Historical fiction is a tricky business. The author has to walk a perilous line between writing characters who are true to the period and writing characters that appeal in some way to the reader of today. It is not easy to do both. So many authors bungle it that for a while now I have gratefully let historical fiction slide off my reading list.

But in deference to Julie the Bookworm’s opinion, I decided to try Master and Commander, the first in Patrick O’Brian’s series about Jack Aubrey, a British naval captain during the Napoleonic Wars, and his friendship with Stephen Maturin, the ship’s doctor.

O’Brian demonstrates respect for his audience by making Aubrey a man of his time. While O’Brian may judiciously direct our eye away from action that might be distasteful to a modern reader, he allows Aubrey to have the attitudes and behaviors one would expect from a man of 1800. Transplanted to 2008, I suspect I would find Aubrey a sexist boor, but in his own time period, he is distinctly likable (not least because he has that rarest of qualities in British historical fiction about the military: competence).

O’Brian hints at this difficulty when Stephen and Jack disagree on the mutability of identity:

“The identity I am thinking of is something that hovers between a man and the rest of the world: a mid-point between his view of himself and theirs of him - for each, of course, affects the other continually. A reciprocal fluxion, sir. There is nothing absolute about this identity of mine. Were you, you personally, to spend some days in Spain at present you would find yours change, you know, because of the general opinion there that you are a false harsh brutal murdering villain, an odious man.”

“I dare say they are vexed,” said Jack, smiling. “And I dare say they call me Beelzebub. But that don’t make me Beelzebub.”

Jack sees his identity as a fixed and static thing, determined by himself. Stephen sees identity as something fluid, affected by outsiders’ perceptions of us, which may change according to time and place.

I have been thinking about these things after a conversation with my mother this week. We talked about my childhood, and our different memories about it. Things that meant one thing when I was a child mean something different now. The story I mentioned in another post about my parents cutting the cord off the television now seems charming, one my mother’s lovable quirks. But when I was a child, I thought she was an unfair dictator for such things.

Is our identity as mothers mutable?  Do we change from “good mother” to “bad mother” and back again based entirely on what our children think of us at different stages of their lives?

Bub and Pie’s comment on a post of mine from a few weeks ago has stuck in my mind. She said,

Discussions of mommy-blogging often assume that the ultimate arbiters of the rightness or wrongness of it will be our children: if they “mind” then that proves we were in the wrong, and if they’re okay with it then we’re in the clear. But really it’s far more complex than that: different people will respond differently, and those responses will evolve over time…

Mothers decide whether to take Jack Aubrey’s or Stephen Maturin’s stance about identity.  The qualities our children loved or hated when small may cause the opposite reaction in them when they are thirty-five. One of our challenges as mothers is to somehow hold on to what we know of ourselves - how hard we tried, how much we loved, how we did some things well - during the angry years our children may go through.

My daughter will not always throw her arms around me and declare, “Mommy, you’re my best friend!”  The day may come when her words are decidedly less complimentary.  I don’t think I change from good mother to bad every time she will tell me so.  My identity as mother must come from something deeper, something other than her reactions, so that my identity remains stable, leaving me free to wait for the day when she finds me lovable again.

Even when I cut the cord off the television.

I was once chased by a crazed gosling.

I was walking with Az the Husband through our favorite cemetery (yes, we have a favorite cemetery). It goes on for acres, full of trees and ponds, populated with the restful dead and assorted wildfowl.

I was kneeling down for some reason, maybe to read a gravestone, and I looked underneath a large cedar tree. There it was, ugly and covered with fuzz, a grey and gawky gosling. It raised its long neck and stared at me.  For just a moment, our eyes met and held.

Then it ran right at me.

Boink! It ran into my ankles. I hopped away, trying not to step on it. It ran again. Boink! It was making that hungry baby bird sound. I raced off. It followed.

For the next ten minutes, I ran away from the gosling. I ran over a footbridge to a tiny island that held a columbarium for urns. The gosling raced after me, pattering after me on the bridge and heaving itself at me on the little island. I hopped again, and as the gosling looked around at the tiny island I yelled, “Run!” to Az, and we raced back over the bridge, into our car and drove away.

The little thing was still racing around when we left.  Possibly still looking for me.

I wonder sometimes what became of it.  Did it believe I was its mother?  Did it grow up to become a healthy, well-adjusted goose?  Was its early experience of species confusion the beginning of a long life of rejection and humiliation at the hands of goosekind?

I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

Tonight I opened the door to my daughters’ bedroom to check on them while they slept. Sweetpea, who just turned three, was lying half on the floor, half on her bean bag chair, right in front of the door. Her little body slid across the floor as I slowly pushed open the door.

I bent down to gather her and her special blanket into my arms. She woke as I lifted her. “Mama, snuggle me,” she called.

I lay down with her in her bed, my arm tucked under her shoulders. She arranged her blanket the way she likes (”cover me with the bear side!”), popped her thumb in her mouth and wriggled into me. We began to play her favorite bedtime game, where I pull her thumb out of her mouth, and she giggles and pops it back in.

A few weeks ago, she began to say that she loves me. Not grudgingly like before, but loudly, with jubilation. “I LOVE you, TOO, Mommy!” She shouts, in the closest thing to a bellow that a tiny three-year-old can muster.

