Calley Marotta is a former K-12 special educator and current college professor. She teaches writing courses on topics ranging from disability to fashion. Her research and creative writing focus on literacy in the lives of essential workers including parents. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Maine Review, Mutha Magazine, and Atticus Review. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir titled Blame The Mother.
Blame the Mother follows a new writing professor and mother who is grappling with her young daughter’s rejection and the resulting shame when her child overattaches to her father. The book moves across time and genre speculating what caused the child’s rejection while interweaving feminist and disability justice research about attachment, care work, parenting culture, and institutions of motherhood. In separate chapters, the narrator uses speculative nonfiction to seek comfort through real figures that are not available to her in her real life.
As the story unfolds and blame becomes less clear, the narrator’s husband, the father who is upheld as the obvious good parent, turns out to have a role to play in the family’s problems. But throughout the book, the question remains, will the mother find a way to make her daughter love her? Blame the Mother is an exploration of and challenge to a culture bent on blaming mothers for society’s ills and a call to reimagine mothering outside of maternal primacy.