Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays

When we returned home on the bus every day after long hours of reading and arithmetic and sometimes tense, confusing dramas with other children, we each sat on a stool in the kitchen, ate the cookie or cake our mother had baked for us, and told her what was new. She laid out our clothes for school, put towels in the dryer so they would be warm when

My mother was not at all worried about the fate of the boys in my life when I was fifteen. She was worried about me, and her ethics included my caring for me. She was worried young men who had the power advantage would manipulate her child. She was worried about my own weakness and desire to please. My mother did not think I would regret wholeheart

As her daughters grew older, my mother was wary of intruding on our privacy. She believed in knocking on doors, not barging through them. She never forced conversations. When we talked, she listened to me carefully, her eyes returning to mine throughout our dialogue. When I was a teenager, she was especially careful, aware no doubt that I boiled wi

“the neck of the uterus is like the penis, and its receptacle with testicles and vessels is like the scrotum.” Laqueur twists the phrase “seeing is believing” into “believing is seeing.” This makes the point exactly. The drawings that accompany the texts written by anatomists who had dissected human bodies and had intimate knowledge of them illustr

We are all, to one degree or another, made of what we call “memory,” not only the bits and pieces of time visible to us in pictures that have hardened with our repeated stories, but also the memories we embody and don’t understand—the smell that carries with it something lost or the gesture or touch of a person who reminds us of another person, or

there is a detached quality to the eulogy, as if he is surveying his childhood from a great distance, and his link to the woman who bore and suckled and cared for him is missing.

In a 2018 essay for Aeon, “The Macho Sperm Myth,” the biological anthropologist Robert D. Martin argues that such fantasies have interfered with research in embryology and blinded scientists to actual biological processes. In her now classic 1991 essay, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male and Fe

Motherhood has been and is drowned in so much sentimental nonsense with so many punitive rules for how to act and feel that it remains a cultural straitjacket, even today. The metaphor is highly conscious. The straitjacket used to restrain psychiatric patients is an apt image for what Rich meant by keeping women under male institutional control.

Then she turned to her temporary wards, nodded at them, and said, “Okay, now, go wild.” They took the cue. They howled, hooted, rolled in the driveway dirt, threw whatever was handy, ran in and out of the house, slammed doors, kicked trees and fences, and spat at each other in an orgy of freedom as my grandmother watched them, seated calmly on the