The first time was an accident. She was slicing carrots, trying to keep them thin and angled, assaulted on her left by the blaring television in the living room, and on the right by her children squabbling in the…
I heard an interview recently with Jessica Anthony, whose work I admire, where she said, “I think we underplay the importance of metaphor and imagination, in particular in contemporary American culture. We’ve become profound rationalists in our way.” (Listen more here, if you’re so inclined.) This notion of downplayed metaphor has stuck with me because I love metaphors, but fear them a little too. Just like what they seek to explore, metaphors are tricky.
Poorly executed metaphors and analogies have their own value in making us laugh—“He was as tall as a six-foot-three tree” gets me every single time—but run the risk of being ridiculous, or worse, reductive. “The Family Gathers at a Meal” is about parenting, specifically motherhood—a state of being that has its own rich canon of literature attempting to explain and define it. There is so much to explore, so much to be said…but where to begin? How to preserve the nuance? Metaphor, for me, is a tool to both contain and reveal an idea that otherwise feels unwieldy, or overly familiar. It helps me grip and explore the parts of life I feel like I don’t have the most tenacious grasp on by knocking on the visual part of my brain.
The first and last lines of this story came to me first, in one of those blessed writing fits where the idea shows up and wants badly to be expressed. The visual, the dripping blood, was key. In this piece, metaphor narrows the focus of motherhood to explore just one mother whose family is literally feeding on her. That little slice of body horror (pun intended) reveals something more in the questions the metaphor invites: What does it mean to be food for a living being, or a community? How does it feel to feed someone else? What is nourishment to a parent, long after the tender terror of breastfeeding has passed? Why is sacrifice so much more than mere depletion? Eating is something we all participate in daily for survival, and for which we’ve crafted traditions and celebrations and songs of praise. Reproducing, caring, parenting—these are necessary functions, too. They are nothing if not biologically rational, yet they slip away from simple explanation and facile understanding. And we just can’t stop writing about them, trying to see them in new ways.
ANDREA CAVEDO has taught high school history and government in and around Chicago for the last decade. Her writing has appeared in Orca and HerStry. She is at work on a novel. Find her on Instagram and Threads @mrscavedowrites.
