A little disclaimer: This piece is a dispatch, not an essay. Normally I take my time to shape a piece. I rework it, find the meter and reach for the right metaphor. This one I’m sending raw.

A year ago I opened a blank page that wasn’t private.

Before that there was a very intense stretch of studying and living Motherhood at the same time. Studying under a doctor of Motherhood studies to give the sociology and the hormones and the whole architecture of it a name. Identity work. UCLA’s Certificate Program in Social Emotional Arts. Workshops, seminars, retreats on craft and three years under a poetry mentor. I used all of it to process what was happening to me in real time. Some of that training was meant to heal. Although I still flinch at that word. But I held myself back from anyone watching me use any of it (mostly). Last July I stopped holding myself back.

For the first few years of her life, ten minutes at the table felt like theft. I kept a ledger of every page written as a debit against her and against my worth as her mother. I believed that needing to write or create at all was the tell that I wasn’t enough for her without it.

I don’t believe that anymore. Although, I’m still subconsciously unraveling from that belief which makes this super messy. She’s five now. She paints on the floor of the dining room with a focus I recognize because it’s mine. And last month she told me, flat and certain in the way only young children are about the truest things, that she is an artist. Not that she likes to paint or draw. Not that she loves to play with clay. That she is an artist. I don’t fully yet trust my own theory here, because it’s the one I want. That five years of watching me tend something of my own taught her a woman keeps a self alongside a child rather than in the place of one. I could be wrong, I often am. But I saw her face when she said that. I’m not wrong about that.

My writing and creating was never separate from my mothering. It was the practice that let me survive being interrupted seven times an hour and still find the thread again. I built circles out of the same material (nearly a hundred mothers over the last four years) and somewhere in it the line between my grief and theirs went soft enough that I stopped being able to find the edge.

Here’s the part that isn’t gratitude and I’m ashamed to say out loud. I’ve grown disillusioned with the container. I watch machine accounts with no throughline pull enormous numbers of eyes saying very little, and I called what I felt jealousy for a while and made myself small for it. But it isn’t jealousy. It’s that I’ve landed somewhere I no longer recognize as writing FOR me, and that non-recognizing is what’s kept me pacing the room searching for a clean resolve.

Something has outgrown its shape. Not Substack. Me, inside it.

I’ve done this leap before. Six years ago, an unplanned pregnancy that I chose to meet fully instead of managing from a distance. Five years ago, a certification to give my own experience a spine. Three years ago, a poet I asked to take me under their wing. A year ago, asking strangers to watch me write. Every leap looked like the end of something safe safe right up until it wasn’t.

I’ve been carrying so many ideas for the last six months. All of which have scared me and I’m not ready to promise. Only name. A symposium on the structural weight of mothering that doesn’t ask either side of the duality to apologize for itself. A quarterly gathering the work of creative mothers across every medium they touch. More circles where we are writing in the same room instead of the same feed. An apprenticeship where the theory hands over, unpacked with the tools that actually held me, so other mothers and caregivers find their way back into a creative life that’s changed shape along with them.

None of this is decided.

What is decided for me: if one of these essays that I’ve shared in the last year has landed somewhere raw for you, you gave me proof that what I make alone in the minutes/hours/days/weeks that I used to feel guilty about stops being only mine once I let it go. Thank you for a year of witnessing that.

I’m excited to be scared again.

some of my personal favorite pieces:

letdown →

this was one of my hardest experiences in mothering, still hurts, but writing this piece did release something for me

the creature at the end of the string →

this piece talks about ambition, but the reason i mention this piece now is that it was a moment i really let myself stretch my creative writing muscles

what comes to the fence line →

rage was such a prevalent part of my early mothering experience and also something that made me feel shame, this piece is where i’m at now on the subject

The notebook doesn’t know it’s supposed to be two things, smelling of a childhood I can’t quite place. All wax and cedar shavings from the pencil sharpener she insists on using all by herself. Even when the pencil doesn’t need it. Underneath that, the damp smell of paper left open on a car floor. I know this smell better than my own perfume. And honestly, I could find this notebook in the dark by scent alone.

A sentence about vigilance sits right under a drawn castle. Four turrets, though one leans as if it just gave up halfway through standing. The graphite is smudged where my palm dragged across it before it dried. Right next to the smudge, in wax so thick it’s raised off the page, sits a scar. It reads: the mind cannot hold vigilance and depth at once, it has to choose, and Motherhood has already chosen for you… The sentence stops there. I don’t know if it was finished or if she asked for a snack. The crayon she used is a color called Burnt Sienna. It’s everywhere. The turrets, the moat, the hair. A small violent orange that has opinions about everything it touches.

