Motherhood

"Parent or childfree" used to be my framework for understanding a dividing difference of adult life. But aging and, yes, friendship, have taught me that there are so many experiences that binary doesn't capture: To want kids but not be able to have them, for physical or financial or logistical reasons. To not want kids but accidentally get pregnant... See more

My life as a parent seems to come at the storytelling problem differently. The experience crowds out the narration, rather than the other way around. What is there to say about omnipresence? There’s a tactility to parenting (feeding, cleaning, dressing, hugging, rocking, kissing), a primitive quality (love, protection, devotion), that resists... See more

But I love being a mom. I’m not always great at it—let’s be very clear about that. Sometimes I yell. I don’t enjoy playing make-believe, and I mostly leave the work of crawling on the floor and pushing Hot Wheels around the rug to Ken and the grandparents. Sometimes, I can get very caught up in my work and have a hard time focusing on what my son... See more

Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist... What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible... See more

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