Deborah Copperud
MVMOMS
On my last trip to the Washburn branch of the Hennepin County Library as a volunteer book reviewer, I elbow the automatic door opener. I am oblivious that, before my next visit, I will resign my unpaid position in order to preserve my punctuational integrity. When the heavy door swings open, I squeeze my blue nylon double stroller through the entrance.
“Say hi to the librarian!” I instruct my stroller passengers. Gloria, the librarian, smiles at us from behind the front desk. My four-year-old twins wave at her with the tempered enthusiasm of a Midwestern dairy princess on a bedazzled truck bed in a small town parade.
I steer their unwieldy chariot toward the children’s section, past a row of computers outfitted with child-sized headphone sets and colorful keyboards, past an appealing graphic novel display, then through the moody teen bookshelves. My twins grab at the outward facing hardcovers, all of which feature unhappy adolescents tilting their heads beneath edgy, graffiti-style titles. We emerge from our wheeled journey through the stacks to a communal play area under a vibrant ceiling mural.
“Here we are!” I unbuckle my twins from their stroller restraints. They slide down from their fabric seats and beeline to the toys. The children’s librarian calls this the pre-literacy section, but a label like pre-influenza or pre-RSV or pre-strep fits, too.
“I’m going to look for books,” I say, and scoot over to the picture book bins. My kids know their way around. We visit the library often, a least once a week, to exchange books, attend storytime, or just to kill time at a free destination that welcomes us and our germs before we pick up my oldest son, the twins’ big brother, from his morning preschool program.
Today, our library visit has a purpose: I need to find three books on a theme. Or find three books that I like, then fabricate a theme that ties them together. I write book reviews for a parent newsletter and my monthly column is due by the week’s end.
Randomly, I start with a book bin labeled C, but it contains only books authored by Eric Carle. Not helpful. Every literate parent already knows of Carle’s ridiculous, binge-eating caterpillar. And they most likely know Carle’s next most popular book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and his third most popular book, the derivative Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?, both of which feature a preposterous premise. In each book, beautifully illustrated animals spy or eavesdrop on other creatures which, in a real world environment, they would flee from or eat. Eric Carle doesn’t need my recommendation.
I glance at the D and E books. At the front of the F bin rests Thank You, Bear by Greg E. Foley. That’s a cute one. Less well known. Its titular character finds a perfect present for his best friend and, on the way to gifting it, a whole forest of creatures tries to talk the bear out of giving it away. The theme “Stay true to yourself” comes to mind. So does “Don’t give a shit about what woodland critters think.” Then I arrive at a simpler, less profane theme: “Bears.” Brilliant. What is the deal with bears in kids’ literature, I wonder? Stories about huge and sometimes-predatory mammals must trace back to myths from pre-industrial times, when dangers emerged from the wilderness. Not like now, when most dangers emerge from too much taming, now that humans have demolished and polluted and raised the temperature of Earth’s remaining wilderness areas. I make a mental note for next month’s theme, maybe climate change, severe weather, or mass extinction.
Have I done bears before? I think back. I can remember months where I’ve compiled a set of books on themes of space exploration, the alphabet, naughty protagonists, alternative fairy tales, winter, colors, and instructive bunnies. But I haven’t done bears. For now, I’m on to something. I have a tentative theme and one book, which halfway completes my library mission.
I check on my twins. They pile fake fruit into woven baskets, then transfer their harvest from a wooden Melissa and Doug structure over to an aggressively cushioned window seat that wraps around the entire, circular play area. This activity exercises all of their pre-literacy skills, plus probably exposes their immune systems to a light staph infection or Herpes simplex virus.
They sit down and pretend to share a plastic peach. “Not in your mouth!” I chastise.
I appreciate the library’s family-friendly design. Before I had kids, I aspired to work at a library like this one, but over in the grown-up section, which is hushed and serious. I wanted to uphold the principles of democracy by offering unfettered access to a wide array of viewpoints in reading material and other media. And if not that, then I wanted to answer reference questions on complex topics. Or, at least, help library patrons with important business, such as refilling printer toner and converting .doc files to .pdfs. I still, wistfully, hope that someday I will get to share one of my life’s true passions: exporting citations from electronic research databases into properly formatted works cited pages. Modern Language Association rules for works cited pages are my favorite. But, as a true style guide-head, I’m equally proficient in APA rules for reference lists, as well as Chicago and Turabian rules for bibliographies.
