Motherhood

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.

But strictly speaking, ambivalent is precisely the word two years in, because my feelings on the experience of motherhood do not add up to a tidy conclusion in the positive or the negative, but in a miles-long bracket that includes every possible feeling.

Year Two was emotionally on par with running back and forth between a hot tub and an ice bath,... 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