Page twenty-two is only Rapunzel. The hair runs off the page and on the the next one, completely uninterrupted, gone slightly waxy and shiny in the places she pressed hardest. Little ridges you can feel with your fingertip if you close your eyes and run it down the spiral. This is the one page that got to be a whole thing. I didn’t write anything on twenty-two. Nothing. I remember watching her draw it, the way her tongue came out the side of her mouth. Her blonde hair brushing the paper. The puff sleeves that took four tries and four different pinks because none of them were pink enough, anyway.

Flip ahead to page thirty-one and there’s a grocery list crammed into the top corner in ballpoint. Milk, the yellow crayons, something for dinner that never got named. Underneath it, in the same blue pen, a paragraph about the manuscript’s second act. I have read it maybe four times since and still don’t fully recognize it as mine. The ink bleeds where the two worlds touch. A small inky bruise where grocery list becomes literature becomes grocery list again. Even an inch from me eyes, that boundary refuses to exist.

There’s a sun with a face on page forty. You know the kind. The kind that is always content and cool in children’s drawings no matter what’s happening everywhere else on the page. Rays stretching to the margin to light something off page. Below it, half a sentence, the graphite pressed so light it’s almost a ghost on the paper: what the institution requires and never repays

And then nothing.

Not a period or a trailing off I chose. Just the place where the page ran out of my attention and started belonging to her. The pencil lifted mid-thought and handed over. A bowl filled and a shoe found, just a small crisis resolved in the time it takes a sentence to lose its nerve.

I have gone looking for the rest of that sentence. In later pages, in earlier ones, in the notes app at two in the morning, in the four other notebooks that came before this one and are boxed in the closet smelling of the same wax and the same cedar. It isn’t anywhere. Like a word stuck in the back of your throat I can feel the shape of what it was going to say. Present and refusing and then gone the second you reach for it directly.

I’ve never tried to copy my sentences into a clean documents, separated from the turrets and the hair and the grocery list. I think if I did, they would stop being true. In a way I can’t really explain to anyone who might ask. The half-sentence under the sun means one thing sitting under the sun, warmed by it almost, and it would mean something thinner and colder floating alone on a white screen with nothing above it but margin.

I still haven’t found where I left off on page forty. I open the notebook sometimes just to check, and every time, the sun is still smiling like nothing was ever interrupted at all.

more like this:

what vigilance does to a mind →

on the cognitive cost of always listening

Meanwhile my daughter, has strung a piece of string from the kitchen chair leg to the cabinet handle, cutting the room in half at knee height. I have stepped over it four times today. I have not taken it down.

A thread is nothing on its own. It only becomes something once it’s pulling two things toward each other.

This one’s about the connective stuff, the parts of a life that don’t look like much until you trace where they lead. Below, three ways into it: one for you, one for the small kids stringing rooms together right now, one for the older ones starting to ask where things came from.

Read more

There’s a coyote that runs the streets of our neighborhood. I hear her before I see her, most nights. A single yip that turns into three, then a chorus that comes from everywhere and nowhere. The acoustics of dark and chain-link fence. My daughter sleeps through it. I like there and track the sounds with held breath, waiting to see where it lands.

I looked it up once, at 4am, when I should have been sleeping. Coyote mothers den alone. They don’t share territory when they’re raising young, don’t tolerate other females near the pups, will run off animals four times their size if the den is threatened. The males bring food. The females do the rest. The vigilance, the moving of pups from den to den when a place stops feeling safe, the teeth. Wildlife services calls this “aggressive,” when they call it anything. Homeowners call animal control. Somebody’s dog gets bitten defending a yard that used to be coyote ground, and headlines run with the word attack, no mention of what was being defended, or from what, or why she was still there in a place that used to hold room for her.

I think about her more than I say out loud. I recognize the shape of what she’s carrying and I recognize what happens to her for carrying it visibly.

There is a version of me that sits at the dinner table with my jaw wired shut, passing the salt, laughing a half beat after the punchline because I’ve learned to watch other faces for the cue. Under the table my hands stay flat on my knees. I’ve been the good animal, the one who dens quietly, doesn’t run off the neighbors, doesn’t bite even when biting is the correct and proportionate response to what’s coming near the pups.

