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1 Prologue Icy Bridges Inoted the warning, though it was commonplace: BRIDGE MAY BE ICY. I usually find such signs amusing, heedless of seasonal change, incongruent in eighty-degree weather. But I know their purpose is serious: to remind of danger that can arise unexpectedly. On this January day in 1998, the danger was very real, and I was not laughing. I had come to a halt on the freeway, with ice glazing the road and snow blurring the air. There was just one car ahead of me, but in front of it two highway patrol cars blocked the road, preventing further progress. At a dead stop on I-80 in the middle of Pennsylvania, I watched the snow fall into the ravines around me and onto my windshield, gathering on all sides. I peered through the glass, trying to see the highway ahead. Across the icy bridge, I could barely discern numerous lights flashing, red and blue: emergency vehicles drawn to a catastrophe on the other side of the chasm. I had debated whether or not to make my departure from Ohio that morning. The weather forecast had been iffy, and the five-hundred-mile drive would be exhausting. But I had already picked up the rental car the night before, loaded the trunk with my computer and books and clothes, old journals and photos and letters, and arranged to get the key to the New York apartment in which I would be staying for the next four months. I was ready to be on the road and had decided to take this risk. Behind me were my husband, my teaching job at a liberal arts college, my small-town home. Ahead of me were my grown daughters, a city apartment of my own, and the opportunity to take on a writing project that had been haunting me for years. 2 | Biting the Moon I was glad to have with me a book on tape: The Good Mother. As long as my gas supply held out, I could keep the engine running and sit in a warm car, listening to the Sue Miller novel in relative comfort. I had chosen this tape deliberately as a way to focus my thoughts toward the writing that lay ahead of me. The project was to write my experience as a mother—primarily a single mother. My questions had emerged out of years of thinking about narrative and self and motherhood and feminist change. What does it mean to be a mother and a self at the same time? How does my experience as a single mother shed light on the notion of a mother–self? More painfully: What kind of mother was I? What kind of life have I made, and what are the costs of that life—for my daughters, for their father, for me? Most immediately: Can I use this gift of time to write, as I had always meant to do? Toward the end of The Good Mother, Anna, also a single mother, assumes the blame for losing custody of her daughter: “There was no one I blamed so much as myself. . . . It was a chain of events set in motion by me, by my euphoric forgetfulness of all the rules.” As I sat in the car, frozen in space and time, I heard these words and grew angry at Anna for entirely different reasons. I was not angry at her for being a “bad mother” or for breaking the rules—I would certainly not judge her for wanting to have a sexual life and a self-definition beyond “mother.” I was angry at her for failing to anticipate consequences that she could have prevented and for so easily relinquishing all of her desires to the demands of “the rules.” I was angry at her for succumbing to the cultural definition of a good mother: selfless, without a self. When the accident on the other side of the bridge finally cleared, the highway patrol officers left their cars blocking the road and walked past my car to the vehicles behind me. In my side-view mirror, I watched them talk to a truck driver in the next vehicle back and then walk farther down the line. That truck driver and then another eventually pulled out and moved to the front of the now very long line of vehicles. With patrol cars leading, lights flashing, the two trucks followed side by side, setting our speed for us as we moved...

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