Fresh Hell: Motherhood in Pieces

By Carellin Brooks

This book isn’t about perfect moments with your infant. It doesn’t dispense sensible advice or proscribe schedules to manage the lawless days and nights of early maternity. Instead, this literary think piece, an Eat, Pray Love for the smarter mommy crowd, seesaws from disaster to delight, horror to grim resignation, much like motherhood itself. An antigen to the anodyne, mother-knows-least tone of such cordially hated tomes as What to Expect in the First Year, Fresh Hell answers Dorothy Parker’s question— ”What fresh hell is this?”—in exhaustive detail. Fifty-two spare meditations, one for each week of baby’s first year, cover subjects from baby poop to more baby poop, breastfeeding and its relation to same, broken nights and endless days, and all the other low points of having a baby. Thankfully, the book’s raw prose reminds frantic and time-strapped new moms that their brains are only temporarily on vacation. And its moments of poetry assure them that the madness they experience is intermittently divine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781927335598

Carellin Brooks

Rhodes Scholar Carellin Brooks is the author of Fresh Hell: Motherhood in Pieces (2013), Every Inch a Woman (2011), and Wreck Beach (2007). She has edited the anthologies Carnal Nation, with Brett Josef Grubisic, and Bad Jobs. Winner of the Books in Canada Student Writing Award for poetry (1993), the Cassell/Pink Paper Lesbian Writing Award for non-fiction (1994), and the Institute for Contemporary Arts New Blood Award for prose (1995), Brooks lives and works in Vancouver, where she was born. Connect with Brooks at www.carellinbrooks.com or on Twitter @carellinb.

Book preview

Hell

Fresh Hell

Motherhood in Pieces

Carellin Brooks

DEMETER PRESS, BRADFORD, ONTARIO

Copyright © 2013 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Demeter Press logo based on the sculpture Demeter

by Maria-Luise Bodirsky <www.keramik-atelier.bodirsky.de>

Printed and Bound in Canada

Front cover: Finn Canadensis, Honk Honk Graphic Arts

eBook development: WildElement.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Brooks, Carellin, author

Fresh hell : motherhood in pieces / Carellin Brooks.

ISBN 978-1-927335-32-1 (pbk.)

1. Motherhood. I. Title.

HQ759.B77 2013 306.874’3 C2013-906424-9

Demeter Press

140 Holland Street West

P. O. Box 13022

Bradford, ON L3Z 2Y5

Tel: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Website: www.demeterpress.org

for my girls

Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Surprise

2. Conceived Of

3. Immaculate

4. Natural Disasters

5. Sucks

6. Just a Cigar

7. My Sentence

8. You Heard

9. Doomed

10. Only a Fool Would

11. Good Lookin’

12. Go Away

13. Sainted

14. More Hell

15. Friendly Game

16. Emergency Response

17. Proof

18. Dry

19. Evergreen

20. Warning Notice

21. Brown Study

22. Prospectus

23. Free Advice

24. The Plot

25. Ring the Circle

26. Racked, Shelf, Nice Pair of Teeth

27. Columbus Junior

28. All Night (Refrain)

29. Indictment

30. Radiate

31. The Toll

32. Runneth

33. What We Take From One Another

34. The Strain

35. Little People

36. Crimes, Evidence

37. The Impending

38. The Knowledge

39. Experimental Horror Movie

40. Here Comes the Airplane, Pbbt

41. Ruined

42. Removal Man

43. Double You

44. You Were Told

45. The End

46. Bolstered

47. The Last Fight You Ever Had

48. Who Now?

49. Fell Down the Stairs

50. One Last Wave

51. Happy

52. Reckoning

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my daughters, for putting up with me. They are each far better than I deserve. My heartfelt thanks also to Peter Nosco for all those plates of food, and especially for the extra hours of sleep. I would also like to thank those who provided invaluable advice, kind and sensitive comments, subtitle suggestions, and lucid queries, not necessarily in that order, namely Angie Chan, Kyla Epstein, Daniel Gawthrop, Brett Josef Grubisic, John Harris, Vivien Lougheed, Melva McLean, Julia Saunders and the members of Letterheads: Mindy Abramowitz, Kate Bird, and Shannon Underwood. Finally, my thanks to everyone at Demeter Press, especially Andrea O’Reilly, and to Finn Canadensis, cover designer extraordinaire!

1. Surprise

WHEN A BABY HAS THE BIG ONE, the special, the surprise, you can’t help but feel tricked. You’re stripping off what appears to be a perfectly ordinary diaper. There are no ominous musical chords, nothing to warn you. The baby too is perfectly ordinary, screeching or waving its arms agreeably depending upon the time of day, alignment of the stars, alien messages being piped into its baby brain and other factors you will never in a million years comprehend.

Then you catch it. Your first glimpse. No, you say. Like a child you comfort yourself: you imagined it, everything’s fine. But as you continue to peel back the diaper you morph into a horror-film heroine, sheer white nightgown and all, starting down the shadowy cellar stairs with inadequate candlestick in hand.

Now it’s the audience that hears those ominous chords, wills you to go back, slam the door and bar it for good measure. Here your own body and brain attain a rare unity; your own senses yell at you to refasten the Velcro, turn around, go out the door and don’t come back. Because down there, It awaits. The Blob. Viscous, pitiless, spackling baby’s crevices and oozing out the sides. And now comes the first sly waft of a miasma that will soon enough fill up the room, creamy and soured: your sweet milk turned dark.

Wrappings unpeeled, you face it at last: the horror. Every inch of formerly pristine cotton (and you decided to use cloth, you self-righteous fool you; now look what you’ve done) is coated in Harvest Gold. Then the creases, each one to be swabbed. The outrage. The insult. And even as you gape and gasp the baby continues to goo, untroubled by the sensation of cold poo packed into its backside like a perverse beauty treatment and utterly unconscious of the great wrong it just committed. Why should baby care? It’s your problem now. You’re looking around for the candid camera, waiting for the punchline, wondering how long before the curtain rises and someone arrives to say it’s all a joke and nobody in their right mind would expect you to clean up that horror. That hell.

So when there’s no reprieve, no laughing audience, nothing to do but face the thick and evilly scented facts and mop up as best you can, you go in search of your fellow sinner. Would a responsible parent take it out on the baby? After all,