My daughter came home from school and told me about a boy in her classroom that calls girls names and nobody stops him. Not really. She told me flatly, as if reporting the weather, because at five she hasn’t learned this is supposed to make her voice shake. She sat there today, she said. Waiting for someone to step in. Teachers shuffled papers. Nobody came. And I felt the physical sensation of something old rising up through my ribs and into my jaw. Heat, then a tightening along the back molars, the animal pressure of a mouth that wants to open and hasn’t been given permission.

This is maternal rage, and it has no acceptable public shape. A mother is supposed to be the den, not the animal defending it. Soft, warm, absorbing. The place you return to. Never the thing that runs at your throat when you get too close to what she’s raising. So we grind our teeth down to bone at the dinner table. We laugh a half beat late. We let the men bring the food and take none of the credit for the rest, the vigilance that never turns off, the moving of children from one unsafe place to another, over and over, without complaint so as not to be called difficult, or hysterical, not herself. As if a woman’s self were a den she’s allowed to build but never allowed to defend.

I used to think I was protecting the family portrait by keeping this part of me denned up. Smiling in every photograph. No soot on the frame.

I’m starting to think is opposite is closer to true. The people I’ve been protecting from this animal are the same people who taught me to keep her hidden in the first place. And my daughter is watching me hold this shape at the table, learning the same jaw-wire for her own mouth. Unless I show her, not tell her, in my hands and my face and what I let cross them in daylight, that a mother can carry something with teeth and not become a danger to the thing she loves.

She isn’t tame. She isn’t supposed to be. Somewhere behind my house tonights, she’s running the alley, and nobody’s called animal control yet. I’m rooting for her to make it to morning.

more like this:

the creature at the end of the string →

on ambition, Motherhood, and the interrupted pursuit

Read more

Every decision I have made as a mother has a price tag I did not see until after I paid it. The nap I used to write instead of sleep. The twenty extra minutes of screen time while I finished the sentence I had been carrying in my mouth for 72 hours, turning it over like a hard candy, feeling for the place where it would finally dissolve. The money spent on mentorship and craft and the education of learning to trust my own perception while the grocery bill climbed and my daughter grew. The way months move when you’re not watching them, which is too fast, and the way they move when you are watching them, which is also too fast, but heavier, because now you know it.

I told myself it was worth it. I told myself this so many times that the words went smooth in my hands, like a stone you carry in your pocket until it loses its edges and you cannot remember what it felt like before it was smooth.

When I finish the fourth draft I move my cursor to publish and I pause.

I stop and I wait and the screen is bright. The number of views is zero and I watch it be zero and I think about every version of myself that got me to this moment. The one who gave birth in 2020 in a silence I did not choose, the city closed like a fist, the hospital room empty of everyone I wanted in it. The one who came home and decided that having an interior life was not a luxury she was willing to surrender. The one who stole the time, who paid for the craft, who sat in the guilt of a mother who wants things for herself and made herself sit in it anyway, and keep writing. And the number is still zero and the screen is still bright. I wait and I watch and the cursor blinks without mercy and without meaning and I think: this is the moment.

This is the moment before the world decides. And for a few seconds I am still whole and the writing is still only mine and no one has looked at it yet. With those new suspicious eyes, the ones that arrived with a technology that can produce the surface of human expression without the wound underneath it.

Here is what that costs me that I did not budget for. Here’s the receipt.

I have been keeping one since 2020. Every stolen nap, every hour of childcare I paid for so I could sit somewhere and try to remember the shape of a self who has a thought that lats longer than a diaper change, every dollar to a mentor who taught me the difference between a sentence that performs feeling a sentence that holds feeling. I kept that receipt because I believed that if anyone ever asked what this cost me, I could show them. I could remind myself. Proof it all came from somewhere real.

One month ago the receipts stopped being a figure of speech. School ended and every hour I spend making anything now has a line item attached to it, a sitter paid by the hour so I can sit at a desk and reach for a sentence. I want to be a woman who models a life pursued alongside a life of care. I also know down to the dollar what that costs per hour, and I have started doing the math mid-sentence, which is its own way of losing a sentence, I suppose. Two weeks ago I drafted a piece and never hit publish. Anyone looking at the numbers would read that as a habit broken, a woman who couldn’t hold the line. What was actually happening was a body trying to carry a summer with her daughter and a self with a desk and a ledger with both their names on it, and finding there are only so many hours a day will hold no matter how you divide them.

