Religion, politics and money are usually cited as the top three topics to avoid at a dinner party, but surely parenthood trumps them all. To the uninitiated, the mysterious world of ‘tummy time’, ‘co-sleeping’ and ‘toxins’ may easily be construed as having religious connotations, while few decisions can feel as political as ‘disposable versus cloth’ or ‘breastfeeding versus bottle’. To my own non-mother eyes, the stories of motherhood that infiltrate our media suggest that mothers must navigate a seething minefield of potential faux pas on a daily, nay, hourly basis. And rather than dispel this vision, the storytellers Monica Dux has gathered together in Mothermorphosis invite us to explore this bizarre landscape in the most generous way possible – by sharing their own tales warmly and candidly, however raw the material.

And the material is frequently raw. George McEncroe’s harrowing birth story in ‘I Wore My Red Lips And Pretended I Was Fine’ shook me deeply, as did Hannah Robert’s in ‘The Second-Best Blanket’. Jane Caro doesn’t hold back when she describes ‘grieving the loss of the independent person that (she) had been’ (‘The “Me” I Had Been’). Nor does Susan Carland when she addresses the particular fears she has raising a Muslim girl in Australia today (‘Mother Courage’). These essays are intimate; I felt as though I was there with the storytellers, in their own homes or hovering beside the midwives.

In her introduction, Dux writes that motherhood is ‘at once mundane and commonplace, yet at the same time utterly unique and momentous’, and it is this experience that Mothermorphosis captures best. These essays are utterly unalike, yet echo one another in small details and sentiments. I found it sad, if not surprising, to see how many storytellers expressed concern over how they might be judged by other mothers. For this reason it’s heartening to see how stories, like those shared here, have the power to lessen that concern.

Bronte Coates