Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Michelle Ross writes about Shapeshifting from Stillhouse Press.

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In Shapeshifting, I wanted to write mothers who are human and messy, who are allowed to be their whole selves. I wanted to write of the pressures on mothers, the impossible expectations. I wanted to write of the isolation of motherhood. I wanted to write of the power mothers have over their children even when in all other respects they may be powerless. I wanted to write of the shittiness of being female in a world in which other people feel entitled to tell you what you can and cannot do with your own body. I wanted to write of the guilt mothers feel. I wanted to write of the many fears for their children’s safety and wellbeing. I wanted to write of the pain of having an emotionally unavailable mother. I wanted to do all these things and many more at once.

Here are my notes:

1. Sometimes shapeshifting is a curse (e.g., the witch transforming the prince into the beast.)

a. The story my mother told me about myself when I was a girl was that I was mean, ungrateful (“ingrate” was the term she often used), and insensitive. Sensitivity, or the lack there of, was the primary dividing line between me and everyone else, meaning my mother and my siblings. My dad was often working overtime, rarely home, so where he fell in my mother’s narrative, I wasn’t entirely sure.

Years later she would settle that question in a series of emails we exchanged when she declared that she wouldn’t attend my wedding because she didn’t want to see my dad or his new wife or his extended family. I wrote to her expressing my pain that she wasn’t willing to endure some discomfort on my behalf. She wrote that she was a “good mother” and always had been. This time when she accused me of being cruel and insensitive, she added, “just like your dad.”

b. In my prenatal centering group, the midwife told ten pregnant women and their partners that a mother should, if at all financially possible, be at home with her young child for the first several years of that child’s life. Young children need to be at home with their mother, she said.

c. In my boss’s office, when I negotiated with her about my maternity leave, which she made sure to inform me she was not required by law to grant given that she had fewer than 50 employees, she warned me that a professional woman does not allow motherhood to get in the way of her career.

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2. Sometimes shapeshifting is incredibly isolating and lonely (e.g., werewolves, who transform against their will into beasts once a month on the full moon, but the rest of their days, they are human — or as human as anyone who spends one day a month at the mercy of such a transformation can be anyway.)

a. Late in my pregnancy, when there was no denying my state, strangers in restaurants, grocery stories, the post office, you name it, smiled at me in this weird, adoring way like I wasn’t a stranger at all. They asked when I was due, whether I was having a boy or a girl. People with whom I hadn’t before had the kind of relationship that involved physical touch asked to put their hands on me (or didn’t ask). Of course, it wasn’t really me they were interested in. If they could have reached right through my belly to the baby, they would have.

b. My partner didn’t last even one night in our bed after our son was born. He couldn’t sleep, he said, so he went to the guest bedroom in the middle of that first night and didn’t return to our bed for several months.

c. In my son’s first months of life, my partner was constantly running errands on weekends and evenings when he wasn’t at work. He’d say something like, “We’re out of crackers,” and then he’d disappear for six hours.

d. After my maternity leave when I returned to the office, I expressed breast milk in a bathroom stall because I was offered no alternative space in the building.

e. There were baby play dates in which I felt almost as lonely as I did at home alone with my son, for this new language of motherhood felt alien and uncomfortable on my tongue.

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3. Sometimes shapeshifting is a means of predation (e.g., Zeus, who transformed into a swan to rape Leda.)

a. I remember well how gendered my parents’ relationship was when I was a girl. My mother stayed at home with the kids while Dad worked. My mother did the housework, while Dad built stuff in the garage or spent his weekends hunting or working overtime. My mother didn’t have an income of her own and had to ask Dad for money if she spent what he’d already given her. She was relatively powerless in so many respects, except in her relationship to the small humans who depended on her for their survival. (The contrast in my language for my parents — mother, Dad — is subconscious, instinctual. When I noticed myself using these contrasting terms in these notes, I wondered if I should “correct” my language. Surely it isn’t fair that the somewhat absent father gets the cozy, familiar “Dad” while the stay-at-home mother gets the stiff, distant “mother.” But fair or not, “Mom” feels wrong; “Father” feels wrong.)

b. Becoming a mother has taught me much about my own childhood. I’ve learned how much I needed from my mother that I never received. I’ve learned how powerless and vulnerable I was. I’ve learned that the stories my mother told me about myself, and that shaped my sense of myself and the world, were an abuse of that power, and that they were just that: stories. I’ve learned that I can tell stories of my own.

