Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the emotional complexities of motherhood, emphasizing the inevitable losses as children grow and change.
Karen Joy Fowler's quote explores the profound experience of motherhood, highlighting that mothers constantly grapple with the idea of loss as their children grow and evolve. Each stage of a child's development is marked by a sense of mourning for the previous version of the child that no longer exists, creating a unique mix of presence and absence. This relationship is imbued with emotions, where mothers engage with both the tangible and the ghostly remnants of who their children once were, acknowledging that these transitions can be painful yet are an intrinsic part of the nurturing process.
In practice
In a speech about parenting, you might reflect on the bittersweet nature of motherhood by quoting this.
There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face.
I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant—step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word.
Luckily, my father and my mother liked us to talk, so they encouraged us to talk, so that the girls in my house, they're all very powerful speakers and powerful agents of their own will, as is my brother.
God blessed me with two unbelievable parents, and I am just like both of them. I have the smile and charisma of my mother and the big heart of my mom, because she wants to save the world and help the world, so I am just like her.
Your father, Jo. He never loses patience, never doubts or complains, but always hopes, and works and waits so cheerfully that one is ashamed to do otherwise before him.
In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.
His brothers were the type; he was the variation.
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