The Kindest Lie

May - The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson

For May's blog, I thought I'd do a little

post-Mother's-Day reality check brought on by Nancy Johnson's novel, The Kindest Lie.

There is so much sentimentality around motherhood. It makes me itchy with a need to push back. And for those of you concerned, I have a therapist. We are talking about my aversion to mushy feelings and anything that smacks of vulnerability.

But you must agree that every mother doesn't qualify for sainthood. I'm a mother, and I sure don't.

When I was young, my conservative southern family referred to the "miracle of birth" in awed tones. As a teenager, I would roll my eyes and remark that giving birth was far too common and too predictable to qualify as a miracle. After becoming a mother, and a few therapy sessions, I amended this statement, but the fact remains: that motherhood isn't that special….or is it?

The Kindest Lie asks us to take a different look at motherhood. Ruth Tuttle became a mother at 17 and gave her son up for adoption before departing for an elite education at Yale. She never spoke of her son, her pregnancy, her decision. Not even to her husband.

And then she did.

Nancy's novel gives us a glimpse into Ruth's circumstances. We are immersed in her world and into the complicated mixture of guilt, shame, self-doubt, love, and hate of her unplanned pregnancy. The Kindest Lie shows us how our families, our communities, and our society are biased against women who experience an unplanned pregnancy. And Ruth experiences an unplanned pregnancy as a teenager and as a woman of color.

Often, at this very vulnerable moment in their lives, a woman finds herself alone.

Humans, being human, are not always thinking clearly. Hormones being hormones. A mammal is built to reproduce. That's not morality. That's biology. Sometimes it happens with all the boxes checked, and the new baby is socially sanctioned. Sometimes, biology has its own ideas.

We know that. But we pile on the blame anyway.

The mother, the one so revered on Mother's Day, gets the full weight of the blame. She should have taken precautions. She should have known better. She shouldn't have been so easy. What did she expect?

The father, the other person responsible for this new life, is often out of the picture, unavailable, inaccessible, and unaccountable. He can slip away clean and without consequence. No mention of his moral compass. No shadow following his reputation.

Even the people who are committed to helping the mother often take over. As with Ruth's grandmother, they make decisions on their behalf in a rush to help. Years later, Ruth is still second-guessing her choices, still thinking about what options she might have had.

When Ruth couldn't contain the secret any longer, she decided to find her son. Her journey takes her back home to ask questions she never felt she had the right to ask. Her journey reconnects her with her family and with parts of herself that she had long denied.

The Kindest Lie asks us to feel Ruth's panic as a teenager and into adulthood as she tries to navigate back to the truth. And it asks us to do a little introspection of our own. About mothers. About race and about empathy. Mother's Day might not be enough.

You can get a copy at your local bookstore or mine, Blue Bicycle Books in Charleston, SC.