Review: The Big Rumpus

I read Ayun Halliday's The Big Rumpus back when I was staying up in the 'Burbs.  And I have wanted to write about it for a while but since The Great Escape, I have either been busy trying to prepare Baby Girl's new room in my free moments or I have been so grumpy that I could not possibly write about a book that I really liked.

But the room preparations are nearly done.  The window shade has been ordered.  The toddler-proofing is nearly done.  And I have bought and returned enough bedding to outfit a major hotel. 

And, in spite of a nasty experience at an uptown department store yesterday (The one elevator was out of service and so I had to use the skinny escalator to get Baby Girl from the second floor to street level and, as I was struggling with her stroller, instead of hustling her stilletto-clad bird-legs over to help me, this perfectly horrid sales lady barked "you know we do have elevators for that" as though I were trying to wheel an open barrel of bio-waste through the Armanis.  Yes, I had a serious case of plumber butt thanks to my non-fitting pants and I was only there to check out the sale racks, but there was no need to get nasty about it!), I am in a relatively chipper mood.      

So, I thought I would throw in my two cents about Zinester Ayun Halliday's romp through New York with wild daughter Inky and new baby Milo. 

I really enjoyed this book.  Halliday paints a vivid picture of raising children in a rather bohemian (god, that makes me sound WASP) part of New York.  It makes you want to shed your air-conditioned ranch style home and head back to the heart of the city. 

And even though this is obviously one cool chick (she created the East Village Inky, has travelled everywhere, is married to the creator of Urinetown), she is not self-consciously (read: annoyingly) so.  She is warm and bloody funny (I laughed out loud a lot).  Here she describes her days with preschooler Inky:

I can't help thinking of Io, the Greek maiden whom the gods turned into a calf and bedeviled with a pestilential cloud of flies.  Whenever she stopped running, the flies bit her mercilessly.  She had no choice but to stay on the move.  This, as Hermes and even Prometheus observed, was torment.  You know it's bad when even the guy chained to a rock so a hungry eagle can devour his self-regenerating liver feels sorry for you.

From the moment she wakes me in the morning, I am Io and Inky is the flies.  The flies want vitamins, breakfast and a stack of books read aloud.  They need to know what we're doing today.  They petition to watch television shows that don't come on 'til 4:30 in the afternoon.  The flies don't like to listen to National Public Radio.

And while the fun of this book is in Halliday's description of her colourful, urban existance, she shows that there exists some universal truths.  Like trying to balance being creative with the more aspects of mothering.  Like the fear that something bad will happen to your children ("Please don't let anything happen to my pretty chickens," she prays, quoting from Macbeth) - a fear that can only be exorcised, for her, through watching a popular prime time hospital drama.  Like the frustration of waiting to go into labor during a heat-wave.

And she discusses how the universal elements of motherhood bind us more than where we live, or what race we belong to, or what economic bracket we fall into might indicate:

It's good just to know that ...[other mothers are] out there in Bumblefuck, Idaho.  We might not see eye to eye on the best place to raise our children, but we are all in the same boat.

I used to think that this expression meant that we all shared one boat, that your paddles are made lighter by the presence of others.  That's not what it means.  Even on a good day, my paddles feel like they're filled with buckshot.  I'm willing to bet that every other mother's do too.  Shortly after you give birth, most of the activities that defined your identity are suspended to let you mix apple juice, deal with somebody else's snot and develop a lot of highfalutin ideas about television.  You're not being paranoid or melodramatic if you feel like you're the only grown-up in your boat.... Then in the middle of some dark night, when you're up, dog tired, struggling to keep your sleeping children out of the bilge water, you notice another crappy little boat a few yards out.  And another.  And another.  The ocean is fairly crawling with boats as crappy and little as yours.  Each one holds a mother tethered to a baby, a sleeping toddler or a jacked-up three-year old still gibbering from an ill-advised late-afternoon sugar fix.  We're all in the same boat, all right.... There are millions of these boats in the sea.  We shout to each other across the waves.  Nobody will get offended if you have to interrupt her midsentence to seize your daughter by the ankle before she dives after a birthday party favor she drpped overboard, possibly on purpose.

And while this is not a Political read, it does touch on the potential isolation of motherhood, the politics of breastfeeding, the loss of identity, the importance of reaching out to a community, and the way that the mothering process can actually fuel rather than impede creativity. 

Comments

[Jen Wingard]

Thanks for this post. I completely agree with you, and would like to add that if celebrities want to use their clout to help end poverty -- why don't the make the one campaign about giving one percent of each of their total net worth to the cause. That would make a dent.

[Running2Ks]

SOOOO sorry for the double post. Typepad hosed on me and I had to restart. Feel free to delete the duplicate ;)

[Running2Ks]

That boat analogy is really beautiful. Thank you for sharing it. It is so true.