Tracy C. Gold is the author of the new children's picture book Call Your Mother. Her other books include Everyone's Sleepy But the Baby. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Q: What inspired you to write Call Your Mother?
A: There are two big inspirations for this book.
The first is that my grandfather would always call my dad and say "Carl, call your mother." Then, when my dad would call his mom, she would say "Why don't you ever call me?"
It became this big family joke and definitely made the phrase "Call your mother" top of mind for me when my publisher, Familius, mentioned they were looking for books about moms. I wrote a draft of Call Your Mother and they loved it.
Oddly, as I wrote, the book felt kind of familiar. So I looked back in my files and it turns out I had an old draft called "What would Mommy do" that was basically the same book as Call Your Mother but not as well-written.
So, the deep down more heartfelt inspiration, that had been there for years, was really the way that my relationship with my own mother changed when I became a mother myself. Every time I was up in the middle of the night (or let's be real, all night), I was thinking "She went through all this for me?!" And I called her for help a lot!
Of course, becoming a parent changed my relationship with my father, too, but you'll have to wait for Call Your Father, which is scheduled to come out from Familius in 2026, to read more about that!
Q: What do you think Vivian Mineker’s illustrations add to the book?
A: They're incredible. I will say that the book never really made me tear up until I looked at an early draft of Vivian's illustrations and I got to the very last page where we see (spoiler!) a new baby, a mom, a grandma, and a framed picture of a great grandma.
I had a rough idea that we should see the great grandma somehow in that last illustration and had communicated that to the publisher but I had no idea how Vivian was going to pull it off.
My daughter barely knew my grandmothers, but the love that they gave my parents, and the love that my parents gave me, directly feeds into the love I give my daughter, and the love she will one day give her kids, if she has them. That last illustration presents that chain of love so beautifully.
Then we have my kid's favorite illustration: the baby (and the cat) making a mess in the bathroom. Vivian just does such a lovely job of letting a range of emotions shine through in her characters.
Q: What do you think the book says about relationships between mothers and children?
A: At least for me, the book speaks to how you really can't know how much your mother loves you until you become a mother yourself. I mean, my baby was a screaming, crying, tiny alien-looking thing who would refuse to eat and sleep (and often still does, six years later!).
I'd vomited for about nine months straight while pregnant, then had my guts sliced open to have her via C-section because she was too stubborn to get out of her breech position (stubbornness is another characteristic she has maintained, ha!).
Yet pretty much as soon as I felt her kicks--and then even more intensely, when I first heard her cry--I knew I would do anything for her. I'd die for her. I didn't necessarily enjoy her company for a while, at least not in the middle of the night, but I overwhelmingly loved her.
And I knew, in a way that I never had before, that my mother felt the same for me. It made me feel very warm and supported and that was very much needed in that tough and sleep-deprived time of my life.
Q: What do you hope kids (and adults!) take away from the story?
A: For kids, this is a fun and lighthearted book about how much their mothers love them. I want it to make them smile and give their moms a hug.
For adults, I hope it makes them remember how much they appreciate their moms, or the mother figures in their lives. I hope that if their moms are still around, they call them, or if their moms have passed, that it fills them with happy memories even if it might be bittersweet.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Well, I've got Call Your Father in the pipeline from Familius, also illustrated by Vivian Mineker, but right now that's mostly a waiting game and I'm not sure if Vivian has even started.
I've always got a bunch of manuscripts bouncing around in my brain (or in my agent's inbox). Right now, I'm playing with mostly animal books...dogs, horses, skunks, falcons, and raccoons are some of my subjects.
So yeah, when I get time away from my work as a freelance editor, I am having a lot of fun with more picture books! I'm also working on some on-demand classes about picture book writing--one for beginners and one that teaches rhyme and rhythm.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I love to point out that Call Your Mother has a page in the front matter that says "Dedicated to" with a blank line for people to write their mother's names.
I kind of panic about dedicating my books because I go down this spiral of people's feelings getting hurt if I don't do the dedications right so I decided to do no dedications for any of my books.
Familius (the publisher) came up with the idea to do this "dedicated to" page so that readers could write the names of their own mothers (or grandmothers, or mother figures) in the book.
I think that is just so perfect. This way, people don't have to give their moms a book dedicated to my mom. They can personalize it to theirs.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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