Authenticity vs. Performance in Kate Baer’s And Yet

The Thematic Claim: The Cost of the Curated Self

In And Yet, Kate Baer interrogates the exhausting conflict between the speaker’s internal reality and the socially scripted roles she is expected to perform. The collection argues that the pressure to appear as a “good mother,” a “happy wife,” or a successful woman in a culture of curated perfection creates a debilitating split. Yet, through moments of raw self-disclosure and quiet domestic rebellion, the speaker insists on reclaiming a truth that cannot be smoothed into a filter. This tension—between what is felt and what is shown—runs through poems about ambition, happiness, motherhood, and emotional volatility.

The Performance of Ambition: Glitter Heels on a Battlefield

In “My Ambition Goes Off to War”, the speaker personifies ambition as a soldier who packs an ordinary suitcase but includes glitter heels. The commander’s failure to react to the impractical shoes highlights how the performance of personal desire clashes with the grim reality of duty. The train departs, its smoke fading into clouds, and the speaker begs for postcards she never receives. The glitter heels symbol become a stand-in for the parts of the self that are deemed frivolous or inappropriate in the serious work of family life. The unreachable ambition suggests that the speaker has exiled her own drive to fit a nurturing role, and the severed communication indicates a lasting disconnection from her own desires. Here, performance is not about social media but about the internal silencing of a version of the self that does not fit the mother-wife script.

The Ironic Instructions for Simulated Happiness

In “How to Be Happy”, Baer offers a five-step program that reads as a sarcastic guide to manufacturing contentment. The speaker advises waking to ocean sounds from an expensive white noise machine, declaring “life” with energy, and celebrating small pleasures like a child’s mispronunciation of cauliflower. The poem’s punch comes when a flower is renamed a “little rage,” insisting that beauty is not performative. The final step—to remember the self before pursuing “a big, important life”—points to a lost authentic identity. This poem critiques the wellness industry’s promise that happiness can be assembled from purchases and affirmations. It aligns with “Not a Diet Diet”, where a system promising self-improvement through consumption is exposed as a trap, and “Sad Olympics”, where the speaker buys a new air fryer and pink diffuser to cope with depression. These poems reveal how performance often clothes itself in consumerism: buy the right product, perform the right feeling, and the inner void might be hidden.

Authentic Motherhood vs. the Performance of the Good Mother

The most powerful resistance to performance appears in poems about the speaker’s children. In “Marvel”, the speaker watches her daughter at the kitchen counter and recalls the birth, when the baby looked alien and she admitted to the nurse she didn’t know the child. Now the girl is “the most beautiful” she has ever met. This poem rejects the myth of instant maternal bonding; instead, it offers a painfully honest arc from confusion to love. The speaker becomes both Mary and the angel, her daughter a lion entering a soft, ordinary life. The religious imagery elevates everyday intimacy over curated images.

Similarly, in “Influencers”, the poem witnesses a mother giving quiet kindness to her child’s rage, “the winter’s sun move from her tired shade.” True influence, the poem suggests, is not the polished content of social media but the unglamorous act of bending toward a child in need. This contrasts with “Burnout”, where the speaker refuses to participate in “world breastfeeding week memes” or conversations about strollers. She declares she cannot know what it is to be a good mother “when mother is already heavy enough.” The performance of maternal competence is rejected outright. Yet the speaker does not escape the performance trap entirely: in “What Are We Doing Here?”, she fakes a bladder problem to avoid answering loaded questions about global warming and parenting, then asks her daughter about her “rose and thorn”—a ritual that may itself become a performance. The cycle persists.

Complexity and Contradiction: The Fatal Flaw of Hope and Disgust

The theme’s deepest complexity emerges in “Fatal Flaw”. Here, the speaker throws a surprise party for her rage, attended by first responders. She calls herself an “insult to this world” and recalls writing “inslut” while drunk—a fusion of insult and slut that captures self-loathing. Her emotional state careens between hope and disgust, compared to the weather or her own inconsistent poems. The image of a dog chasing its tail illustrates the futile cycle, and the repeated “and yet” signals stubborn perseverance. The fatal flaw is not rage itself but the inability to maintain a stable, performative self. This poem, along with “And Yet” (chapter 35), where the speaker realizes no hero will save her and that “the war will always be in you,” refuses resolution. Instead, the collection embraces the mess. The speaker’s authenticity is not a polished truth but a volatile, unresolved presence. The triple “and yet” in “Fatal Flaw” becomes a mantra: despite the performative pressures, despite the failure to be consistent, she persists.

Symbols reinforce this split. The butterfly appears in other poems as a fragile transformation, while baby clothes evoke the small, tangible markers of motherhood that resist abstraction. The train from “My Ambition Goes Off to War” is both escape and abandonment. Each symbol anchors the speaker’s struggle between what she owes the world and what she owes herself.

Conclusion

Kate Baer’s And Yet does not resolve the conflict between authenticity and performance; it lives inside it. The speaker performs roles—ambitious career woman, satisfied mother, contented wife—yet continuously subverts them by naming her rage, her boredom, her ambivalence. The collection insists that the most honest response to a culture of curated perfection is to admit the performance and then, with a shrug, refuse to be good at it.

Study Questions

1. How does the symbol of the glitter heels in “My Ambition Goes Off to War” encapsulate the tension between personal desire and social expectation?
   Answer: The glitter heels are impractical for combat, yet the commander ignores them. This reflects how the speaker’s personal aspirations are deemed irrelevant in her domestic “war.” The heels represent parts of the self that do not fit the role of self-sacrificing mother, and their silent dismissal shows how performance demands the suppression of these aspects.

2. In “How to Be Happy,” what is the effect of renaming a flower a “little rage”?
   Answer: It deliberately rejects the language of positivity and the notion that beauty must be serene. By calling the flower a “little rage,” the poem insists that authentic beauty can include anger and imperfection, undermining the performance of effortless happiness.

3. How does the speaker’s admission in “Marvel” that she told the nurse she didn’t know her newborn challenge conventional narratives of motherhood?
   Answer: The admission breaks the performance of instant maternal love. It shows that authentic connection can develop over time, and that honesty about confusion or alienation is more truthful than the curated image of blissful bonding. The poem redefines maternal love as an earned rather than automatic state.

4. Why is the speaker’s flaw described as “fatal” in the poem, and how does it relate to the performance of a stable self?
   Answer: The flaw is the inability to maintain a consistent emotional state—oscillating between hope and disgust. In a culture that demands cheerful composure, this volatility is “fatal” because it exposes the speaker as unreliable, failing the performance of steady contentment. Yet the poem’s “and yet” suggests this failure is also a form of stubborn authenticity.

5. What does the act of faking a bladder problem in “What Are We Doing Here?” reveal about the speaker’s relationship with performance?
   Answer: It reveals that even as the speaker critiques performance, she still uses small deceptions to avoid social expectations. The subsequent ritual of asking her daughter about “rose and thorn” may be another performance of attentive parenting. This complexity shows that the speaker cannot fully escape the roles she opposes, highlighting the theme’s persistent contradiction.