She’s Back in Circulation

Is there any stage of life when one should stop remaking oneself? Clearly never, if Kelly Harms can have her way with ageist, sexist taboos that have snared older women in filmy webs. In “The Overdue Life of Amy Byler,” the protagonist leaves her three fraught years of single mothering – the diving practices and school pickups and healthy dinners – to embark on a “momspringa.” The term, hashtagged by a fashion mag that’s run by her snarky, devil-may-care New York friend, launches her into a different life. From shapeless tees and stained sweats, she’s forklifted into styled pants, seductive skirts, sheer blouses, a bouffant hairdo and chic flats, a physical makeover that feels timely after bumping into the “hot librarian” (and yes, believe it or not, there are hot librarians!).

Breaking Out of Motherhood

“Momspringa” was conceived as a take on “Rumspringa,” a term I needed to Google to determine its origins. Rumspringa, for those who don’t know, is a relatively carefree phase pursued by Amish teenagers, before they choose to be baptized by the church. The Amish live a mostly tech-free life, wear solid colored clothes with suspenders and capes, ride horse-drawn buggies, like they’re stuck in a past that others have moved on from. Harms seems to suggest that many moms are stuck in a similar, imprisoning antiquity, one with rewards no doubt, but also strewn with losses and regrets.

A Medley of Midlife Dates

Amy Byler also has to deal with her husband’s inexplicable vanishing for three years, his parachuting himself from the drudgeries of a Dad into the lingerie-donning grip of a 20-something. And then his equally sudden reappearance, and aggravating appreciation of their kids – and her single parenting – while offering her an opportunity of a lifetime. To escape to New York and do her own thing: which in her case, as a nerdy librarian, also involves attending a librarians’ conference at Columbia, and becoming the object of the #momspringa article. More significantly, Amy starts dating, familiarizing herself with norms that accompany contemporary midlife encounters.

Landing a Fairytale Ending

The dates are funny, sad, boring, uplifting. Despite her mommy-figure, and earnest librarian’s obsessions – how can one get kids to read at varying levels in a classroom without stigmatizing the less proficient and demotivating the geniuses? – she does find a storybook romance. And thank god for storybooks like this that remind us that protagonists can be of any age and any type, accompanied by kids or not, and land a dreamy, Hollywood-type ending. Inevitably, she ferries her mom guilt and wrestles a seemingly impossible choice – her kids or the hot librarian? – till life settles it for her. Spoiler alert: sometimes you can have both.

Reading What Kids Want

Read this book for its wit and clever literary allusions, for its championing of a #momspringa movement, for its recognition that romance comes in all shapes and sizes and never stops being comic. More than anything else, read this book for its ideas on reading. As a librarian, Amy struggles with budget cuts, dwindling attention spans, eye-rolling teens, but manages to cook up a scheme that can appeal to schools, parents and teachers: to have kids make their own choices among a slew of mixed-level titles that they gobble up on e-readers, hence tackling the self-consciousness of weaker readers and the hubris of smarter ones. If you want your kids to read, you also have to  read your kids.

References

Kelly Harms, The Overdue Life of Amy Byler, Lake Union Publishing, Seattle, 2019