in the title chapter, where a blue jay scares away a hawk that would have it for dinner. “Yet the jay, ridiculous, continues to dance, hopping forward, hornpiping up and down with tiny leaps, all of its feathers on end to increase its size. Its crest is sharp, its beak open in a continual shriek, its eye-mask fierce. It pedals its feet in the air. The hawk steps backward. She seems confused, cocks her head, and does not snap the blue jay’s neck.” I am reminded of a similar scene in Diana Hume George’s The Lonely Other, in which three women take on a gang of men bent on raping them by opening the door to their cabin, fluffing up their feathers, and giving a fierce-enough impression of no that the men back down, despite the women’s inferior size and number. I am reminded, too, of life. This is the way to escape the bear. This is how humans keep our lives when something bigger would have it.

If there are other lessons you can take, like how to keep from losing it with your crying baby, they’re given without preachiness (vent your anger with a sweet voice to your infant). Eventually, she admits that one might find advice here: “if anything, the meaning in this book for others may be this: Here is a job in which it is not unusual to be, at the same instant, wildly joyous and profoundly stressed.” The Blue Jay’s Dance gives us permission to find ourselves ambivalent about our life with children. We are gratified by her reassurance that we have what it takes to be mothers, even though we’re not enamored of every duty.

Erdrich does the most important job of the essay well; that is, she tells our stories while telling her own. This is what we want from our nonfiction writers. We don’t need correction or reprimand or warnings so much as we need the awareness in our lives that we are not alone, despite how lonely we feel. The writer’s role is still, after all these centuries, to validate the reader, to show us to us.