“I had always thought that I would become someone else the moment he left me. I had thought that the light would go out and turn on again all of a sudden, like at surprise birthday parties. At the dawn of her motherhood, Julia Kerninon did not suspect the ruckus that a small brush of a few pounds was going to make in her life. In his third attempt, Touching solid groundthe writer tells the story of the wanderings and joys of her quest to reconcile the woman and the mother within her.
We find her out of balance from the outset: “In this state, alcoholic, engaged, overwhelmed by my son, literary prolix, I was trying to conceive a baby in the torpor of the global heat wave. She struggles to combine her identity anchors, as if a bridge is missing in her existence, to link the young woman she had been to the mother she has become.
It is by turning back that the future is set up. Against motherhood which had stripped her of a part of herself, Kerninon looks back on her childhood loves, on those nights in front of the typist to tie up stories, then on her meeting with the one who is now her husband. and the father of her children: “All my life, I had woken up before the boys to go out in the early morning to run errands and cook the pancakes of my childhood, and always the boys had pushed away my small plates full of hope. When I saw him pouring the maple syrup with a smile, my life lit up. »
Armed with a flourishing lyricism and a prose that is both ample and precise, the writer peels back the multiple layers of her story and reveals herself, woman-sum, free and assumed, with her paradoxes, her ambitions and her flaws. From then on, there is no more before, there is no more after-maternity, there is only a present which continues.
Kerninon questions the received idea that one is born a mother with the arrival of the first child. Here, motherhood summons a sum of experiences, a state of being and a desire to be part of the living. On the way to her bare ownership, more than a role of mother, she assumes the great dance of her existence, in which she invites her children.