Book Review: ON THE WHOLE: A story of mothering, disability, and becoming the woman I already was (Ona Gritz)Reviewed by Anne KaierFor days after reading Ona Gritz's wonderful memoir of mothering while disabled, certain scenes lingered in my mind—all of them lucid and rich with multiple meanings. There's a moment in which Ona, a first-time mother whose right side is affected by cerebral palsy, begins to feed newborn Ethan. Still in the hospital, she needs help positioning the baby at her breast. The nurse won't do a thing. She just stands there and shakes her head. For Gritz, this admission is a milestone. She realizes that she can't do something, and that she can't do it because she is disabled. The real drama of this powerful memoir is the journey from passing and denial though justifiable anger to the kind of self-acceptance that spills over into laughter. She illustrates this emotional arc in a series of scenes from the first three years of Ethan's life, with flashbacks to her youth, in which her parents taught her to hide her differences as well as she could and pretend nothing was wrong. The brace she wears to bed at night was, by day, hidden on the floor of her closet so her friends didn't have to see it. "This was my first lesson in passing," she writes, "to others but also to myself." Her parents barely mention her CP. "It's nothing. Barely noticeable," my parents told me the rare times they talked to me about my disability. Wanting to believe them, I made a habit of collecting proof. My friends don't treat me as different, I told myself as a teenager. Boys like me, so it can't be all that bad. But then she has a baby and she has to recognize that now and then she needs some assistance. The climax of her emotional drama comes on a train—Gritz carefully keeps her story rooted in ordinary life. She and Ethan take a local to the suburbs to visit a friend. On the way there, the conductor remembers to help lift Ethan's stroller off the train at Ona's stop. But on the way home, even though she warns the conductor that she'll need help when they get back to Hoboken, he forgets. She waits and waits. Hoboken is the end of the line. She imagines the train, with her and Ethan in it, will be shunted off to an distant yard. In the days before cell phones, she finally has no alternative but to lean out the doorway and scream. A maintenance worker comes to check on the commotion and help her get Ethan's stroller off the train, but she is left with a new emotion: anger. As I walk home from the station, I imagine part of me will forever be stranded in an abandoned train yard with Ethan, nothing to sustain us but a sippy cup of water and the animal crackers I brought along. The thought make me shiver, and it takes me a moment to realize that it's not residual fear I feel but rage…Those trains are completely inaccessible. Though I don't say the words aloud, my heart starts to take on their rhythm. It's a measure of Gritz' craft that she not only shows herself awakening to an entirely appropriate anger, but she also grounds this scene in the ordinary: the sippy cup and animal crackers. The vividness of her details delighted me—along with the rhythms of her prose. But all these little details underscore the rich, grainy reality of her life—a life clearly savored, even in moments of maddening difficulty. At the end of the book, Ona is out walking with three year old Ethan. She has come to terms with her disability enough to talk with him about it in a wonderfully tender, quirky way. He asks her why he needs to hold on to her left hand when they are crossing the street. "I don't feel things as well on my other side. So it's harder for me to know that
you're safe." Disability and motherhood taken together can be explosive. Mothers of disabled children and disabled mothers can both be assailed by stereotypes and myths—not to mention outrageous advice about how to be politically correct. Gritz manages to sidestep all this with great finesse. We know, by the end of this short, elegant book, that things will be OK for Ethan and his mother, but I am hoping that On the Whole will not in fact, be the whole of what Gritz has to say about motherhood. I know she writes a column on Literary Mama. But I'm hoping for more. Her intelligence, her poetic insight, her readability, and the richness of her themes all beg for expansive expression in a long-format memoir. She's just published a highly praised book of poems, Geode. Perhaps now she will expand the insightful, novella-length essay I've reviewed here into the big enchilada. On the Whole is published by SheBooks and is available in ebook format at www.shebooks.net.
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