Is there anything better in this world than definitive rules about punctuation in style guides that take a hardline on whether periods belong inside or outside a set of parenthesis identifying publication year? That stipulate a singular, lowercase p to identify a singular page number, and a douple pp to identify a range of page numbers? Rules for whether to initial or spell out an author’s first name? I take pleasure in a perfectly formatted bibliography like some people take pleasure in a pressed crease in their dress pants. Or a ROYGBV-ed pantry shelf. Or artfully swooshed whipped cream on a perfectly plated dessert. I am not persnickety about pants or plates or pantry shelves, but I recognize that obsession with detail. Like the Radiohead song, Everything in Its Right Place, which Thom Yorke very well could have written to express his enthusiasm for rules about one-inch page margins.
I realize that my style guide dream vocation is more of an academic writing center-type of job than a public library-type of job. I narrowly missed my calling when I went to graduate school for library science instead of a writing program. But I (mistakenly) thought that library science was a practical career with many exciting job opportunities. I couldn’t justify the time and expense of a frivolous writing degree, so I chose a profession where, at least, I could be surrounded by books.
My preference for following citation rules over answering reference questions doesn’t matter, anyway. I never realized my public library career dream. After I earned my master’s in library science, the only jobs I could land were at a shoddy business library, and then an online for-profit college (think: the University of Phoenix, but less notorious). I don’t get paid to punctuate or answer anything now. When my twins were born just five years into my librarian career, I quit my job to stay home and care for them, trading database searches and pdf conversion lessons for full-time parenting.
Earlier I wrote “parent newsletter,” a phrase that sounds legitimate, nearly sophisticated, but it’s not accurate. I only wrote “parent newsletter” because the actual organization that distributes my volunteer book review column sounds so hokey that I can barely type it. The newsletter isn’t actually for parents, in general. It’s for moms, specifically. Moms like myself who belong to a club called Minnesota Valley Mothers of Multiples. Mothers of Multiples, as in moms of twins, triplets, and rare higher order multiples like quadruplets or quintuplets. MVMOM for short.
When I was pregnant with my twins, I joined the group in order to gain early shopping privileges at a twice annual event where members sell outgrown baby clothes and gear in a giant suburban high school gymnasium. But at the sale, I observed that the volunteer workers looked friendly and fun. So, after my twins were born, I attended my first MVMOM monthly meeting on a mini-quest to find mom friends. I left my home in Minneapolis and drove several miles south on highway 77, past the Mall of America, and across a big bridge that spanned the Minnesota River. I ate snacks, chatted with other MVMOMs, listened to a guest speaker, and drove home.
At another MVMOM event, a playdate at an indoor playground, I looked around and noticed that every other woman there, aged 25-55, wore the same outfit—chunky wool sweater or a fleece jacket, cross body canvas bag, and Sorel snow boots—and was engaged in a high stakes negotiation with a toddler or two over whether or not to eat the cookie now or save it for later. And I thought, yes, here I am, and there I am, and over there I see several versions of me, too. I looked the part, like a movie extra in the background, mouthing fake dialogue. But, it turned out, I just blended in with the MVMOMs. I didn’t feel like I fit in.
I didn’t fit in because I was embarrassed about my unemployment. The MVMOMs seemed, on a whole, okay with stay-at-home life. Some of them probably chose it on purpose. And I, an asshole, clung to the second wave feminism float I was raised on, and avoided calling myself a stay-at-home mom. When my twins were infants, I thought I’d be jobless just until all three of my kids hit a more affordable daycare center pricing level. Working full time just didn’t make sense, not when childcare totalled more than the take-home pay I earned as a reference librarian. I never lied about having a job, but I hated to admit that I didn’t work. Even at MVMOM meetings, which were the absolute safest spaces to talk about my fragile, sleep-deprived baby brain and my sensitive, hormone-charged feelings. My reticence to socialize as my authentic self meant that I never quite gelled with anyone.
Besides, logistics made it hard for me to get to a lot of the in-person meetings and activities organized for the benefit of moms with babies the age of mine. The drive to the suburbs south of the Minnesota River consumed too much time. My twins didn’t like to nap concurrently. My preschooler had a very part-time school schedule. My husband worked long office hours and frequently traveled for his job, leaving me with the bulk of the housework and childcare.
