Mothers In Ya Fiction By Wendy Delsol

Mother earth. Mother lode. Motherland. At mother's knee.Mother: it's the mother of all metaphors. Yet mothers are absent in a lot of YA literature. As are fathers often, too.I get it. The teen psych grapples with coming of age: becoming independent, testing boundaries, defying authority, exploring sexuality, setting their own future course.And those struggles are a lot more dramatic when tackled alone and/or when facing some major disruptive circumstance. Death of a parent. Runaway. Neglect due to poverty (or excess wealth). Boarding school for paranormal ability. To-the-death futuristic cage fight.All good. Some great, even. Nonetheless, as a writer, I deliberately chose to give my protagonist, Katla, two supportive-albeit recently divorced-parents. I feel this cocooned the reader in a could-be-me surrounding. When her magical ability kicked in-bringing with it a complication, or two-she was still at home and dealing with other, more relatable, high-school issues: new kid, first love, Homecoming dress, etc. Moreover, I assigned her a strong female mentor within her council of Storks, a coven of white witches who match hovering souls with the right birth mother. This wise woman, Hulda, guides and prompts Katla but doesn't directly command her young charge.As a mother of two teen boys and a writer, it's not always easy to practice this kind of subtle guidance. (Is that the tak-tak-tak of a helicopter I hear?) And, for me, there is a parental instinct that kicks in even as a woman writing YA fiction. Authors want to protect their characters. This urge is heightened if and when the character is a child or teen. We resist this protective instinct and heap all manner of obstacles in our protagonists paths, but we don't necessarily enjoy it.(And, yes, there is A LOT of me in Katla's mother, Lilja. All those Kashi jokes-it making a good mulch, for instance-come to me at breakfast.)Parental figures have a place in YA fiction. If they're not a familial entity, mother or father, they can be a guide or mentor. While a main character may benefit from such counsel, there will-should be anyway-a point at which they act independently, incorporating values and lessons learned.Happy belated Mother's Day to those who qualify. And to my own dear, sweet mom, my greatest champion.My mother is a poemI'll never be able to write,Though everything I writeIs a poem to my mother-Sharon Doubiago