If the years and the hourly rate and the math done badly mid-paragraph could be lifted out and the piece could still stand exactly the same, unchanged, then none of it mattered. The nap didn’t matter. The childcare didn’t matter. The receipt is void, and I’m standing here holding it like it still means something.

The pit of my stomach has been cataloging evidence against the question since 2020.

What I want is simple to name and impossible to hand someone. I want the ambivalence and the devotion allowed to share the same chest cavity without one canceling the other out. I want the rage that arrives without warning to be read as information and not as diagnosis. I want the love that reorganized my skeleton to sit next to the grief for the self I was before her, a self I do not miss because she was better, only because she was continuous, because she held one thread from one end of a day to the other and did not drop it sixteen times before ten in the morning. I want all of it looked at at once, unedited, and still called mine.

To send that out into the world is an act of faith so stubborn it borders on delusion.

more like this:

she ran out of room →

on what we mean when we say we lost ourselves in Motherhood

She still asks sometimes. That is the part I was not prepared for. That it would not be a clean ending, that there would still be mornings when she reaches up and says carry me mommy, and I do, and my chest breaks open in a way I have learned not to show her.

She is heavier now. Her legs hang lower. Her feet almost kicking my knees. I tell her to tuck her face into my neck so I can see where we’re going. In truth, it’s because I want her closer, I want to feel all of her weight and try to memorize it. And I feel, all at once and in no particular order love that has no mouth and keeps opening anyway, and grief arriving already dressed for it, like it knew, like it has been waiting in the hall this whole time. And then underneath both of those, something close to shame. Because I know I complained. I remember the shoulder that ached from the bag strap. I remember the parking lots, the counting of steps, the mornings I though I cannot do this much longer. I said it out loud. I meant it.

I was not wrong for this. That is the thing I’m still working out how to hold. The weight and the exhaustion were real. The woman who stood at the back of the grocery store with a forty-pound child on one hip and a bag food on the other, digging through the diaper bag with her free hand looking for crackers. The right crackers, the ones that came in the orange bag and smelled like salt and compromise, that crumbled in the pocket making a fine dust that gets into everything, that she would accept and only she would accept. That woman was not being dramatic she was just at her limit. And she was allowed to be at her limit.

And yet.

When my daughter reaches up now, in the moments she still does, I do not think about the weight. I think about all the times I was somewhere else in my head while I was holding her. All the exits I counted. All the times I put her down as soon as I could and felt, briefly, the relief of my own body back.

I try not to make a big deal of it when she asks. I just pick her up. I hold on a beat longer than she expects. I’m never the first to let go. I don’t tell her what’s happening inside me, which is enormous and wordless and too fast. Grief and love arriving at the same moment, through the same door, elbowing one another for space. Indistinguishable from each other by the time they enter.

This is not a story about gratitude. I am not going to tell you to cherish it, to soak it in, to remember that it goes so far. You already know it goes fast. You’re in the middle of it going fast right now, which is exactly why it’s hard to find gratitude. Because gratitude often requires a little distance, and you have none. You’re just surviving it, the way you survive anything, by getting through today.

What I think is that the complaint and the grief are the same love at different pressures. The woman who counted the exits was paying attention. She was so deep inside that it was crushing her. That is what it means to be the one who holds.

She still asks sometimes. I pick her up. Her knees knock against my hip bones now, a small percussion, her body already practicing the grammar of being too big for this. I do not put her down until she asks me to.

more like this:

she ran out of room →

on what we mean when we say we lost ourselves in Motherhood

What you cannot explain is the unevenness. The way some hours are dense with presence (you were in them, fully, you will remember them) and other hours simply passed through you, leaving almost nothing behind. You were there. Something of you was managing. The hour happened. You have no access to it now.

I have been trying to find a form that could hold this. Language gets close but language is sequential, one word following the next, and what I am trying to describe is not sequential. It layers and compresses. It drops entire sections without warning and then slows to almost nothing over a detail so small you cannot explain afterward why it held you.

Color can do something language cannot. A painting does not have to happen in order. It accumulates. What came before is still visible underneath what came after. The early hours bleed into the later ones. The whole day exists on the surface at once.

