Noticeably absent is any sense of joy or wonder. Breastfeeding isn’t a spontanous success, for one thing a nurse “stood over us and stared at Violet and my huge brown nipple as she tried to latch again.” Blythe struggles to adapt to motherhood and she sees seismic shifts in her relationship to her husband, Fox. Their relationship goes downhill from there.īlythe’s postpartum experience is familiar, and Audrain renders it flawlessly. “I think the baby hates me,” she says just days after giving birth to her first child, a daughter named Violet. Blythe is primed, perhaps even genetically programmed, for maternal struggle. Her grandmother, also abusive, departed in a more gruesome way: by hanging herself from a tree in the front yard. Her own mother abandoned her when she was 11, after years of cruelty. Does the preschooler with a predilection for hitting need a professional intervention, or maybe just a taekwondo class? Is the kid who drops naps but not tantrums a future rageaholic? This sort of hand-wringing, at its most extreme, is at the center of Ashley Audrain’s taut, chilling debut novel, “The Push.”īlythe Connor is reluctant to become a parent - understandably so. Is my child’s behavior normal? It’s a parenting question for the ages, particularly at a time when a certain type of parent (present company included) frets over every childhood quirk, no matter how mundane.
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