Every day I seem to notice some new little way that she is like her father. The independence, the fiery, stubborn streak, the I-dare-you look in her eye. She loves books, but only lets me read them once before she proclaims, “Wanna do it myself!” Then she clutches the book and turns the pages, looking wise, refusing to admit that she cannot read.

When she was a newborn, she had colic. I spent almost every night sitting in the glider, rocking her on my knees, waiting for her discomfort to end so she could finally sleep. It took hours, and I worried that I would not be able to bond with this tiny baby the way I had with my firstborn.

Instead, I find myself captivated by her. Her subtle smiles, more in the eyes than the mouth, require me to watch her face more closely to read her expression. Learning to recognize her feelings is like learning a secret language, or gaining admittance to an exclusive club I never knew was there. Now I feel the goofy smile on my face when I watch her run, her happiness showing in the way her long brown hair bounces as she trots.

She is not my baby anymore. She has grown into my little girl, beloved and treasured.

The good:

• My squirmiest child, the four-year-old JellyBean, was sick enough to snuggle with me under the covers and take a real, honest-to-goodness nap.
• The kids have in general remained in good spirits, despite everyone having a turn with this respiratory flu.
• My mom-in-law, who planned to visit this weekend, kindly put off her trip for a week so we would have time to recover.  I was worried that she would come anyway and get sick too, but now I have time to do some disinfecting.  No arguing was necessary.

The bad:

• I have seen the following movies  so many times, I may have them memorized: Esther: The Girl Who Became Queen, Lilo and Stitch, American Legends, Robin Hood, and LarryBoy: The Cartoon Adventures.
• My house is positively squalid.  In resignation, I hung a full size garbage bag from my bedpost to hold all the tissues.
• Baby coughs.  Oh, they break the heart.

The ugly:

• When a five-month pregnant woman has a wracking fit of coughs, um…  Let’s just say that in desperation I broke out the supply of sanitary products left over from my last birth.  Understand?

Escape is Carolyn Jessop’s account of her life within the FLDS, the fundamentalist mormon sect, and her gradual change from a believer in its religion to a woman who feared its abuses and needed to get out.

Jessop lived in the Short Creek area of Utah-Arizona, where the FLDS dominates a few small towns and their services. When she was eighteen, her parents arranged a marriage for her with a fifty-year-old man, Merril Jessop, who already had three wives. Over the next fifteen years, she had eight children with Merril until an emergency hysterectomy following the birth of her last son.

Carolyn Jessop describes her life in Merril’s household as an endless wrangling for position, each wife (he had seven when she left him) struggling for a place in Merril’s affections. The home was often abusive, and there was not enough money for everyone. Currying favor with Merril was the only way a wife could be certain she could buy her children the basic necessities, or protect them from the abuse of other wives.

As Warren Jeffs (the “prophet” of the FLDS currently serving a prison sentence as an accomplice to rape) gained more power in the sect, rules became more strict. Children were withdrawn from school. Dress codes became more extreme. Less dissent was tolerated. Carolyn became more and more concerned with the direction the religion was taking.

Carolyn and her father sought help from Warren Jeffs to end the abuse Carolyn was suffering at the hands of her husband. Jeffs proved worse than useless, placing the responsibility for the abuse solely on Carolyn. Carolyn decided she needed to leave the sect, but only if she could take all her children with her. Over the course of months, she planned her escape and grabbed the moment when it came, leaving with all eight children, aided by family members who had already left.

Jessop’s book opens a window on a secretive sect, allowing the reader glimpses of its beliefs and practices. Her portrayal of polygamists and their conflicts may also serve as a corrective on the very simplistic view of highly authoritarian, partriarchal religious groups that sees all the men as bad and the women as innocent victims. Carolyn and her children suffer as much at the hands of the favorite wife as they do from Merril himself.

But it is a badly written book. The time frames of the book are not always clear. It is poorly organized. Carolyn’s anger is palpable throughout, not only at the larger corruptions of the cult, but at the snubs and pains of everyday life with the other women. Sometimes she rises above it and expresses sympathy for the difficulties the other women faced, but sometimes I was left with the feeling that she wrote particular paragraphs to anger particular women in retaliation for particular slights.

Perhaps inevitably when writing about a secretive cult, there is a lot of unconfirmed gossip in the book. She writes of things she heard without explaining where she heard them, and she attributes motives to people that she could not possibly verify. I am not saying that I did not believe her, but when dealing with a cult that lies so freely, it is worthwhile to take extra pains to be exact and careful about what the author knows and what the author merely suspects.

Escape still shows the effects of Jessop’s life in the cult in many ways. She exhibits a lingering reluctance to attribute the same corruptions to the men who were prophets during her childhood, portraying most of its flaws instead as the result of Warren Jeffs’ leadership.

Most strikingly, after so many years in a religion that uses people’s sins as blackmail against them, she does not expose many of her own flaws to the reader. Although she describes the fierce manipulation and power-grasping that were a part of life with “sister-wives,” the stories of particular instances are, with only one small exception, always about the pettiness and resentment of other wives, never about her own. She does mention the ways that the structure of FLDS society prevented her from mothering her children as she wanted to.

All in all, Jessop struck me as a capable and courageous woman, but one whose literary efforts are still hampered by the scars of her life. Her book is worth reading if only as a rare opportunity to see the FLDS through the eyes of a former insider, but, like Jessop’s own life, it is a raw and unfinished product.