Story for the Week
When I was a toddler, Mommy and Me groups weren’t a formal thing. In a time when most moms didn’t work outside the home, neighborhood moms organically came together with their kids. Once we started school, the moms on our street still continued to get together for coffee and gossip during the day. (I remember discovering that gem on a snow day. We couldn’t go to school, but the weather did not stop our moms from trudging down the street in the snow for their “coffee klatch.”)
The closest I ever got to Mommy and Me anything was a swimming class. Corinne was around four years old, and we really wanted her to learn to swim. Dennis grew up in the Caribbean, so he learned to swim in the ocean from the time he was small. My siblings and I never took swimming classes, but we eventually learned because our grandparents had a pool in the back yard. It was important to both of us that Corinne know how to swim.
She did not enjoy it…at first. 😂
This particular class required one parent to be in the water at all times. Designed to create an environment where kids were comfortable in the water, the instructors demonstrated different motions the parents could go through with their littles—helping learn how to move their arms and legs in a swimming motion before leaving them on their own.
Corinne was having none of that. The first time we got into the water together, she had a death grip on me. I tried to coax her at least to arm’s length, but she grabbed the shoulder strap of my suit and would not let go. Not exactly how we envisioned her learning to swim.
One of the instructors made a suggestion. Let Corinne stand on the deck of the pool and jump into the water to me. I gradually moved further back as long as I was always close enough to catch her before her head went under the water. That allowed Corinne to feel safe and still in control.
It worked…almost too well. For the rest of the class, she focused ONLY on jumping into the water. Stand on the deck, jump, get out, stand on the deck, jump, get out, stand on the deck…. You get the idea.
We eventually enrolled her in swimming classes at a local YMCA. The Y didn’t allow parents to stay in the pool area during the classes. You had to stay in the building, but the pool was off limits. The instructors explained that kids just learning to swim still looked to Mom and Dad if they could. They found that the kids advanced faster when their parents weren’t around.
After a couple years at the Y, she moved into more advanced classes with our local park district. Is she a great swimmer? No. Could she pull herself up and stay afloat if she fell into a pool or a lake? Absolutely. And she enjoys swimming, which is a long way from that first swimming class.
We never enrolled in any other Mommy and Me anything. Come to think of it, we didn’t even take childbirth or parenting classes before Corinne was born. It probably had something to do with me being an introvert, and maybe there’s something to be said for that. Because maybe it prevented me from befriending a potential killer like in the book reviewed below. 😯
Book Review
⭐⭐
2 Stars for The Push by Claire McGowan
383 pages
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Publication Date: November 12, 2020
Publisher’s Description
The party should have been perfect: six couples from the same baby group, six newborns, a luxurious house. But not everything has gone to plan, and while some are here to celebrate, others have sorrows to drown. When someone falls from the balcony of the house, the secrets and conflicts within the group begin to spill out.
DS Alison Hegarty, herself struggling with infertility, is called in to investigate. She’s convinced the fall was not an accident, and finds the new parents have a lot to hide. Wealthy Ed and Monica show off their newborn while their teenage daughter is kept under virtual house arrest. Hazel and Cathy conceived their longed-for baby via an anonymous sperm donor—or so Hazel thinks. Anita and Jeremy planned to adopt from America, but there’s no sign of the child. Kelly, whose violent boyfriend disrupted previous group sessions, came to the party even though she lost her baby. And then there’s Jax, who’s been experiencing strange incidents for months—almost like someone’s out to get her. Is it just a difficult pregnancy? Or could it be payback for something she did in the past?
It’s a nightmare of a case, and as events get even darker it begins to look impossible. Only one thing is clear: they all have something to hide. And for one of them, it’s murder.
************
I looked forward to reading The Push by Claire McGowan because I enjoyed The Other Wife (How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?), but this title was a disappointment. The story feels like a direct play on Big Little Lies, which I enjoyed, but this felt too similar in terms of the whodunit aspect. We start with a suspected murder; someone fell off a balcony at a party, and no one seems to have seen anything. So the book sets up the discovery of what happened.
The story centers around six expectant couples all attending an antenatal group. In the prologue, the couples are at a party after the births, and someone (we don’t know who it is) is dead and presumed by the detectives to have been murdered. Including the moderator of the group and the two detectives, we have 15 main characters—one dead and 12 suspects. That’s A LOT to keep track of.
One of the detectives is Alison, who was also the detective in The Other Wife. After developing a relationship with her partner from the previous book, she struggles with this investigation because she’s trying to conceive. Diana is her new partner, and Alison isn’t really sure yet whether she likes this partnership.
The antenatal group is almost too diverse. I’m completely in favor of having diversity in characters, but this was unbelievably diverse for a random group of expectant couples. I think this is where the impressions come in from other reviews I saw about the “isms”—ageism, sexism, racism, etc.
Jax and Aaron are an older/younger mixed couple. Jax is about 14 years older than Aaron, and Aaron is biracial. Monica and Ed are an older wealthy couple, with Monica being in her early 40s. Kelly and Ryan are the almost-too-young-to-be-having-kids couple, and Ryan is verbally abusive at the very least. Cathy and Hazel, the lesbian couple, used artificial insemination through a sperm donor. Aisha and Rahul, an Indian couple, have a pre-arranged marriage. Anita and Jeremy are in the process of adopting a baby from the States.
All of the chapters are told from the women’s points of view, even though the men are also suspects. Alison’s chapters are present day covering the investigation. The rest of the chapters alternate starting 10 weeks before, the day of, nine weeks before, the day of, etc. There’s one random chapter “10 weeks before the barbecue”—I have no idea why it’s labeled that way.
Jax and Aaron seem to be the main characters. Many of the chapters are from Jax’s POV, and hers are the only ones told in the first person—again, I have no idea why. A secondary plotline centers around Jax being accused of being a pedophile but really doesn’t need to be a plot element. The entire book could have been written without it.
None of the characters in this book are likable, not even Alison, who I liked in the first book I met her in. Everyone has secrets, which I suspect is designed to create confusion over who could have committed the crime, but again, with so many characters to keep track of, it was all too much. I also find it hard to believe that the detectives didn’t figure out a couple of key things that I totally figured out before they were revealed.
I had to work much too hard to get through this, and I really didn’t enjoy it by the time I got to the end. I would pass on this one.
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