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“Perhaps this is what we should give to new moms: A laptop and a cup of coffee. A notebook and a pen. Permission to dream.”---- One of the many lines from this heart touching memoir that stayed with me
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Book review: What we carry
Maya Shanbag Lang
Harper Collins
266 pages
Published 2020
No spoilers
Category: Memoir
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This was a book I studiously ignored for as long as was possible. When that didn’t work, I put it in my cart in the “save for later” category. It stayed there, and as a kindle sample for a while, until I finally bought the paperback version. After buying it, I put it away in a bookshelf in the study, not near my desk where my TBR books usually go.
I knew it wouldn’t be an easy read. But I also knew it needed to be read; and felt.
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Around the same time, as she embarks on her parenting journey, the author is forced to become a caregiver to her mother.
As her mother loses sight of herself, the daughter begins to see her in a new light. The path from this realization to judging and finally forgiving her mother is written with raw honesty. The mother-daughter relationship, like all other relationships, can be quite complicated. Here, circumstances force it to be lay threadbare and the writer begins to understand her mother, who she thought she knew intimately. She understands the choices and compulsions that had remained hidden throughout her childhood, and finally is able to let go of the burdens she had unknowingly carried for decades.
A difficult journey, but like all journey’s within, worth the hubris that it entails.
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It is about how trauma makes us unsee some things and see others very differently from what they actually are; and how we pick up and shoulder burdens until we come close to breaking.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter if our stories are true or false. What matters is they are ours”
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Beautifully written, the book makes for a stirring read.
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The book is also about feminism, as it draws attention to the moral struggle involved when women finally rise to claim themselves.
The metaphor of the woman in the water holding the baby stayed with me throughout the book, and later too; as I found myself applying it to different situations I had found and was finding myself in.
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A must-read book.
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