Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures

15. But She’s a Mom! Sex, Motherhood, and the Poetry of Sharon Olds

241 But She’s a Mom! Sex, Motherhood, and the Poetry of Sharon Olds | by rita jones 15 When critics and reviewers describe the poetry of Sharon Olds, they tend to place her within one of two categories: a sexually explicit poet or a poet who is a daughter or a mother.1 Although I will not be working with Olds’s poems on being a daughter, I will explore some poems in which the mother considers her position as mother in terms of her daughter. More specifically, I argue that it is important to remove the sex/mother binary to put these “kinds” of poet within one category: a poet who writes about a sexually desiring woman who is also a devoted, sacrificing mother. It is no coincidence that in several of her collections, Olds has ordered the poems in such a way that poems about sex and poems about mothering often face one another or immediately follow one another, while still others, such as “New Mother” (The Dead and the Living, 1984), merge the two concepts into one poem. In this discussion, I examine, within the context of twentieth-century American constructs of proper motherhood, the impact of Olds’s merging of the representations of a sexually desiring woman with those of a woman who is a caring mother. Specifically, I argue that the poetry of Sharon Olds, the bulk of which was published during the latter half of the twentieth century, refutes contemporary constructions of proper womanhood and mothering by offering a woman who is a loving mother and sexually satisfied. This woman reconstructs late-twentieth-century narratives of mothering by exploring and combining her sexual side with her mothering. An American poet born 242 rita jones in San Francisco in 1942, Sharon Olds has been publishing collections of poems since 1980, when Satan Says appeared, and in this discussion, I will be addressing poems from three collections: The Dead and the Living (1984), The Wellspring (1995), and Blood, Tin, Straw (1999). As a white woman who has procreated, Olds in many ways represents the kind of woman targeted by millennial constructs of proper womanhood, and, thus, her poems often reference the American culture’s tension between sexual satisfaction and motherhood, as Alicia Ostriker has noted.2 Before discussing the poems, I would like to examine contemporary notions of “good” mothers, those ideal constructs of mothering against which most women evaluate themselves and are evaluated. Certainly, these constructs rely upon typical markers of female identity—white, middle to upper middle class, heterosexual, and Christian—to impede the success of a great number of women. Several scholars have examined precisely how these markers function and have explored how even those women who meet the basic criteria still cannot meet the expectations of socially approved motherhood. In her important study on what she terms “intensive mothering ,” Sharon Hays thoroughly examines the contemporary status of mothering in America by examining social codes and mothers’ self-evaluations. These evaluations, according to Hays, set up the basic criteria of intensive mothering: “one’s ‘natural’ love for the ‘inherently’ sacred child [that] necessarily leads one to engage in child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive child-rearing” (129). Women argue that this role is best performed by women because men neither have the ability to multitask effectively and efficiently nor understand the nutritional, emotional, and developmental needs of the children (129–30). Importantly, Olds’s poetry rarely emphasizes the male lover’s or father’s role in raising the children. Instead we see mothering from the eyes of the female speaker. Privileging this perspective would seem at the outset to represent a woman thoroughly grounded within the context of intensive mothering,and,certainly,escapingthisnarrativeisadifficulttask.Thevery echoes, however,ofintensivemotheringinOlds’spoetrydemonstrateshow pervasive this narrative is. In their daily lives, women witness narratives supporting intensive mothering that reinforce the basic tenets of good mothers by showcasing experts’ knowledge, requiring significant sums of money and self-sacrificing love of women for their offspring. Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels fully examine how the media have supported intensive mothering . Building upon Hays’s notions of intensive mothering, Douglas and Michaels investigate what they term “the new momism,” a contemporary 243 but she’s a mom! form of mothering that seeks to eliminate all the advances feminism has afforded women since the 1950s (23). Importantly, they assert the new momism “redefines all...