Motherhood

A job is predicated on agreement. (“I will take X dollars for Y hours of work, as long as the arrangement works for me.”) But there are all sorts of other labors that are predicated on duty . Duty to help others, duty to be true to ourselves. (“I’m doing this because it is necessary for me to do it, regardless of whether it works for me or not.”)... See more

My boyfriend and I had just hired a nanny to spend three days a week caring for our baby, to do a kind of work that I’d been shocked to find intimately rewarding but also far harder than anything I’d ever tried to do for eight hours straight. We could afford to do this because a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a... See more

Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own. 

I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil: bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hard-core, edgy, gnarly. It wasn't pale pink; it was brown of shit and red of blood. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle, and power.

It is hard a lot of the time and easy a lot of the time. Is this making any sense? It doesn’t make any sense to me either. And that’s the total mind-melting, incomprehensible, frustratingly indescribable, and also wonderful thing about infants. Time with them has no goal and operates in a strange nonlinear fashion, and you are doing so much but... See more