On Motherhood & Miyazaki's Daughters

Michelle on becoming a new mother; recommended reads, plus a tofu (yes, tofu) music video from Taiwan's great folk-rock musician, Lin Sheng Xiang.

Ponyo (2008).

Michelle on motherhood & Miyazaki’s daughters

Once, when I was about five months pregnant, my husband Albert walked into the room and stopped in his tracks.

“You’re reading… Medea?” he said. 

Pregnancy was a strange time. Already a fretful person, I experienced new heights of anxiety. I’d wake up at 4 a.m., make myself some tea, and read to soothe my nerves. Mothers, whom I’d never paid attention to as a literary category, now seemed to be everywhere. Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir, in which she talks to her baby while hoeing Guatemalan land. Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, which you should definitely never read while pregnant. And Medea. Did I pick up a Greek tragedy about a mother who kills her children to steel myself against sentimentality? Yes I did. Maybe learning about motherhood in an ambiguously proto-feminist mode was the only way I knew how to do it. At any rate, it was impossible to overstate my ignorance—of babies, of gestation, all of it.  

“Is this my uterus?” I as…