“The Mother Who Stayed”

Most books of short stories are collections of unrelated stories or “slices of life” according to Laura Furman, the long-time editor of the annual PEN/O.Henry Prize Short Stories. The good ones are concise, satisfying and self-contained. At the other end of the spectrum is the novel – a longer piece of literature whose chapters link together to form an involved story. Between the short story and the novel is the short story trilogy – three short stories linked together by a “set of characters whose lives are connected through family, location, or sheer coincidence.” The stories can stand alone – and many have in published journals – but collectively they result in a more revealing and thought-provoking piece of fiction.

The Mother Who Stayed is a collection of nine short stories that form three trilogies. In the first set of short stories – The Eye, The Hospital Room, and The Thief,” the stories are connected by Rachel, the middle daughter of three sisters who longs for the mother she lost to illness as a child. Within the stories, the author explores adultery, class distinction, and a child’s perspective on the future – “a place – like the general store where they went for the Sunday paper and five pennies’ worth of candy – only no one knew how to get there.”

The second trilogy – A Thousand Words, Here It Was, November, and The Blue Wall – tells the story of two women who made very different choices in life; one choosing motherhood while the other eschewed this option until it conveniently fit into her plans. But the story is not about motherhood, per se but rather the traits necessary to be a mother and a friend for that matter:  to be present, available, loving, consistent and sensitive to the needs of others.

Sandra, a poet puts her career on the back burner to meet the needs of her husband, Per – a celebrated novelist – and Astrid, the daughter they have together. Their mutual friend, Marion is also a celebrated writer who “wanted the world to sit up straighter and to take even more note of her. She wanted more. More was the principle of her being, and it always had been.”  Years later after Per, Sandra, and Marion had passed away, a writer decides to undertake the monumental task of writing Marion’s biography and discovers long-buried secrets.

In the last trilogy – The Blue Birds Come Today, Plum Creek, and The Mother Who Stayed – the stories center around diaries kept by Mary Ann Rathbun from 1874 – 1902. The diaries are a daily account – in 2 or 3 sentences – of what happened on any given day over 30 years. Absent are feelings, questions, and the recording of devastating events including the deaths of her children, which makes the diaries more of a life account of a woman who bore 16 children on a farm in upstate New York. Mary Ann “never asks the meaning of her work and life” instead writing more often than not “I done what I could.”

A hundred years later, the diaries are found by Dinah when she and her husband, Taylor purchase an old farm house. After Taylor’s death, Dinah turns her attention to the diaries and the choices she herself made throughout her life and long marriage. Dinah was raised by her father after her mother abandoned the family when Dinah was just nine. She regrets not having her own children and realizes “the rock-bottom truth was that once having had Taylor’s gaze of love and serious consideration on her, she couldn’t share it, not even with their own child.” Only when Taylor is gone does she realize what she missed. When she sees the opportunity to fill the empty and needy part of her heart, she throws herself into pseudo-motherhood much like the local diner that serves fake creamer when the local “landscape is dotted with dairy cows.” It’s just another way to accomplish the same thing, or is it?

The theme of motherhood and daughters runs through all nine of the short stories in The Mother Who Stayed but more telling is the universal desire to be loved and to love back, and to be nurtured and to nurture. Timeless in many ways – as the short stories span decades and even centuries – the trilogies draw on aspects of life that don’t change with time: love, loss, and grief. Read the short stories once and then read them again because the second time is even more enjoyable than the first.