Drollerie Blog Tour: Meredith Holmes on impending motherhood

This month’s Drollerie Blog Tour theme is “mothers”, and this time around, I’m hosting Drollerie Press author Meredith Holmes. Meredith is the author of Unseelie, and if you know me well at all, you can bet that this is a book I can support.

Y’all check out Meredith’s essay on her own impending motherhood, and how she feels this may affect her writing! Enjoy.

This month’s blog tour theme is Mother’s Day, or mothers. In the United States, Mother’s Day falls at the beginning of May and this year’s was especially exciting for me as I found out just a month before that I am soon to join the ranks of mom-hood myself. This, as happens to many women finding out that they’re pregnant, caused much introspection which, since I’m a write-a-holic, caused me to reflect on the nature of my characters and maternal relationships. Not long ago, someone had pointed out to me that most of my characters either do not have biological mothers within the story (they’re dead, skipped out, or just not mentioned), or their mother-figures are “non-traditional.” This didn’t mean much to me at the time, aside from a moment of “Huh, that’s right… wonder what Jung would say about that, since my relationship with my own mom is great?” is really starting to take pride of place in my meanderings of late. I wondered, at first, is my writing going to change now that I’m pregnant? Am I going to write more mom-intensive stories? Maybe–we write what we know, after all. While I write about faeries and trolls and demons and other supernatural things, they are all based in emotions and needs and wants that we all, as humans, have. Though I do think I saw a faerie when I was a kid…but that’s a story for another time. The non-traditional motherhood part…well, I’m a non-traditional mom myself. I’m a Pagan and bisexual, which is pretty dang non-traditional in these parts, and I know that has reflected in my writing when I depict relationships between characters and maternal representatives.

As I get further and further into this pregnancy and the reality becomes less glowy, stunned, “Oh my god, I’m going to have a baby!” and more “I need to start getting baby supplies, I need to take care of my health, what am I going to do if xyz happens?”, maybe my characters will develop different maternal relationships. Maybe Du’s mom might make an appearance in Wild Hunt or the demons may have a bonding moment in my new trilogy I’m working on. I wish I could claim so great insight from gestation (I’m almost into my second trimester–maybe the insight comes after week thirteen?), some remarkable “ah ha!” moment that women in those birth books from the 70’s seem to have, judging by the expressions on their softly-lit faces as they gaze with wonder at their perfectly rounded bellies and their partners with the Bob Ross hair and porn-stache gaze on lovingly while Hall and Oates play in the background, but so far the only insight I’ve had is “Oh dear god, I have a HUMAN BEING inside me!” and “I hope she (I’m pretty sure it’s a she) is okay…and doesn’t have the problems I did growing up.” Maybe, thinking about it now, that’s why the mother roles in my stories aren’t conventional–none of us are conventional, whether we’re mothers of the body, of the spirit or of the heart, whether we’re male or female, birthing our creations through writing or drawing, music, dance, speech or physically, in the classical sense of the word “birth.” None of us are “traditional” or “conventional” and that’s what we should think about for Mother’s Day–mothers of all sorts, of all stripes, we love you. And sorry about that car thing when I was 17. Seriously. I had no idea a transmission would do that.