"mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they've come"
some musings after an impromptu two-year writing hiatus
Exactly three (3) people have asked me when I’m publishing my substack again, so…hello again.
Both my therapist and my hairstylist are on maternity leave. So is my colleague whose office is across the hall from mine. Most of my friends from college are having children and a few of Dan’s college friends are starting their own families too.
Society tells me its time. I read an article about an OBGYN pushing a supplement with dubious pre-natal benefits to his upper-East side clients. The article noted that babies conceived naturally post-40 are basically miracles. I calculate my age, the time it takes for a body to recover from pregnancy, and take into account the optimal age gap between children that scientists suggest. I think of all the articles and books and podcasts that I’ve consumed simply by being a woman who has never been sure if she wants to be a mother and thinks that if she reads everything that’s ever been written about motherhood she will someday find the right answer.
I wonder if men feel like they’re being suffocated when people ask them if they’re having children? If men consider how every social issue will affect their potential future kids? If men spend countless hours of their lives researching parenting styles or worldwide maternal death rates?
A Colombian woman in the adult ESL class I volunteer teach asks me during our snack break, “Do you have kids?” When I reply “no” she doesn’t miss a beat. “A dog? Cat?”
“Yes, I have a dog,” I answer shyly, feeling the twinge of something-similar-to-shame-but-not-quite-shame I always feel when talking about my dog as a married woman to women who have children. Like Lola is a placeholder or a practice run before the “real thing.”
“Mejor,” she replies definitively, waving her hand like she’s brushing the thought away. The conversation moves on to arepas.
I recently listened to a New York Times podcast, The Retrievals. I waited for every episode to be released with eager anticipation. The storytelling is the best I’ve heard in a long time and each episode swallowed me whole, surrounding me with the pain of women. It details the story of the Yale Fertility Center and one of its nurses who was convicted of stealing fentanyl from the center, leading to women undergoing painful procedures without any pain medication.
I have a lot of empathy for drug users so the nurse’s actions that stemmed from her fentanyl addiction didn’t shock me. What stunned me is the all-encompassing desire the patients have to become pregnant. That these women went through excruciating pain undergoing completely unmedicated egg-retrieval procedures for the chance to have a child. One woman experiences the egg-retrieval procedure eight times, assuming that it’s supposed to be unbearably difficult, not knowing that her fentanyl has been swapped with saline. She knows that motherhood is often painful, so it’s only natural that the first step to become a mom hurts.
Most of the doctors at the clinic don’t take the time to understand their patients’ pain. One doctor threatens to stop the retrieval process if his patient doesn’t stop screaming. The woman clamps her mouth shut and he proceeds.
It is well documented that women do not have their medical pain not taken seriously. It’s worse for Black women and other women of color. Serena Williams, one of the most famous Black women in the world almost died having her first child because her medical team wouldn’t listen to her pain. If an elite athlete, hyper aware of her body from a young age, can’t get people to take her pain seriously, who can?
When I lived in Guatemala, the children at the school I worked at would often ask me if I had children. At first, I laughed because the idea that I would have kids at 23, would choose to leave them to move to Central America in order to hang out with other children seemed truly ludicrous to me. But the more I was asked, the more I wondered why they were asking. Bebes? was always the first question, followed by y el novio? I’ve heard anecdotally that teenagers who have unresolved family trauma sometimes view their ability to have a child as a “do over.” They want to pour the love they didn’t receive into a child of their own. Children stay with you and love you. They rely on you and can’t leave like boyfriends and fathers.
Now many of those same Guatemalan girls I worked with have children of their own.
I see video after tik tok after post about women struggling with infertility or who are happily child free or who have found their purpose in life by becoming mothers. I wish I had the certainty of these internet strangers.
I worry on (at least) a weekly basis:
that if I have kids and continue my volunteer and activist work that my children will be miserable without my constant presence. I think of Dorothy Day’s granddaughter's book, and the strains Dorothy’s work put on her relationship with her daughter.
that the climate trajectory we’re on will make the world uninhabitable and it’s cruel to send a child into a world where I know they will be forced to find ways to survive.
that, after years of research and listening to adoptees, I’ve realized there is probably no such thing as ethical adoption.
that it’s a privilege to be having these conversations in the first place and so many women have had children in the face of poverty, danger, and oppression as an act of hope or necessity so why am I so worried?
that a stranger will call me “mama” which I find to be extremely annoying.
that every identity I have outside of mother will be stripped away and my husband will be allowed to maintain his personality but I won’t.
I don’t know if anyone expected the Barbie movie to be a treatise on motherhood and women. I didn’t know what to expect going into the movie theater in July, but I trusted Greta Gerwig to do a good job. Frances Ha is one of my favorite movies and while she didn’t direct it, by playing Frances she proved her mastery over the ability to hone in on the specific emotions of female friendships.
Overall, I loved Barbie. Yes, America Ferrera’s monologue was a little Women’s Studies 101, but it reached such a wide audience, including people who had never had those thoughts before. Also, I’ve never heard more laughs and screams in a movie theater than when the “Depression Barbie” commercial hit the screen. Greta really pinned us mentally ill girlies there. I hope they don’t make a sequel.
There is so much more to say on motherhood and all its complexities. And I am only an observer. A sailor navigating these ever-changing waters.
I know one person/thing can’t have the answer to my parenting anxieties and I don’t want unsolicited advice. What I do want is to provide a space for vulnerable thoughts in a world where many choices appear to be clear cut on the surface. I’m trying to embrace the mess and confusion. Maybe you are too.
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death-brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” -Louise Erdrich
Links To Click On When You’re Bored At Work
This devastating article about children medically experimented on and involuntarily institutionalized in post-WWII Austria.
As someone who faithfully read Ask Amy as a child, this made me laugh. I read this in 2021, but I haven’t published since then so here we are.
Also old, aka from 2021, but it’s a good one!
I love a jammy egg in ramen and I love a fried egg on a breakfast sando so this article appealed to me.
Reckoning with the pain families (intentionally or unintentionally) cause.
Things That Are Bringing Me Joy
I recently attended two very joyous weddings that really made me appreciate all the people in my life that I love.
This gorgeous painting from Harmonia Rosales.
Buying tiny samples of perfume online and wearing different scents when the mood strikes me. My search to smell like a bag of marshmallows continues.
My boss telling me that I'm a "strong writer." Truly nothing brings me more joy than positive responses to my writing. *nicholas hoult in mad max voice* Affirm me!
An article about a community coming together to help puffins in the face of climate change.
The current Synod on Synodality, despite its dumb name.
Learning about the prints of Dutch artist Julie de Graag.
Thank you for joining me in this space. The world is so heavy. I’m wishing you peace, solidarity, healing, and joy.
xo, Maeve