Motherhood Exaggerated

Name: Motherhood Exaggerated
SKU: 4920
Price: 21.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Judith Hannan

$21.00

When eight-year-old Nadia cracks her jaw on a piece of Halloween candy unmasking a rare bone cancer, mother and daughter are launched on a revelatory journey of treatment, recovery and survival. As Nadia fights her way through chemotherapy, surgeries and hospital stays, her mother, as well, is tested as never before. Not always certain about how to raise her daughter, who seemed born with a gravity and preoccupation with death, Nadia’s mother must confront her own upbringing, her past anxiety disorders, her relationship with her husband and other children, and her ambivalence about faith in order to shepherd her daughter toward health and survival.

Categories: All Books, Judith Hannan, LaurelBooks, Prose Tags: Judith Hannan, Motherhood Exaggerated, mothers, staff pick

Meet the Author

JUDITH HANNAN has been a writer for over 25 years; 10 years ago she began
exploring personal narrative. Her essays have appeared in such publications as
Woman’s Day, Twins Magazine, The Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, Mom Writer’s
Literary Magazine, The Healing Muse, and the anthology On The Vineyard III. She
teaches writing about personal experience to homeless single mothers and to
at-risk adolescents. Ms. Hannan has a long history of involvement in children’s
education, health and welfare. She served as Director of Development for the 92nd
Street Y and then for the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. She serves on the Board of the Museum
as well as on three boards affiliated with the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York—the Adolescent
Health Center, the Children’s Center Foundation and the new Global Health Initiative. Ms. Hannan
lives in New York City with her husband and three children.

Critic Reviews

She lets the reader in on the ways in which she departs from the collective myth of the ideal mother while holding our attention to the space in which a child’s illness demands the very best.
—ForeWord Review, Full review at www.forewordreviews.com

A child with a life-threatening illness is every mother’s nightmare. Yet Judith Hannan’s memoir, Motherhood Exaggerated, is a beautifully written narrative that every reader will find compelling. This is not just a tale about a mother and daughter on a frightening medical journey but a moving, engaging retelling of the complex bonds and tensions every parent experiences in our relationship with our children.
— Mary Gordon

I congratulate Judi for going through these things again in the writing of this book, for it must have been a harrowing experience. And also, she must now see herself as the artist she is, for she has made us want to go on and turn every difficult page, to burst through the same bubbles that she bursts through and then finally, perhaps midway through her own life, stand naked in the glory of a new and robustly complicated relationship with herself.
— Carly Simon

Judith Hannan has performed a valuable service by publishing this remarkably honest account of the crisis she and her family went through as her daughter—now a brilliant and beautiful young woman—dealt with a rare form of cancer. She takes us with her on her journey through the valley of the
shadow of death and then back to the sunshine of life. Tears of remembrance came to my eyes and will to the eyes of other readers who have been through similar crises. Judith’s willingness to share intimate feelings and to discuss difficult moments is a gift that will help so many, as it has already helped me, to deal with the pas as well as the future.
— Alan M. Dershowitz

Excerpt

Nadia has a fever. Naturally, I don’t think a little bug or even Lyme disease.
The new scare on Martha’s Vineyard is deadly tularemia.
What if that’s what Nadia has?

— journal entry, August 15, 2000

Butterflies were scarce on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2000. Every day I would check the meadow outside my window. The summer before, the flowers would take flight each time I passed. Now they remained as immoveable as the queen’s guards.

On Labor Day morning, as my family prepared for our return to New York, I searched one last time. Nothing. Who would want to come out to play on such a leaden, gray day? The sky was too heavy for my head.

I struggled to look up. One more search.

I cannot explain my desperate search for butterflies. My need for this symbol of renewal is primal, connected to my certainty, since her infancy, that something horrible would one day happen to my daughter Nadia, who now lay in bed with a 101-degree temperature.

Then, out of the northern sky, over the rooftop of my house, they came. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them—dragonflies—pushed by the wind or perhaps beating a hasty retreat from an advancing cold front. They dusted the air like ashes.

The dragonflies uneased me. Their flight was erratic, their purpose in such numbers seemed sinister. I resisted being borne back to New York on their wings.

There were two pieces of clinical evidence that summer that hinted that cancer was developing in Nadia’s body, two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose meaning would only be revealed when seen as part of the whole. An athletic and determined eight-year-old, Nadia dragged her way at a plodding walk through the 3.1 miles of the annual Chilmark Road Race. A week later, she came down with the first of three fevers that left nearly as fast as they came. By the time we boarded our plane to return to New York at the end of the summer, the second fever was gone. (The third would come in late September.)

I’ve always felt panic in the face of fever. I’ve handled my children’s broken bones, the croup, asthma, and anaphylaxis with more confidence than I have ever coped with a fever. Now, with no other symptoms to deal with, I brought Nadia tomato soup on a tray with a vase of flowers, hiding my anxiety behind an uncharacteristic level of fussing.

My sense of foreboding lifted once we were back in New York. Nadia had an easy transition back to school, and I had a more neutral perspective on her third fever. But outside of school, Nadia started to become unsettled.

For the first two years of her life, Nadia slept as if in a state of tormented limbo. She began her nights with a brief period of what resembled deep and satisfying rest but then spent hours moaning and squirming as if confronting a great fear. Anxious to banish whatever was causing Nadia such anguish, I went to her throughout the night. Her eyes were always closed; she showed no signs of being awake, and I never found the source of her misery.