Abstract

For this essay, we were given prompts that all revolved around one book, Her Body and
Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. We had to choose a prompt that we thought we can best answer. These prompts consisted of genres of motherhood, marriage, partnership, or the endings of certain short stories. Some of these genres were shown consistently throughout the short stories. For this essay, I wrote about marriage and partnerships because i personally thought these short stories had these genres but also were different throughout the stories.

In-Class Essay

The last couple of weeks we have been reading a book. Within this book, short stories make up this book, each with different themes, conundrums, or any lessons the author/narrator wants to teach us. I have not heard of this book but after reading it, it has made me want to continue reading the authors books. The title of this book is “Her Body And Other Stories”, and it’s written by Carmen Maria Machado. Machado is known for her essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism and has won many awards throughout her career. As I briefly mentioned before, within these short stories Machado incorporates various themes. One of these themes involve motherhood, marriage/partnerships, or even real world problems women face today. In this book, there are various stories in which motherhood is mentioned or we get the sense that motherhood is being talked about. Machado clearly shows us, the readers, that motherhood is important and that we should learn about it throughout the book. 

What is motherhood? As someone who has never been a mother of something, I personally don’t know the actual and proper definition. My definition of motherhood would have to be the experiences a mother has while growing along with their kid. We see various examples of motherhood in many stories, such as “A Husbands Stitch”, “*8 Bites”, and of course “Mothers”. Each of these have different examples of motherhood but each plays an important role in the story. 

Between “A Husband’s Stitch” and “8 Bites” we get two different ideas of what motherhood is. The title of this story and idea of motherhood don’t somewhat correlate but there is a part that slightly does. When the mother is done giving birth, the husband asks the doctor if she can get an extra stitch, referring back to the title, but this extra stitch can hurt and can be uncomfortable for the woman as she tries to heal up. This is showing us that she is losing her agency because she clearly isn’t able to control her decisions. But motherhood comes into play when the wife and her kids grow up as the story passes by. We can see that the relationship between the kid and the mom is very strong. We see the wife also growing as a wiser person with the help of her family. There are similarities between the wife and the kid and the wife with their parents. They teach him the same ideas of marrying someone who he feels passionate about. That’s how the wife met her husband. In “8 Bites”, we can have a completely different idea of motherhood, this short story was about eating disorders and the negative impacts people have on women’s bodies. This story shows us the negative relationship between the moms and their daughters. For example, we are told that the narrator’s daughter isn’t with her anymore but they commute from time to time. Their relationship is very bad, they are getting into arguments, having no trust no trust with each other, and simply not communicating with each other. We don’t know what originally happened that made them this distant from one another, but due to the surgery the mother had, it made them even more distant and the daughter felt betrayed. These two short stories have different ideas of motherhood. In my opinion, Machado purposely wrote these stories to show us that not everything is perfect, everyone is dealing with something. Motherhood can be something beautiful but at the same time it can be something completely opposite of beautiful. Motherhood helped shape these stories to see other problems that arise within this theme, such as body image or agency. 

In the story “Mothers”, we see another idea of motherhood. In this story, the narrator is given a kid by a woman she was sleeping with. The mom left the kid with the narrator and completely ran off. “I am so hypnotized by her that I miss the receding footsteps, the crack of the slamming car door. But then Bad is gone, and for once, I am not alone, after”. Towards the end of the story, the mom is mentioned again but the kid is now slightly older than before. “Mothers” is a perfect example of motherhood because we see the experiences the narrator faced when with this kid. She was in charge of raising this kid who was given to her. She wasn’t given a name for the kid, it took her a while, but she came up with one. ”“When the baby cries, she could be hungry or thirsty or angry or cranky or sick or sleepy or paranoid or jealous or she had planned something but it went horribly awry. So you’ll need to take care of that, when it happens”. This story shows us that there are mothers out there in this world having to deal with similar situations. Mothers have to raise a kid all on their own, without any help, and having to deal with the struggles this world brings them. 

 Overall, the idea of motherhood plays a crucial role throughout this entire book. We see the different ideas of motherhood, whether it being positive or negative. Machado had several important themes throughout this book, but I’d say motherhood stood out the most. There are other stories that involve motherhood, but id say these 3, “A Husbands Stitch”, “8 Bites”, and “Mothers” best represent this topic. She wrote these stories so that we would be aware of the things happening around us, to make us realize the significance of motherhood.