As the mother of a five-year-old, I’ve spent plenty of time in our local zoo. All that wandering from merry-go-round to petting zoo to reptile house gives you plenty of time to daydream about potential novel ideas. At some stage it struck me that all my recent ideas had one thing in common: motherhood.
So I thought, well, what if motherhood is the story? What if I constructed a scenario with the main purpose of turning the idea of motherhood round and round and taking a long look at it?
Then a few other odds and ends began to bring that original idea into focus.
For me, the zoo is a place where I have a very geographic sense of the different phases of my son…and of how those phases have flared so brightly and then evaporated. Once upon a time he liked to climb a stone turtle, but that was when he was two. He had forgotten the turtle entirely by the time he was three. Once upon a time he loved the merry-go-round, but then a guy with a weird voice spoke to him while he was riding, and that was it for the merry-go-round. In the zoo, I was focused on my son’s present moment—his odd obsessions and hilarious quirks and stubborn habits—while also constantly reminded of all the other versions of him that had disappeared.
Likely because of events in the news, I also had frequent thoughts of what I might do if a shooter burst into the zoo—where would I go? How would having my son with me change that plan? (In all honesty, I cannot claim that this was an entirely socially relevant train of thought. I also had thoughts of what I might do if zombies took over the zoo. You have a lot of time to think if you are examining every single primate in existence. )
But eventually it occurred to me that maybe that dark daydream of a life-or-death situation could tie into a novel about motherhood. Maybe all the intricacies of motherhood—the love and joy and sacrifice and animal pull of it—might be brought out most intensely in the most intense situation.