Jennifer, your site Chopping Potatoes is rich with your writing. A lot to explore, but please start with an overview of Chopping Potatoes. When did you start writing it and what inspired you? How did you come up with the name?
Chopping Potatoes was born in January 2012. Two years into my recovery from postpartum depression, I was ready to share my story, both to process it further and to let other women know they were/are not alone.
The title for the blog was born of one harrowing night of dinner prep. My newborn fussed in her chair, my toddler zoomed around, and my preschooler begged for my attention – all while I chopped very dense potatoes with a very sharp knife. I suddenly had the thought that if I chopped my finger, I would have to go away in an ambulance and someone else would deal with it all.
It’s become a metaphor for the struggles of motherhood – and the start of my journey towards mental health.
Please tell us about your background. We found this passage on your site intriguing: “I wrote my first novel in second grade on my father’s Underwood Typewriter. It consisted of approximately thirteen chapters of two to three sentences each.” And that was the start of your passion for writing. Tell us more.
Initially, the passion may have been for the typewriter itself. My father had inherited it from my great-aunt, Margaret, an English teacher, poet, and artist in her own right. It was a behemoth whose strong imprints somehow made the words typed seem more official. I used it to write my autobiography wherein an entire chapter consisted of the name of my school, teacher and grade; however, I loved seeing the chapters stack up to fill a page of hard copy.
In eighth grade, I discovered my passion for the creative nonfiction essay, writing a submission for a contest about a stunning sunrise over a marsh by Conimicut Point in Warwick. I didn’t win, but my obsession with becoming the next nature columnist a la Ken Weber continued.
You went on to teach English/Language Arts, correct?
I did. After-student teaching juniors and seniors in high school, I landed in seventh and eighth grade at Gorton Junior High School. Witnessing the ‘a-ha moments’ was amazing, but I often paraphrased about harnessing their unpredictable energy: if only we could use it for good rather than evil.
After the birth of your third child, you experienced postpartum depression – but you hid it from most people. Why? And what is your recommendation now for the many women who experience it, too?
In the depth and aftermath of postpartum depression, the struggles I experienced felt like a failure on my part; an indictment of my character and performance as a mother. Society views the birth of a baby as the happiest occasion – and it is – but in the midst of that, for a mother to admit anything other than adoration seems criminal. I know now that depression is a liar. It fills your brain with untruths and warped perceptions. And if the discussion around the reality of motherhood, particularly in the newborn stage, was more open, I feel that would make it easier and safer for women struggling to get help.
My recommendation for women who think they may be suffering from postpartum depression is to reach out to someone. Start with your spouse, a trusted friend, another mom. They can support you in approaching your obstetrician or general practitioner. You can even discuss it with your baby’s pediatrician. Any one of these can connect you with a mental health professional so you can start feeling like yourself again. Postpartum Support International also has extensive resources on their website. Share your struggles. You are not broken. You are not alone.
Your site is broken down into six themes. Let’s learn about them, starting with
Mothering
Being a stay-at-home mother to four daughters has certainly informed my life. Posts here detail the everyday from the mundane to the sublime to the absurd; wax poetic; share the struggle; lament the loss (of self, sanity, babies growing up).
Living
Posts explore the cycles and balance of being human; surviving the day-to-day; embracing the beauty.
Healing/Suffering
Posts here reflect on emerging from mental illness or being subject to its negative symptoms. Also, the ways we can be broken down and build ourselves back up.
Surviving
Not every day is one for progress or jubilation; sometimes merely making it through is success.
Reading
Posts here are a mixture of book reviews, for many aged readers, literary quotes, literary analysis, etc.
Writing
Notes on my own process, writing in general, excerpts, television series reviews, etc. Both these and Reading often fall within my ‘Weekend Write-Off’ series posted on Fridays.
While these are listed as separate entities, often the lens of one shapes the view of another.
We find that you have other completed works or works in progress. You certainly are prolific!
My writing has seemingly followed the trajectory of my experience. Stories for young readers and young adults while I was teaching and my children were small; stories ripe with the fruit of motherhood and its repercussions as my family grew and my own story intersected with maternal mental health.
Tell us about Next in Line, the working title for a young adult novel.
This manuscript tells the story of Dmitri, a young man who was born of a writing exercise with Mark Peter Hughes at the ASTAL Institute on Writing for Young People at Rhode Island College. Dmitri is next in a line of strong, Greek American men in Providence, Rhode Island who run a plastering business – but all he wants to do is pursue his passion for sculpting. Throughout the story, he tries to find the best way to speak for and pursue what he truly wants.
And Larry the Lizard.
Larry the Lizard is actually how my kids refer to this story. Its official title is The Tail End of Trouble and it’s a picture book about an extremely anxious lizard. His mother always encourages him to let go of his worries, but he clings to them even tighter. When stalked by a hawk, he discovers letting go may be the only way to survive.
And “an adult novel fictionally portraying a real event from my family’s history.”
There is a story of a lost child. It was only told in whispers years later. I’d like to breathe life into the love and loss that surrounded the event. Always mindful of maternal mental health, I’d like to plumb the depths of the mother/child bond and what separation does to it.
What is your current work in progress?
I’m very excited about the novel I’m revising entitled Nursing a Wound. When the circumstances of life collide with the stresses of motherhood, Jill Simon is pushed to the brink. An antagonistic school nurse becomes the figurehead for all the judgment Jill feels. Will Jill seek out her help or succumb to the dissociative break some part of her is starting to feel she most desperately needs?
Obviously a fictional work, but stands to expose the tremendous and unrealistic pressures modern motherhood exerts upon women.
Which leads into the other work I’m revising: a memoir of my experience with postpartum depression. My own narrative is woven through with cultural and medical research showing the conditional atmosphere in which mothers birth and parent today.
We always ask writers this question, so here you go: What is your advice for someone who is writing or wants to be a writer?
Write what speaks to you. Don’t write what you think other people want to read or what will be popular. Your words will only sing if they come from what you truly want to say.