Read more

I’m in the bathroom with the door locked, which is the only room in the house with a door I’m allowed to lock, and I have less than six minutes before someone realizes I’m ‘missing.’ I put on the dress I changed out of twice already. Leaning toward the mirror, applying lipstick in the same way I always have. Bottom lip first, press my lips together. Study myself a moment before I reach that point that I know if I look any longer the mirror will convince me I need to change again and that my lipstick shade is all wrong. Then I unlock the door.

Downstairs my daughter wants one more hug and then another and I stand in the doorway negotiating with a five-year-old about the nature of goodbye. And finally, by the time I pull out of the driveway I have eleven minutes to become a person who goes to parties.

The room smells like amber and cedar and something else I can’t place even though my sense of smell has shifted since baby. A playlist runs underneath the conversation, announcing taste without committing to it. Metallic fringe hangs over the buffet. Balloon letters spell CHEERS in a font that’s working overtime. A drink is offered to me. It’s pink and muddled. I accept because it’ll give my hands somewhere to be.

Near the window there’s a woman with a quality I recognize but can’t find the name for anymore. She laughs at the right moments and holds her drink loosely. People turn toward her and stay turned, attracted to the brightest light source in an other wise dim room.

I feel, standing twenty feet away with your pink muddled drink, the flicker.

It moves through my chest first, then my throat. A current dropping, the room coming in slightly too bright and too loud, my own edges going soft. I’ve felt this before. At the pediatrician’s office when the doctor asked if I had any concerns and I had so many concerns that I couldn’t begin to locate a single one, standing there under the fluorescent light with my daughter on the paper table, fascinated by the crinkling, saying: no, I think we’re good. At pickup when another mother asks what I’d been up to and I said: oh you know, the usual, and she nodded and maybe she understood and maybe that was worse. At my own kitchen table on a Wednesday, reaching for a thought I was sure I had that morning and finding only the space where it used to be.

I did not expect to feel it here.

I cannot hear her words from across the room. I can only see her hands moving and the faces of the people listening and the easiness of someone who knows, without checking, that she is interesting.

I open my mouth. What comes out is the same thing. The thing about sleep, about the fever last month, about the cute thing my daughter said in the car on the way to school that I’d been saving for exactly this kind of moment because it is the most interesting thing that has happened to me all week. I hear it leaving my mouth and I’m already somewhere above and slightly to the left thinking: stop, not this, find anything else, find anything that not having to do with mothering.

Smile. Take a sip. This muddled drink is too sweet.

Somewhere along the way I started declining invitations. Motherhood makes for convenient excuses when it comes to these sorts of things. Just enough that nobody really notices, but enough that I notice. And I try to show up late when I do go, slipping in after the room has found its rhythm and organized itself into conversations, after the attention has somewhere else to be. I look for a corner with a sightline to the door and station myself near someone I already know, someone who will talk to me without requiring a performance, and I can let the party happen at a comfortable distance.

On the drive home the babysitter clock is still running, twenty five dollars an hour ticking against the dashboard, and I’m running the evening back anyway. Every exchange, every moment I opened my mouth, every moment I didn’t. I reach for what I could’ve said and come up mostly empty, or I find it too late, the right thing arriving on the freeway at eleven fifteen when the room is already gone. I practice. Anecdotes I might use next time I do accept an invite. Observations I could offer, ways into a conversation that make me seem like someone who just naturally has things to say. I rehearse the ease I watched that other woman carry. I try to reverse-engineer looseness.

This is what believing I’m not interesting since becoming a mother looks like when it moves out of the party and into the rest of my life. It’s a project. The ongoing management of exposure and damage, a thousand small adjustments made so that nobody sees the flicker before I do.

I think, at first, this must be a content problem. That she has more to talk about, more range, a life that extends past the radius of a small person’s schedule and sleep windows and the ecosystem of worry that moves in when I became responsible for keeping another person alive. That the world kept its conversation moving while I stayed in one room, and arrived at the party carrying only what fits inside my own home.

But that is not exactly right, is it?

I was thinking, even in the fog of it. Reading when I could, in the ten minutes before my daughter woke or the twenty after she finally went down. Watching, observing, turning the experience over in my hands. Even when the experience was identical to the day before and the day before that. The material was there. But Motherhood had taken the floor out from under the person who used to say it. All at once and then again and then again. Every time I found my footing the ground moved. Every time I thought I knew what I was running on, the current changed. I was running on voltage nobody had named yet, in a configuration nobody had explained, and the lamp worked but I had no way of knowing that from inside the flicker.

