Motherhood Exaggerated

When eight-year-old Nadia cracks her jaw on a piece of Halloween candy unmasking a rare bone cancer, mother and daughter are launched on a revelatory journey of treatment, recovery and survival. As Nadia fights her way through chemotherapy, surgeries and hospital stays, her mother, as well, is tested as never before. Not always certain about how to raise her daughter, who seemed born with a gravity and preoccupation with death, Nadia’s mother must confront her own upbringing, her past anxiety disorders, her relationship with her husband and other children, and her ambivalence about faith in order to shepherd her daughter toward health and survival.

Judith Hannan is the author of Motherhood Exaggerated (CavanKerry Press, 2012), her memoir of discovery and transformation during her daughter’s cancer treatment and transition into survival. Her most recent book is The Write Prescription: Telling Your Story to Live With and Beyond Illness. Her essays have appeared in such publications as The Washington Post, AARP: The Girlfriend, Woman’s Day, Narratively, The Forward, Brevity, Opera News, The Healing Muse, and The Martha’s Vineyard Gazette. Ms. Hannan teaches writing about personal experience to homeless mothers, young women in the criminal just system as well as to those affected by physical and/or mental illness. She is a writing mentor with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Visible Ink program where she also serves as an interventionist in a study to evaluate the benefits of expressive writing among elderly cancer patients. In June, 2016, Ms. Hannan joined the faculty of the inaugural Narrative Medicine program at Kripalu. In 2015, she received a Humanism-in-Medicine award from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation. Ms. Hannan serves on the board of the Children’s Museum of Manhattan where she is also Writer-in-Residence. www.judithhannanwrites.com

"Nadia has a fever. Naturally, I don’t think a little bug or even Lyme disease.
The new scare on Martha’s Vineyard is deadly tularemia.
What if that’s what Nadia has?"

— journal entry, August 15, 2000

Butterflies were scarce on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2000. Every day I would check the meadow outside my window. The summer before, the flowers would take flight each time I passed. Now they remained as immoveable as the queen’s guards.

On Labor Day morning, as my family prepared for our return to New York, I searched one last time. Nothing. Who would want to come out to play on such a leaden, gray day? The sky was too heavy for my head.

I struggled to look up. One more search.

I cannot explain my desperate search for butterflies. My need for this symbol of renewal is primal, connected to my certainty, since her infancy, that something horrible would one day happen to my daughter Nadia, who now lay in bed with a 101-degree temperature.

Then, out of the northern sky, over the rooftop of my house, they came. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them—dragonflies—pushed by the wind or perhaps beating a hasty retreat from an advancing cold front. They dusted the air like ashes.

The dragonflies uneased me. Their flight was erratic, their purpose in such numbers seemed sinister. I resisted being borne back to New York on their wings.

There were two pieces of clinical evidence that summer that hinted that cancer was developing in Nadia’s body, two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose meaning would only be revealed when seen as part of the whole. An athletic and determined eight-year-old, Nadia dragged her way at a plodding walk through the 3.1 miles of the annual Chilmark Road Race. A week later, she came down with the first of three fevers that left nearly as fast as they came. By the time we boarded our plane to return to New York at the end of the summer, the second fever was gone. (The third would come in late September.)

I’ve always felt panic in the face of fever. I’ve handled my children’s broken bones, the croup, asthma, and anaphylaxis with more confidence than I have ever coped with a fever. Now, with no other symptoms to deal with, I brought Nadia tomato soup on a tray with a vase of flowers, hiding my anxiety behind an uncharacteristic level of fussing.

My sense of foreboding lifted once we were back in New York. Nadia had an easy transition back to school, and I had a more neutral perspective on her third fever. But outside of school, Nadia started to become unsettled.

For the first two years of her life, Nadia slept as if in a state of tormented limbo. She began her nights with a brief period of what resembled deep and satisfying rest but then spent hours moaning and squirming as if confronting a great fear. Anxious to banish whatever was causing Nadia such anguish, I went to her throughout the night. Her eyes were always closed; she showed no signs of being awake, and I never found the source of her misery.

She lets the reader in on the ways in which she departs from the collective myth of the ideal mother while holding our attention to the space in which a child’s illness demands the very best.
—ForeWord Review, Full review at www.forewordreviews.com

A child with a life-threatening illness is every mother’s nightmare. Yet Judith Hannan’s memoir, Motherhood Exaggerated, is a beautifully written narrative that every reader will find compelling. This is not just a tale about a mother and daughter on a frightening medical journey but a moving, engaging retelling of the complex bonds and tensions every parent experiences in our relationship with our children.
— Mary Gordon

I congratulate Judi for going through these things again in the writing of this book, for it must have been a harrowing experience. And also, she must now see herself as the artist she is, for she has made us want to go on and turn every difficult page, to burst through the same bubbles that she bursts through and then finally, perhaps midway through her own life, stand naked in the glory of a new and robustly complicated relationship with herself.
— Carly Simon

Judith Hannan has performed a valuable service by publishing this remarkably honest account of the crisis she and her family went through as her daughter—now a brilliant and beautiful young woman—dealt with a rare form of cancer. She takes us with her on her journey through the valley of the
shadow of death and then back to the sunshine of life. Tears of remembrance came to my eyes and will to the eyes of other readers who have been through similar crises. Judith’s willingness to share intimate feelings and to discuss difficult moments is a gift that will help so many, as it has already helped me, to deal with the pas as well as the future.
— Alan M. Dershowitz

February 2012
312 pp
Trade paper – 6 x 9.5
ISBN 978-1-933880-27-3
EBook ISBN 978-1-933880-30-3
LaurelBooks