Now that I'm pregnant, my husband ignores me: Bad Advice Friday

Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back

The vast majority of resources on pregnancy and motherhood direct our eyes and minds to issues that don’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things. The problems we face are much bigger: a culture in which men hold nearly all of the legal and economic power; a society in which whiteness is considered the norm and superior to other races and cul

The changes the pregnant brain undergoes have been underestimated, Hoekzema told me, “as hormones and their impact often are, and thought of as something akin to an extreme menstrual period, while this is of course on a completely different scale.” It is likely the most drastic endocrine event in human life. But people think of new motherhood as ma

It’s hard for my wife not to feel cursed. Instead of a warm and welcome space for her children, she can picture her body to be dangerous and uninhabitable. She wants to think of Aiden as our miracle child, the only one to survive the harsh climate of her broken body.

The most obvious example of how far we have strayed from our organic roots as a female community is the birthing practices of our present-day culture. Women have actually come to believe that we don’t know how to have babies. We fear it, dread it, look to the “experts” to help us do it right. We go to sterile, unloving environments away from home a

We have become convinced that if we do this any other way, we will endanger the children we are bringing into the world—that we will do the ultimate disservice and be ultimately irresponsible to our offspring. So we mutely accept the advice of the Almighty Doctor and his white-coated staff, and, consequently, we endure an extremely high “complicati

“But women all get that way after children come—too much mother, too little wife.”

I didn’t realize how much internalized misogyny was wrapped up in my perception of women of all stripes, not just mothers. The truth was, I found fault with most of the women I encountered in the world. Every single one of them looked like a cautionary tale of what not to become. I didn’t realize yet that I was huffing the patriarchal spray paint t