Book and Radio Review: Fothermather

Gail McConnell's Fothermather is a slender pamphlet that performs an ambitious task, it attempts to give language to a family structure for which existing English vocabulary is not yet sufficient.

When Fothermather arrived in the post, I tore open the packaging before I had even taken off my coat. What greeted me was a striking image: a seahorse floating in pale, skeletal lines across the cover. Before reading a single poem, I found myself reaching instinctively for metaphor. After all, seahorses are one of the few species in which the male carries and births the young, an inversion of reproductive roles that has long fascinated biologists and storytellers alike. Looking at the cover, I wondered whether Gail McConnell had chosen this creature as a symbol for queer parenthood, for the redistribution of pregnancy and care within a two-mother family. I assumed, perhaps too eagerly, that the seahorse stood for a reimagining of who gets to gestate and who gets to be called 'mother.'

But when I finally opened the pamphlet, I encountered something far less symbolically stable than I had expected. The poems were fragmented, dreamlike, at times indecipherable bursts of syllables, half-words, repetitions, a language that seemed more felt than spoken. My initial response was confusion. Had I misread the seahorse entirely? What did these fractured lines have to do with queer kinship or with the lived realities of a non-biological mother – a role that as Dr Rhonda Brown and Dr Amaryll Perlesz have noted, lacks any universally accepted term and is often linguistically invisible in both public and institutions settings?

It was only when I turned to McConnell's BBC Radio 4 documentary where she and her partner Beth narrate the story of conceiving and raising their son Finn, that the poems began to make sense. Hearing McConnell read aloud section of Fothermather, the strange textures of the text transformed. What on the page had seemed obscure now sounded unmistakably like a child learning to speak: babbling, testing rhythms, shaping the world through sound. Finn's early attempts to differentiate 'Mama' and 'Mommy', and his phase of simply calling everyone 'mommy', suddenly echoed through the poems. Their repetitive, playful phonetics no longer felt like abstraction but like a faithful rendering of the linguistic environment of a household inventing the vocabulary it needs.

The documentary reveals another layer to the seahorse, one grounded not in reproductive symbolism but in anatomy. At the 20-week scan, McConnell sees Finn's developing spine on the screen and writes, 'my mouth sounds seahorse in the dark ... a creature with a spine turning upside down the right side up for birth.' Hearing this passage recited, I realised my earlier interpretation had been both incorrect and paradoxically still meaningful. The seahorse emerges first from the literal shape of a fetus, yet it resonates symbolically with the structural reorientation of parenthood in a same-sex family. In Fothermather, biology and metaphor fold into one another, neither cancelling the other out.

The pamphlet takes on further significance when read alongside research on lesbian co-mothers. Existing terms such as non-biological mother, non-birth parent or co-parent all define a mother by what she is not, thereby framing her role as secondary or lacking. This language of lack contributes to the social invisibility of lesbian co-mothers who are frequently recognised neither as mother nor as legitimate parents within public institutions. Further research on this phenomenon can be found in the work of Professor Ellen Lewin here and Cassandra Wilson here among others. Viewed in this context, Fothermather becomes not merely a poetic experiment but a linguistic intervention, an attempt to name maternal labour without subordinating it to biological essentialism.

McConnell's own account of how the title emerged further illuminates this linguistic work. She recalls having in her ear Seamus Heaney's 'Fodder', where wordplay renders both linguistic colonisation and intimate familial naming newly audible. She notes that 'mather' derives from the Irish meadar, linked to the Latin metrum – a term that denotes a vessel for measuring as well as the root of poetic metre. In her hands, Fothermather becomes 'an alphabet I play with in its formative parts', a word she sounds out syllable by syllable alongside Finn, as though parenthood itself were being spoken gradually into being.

Compared with other contemporary works on queer parenting, Fothermather is less concerned with advocacy or policy than with texture. It offers an embodied poetics of parenthood, one that recognises the bodily asymmetry between two mothers while refusing to let biology dictate the emotional structure of the family. The poems do not pretend the absence of gestation is trivial; instead, they make space for longing, for the ache of wanting to feel 'his movements' but not being able to. Few texts articulate so honestly the position of the non-gestational mother, who must build attachment through care and creativity rather than through pregnancy.

Fothermather will likely not appeal to readers expecting linear narrative or more conventional lyric poetry. Its experimentation can feel disorienting. Yet the disorientation is itself thematically faithful. Becoming a queer parent, especially a non-biological one, means navigating the absence of established scripts. McConnell refuses to smooth that difficulty away, she transforms it into sound.

In conclusion, Fothermather is a compelling contribution to the cultural record of queer family-making. It pairs powerfully with the BBC documentary, which grounds the poems in lived experience, while the poems lift the documentary into a realm of metaphor and sound. Together they form a portrait of a family made through intention, vulnerability and an inventive love that refuses old boundaries. It is not an easy pamphlet, but a generous and resonant one which inviting us to listen closely to the fragile, formative sounds through which a family is made. I recommend the pamphlet and the radio programme to readers interested in queer kinship or the ways poetry can reshape the language of belonging.