Title: Mother’s Milk: Poems in Search of Heavenly Mother
Authors: Rachel Hunt Steenblik (author), Ashley Mae Hoiland (illustrator)
Publisher: By Common Consent Press
Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2017
Number of Pages: 190
Binding: Paper
Reviewed by Rachel Helps
I really loved this collection of poems about Heavenly Mother. Many of the poems drew parallels between earthly mothering and Heavenly Mother’s possible role. As a current mother of a young child, they really touched me in a raw and emotional place. Can we explain the “sacred” silence about Heavenly Mother by explaining that she’s using the bathroom by herself and taking a long shower? Can we demand to hear more about Heavenly Mother through the mouth of a toddler screaming “I want my Mommy! I want my Mommy!”? There was one evening where my daughter wanted me to sit in her room while she fell asleep. I read this poem then:
Breathe
I tiptoe quietly into my
daughter’s room, to see if
she’s still breathing. Her
chest rises and falls, a
hand moves. She sighs.
I tiptoe quietly into my
Mother’s heaven, to see if
She’s still breathing.
Her chest rises and falls, a
hand moves. I sigh.
It was so perfectly attuned to what I was doing and how I feel about Heavenly Mother that I ugly-cried about it for a few minutes. So I think you should just be careful not to read these poems in public if that might happen to you.
Many of the poems referenced other writers or essays about Heavenly Mother. For someone like me who wrote Claudia Bushman’s Wikipedia page and brings out Daniel Paulsen’s essay on Heavenly Mother every Mother’s Day, I understood maybe half of the references. I was ready to be indignant about how the references made the poems almost inaccessible, and would certainly need annotations in future editions, but there are explanatory notes at the end, which I really appreciated. I should note that if you aren’t dissatisfied with the (however brief) Heavenly Mother literature, you might not like these poems. The first chapter, which envisions Heavenly Mother from a child’s point of view, can come across as entitled or whiny. For me, I found those poems empowering and weirdly comforting? because it reminded me that sometimes I’m emotional like a small child.
We often receive revelation that we ask for, and sometimes I wonder if mothering is too removed from our church leadership’s immediate awareness (or plain awareness) that they don’t ask for revelation about Heavenly Mother. As much as I am sad that the LDS church hasn’t had more official revelation on Heavenly Mother, I am also spiritually grateful for this poetry collection. It speaks to my yearning to be closer to my Heavenly Mother.
Rachel Helps is the Harold B. Lee Library’s coordinator of Wikipedia initiatives, where she offers trainings on how to edit Wikipedia and writes and edits Wikipedia pages related to the library’s holdings. Some of the pages she contributed significantly to are those for Lucinda Lee Dalton, Leonard Arrington, and the contemporary section of Portrayal of Mormons in Comics. She helped her sister, Andrea Landaker, write a newlywed relationship simulation called Our Personal Space, and they are working on the sequel which focuses on raising children.