Here’s what faulty wiring actually does over time: it keeps producing light. Inconsistent, unpredictable, arriving on no schedule I or anyone else can anticipate. I say the right thing mid-sentence at a dinner I didn’t expect to enjoy and I feel it before anyone reacts. The wattage returning, the room sharpening, myself arriving back inside my own edges. It lasts for an hour or a whole evening and then the current shifts and I’m back to managing the flicker, back to the corner with the sightline to the door.

But the practicing stops. At some point, without marking it, I stop rehearsing anecdotes on the freeway. I stop trying to manufacture ease because I start to understand that ease was never what I was actually after. What I wanted was what that woman near the window had. The willingness to take up space without apologizing for the dimensions of it. I’d spent five years being needed at a frequency and intensity that left no part of myself unclaimed, a person on permaneet call, and then I walked into a room and wondered why I couldn’t hold my drink like someone who’d never been on call in her life.

I get there differently. It’s not easy or steady. I arrive knowing the light will go and come back and go again, knowing I’ll feel the flicker in my chest in the driveway before I even walk through the door, knowing the drive home will sometimes be a kind of audit. I hold my drink a little looser than I used to.

The light goes. The light comes back. I’m still in the room.

more like this:

the creature at the end of the string →

on ambition, Motherhood, and the interrupted pursuit

I started running the numbers in April.

Not once. Continuously. In the shower, at red lights, while my daughter talked to me about important things and I nodded along without fully hearing her. The numbers were always there, a low current I couldn’t step out of. What I earn in a month, what childcare costs in a month, what is left when you subtract one from the other, what it means that the remainder is so small.

Summer was coming. School ends and the container ends with it. The structure that holds her days, and in turn, mine. The structure makes work and all of this possible. Without it, work requires someone. Someone costs. And the cost doesn’t sit still long enough to calculate cleanly. It moves, multiplies, folds back on itself until you’re not sure what you’re working for, only that stopping feels like conceding.

So I kept running the numbers.

What I was looking for, I think, was a configuration that worked. A schedule, a rate, a ratio that would add up to enough. Enough to pay what needs paying, enough time with her (and there’s never enough), enough of myself left over (also, never enough) to do the other work. The writing and the thinking. The thing accreting so slowly I sometimes can’t tell if it’s growing or just sitting there laughing at me. I was looking for the math that solved it. I kept not finding it. And what else could I do but to keep looking anyway?

What I want is this.

A morning in late June, before the heat arrives, walking out to the garden together. We sink our hands into the dirt. We cut herbs for some meal we haven’t quite decided yet. She reaches for a lemon while I hold back the branch. There are watermelons growing along the fence in the side yard. Green and improbable. She checks them every morning like she’s listening for a sound that hasn’t happened yet. Her palm flat against the rind, her face serious with the effort of believing.

Afternoons in the pool, the two of us on a floaty that isn’t really big enough, her rocking tipping us side to side, and she sings a little rhyme she learned at school months ago. The sky is white and hot. I lose track of what time is.

I want to drive up the coast on a Tuesday because there is no reason not to. I want to send a postcard from Carmel-by-the-Sea, where I’ve heard there are no street addresses, only a single post office everyone walks to, and your mail just waits there for you the way things used to wait. We meander back down the coast, stopping when when the water looks worth stopping for, no clock running, the car full of salt air and whatever she’s collected from the beach. A shell, a feather, a rock that has some magical properties I’m sure she’ll tell me all about.

I want my skin to smell of chlorine, dirt, salt, citrus by the end of August.

I know where this comes from.

Growing up, Summer was the longest exhale of the year. Once spring break ended I could feel the last weeks of school in my body — a tide going in and out. And then school ended and we were outside until the grass went cold under our feet and nobody had called us in yet. Beach trips and park barbecues and family and loud voices filling every room. Days that had no bottom, that you could keep falling through and always land somewhere good. In September they asked us to write an essay about our Summer and I always had too much.

We are a week away from the start of our Summer. The numbers are what they are. There will be days she is with someone else while I work, days I feel that cost moving through my chest like something swallowed wrong. There will also be mornings in the garden, the lemon branch pulled back, hands in the dirt.

The watermelons are growing. She checks them every day, her knuckles pressed against the rind. Breath held and waiting for the knock that means it’s ready. That thick, resonant thunk that drops through the hollow and tells you: NOW. This one. Come and get it.