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4. Sometimes shapeshifting is escape (e.g., Nemesis, another goddess attacked by Zeus in swan form; she transformed into a goose to flee him.)

a. While I don’t know many concrete details about my mother’s mother, I’ve been told by both my parents that my mother’s childhood was terrible, her mother cruel. When I was a girl, my mother became estranged from her entire family, (and so vicariously, we, her children, were estranged from them too) because, as my dad explained once when I asked why, being in contact with her family was too painful for my mother to bear.

b. My earliest memory is of crying out for my mother and a long time passing before she came to my aid. Many of my memories of my mother are, in fact, memories of her absence, despite that she was a stay-at-home mom for most of my childhood. She took to her bed for long stretches in the middle of the day. Her bedroom door was often shut. Because I was the oldest of three, it was my job to care for my siblings and to make sure they didn’t wake her.

c. In mothering my son, in trying to be the kind of mother I have longed for, I’ve felt in a way that I’ve mothered myself.

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5. Sometimes shapeshifting is done at will (e.g., a vampire transforming into a bat, a witch into a cat.)

Despite my own childhood, I wanted a child. Not children; a child. Many women I know who are estranged from their mothers have chosen not to become mothers. I relate. This is part of the reason I chose to have just one child, no more. I didn’t want to have a family that too much resembled the one I had growing up.

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6. Sometimes shapeshifting is permanent (e.g., Daphne, transformed into a laurel tree by her father to free her from Apollo’s pursuit. She escapes Apollo, sure, but the price is to give up her human form.)

Whatever one’s relationship to mothering, whatever kind of mother one is, I think it’s fair to say that becoming a mother is an irreversible transformation, like Daphne’s into a tree. Something is fundamentally altered.

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7. Sometimes shapeshifting is a metaphor for mundane human stuff.

a. My eleven-year-old son lost four baby teeth in a single week recently. One of them he lost slowly — fragments chipping away bit by bit for days.

b. My son asks me all manner of questions about sex. He asks me questions I never in a million years would have asked my own parents when I was his age, or well, at any age. I grew up in a family in which we didn’t talk about anything, certainly not awkward, important stuff like sex or feelings.

My mother’s way of teaching me about puberty: a thin, hardback book whose cover was a collage of photos of wholesome looking girls, their glowing pubescent skin strangely devoid of acne. The book arrived in the mail, and I remember being baffled at how it had found its way to me, as though there were a Santa Claus of puberty.

c. When my son was young enough that I still counted his lifetime in weeks, one afternoon my partner took our son out in the stroller around the neighborhood while I got some sleep. In those early months I was perpetually exhausted. My son breastfed every few hours, night and day. When I woke from this afternoon nap, breasts engorged, and my partner and baby weren’t in the house, I became something unrecognizable to myself. I want to say I became animal, though of course, we are all already animals. So let me just say that on that afternoon, I was very much in touch with how animal I was. I prowled the house, pawed at the windows, my senses heightened as I searched for my infant. I was frantic, and I was feral. When my partner finally came through the door with that stroller, I pounced on him and swept up our baby, which at that moment I’m sure I referred to as my baby. My partner stared at me, bewildered.

d. A word that was frequently on my mind and on my lips in the early years of my son’s life was “temporary.” All these challenges will eventually pass. I will reclaim my life, my time. I will return to some semblance of normalcy. “Temporary” is the right word but the way I was thinking of it wasn’t quite right. As my son shapeshifts, so do I as his mother. To be human, to be mortal, is to constantly be shapeshifting.

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