The Compleat Story
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| One of the final issues. (Courtesy of Zoe York) |
It started yesterday, when a fellow romance author recommended a book called Romance Your Brand: Building A Marketable Genre Fiction Series by Zoe York. The suggestion was timely; I’m in the early stages of planning a new romance series with the accidental pregnancy/secret baby tropes. I want to make it rain babies in my mythical town of Fairview, but I also want to make sure people find and love these books.
I love babies, birth and breastfeeding so much I once considered becoming a midwife or doula. I love books so much that there’s seldom been a time in my life when I haven’t been reading or writing one. Problem is, my first small-town romance series (The Small-Town Secrets) has garnered strong reviews and enthusiasm but ho-hum sales. Perhaps, I thought, Zoe’s book will show me what I need to change.
Turns out she does have plenty of wisdom to impart. But before I got started reading her book, a nugget in the foreword sidetracked me entirely. Zoe mentions that she learned the publishing business at her mother’s knee, while watching her publish a magazine dedicated to things like attachment parenting and breastfeeding. Most people read that line and then read the next one. Not me. I stopped right there.Wieslaw Karpinski (holding Amanda Young),
Catherine Young, Zoe York,
Vera Karpinski. (Courtesy of Zoe York)
I immediately suspected her mother must be the woman who put together The Compleat Mother, a long-out-of-print zine that meant everything to me as a young mom. And if so, how bizarre is it that a woman whose little magazine taught me so much about being a better mother might have a daughter who, three decades and more later, could write a book that would teach me how to be a more successful romance novelist?
I stalked Zoe online and sent her messages on both Facebook and Twitter. She was kind enough to confirm that yes, her mother published The Compleat Mother. I was able to tell her how much her mother’s writing had influenced me and made me the mother (and now grandmother) I am. I can only imagine how meaningful it must be to have a (compleat!) stranger praise your late mother; we both teared up.
My babies were born in 1989 and 1992, and in those days, glossy parenting magazines funded largely by the advertising of formula manufacturers and the makers of other mother substitutes told us exactly what we should do: Go to the hospital, get an epidural and give birth on their time table. If you couldn’t do it fast enough, you’d be given a cesarean. Once born, babies would drink formula on a schedule and then sleep in a crib in another room, and if they didn’t like it, you should let them cry it out. They’ve gotta learn to self-soothe.
Most moms of my generation followed this more or less. Some moms tried to nurse, but most of my peers believed they “couldn’t” because they “didn’t have enough milk.” I wondered how the human race survived, with something like 90 percent of human women not being able to feed their children their own milk.
I was lucky, though. My mom had nursed me, albeit for a short time, and I had attended La Leche League. So nursing went well for me. I don’t remember who handed me my first copy of The Compleat Mother. I do know that even as a very poor young mom, I came up with the money to subscribe to it for many years, because I needed it like I needed groceries.
The Compleat Mother didn’t have any advertising for formula or strollers or pacifiers or disposable diapers. Going from memory, the few ads were for things like books, cloth diapers and red raspberry leaf tea. I suspect the greater proportion of the publication’s income came from subscriptions.
We were a community. Lacking the Internet, which would come around soon but not soon enough for my baby-making season, mothers connected with each other through the magazine. I exchanged old-style letters with several other moms. For years, I corresponded with a Dutch woman named Annaliese. I wish I knew how to connect with her now and tell her that I ended up marrying a Dutch man!
The Compleat Mother gave me information, but it also gave me the courage to follow my instincts. No, I didn’t need to force my babies to sleep in cribs. Yes, it was always good to respond to my babies’ cries. I did not need to wean according to someone else’s timetable. I could continue nursing my first all through my pregnancy with my second, and then to nurse them together for several months. Naysayers told me I would stunt the new baby’s growth. (He was 10 pounds.) I could discipline my children with love and respect and without violence.
What set The Compleat Mother apart, though, was its feminist stance. Even today, it’s not always easy to find voices that stand up for babies and mothers. There are some feminist voices that barely acknowledge that many women want to be mothers. There are conservative voices that want mothers barefoot and pregnant and who fully support breastfeeding, but insist mothering is the only rightful occupation for women.
But women can do lots of things. Some of us have several intensive mothering years and then we run newsrooms, start businesses, write for magazines and launch careers as novelists. That would be me. Others work as journalists and then start their own magazine and write books. That would be Zoe’s mother, Catherine Young. Others are so successful writing romance novels that they also write books teaching other novelists how to follow in their footsteps. That would be Zoe. Others design engines or build houses or argue court cases or write code or whatever else they want to do. We’re women. We can do a lot of shit besides have babies, but if we do want to have babies, that in no way means we can’t do plenty of other shit, too. Just watch us.
You’ll find more than a few birth scenes in my books. One of my characters (Julie, in Perfect Fit) is a doula training to become a midwife. The birth scene in Kiss and Tell is not to be missed. I love birth. My own births were not the natural births I had hoped for, but I attended my daughter’s natural births and I’ve never seen such goddess-like strength!
What’s the best thing about romances? It might be the opposite of what their detractors think. Critics believe romances are just about finding a man. Those people are missing the point. Romances are usually female-centric. There are all kinds of romances out there, but most of them aren’t just about finding a partner. The best heroines have their own lives and careers already. Few of them are looking to a man to “complete” them. Romances are a celebration of womanhood. When you read a romance, you step into a woman’s world. She may have children, she may have career issues, she may have money problems, she may be caring for her older parents. She might have a lot of different things going on — same as any other woman. She probably has girlfriends, and most of the time, they do much more than just talk about men.
Traditionally, the everyday world of women has been thought unimportant — by men. Male historians knew about the diary of Martha Ballard for eons and dismissed it as meaningless fluff centered on women’s lives. It took Laurel Thatcher Ullrich to write A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. It turns out that the stories of women who are delivering babies and tending gardens and spinning wool matter just as much as the stories of the menfolk who are out there fighting wars. (Read that book, if you do happen to like women, birth, babies, history or herstory. It’s a good one!)
The lives of women matter. They matter if and when we’re giving birth, and they matter if and when we have outside careers. The stories of our relationships are worth telling, too. Nothing about women’s lives is trivial, including those parts of the female life that have to do with finding a partner, birthing babies and caring for them. I insist these parts of the female life (for those who choose them) be recognized as just as important as the businesses we run, the masterpieces we paint or the machines we invent.
We are women, and we’ve always known that our intimate and family lives are a big part of what makes the world go round. The stuff that men have been doing all through history? Some of it was important, sure, but they couldn't have done any of it without us.
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