Lightning Flash Writing

I’ve never gone all out for Mother’s Day celebrations. When I was younger, I’d make my mom a card. As I got older, I’d cook her a meal. After I moved out, I’d bring over fancy coffees we could enjoy together. Once I became a mother, too, she’d give me gifts, but I was never pampered or had a day “off,” which is fine; that’s not my style.

This year, I wanted to reflect on mothers in fiction and try to define them, classify them, and relate them to reality.

Here’s a quick list of the fictional mothers who came to mind without even trying:

• Norma Bates (Psycho) – Dead, yes. Gone? Hardly.
• Marmee March (Little Women) – The literary gold standard. Calm, wise, ever-steady.
• Sethe (Beloved) – Maybe the most tragic mother in fiction; you can feel her love, her terror, her desperation.
• Ma (Room) – A mother whose strength bends reality for her child’s sake. She builds a whole world out of scraps.
• Dorothy Quimby (Ramona Quimby series) – A real one. Not perfect, but present. Tired but trying. Often overlooked, but never forgettable.

Ramona’s mom is the one I focus on when it comes to mothers I feel like I “know” in fiction. She’s not dramatic. She’s not always warm. But she is real. In Ramona and Her Mother, we watch Ramona ache for the version of her mother she used to have—before work, before responsibilities piled up like laundry baskets. There’s this quiet pain: Ramona feels her mom prefers Beezus. That she’s not the daughter who gets it right. That no one really likes her.

And isn’t that the secret undercurrent of childhood? That feeling of being out of sync with the people who are supposed to love us most?

Later, in Ramona Forever, the family expands. Her mom is pregnant. Ramona gets more freedom, more fights, more feelings. It’s all so ordinary, and yet when I read it, it feels enormous. Maybe because Beverly Cleary never talked down to her readers. She trusted kids to handle real stuff, and she trusted parents to not always have the answers.

I’ve been thinking lately about how many books I’ve read in the past few years where the women are childfree, whether single or partnered. And it’s not a complaint; it feels like a mirror. Maybe we’re writing about what our lives need to look like now, considering the state of the world and the ability in our country to raise healthy children and provide all they need. Maybe we’re shifting our focus from caretaking to being because it’s all we can handle right now. Maybe the stories are catching up to the moment.

But I still think about Ramona’s mom. About a woman who made tuna casserole and quietly held a family together. No fanfare. No glowing Instagram post. Just showing up. That’s a kind of power, too.

Who are the mothers you remember—real or fictional? The ones who shaped you, haunted you, held you up, or maybe just made really good sandwiches? I’d love to hear.

Instead of a book recommendation, I’m doing something a little different this month.

I want to share this piece I wrote in a Kathy Fish workshop in 2022. Appropriately, it was my response to the January 14th prompt. I’m publishing this Substack on May 14th. My son came into my life on June 14th.

I wanted to capture the feeling of knowing my life would completely change in just a few hours. I knew I had to go through something major to get there, but nothing would ever be the same. I can still see myself pacing the house between contractions, buzzing with excitement and anxiety.

Hush, hush, settle down.

I can’t sleep. If I’m not feeling the sharp, shooting pain, I’m thinking about it, dreading it, ready to grit my teeth against it. The midwife says to soak in a warm bath, light some candles, enjoy the solitude—it won’t last long. But I can’t relax because everything is twitching, fluttering, wiggling.

In the morning you’ll arrive when it’s still dark outside, like the night never ended even though something new has begun.

Write a story about a moment right before everything changes. It can change because of something significant, like how I used pregnancy in my piece above. Or it can come about because of a seemingly simple decision that sets off a domino effect of changes.