Rereading Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Eight months into the pandemic, I reread Adrienne Rich’s 1976 classic Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. I read it sequestered in a suburban house with husband and two children, all of us working, schooling, playing, living within its four walls, hemmed in first by an early Saskatchewan blizzard, then public health regulations limiting in-home gatherings to no more than five. I read the book—or tried to read the book—while Miriam, seven, and Pilgram, four, rolled cars on the floor beside me, ran like airplanes, asked me to slice an apple, asked to go to the snow hill, climbed my body like a snow hill, pushed furniture together to approximate a snow hill, and wailed that they couldn’t find their mittens. I read—or tried to read—while remembering the first time I read Rich’s lucid prose a decade ago, and the way silence stretched, luxurious and free. It is easy to forget how groundbreaking Rich’s first prose book was, with its blend of research, personal experience,

Eight months into the pandemic, I reread Adrienne Rich’s 1976 classic Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. I read it sequestered in a suburban house with husband and two children, all of us working, schooling, playing, living within its four walls, hemmed in first by an early Saskatchewan blizzard, then public health regulations limiting in-home gatherings to no more than five. I read the book—or tried to read the book—while Miriam, seven, and Pilgram, four, rolled cars on the floor beside me, ran like airplanes, asked me to slice an apple, asked to go to the snow hill, cli