Crossing the Moon. Paulette Bates Alden. 1996. What interested me most in this autobiography was not the on-again-off-again desire of the author to have as child as I am thirty years past that or her account of dehumanizing fertility treatments but her description of her southern childhood and college years in the fifties and sixties. She could have been writing about me, my female relatives and my friends. She didn’t fit in with the traditional life she was expected to embrace nor was she ever comfortable with the hippy-life that held a certain appeal. She is good writer and I enjoyed reading about her cross country trip to California and her writing classes with one of my favorite authors, Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose is one of my favorite novels). ( )

Motherhood and family relationships are the core of Paulette Bates Alden’s memoir, CROSSING THE MOON. Born in 1947 and raised in a traditional southern Baptist environment in South Carolina, she left home to go to college where she studied writing. Her first stop was Chapel Hill, North Carolina, then on to Stanford in California for graduate studies.
Her life became totally different than the one she had imagined while growing up and being lived by almost everyone else with whom she had grown up. Most all the girls she had known in South Carolina had gotten married and had children. At Stanford, there was a lot of talk and relationships involving sex. “We talked a lot about giving birth, but we meant to ourselves.” In her studies she realized that more literature written by men. “One can only conjecture about how many great feminine novels are walking around in flesh and blood. Women seem to have babies instead of books.”
She eventually did get married but wasn’t interested in the children part until she was about forty years old. She wondered if that was a rejection of her mother, whose role in her life looked different in retrospect.
Much of the book is about the relationship between her and her mother, the way it seemed to her as a child and then as an adult, understanding what her mother was trying to accomplish. She remembered that while growing up, her mother “couldn’t look at [her sister] and me without thinking up some way to improve us, something else that we needed to do. No wonder we wanted to escape her.” “By the time we were teenagers, the very qualities in her we had valued in childhood became the source of conflict....We began to resist her, to separate from her, the normal thing. But this pulling apart was not without its pain, anger, and sorrow on both sides.... She wanted what was best for us, but what was best was defined by what society had in mind.... And in that era when everything turned upside down, even if we didn’t always know who we were, at least we knew who we weren’t: our mothers and fathers.” At one point when she was visiting her mother and met with childhood friends she “grew to see that at least in part my mother was right. As I became more comfortable with myself and more surely established in my own life, it became easier to accept my friends and the choices they made. I wasn’t so defensive or threatened.”
As she neared the end of her child bearing years, her interest in becoming a mother increased dramatically. When it wasn’t as easy as she expected it to be and she and her husband began undergoing infertility treatment, that interest became the most important issue in her life. She does into detail explaining the various tests and steps they took trying to achieve parenthood for several years. The way she dealt with not being able to maintain a pregnancy presented an important window to understanding how some women can deal with this situation and which flies against those who are doing so much to make abortion illegal: “It will never get that far. It will never be a baby I lose; it will be a pregnancy.” When she finally decided to stop trying, she
realized “Giving up on a child felt like a death. It was a death, but there was no ritual, no ceremony to mark it. There was no body, no funeral.”
At times I had the feeling that, initially, her wanting to have a child was more the result of peer pressure than of a genuine desire on her part. “Did I really want to be a mother, or did I really just want to conform to society’s expectations or me?”

CROSSING THE MOON is a very honest, open telling of the relationships between parents and children, husband and wife. It questions how much the way we view our own relationships with our parents, particularly our mothers, determines the type of lives we choose to live and how changes in that perspective can influence our future decisions. It also takes us through the agony of trying to achieve a goal that appears to be so easy for so many yet out of reach for others.
It was well-written and flowed smoothly.
This book was a free Amazon download. ( )