I also felt that there was a sensibility difference I could never quite achieve. This, too, was wrapped up in the weighted blanket of misogyny that trapped me in my discomfort with maternal unemployment. Sometimes people make a distinction between different types of intelligence: street smarts and book smarts, especially when they want to take a grade grubber down a peg. I’d add a third category: suburb smart. The MVMOMs were suburb smart; they had this way of assessing a situation, then making it safer, more comfortable, and inclusive. Hanging out with MVMOMs was like living in a life hack content social media channel. I marveled at how they knew to fill a restaurant-size sheet pan with ice upon which to place salads for potluck picnics. And how they always chose parks with fenced-in playgrounds for playdates. From the MVMOMs I learned to bring small Ziplock baggies to movie theaters for easy popcorn splitting; that a shrunken blazer instantly classes up any outfit, even yoga pant or pajama leggings; that Rice Krispie Treats, in a pinch, count as a nutritionally sound breakfast. The MVMOMs cleaned up after events with an ethic that surpassed the most diligent Leave No Trace wilderness campers. They set up meal trains for bed resting club members with scheduling precision that rivaled efficiency experts. They built up the confidence of flailing members faster and more effectively than a daytime talk show host and an ultra-caffeinated studio audience. I am not suburb smart. I’m inclined to wallow in hardship.
Even though I didn’t feel like I fit in, I loved the MVMOMs. They were the first people to congratulate me on the birth of my twins without adding any qualifiers. They didn’t gasp or shout “Wow!” or ask invasive questions about natural birth or fertility treatments. They were the only ones in my whole life who understood the particularities of parenting twin infants, both the challenges and the joys. How hungry breastfeeding two babies, simultaneously, made me. How no one in my house ever got enough attention. How, not too long after the worst of the round-the- clock feeding and diapering and sleeping or trying to sleep pit of infant parenting, I felt overwhelmed with good fortune.
Even though I was a tertiary member, I had a very keen desire to be a part of MVMOM, to contribute in some way. Volunteers ran the club, from leaders like President and Sale Coordinator, to workhorses like New Member Greeter, and Guest Speaker Booker. None of the roles seemed achievable for me because of the distance, my husband’s work schedule, my lack of suburb skills, and my preoccupation with stay-at-home mom identity denial. Except, there was a volunteer newsletter editor who sent out a monthly bulletin with articles and blurbs that I enjoyed reading. After several months of seeing messages from the newsletter editor appealing to members for content, I thought to myself: I could write about kids’ books! So I pitched a little book recommendation column that the volunteer newsletter editor immediately accepted.
Writing brief reviews of three books every month made me feel like a legitimate MVMOM member, a contributor to the community, even though my participation was asynchronous and online. Plus, I enjoyed the autonomy. Except for the newsletter editor’s deadline, nobody told me how to write the reviews. I picked the books, evaluated them, and distilled their best qualities into brief, three- to four-sentence paragraphs. Every month I turned in perfect copy that the newsletter editor pasted into her newsletter template.
To curate my bear theme, I flip through more bins and grab each picture book with a bear on the cover to check out and evaluate at home. I don’t have a rubric, just an innate method for evaluating books. I recommend books that I enjoy enough to pay attention to while I read to my kids. Most books make me zone out while reading because they’re not engaging. Mediocre books make my voice go monotone and my mind wander. My kids don’t seem to notice when this happens, and if they notice, they don’t care that I read to them in my mom-zombie voice. Good read-aloud children’s books hold my attention and make me read with expression. I recommend books with clever language, endearing characters, tight plots, and captivating artwork.
My twins abandon the toy fruit and help themselves to books from the pile I stack on the cushioned window seat. They engage in what the children’s librarian calls pre-reading: flipping pages, studying illustrations, and making plot inferences. It’s a great source of pride for me that, in addition to alphabet letters, they also know ? and ! The three of us sit on the floor for a few minutes, a rare moment of calm and inaction.
My twins and I swivel our heads when we hear a small voice cry out, “Why?!”
“Because I said, ‘we can only check out two books,’” the child’s adult— mom, nanny, grandma; I can’t tell—raises her voice, too.
I want to speak up in defense of the other child, the would-be bookworm on the other side of the children’s area, who crescendos a righteous protest against his adult’s paltry two-book limit. I want to correct the adult. The limit is actually fifty books per library card, but I refrain from interfering. Instead, I let my twins take turns swiping our big bear book stack through the automatic checkout machine and layering them on the undercarriage of our stroller.
