Shapeshifting by Michelle Ross: Motherhood’s No Fairy Tale
When you hear a book is about motherhood, you might immediately imagine its filled with Hallmark Sentimentality, pedantic and often unrealistic advice about self-care and bonding, and overly archetypical depictions of women-as-natural-caregiver. This is not the case when it comes to Shapeshifting by Michelle Ross.
In this collection, Ross directly confronts and dismantles many of the cultural myths we hold about mothers and women. Ross’ women are a far cry from the near-perfect yet somehow still suburban mothers whose biggest issues are often framed as feeling self-indulgent for wanting a spare hour a day to practice yoga, or finding ways to remain intimate and attractive to their spouse. The women of Shapeshifting are complex in their issues, in their relationships to their spouses, their children, their own mothers, and themselves. In the title story, “Shapeshifting,” after a mother learns of her daughter’s pregnancy, they exchange morbid postcards featuring decapitated heads, long-fingered gargoyles, and vultures eviscerating a body coupled with messages such as “Hope you have a happy labor!” Shortly after another mother gives birth, she is horrified by the pleasure she finds in the power she holds over her daughter:
You could have left her out under the sun until she melted if you’d wanted. You were wickedly amused by the pleasure it gave you to have so much power over her, weren’t you? That her survival depended on you? Power, you came to understand, is one of the joys of motherhood.
This revelation also depressed you.
Michelle Ross, Shapeshifting, 126
Ross examines the duality of both being a mother and being an individual, and never shies away from the brutal, the ugly, or the elements of ourselves that might cause shame. Her mothers are far from perfect, but neither are they villainous mothers of fairy tale out to poison apples and stuff children in the oven. Instead, Ross’s characters navigate the margins between the two polarized myths we have about mothers—the insta-parents and their perfection, and the flat monsters presented in so many of our cultural tales with an acute awareness of their influences on us.
In the fairy tales the mother reads the girl before bed, the monsters are often mothers. Stepmothers, birth mothers, old hags—same difference.
In the horror films the mother watches some evenings when the girl is asleep, the monsters are often children. Adopted children, biological children, little men who are mistaken for children.
Michelle Ross, Shapeshifting, 207
Through the often deeply strained depictions of the relationships between parent and child, Ross explores issues of the autonomy of both, what either owes the other, and how often and in what ways human relationships fail to match fantasy, and we fail each other.
The majority of the stories are rooted in reality, but many feel dystopian. In “After Pangea,” the husband of an exhausted mother of two becomes the head of what can only be described as a social media cult thanks to his parenting blog. His followers insist on calling him “Our Father” and believe he holds the secrets to parenthood. Meanwhile, we see behind the scenes the practical, gritty and exhaustive work the mother is putting in with no accolades. In fact, her husband often takes the credit, and gives her the criticism. All the while, the mother has to compete via car camp out to earn her son a place at school in a line-up that feels totalitarian with the level of severity and discipline expected of the parents. Ross shows us the banal horrors of being a woman, a mother, where your underappreciated and overworked, as well as the very real and very violent dangers of having a female body, and how that threat seeps into mothers relationships with their daughters.
[S]he kissed her daughter’s head again and again, Jessie had though of all the men who had hollered at her out the windows of cars as they sped by honking, startling her. She always half-expected these men to throw an empty beer bottle. She’d pictured this in gory detail numerous times: a bottle colliding with her forehead, blood trickling into her eyes.
Michelle Ross, Shapeshifting, 61
Her male characters are often operate in completely different realities with completely different sets of rules and expectations than her women, creating barriers of connection between spouses, and between mothers and sons. When watching Rosemary’s Baby, a soon to be father is confused about why his pregnant partner keeps laughing. She states that:
Everything about it is funny … because everything about it is horrifying
Michelle Ross, Shapeshifting, 31.
Through out, women have to confront horrors big and small, often being alienated and misunderstood for laughing at things considered “inappropriate.” In “The Pregnancy Game” a group of women turn horrible scenarios concerning pregnant women’s bodily autonomy and harmful stereotypes about women into a board game after one of them suffers their own miscarriage.
The entire collection itself is laced with darkly funny moments that invite the reader to laugh in the face of these complicated and often frightening elements of womanhood and motherhood. Ross, while also lacing her narratives with beautiful and cutting imagery and metaphors, incorporates the slimy, the real, and the gross, splattering appropriate moments with the piss and shit that comes along with caring for children. In doing so, Ross exposes the hidden work of women, the care they are expected to give, and how they are often forced to cope in isolation with the stresses of being a parent. In the closing story, “A Mouth is a House for Teeth” that feels all too prevalent to the Covid-era (though written before!) a new mother isn’t allowed to leave her house, and her only connection to the outside world is a blog that she runs. In another, when a mother’s childless friend doesn’t support the mother’s plan to force her husband to step up, the mother asks “Whose side are you on?” and the friend replies the baby’s. It’s, of course, what we would expect any good person to say—that the child comes first, always, being that children are so vulnerable. But when mother’s spend all their time caring for their children, this collection shows how often they need cared for, too, and how often there’s no one there to supply it.
Loneliness oozes through these pages even when the characters have friends, have lovers, in their life, because ultimately, this book is about not just about motherhood, but all the ways in which human relationships are complicated and caught between fantasy and reality.
Pete was a kaleidoscope. Sometimes, though mostly just in my imagination these days, the flecks fell into a beautiful pattern. Other times, like now, like nearly every time I saw him in the flesh, the flecks fell into a less flattering pattern, and I wish I could shake them up and try again.
Michelle Ross, Shapeshifting, 10.
This book hits hard for those who have struggled with relationships be it with their parents, their children, their spouses or their friends. It asks us to look at ourselves and these relationships past the simple cultural myths surrounding who we are and who we ought to be, and acknowledge are darker thoughts, our more animal impulses, because in us there is, as Ross writes, always a touch of monster DNA. However, if your expecting answers as many other “motherhood” books promise, you’ll find none here, at least none that are easy. Ross leaves us questioning and haunted, often closing the stories with beautiful, and painful, elliptical endings that leave the reader often groping for meaning alone just as her characters must. There is no easy moral, or happily ever after stamped onto these stories to give ease and comfort. Rather they often end us with a quick jab, a striking moment or image that lands like a sucker punch, and dulls into an aching throb that will sit with the reader long after they’ve closed the book.
