Swaddled
Sage Stories to Wrap Mothers in Love
The intimate essays in Swaddled aim to support mothers as people outside of their children.
In Elizabeth Sarah Cassidy’s confessional essay collection Swaddled, mothers discuss how becoming a parent changed them.
When Cassidy’s first childbirth upended the expectations she had absorbed from social messages about motherhood, her doctor recommended that she join a new mothers support group. Though she feared that she would flounder there, too, the meetings became her lifeline. She was inspired to fill a perceived resource gap, developing material that could support mothers as people outside of their children.
Intimate and advice filled, the content includes soothing conversations between women when one or both are at low points and descriptions of how doctors can be at their most available and affirmative. There are raw admissions about challenges including sleep deprivation, feeding, and changes to sex, and there are discussions of rare postpartum conditions too.
The prose is down-to-earth, making use of slang, exclamations, nicknames, and shorthand language. Some of the content veers into dramatic territory, as with an anecdote about a surrogate mother, but the tone is generally even throughout. Despite the reigning unity in the book’s tone and messaging, its essays function as standalones. They are a consistent length and follow a repetitive format, with their subjects anticipating giving birth, discussing the immediate aftermath of having given birth, and then looking back, covering topics ranging from contemplating abortion to baby abnormalities, infertility, and breastfeeding.
The book’s topical diversity is undermined somewhat by the fact that all of its subjects come from a similar demographic; most are married, educated professionals. With few exceptions, they discuss their partners sharing in childcare duties; some had nannies and other helpers too. Thus, the concerns they share are often internal, as with feelings of lost control or compromised senses of personal success.
Indeed, the speakers often express a desire to be happy, and the positivity they either express or reach toward has an overall flattening effect. Thus, although the essays address various challenges of new motherhood, their delivery on the whole is quite optimistic at the expense of realism; not all audiences stand to be assuaged by the assurance “Your life will come back to you.” Further, the opening and concluding invitations to be a part of the project the book represents are vague and have a slightly off-putting sales-pitch quality.
Swaddled is an affirming collection of essays that center the voices of new mothers.
Reviewed by
Mari Carlson
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