It bothers me when I overhear parents deny their children certain genres, like graphic novels or comics, or types of media, like books on compact disc. Or denigrate Garfield. Or put an arbitrary maximum on books to check out. For my household, we’ve already had to get a card in my oldest son’s name because, between the three kids and I, we can easily exceed my card’s fifty-book limit. I love to feel morally superior by not imposing any literary limits on my kids. Probably this is what it feels like to be unabashedly sex positive, or to have lived through the 1990s without acquiring food issues. I wouldn’t know; I’m a prudish body dysmorphic. The library is the one place I feel smugly liberated.
On the walk from the library to my older son’s preschool, I try to think up all of the books I’ve recommended to the MVMOMs over the last two and a half years, since I started my column. Exotic pets in bathtubs. Picture books by literary figures: bell hooks, Margaret Atwood, and, of all the 20th century poetry monsters, Ted Hughes. Scary books. Counting books. Books on lions. Books on death: a column I worked on after my mother-in-law died, and in response to a regular question on the MVMOM message boards.
Last month, the volunteer newsletter editor position turned over. I hope the new editor likes my work. Actually, I hope she leaves it alone and doesn’t change any of my carefully crafted sentences.
Unless she’s my super secret invisible audience.
I profess to writing the book review column for the reading advocacy, for the cerebral activity, and for the online connection to MVMOMs. But I have one more top secret agenda. My greatest motivator is an audience that probably doesn’t exist. I could have tossed a jumble of words together every month and the MVMOMs would have awarded Facebook thumbs-up to clunky sentences and awkward phrases. They were all nice, time-crunched ladies who wouldn’t have judged me harshly for mixed metaphors or unparallel sentences. So my imagination conjures up a fake target audience.
I agonize over every sentence, every word; just in case one of the MVMOMs reading the newsletter works at a fancy publishing job. This fantasy is not completely out of the realm of reality, I don’t think. There are seriously professionally accomplished MVMOMs: lawyers, doctors, academics, and business owners. Why not a big-time book editor or literary agent?
I don’t care how dumb this sounds because having an invisible reader to win over makes me a better writer. I always have a side-dream fantasy that I’ll be plucked out of a slush pile by someone who sees promise in my writing. A Freudian might attribute this behavior as delusionally compensating for a lack of attention in some aspect of my childhood. And I can trace it to my childhood, but not to where a Freudian might go. I am certain that my desire to please an imaginary reader comes from a combination of watching the film Pretty Woman and reading fashion magazines in my early adolescence.
Pretty Woman premiered in 1990. For girls like me, born in the late 1970s or early 1980s, the Richard Gere and Julia Roberts vehicle was a sleepover VCR stalwart that sent a problematic, Cinderella message that young women need powerful men to recognize their beauty and charm, and ultimately save them from prostitution, poverty, and unflattering skimpy knit dresses.
As a teenager I also read an unhealthy number of fashion magazines that were filled with stories of models being discovered in malls, on trains, and other dull settings where fashion model scout vipers laid in wait for nymphette victims. This was a common trope with endless variations. Later in my adolescence, watching network talk show television, I was deeply affected by the The Late Show bit where David Letterman plucked Stephanie, a young producer, from backstage obscurity, and used her for laughs. Years later he admitted that they had been having an affair with a very unequal power dynamic. Maybe there is something Freudian, actually, to uncover here, but as an adolescent, I didn’t understand or care about the sexual aspects of those unequal relationships. I translated the fairy tale fantasy to my own life, thinking that somewhere, someday, someone with power and influence might see beauty and potential in my writing. Currently, as a reluctant stay-at-home mom, the fairy tale functions as inspiration. I pretend that a glamorous publishing magnate MVMOM will read the newsletter, delight in my pithy sentences about board books, and offer me a book deal.
My MVMOM book review column wasn’t the first time that writing for an unreal audience motivated me to produce my best work. During my master’s degree program, I revised draft after draft of writing assignments for the most aloof professor in the department, a history dude-bro who deigned to teach in the library science program. I attended the program in the mid-2000s, the era of Michael Patrick King and Sex and the City Post-it breakup notes, The Rules, and He’s Just Not That Into You. The history dude-bro was the bad boyfriend version of a university professor. He dressed sloppily and didn’t shave. He arrived to class late and unprepared. He let students run the discussion instead of presenting an outlined lecture. He didn’t learn our names or answer our emails. His impossible-to-impress, messy-hair-don’t-care veneer motivated me to work extra hard to try and obtain his unattainable attention and approval. To be clear, this wasn’t an academic crush situation. The history dude- bro functioned as a stand-in for all of the literary journals that rejected my post-college short stories, for the MFA admission to which I never applied, the book agents to which I never sent proposals, the publishing houses who would never know I existed. I wanted someone, anyone to see me as smart and prescient, as a talented wordsmith who got lost in library school on the way to the English Department. I wanted, above all else, for someone to praise me for being grammatically correct.
