Nana Reads - Glitter and Glue

By Kelly Corrigan

In the name of Allah the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

I am not a fan of memoirs but I liked this one.

It is through the eyes of Kelly Corrigan. When Kelly Corrigan was in high school, her mother neatly summarized the family dynamic as “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.” This meant nothing to Kelly, who left childhood sure that her mom—with her inviolable commandments and proud stoicism—would be nothing more than background chatter for the rest of Kelly’s life, which she was carefully orienting toward adventure. After college, armed with a backpack, her personal mission statement, and a wad of traveler’s checks, she took off for Australia to see things and do things and become interesting. But it didn’t turn out the way she pictured it. In a matter of months, her savings shot, she had a choice: get a job or go home. That’s how Kelly met John Tanner, a newly widowed father of two looking for a live-in nanny. They chatted for an hour, discussed timing and pay, and a week later, Kelly moved in. And there, in that house in a suburb north of Sydney, 10,000 miles from the house where she was raised, her mother’s voice was suddenly everywhere, nudging and advising, cautioning and directing, escorting her through a terrain as foreign as any she had ever trekked. Every day she spent with the Tanner kids was a day spent reconsidering her relationship with her mother, turning it over in her hands like a shell, straining to hear whatever messages might be trapped in its spiral.
 
It is a book about the difference between travel and life experience, stepping out and stepping up, fathers and mothers. But mostly it’s about who you admire and why, and how that changes over time.

I found a lot of quotes that I had to deep.

“And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.”

Motherhood is certainly proof that you can have so many feelings throughout one single day. Plus you can feel so many things all at the same time.

“The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she's gone, it's a whole different game.”

Can we really protect? Do we even try to? A lot of time, we want to just run away because we are ‘old enough.’

“But now I see there's no such thing as "a" woman, "one" woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should have figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all the Motherness blocking out everything else?”

Ah this one got me. That motherness block is real. Sometimes, we see our mothers only as that.

“I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.”

Those harsh words we don’t usually whisper. We just blurt them out. And they hide the shock so well. We decide it didn’t even hurt them. And we are even meaner next time.

“Raising people is not some lark. It's serious work with serious repercussions. It's air-traffic control. You can't step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.”

Ah! The pressure!

“The only mothers who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, distort, neglect, baffle, appall, inhibit, incite, insult, or age poorly are dead mothers, perfectly contained in photographs, pressed into two dimensions like a golden autumn leaf.”

O Allah have mercy on our mothers.

“What is it about a living mother that makes her so hard to see, to feel, to want, to love, to like? What a colossal waste that we can only fully appreciate certain riches--clean clothes, hot showers, good health, mothers--in their absence.”

This is heavy!

“The idea is that readers don't come blank to books. Consciously and not, we bring all the biases that come with our nationality, gender, race, class, age. They you layer onto that the status of our health, employment, relationships, not to mention our particular relationship to each book--who gave it to us, where we read it, what books we've already read--and as my professor put it, 'That massive array of spices has as much to do with the flavor of the soup as whatever the cook intended”

And this applies to not just reading. It is the reality of any type of content.

So, what are you reading these days?