Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1321635 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 120 pages

From Amazon.com
At age 40, Chicana writer and activist Cherrie Moraga decided she wanted to have a child. Waiting in the Wings comprises diary entries made during her pregnancy and the first difficult years of her son's life, as well as retrospective essays on motherhood, partnership, men and woman, and families. Moraga's writing is a rich, fluid mix of English and Spanish that explores the personal, social, and spiritual consequences of lesbian motherhood.

From Library Journal
Moraga, coeditor of the classic This Bridge Called My Back (1983), has written a memoir of the birth of her son. Through the use of journal entries and other prose styles, Moraga tells the story of her insemination, premature birth, and subsequent medical complications and the effect of her son's birth on her relationship with her lover, Ella. Moraga's prose is clean and riveting, and the story she tells is well crafted?so well crafted, in fact, that it loses some immediacy. The power of this work lies more in the life-and-death issues Moraga faced with her child's premature birth than it does in her experiences as a lesbian mother. Nevertheless, Moraga does address the issues that lesbian mothers, both biological and coparent, face. Recommended for all medium and larger libraries and any libraries with lesbian, women's, or Chicana collections.?Melodie Frances, Golden Gate Univ. Lib., San Francisco
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
An honest, introspective memoir of evolving lesbian motherhood. When Chicana lesbian writer Moraga (coeditor, This Bridge Called My Back, not reviewed) was 40, she decided to have a child. She asked her white lover (who is called Ella here, the Spanish word for ``she'') to help, not so much to be the other mother as to continue to be Moraga's partner and support; inevitably, though, Ella does turn out to be a ``co-mother.'' Moraga asks her much younger Mexican friend Pablo to donate sperm; he too ends up becoming very involved with the baby. Against the odds, Moraga gets pregnant the first time they try. In this memoir, Moraga muses honestly on how she feels about having a boy (at first ambivalent, then pleased). She is also thoughtful on the meaning of blood and family; as a lesbian, she's always created her own ``familia,'' yet she is also quite close to her parents and sister, and it was important to her that her baby's father also be Mexican. Both her sister and Ella are present at Rafael's birth, which is premature, and he fights for his life the first few months. Moraga writes well about the struggle and the exhaustion of daily facing this new loved one's death after months of creating his life. When Rafael is well, Moraga battles to find the energy to write. Her relationship with Ella suffers and Ella moves out, though it seems they may stay together. Some of the writing in this memoir is a bit indulgent, having been culled from journals. However, much of it is powerful, and the journal form does give the narrative a sense of immediacy. A strong, though sometimes scattered, account of a baby's struggle for survival and a mother's struggle to define her own new life. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.