What the history dude-bro lacked in classroom management or professional attire, he made up for in a killer library history syllabus and interesting writing assignments. The fact that research papers were my favorite assignments was another sign that I should have gone to school for writing, but I was trying to be practical and settle on library school as writing-adjacent enough. When I completed papers, I’d pretend they mattered, like I was writing them for The New Yorker or Harper’s, any high-prestige, pretentious magazine with a Manhattan address. The history dude-bro held onto our papers until almost the end of the semester, witholding feedback for weeks and weeks, which seemed like a tactic to make me work harder to please or impress him. When he finally handed our work back, he included no comments or grades. At the top of each paper he slapdashed check marks that looked more like lopsided, capital Us; or messy, rudimentary birds in flight drawn by a preschooler. When my best library school friend, Annie, saw his thoughtless acknowledgements of assignment completion, she laughed, “He didn’t even read these!”
After preschool pick-up and lunch, I read aloud the entire bear book pile to all three of my kids. Together, we sort the best from the dreck. I identify three suitable books for my “When you’re tired of reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” theme. I hope it helps MVMOMs burned out on Eric Carle. And showcase my impeccable taste to the MVMOMs who, in my imagination, work as literary agents and high powered publishing executives.
Over two days, I agonize over revisions. Finally, I submit the bear copy and book cover jpeg downloads to my new editor. The old volunteer editor, the one to which I originally pitched my idea, used to send a quick “Thanks!” or no reply at all. So the new editor’s lengthy reply surprises me. She writes back with an explanation about how she’s decided to change the newsletter’s publication schedule from monthly to quarterly. Going forward, she only wants to receive my book review column four times a year. I feel semi-insulted about the downsizing of my monthly column. The new editor’s email brings back professional disappointments that still sting, like when I tried to increase my hours at my last reference job at the online school, and my manager could not schedule me for daytime hours because of a hiring freeze. And at my first professional job at the business library, when the board of directors who collectively looked like a group of archetypal cartoon capitalists—Mr. Burns, Mr. Krabs, and the Hasbro Monopoly man—squandered the endowment on pricey consultants and unnecessary technology, then laid off the librarians to balance their budgeting mistakes.
When the new editor’s newsletter notification arrives in my email, I open the message and click the link to view the publication, which is hosted on the MVMOM website. I scroll through birth announcements, a club calendar, and the Meet a Member Q+A.
There’s my column, which has gone through some kind of editorial version of a barbershop buzz cut wherein the new editor shaved and clipped and plucked away all of my advanced Strunk and White-inspired techniques. The new editor replaced my semicolons with regular-ass commas! Despite the need for semicolons to provide clarity among items in a list! In another book’s description, the new editor exchanged an emdash for a colon. What?! She completely misunderstood the point of my emdash—emphasis!—in setting a phrase apart.
Usually my efforts go unnoticed and unappreciated. So I was gobsmacked that the new editor changed my impeccable copy! Removed my Oxford commas! If there was a publishing house bigwig or literary agent phenom lurking in the digital recesses of MVMOM, they’d never scout me out of obscurity, not when the new editor made me look like a boring book reviewer incapable of punctuational flourishes.
I cannot bear the thought of spending so many future hours on crafting tiny paragraphs. Only to have the new editor wield her proverbial red pen—no! A veritable black Sharpie marker over my words and my precious punctuation. My parenthesis and my hyphens! The new editor might as well have highlighted my entire column with her cursor, then selected the Adobe Tools > Redact feature.
My dreams dashed, I cope in the only way I know how. I send a mild-mannered resignation email to the new editor. In a huff, I write:
Great newsletter. I’m so sorry, but I’ve overcommitted myself with a new volunteer opportunity at my son’s preschool. Unfortunately, I can no longer write the book review column for MVMOM.
I leave out my indignation at the new editor’s lack of respect for my punctuational integrity. But I sign off with a poorly placed interrobang:
Best of luck and take care?!
Deborah
DEBORAH COPPERUD is a writer and podcaster in Minneapolis, MN. Her work has been published by Racket, Blue Earth Review, and Great River Review, with work forthcoming in Defenestration and Another Chicago Magazine. She co-hosts the It’s My Screen Time Too and Spock Talk podcasts.