Strange Guests: Mother’s Day v. Memorial Day

Who knew becoming a mother was twice as deadly as serving as a soldier in a war?

Tom Tordillo
3 min readMay 7, 2022

Tomorrow, America celebrates Mother’s Day. A few weeks later, America will also honor soldiers slain in war with Memorial Day.

During 20 years of the “war on terror,” approximately 7,000 American soldiers died from enemy action in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the same period, 14,000 women died in childbirth in America, or approximately 700 per year.

America spends about $1 trillion per year on the Dept of Defense and the Dept of Veterans Affairs. Memorial Day and Veterans Days are both federal holidays.

We have one day to honor Mothers — not even a federal holiday — scheduled during a weekend.

Google occasionally offers intriguing, under-appreciated articles when I’m looking for classical poetry by actual mothers. I don’t know much, but figured a quick search might lead toward filling some gap in my education.

Prof. Lily Gurton-Wachter’s “The Stranger Guest: The Literature of Pregnancy and New Motherhood” starts with this delightful introductory sentence:

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, from Wikimedia Commons

My title, “The Stranger Guest,” comes from a little-known poem by a little-known early 19th-century poet named Anna Laetitia Barbauld with the amazing title “To a Little Invisible Being Who Is Expected Soon to Become Visible.”

- Lily Gurton-Wachter

Dr. Gurton-Wachter’s essay is 3700 words: worth a read. Wikipedia’s entry is about 6000 words or so when last checked.

It’s less generous:

Barbauld was remembered only as a pedantic children’s writer in the 19th century, and largely forgotten in the 20th, until the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s renewed interest in her works and restored her place in literary history.

Our friends at Wikipedia

Pedantic? Hmmm…pedants posed every worthwhile question that ever rattled the universe. Like why do we honor our soldiers when they bear a small fraction of the physical risk of harm applicable to every mother? (We probably ought to honor mothers who are or have been soldiers with an entirely new holiday…). Pedants care about little things like that.

So back to Dr. Gurton-Wachter:

In 1799, when Barbauld was writing, and the death of both mother and child during birth were commonplace…

Since 1799, numerous revolutions increased safety of both childbirth and soldiering. At least for some people.

If some enemy military killed 700 American soldiers per year, you would expect Americans would be quick to demand the obliteration of that enemy. If ‘improvised explosive devices’ kill soldiers, one part of the response would be to identify who to kill — another would be to invest in body armor, better armored personnel carriers, better medical response capabilities. Things like that get taken seriously.

Gurton-Wachter ponders the dearth (not the ‘death’) of mother-poets in ‘literary classics’ -

…in the grand scheme of things, there aren’t that many books written by mothers at all, especially before the 1970s. The most famous women writers in the English language — Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen — did not have children, and one might argue that this is no accident

Lily Gurton-Wachter

The only mother/writer from before the 20th century I knew of was Mary Shelley, who ‘conceived’ of Frankenstein’s creature after losing one of her own daughters during childbirth.

A strange guest indeed.

Mary Shelley described Frankenstein’s creature at one point as an ‘abortion.’ Fascinating choice of words given current affairs in America.

Abortifacient

A tritone of reverence, arrhythmic irrelevance,
Dictate that a goddess sing wrath of Achilles.
The strains of that gospel that Mammon conceived
Sets forth each fetus, each disposable soldier,
As memorialized silences violently grieved,
Vaingloriously fought,
Discordantly sought,
The half-lives of heroines this world aggrieved.
Or was it simply a world where too many agreed
That a woman when raped had no choice but to bleed?

  • Tom Tordillo (2022)

Yes, I am angry at the draft opinion from the Supreme Court last week.

The actual opinion is imminent. Followed by opinions about opinions. Lacking anything substantive to add to the cacophony, I’ll sit and ponder…when we act upon our caring in public, why do we care so much about our soldiers, their safety, comfort, freedom — and so little about our mothers? Why do we pretend that the one is extremely dangerous — and the other isn’t?

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Tom Tordillo

Necromancer unleashing zombie hordes from Project Gutenberg to work literary atrocities. Also father/lawyer/commentator/ironic.