I want to be there when she hears that.

more like this:

she ran out of room →

on what we mean when we say we lost ourselves in Motherhood

I became interested in erasure poetry years before I understood why. The form is simple: you take a text that already exists (a page from a book, a legal document, a letter, a news article) and you remove words until what remains is a poem. What you are left with was always in there. You did not write it, you excavated it.

What interested me, I think, was the permission. Someone else made the original thing. You are only responsible for what you kept.

I have been thinking about this in relation to the language of Motherhood specifically. The scripts, the performed okayness, the vocabulary of selflessness that the institution hands you and expects back. What would happen if you treated that language the way an erasure poet treats a found text? If you went through it with a pen and crossed out everything borrowed, everything softened, everything said because it was expected and kept only what remained?

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The alarm doesn’t wake me. My body has already done that. Some interior clockwork I can’t uninstall. It runs its own shifts now. No matter how much I claw at my skin trying to find it the ledger continues.

Then the buzzing starts. I laid too long eyes staring at the ceiling wondering what it must be like to not see 1am night after night. A small clench below my sternum, the body’s shorthand for again.

She’s been asleep for forty minutes. Before that I spent an hour pressing her back into sleep with the full weight of my presence. My warmth, the metronome that is my heartbeat, and a stillness I’ve learned to manufacture even when nothing inside me is still. And now this.

I slip out of bed the way you move through a space where something fragile is balanced on the edge of a shelf. Every motion calculated before it happens. I have become superstitious about speed. Fast movement, I’ve come to believe, is a form of arrogance. A claim that the night is stable, that she will stay asleep regardless. I do not make that claim. I move like water finding a path. I move like I am not moving at all.

An amber plug-in throws the bathroom into a low warm glow, the color of something preserved. It should feel like a sanctuary. I designed it that way. Little alter of bottles and flanges and tubing, assembled in the dark by a woman who know this liturgy by hear.

I sit. I attach everything. The machine starts. Its rhythm steady, mechanical pulling, repetitive and indifferent. A sound that after weeks begins to resemble language even though it says nothing.

Then the letdown comes.

Like a tide crashing into a massive marble hall. Not gentle or gradual. Moving through the whole space at once and then gone before you’ve finished registering it. Every single time. A tidal surge of rage so complete it has no target. It doesn’t want anything from me. I wish it did, because I’d happily yield. It doesn’t need a reason. It just moves through my interior. Through me.

This is DMER. Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex. A drop in dopamine that coincides with letdown, producing a sudden flood of dysphoria — dread, self-loathing, fury — that lasts just a few minutes and then lifts completely. Leaving nothing behind but the absence of itself. My body was doing something to me. The body was not evidence. It was just a body. I did not know this then.

What I knew then was that every letdown felt like a verdict.

I had not chosen the standard. I did not sit down and decide: you must feed your child from your body or you have failed. It was already there when I arrived. Configured before I knew to question the set up. I have no judgement — not even the ghost of one — about how other mothers feed their children. The judgement lived only in one direction: inward, and down.

She would not latch. Every attempt ended in both of us ruined. Her screaming, me bleeding literally and figuratively, the space between us filling with something that felt like proof of something I didn’t want to say out loud. I tried for months. Then I added pumping. Then I kept trying. Then I accepted the thing I could not make true, and I pumped exclusively, every two hours, for the next seventeen months.

Twenty minutes of every two hours. The number burrows in and makes a home in my chest. I will do this six thousand, five hundred and seventy times before it’s over. I don’t know this yet. Which is probably for the best.

The wave hits again. Recedes. I sit in the haze between, in the strange flat aftermath, and wait for the next one.

One side finishes. I transfer the milk to the bottle. Surgical in my caution. Every leak, every spill, wasted drop lands as documentation in case that’s already overwhelming. I know this isn’t rational. Rationality departed months ago. What’s left is just the body and its private accounting, adding columns in foreign language. I place the bottle in the mini-fridge that I bought for the bathroom to make my life easier. Now it laughs at me.

I stand for a moment. One breast relieved, one still full and aching. The asymmetry of it is almost funny. I am a woman split precisely down the middle: one half attended to, one half waiting. This is roughly accurate about everything.

Back to the machine. The other side. Another ten minutes of waves moving through marble halls, crashing and receding, crashing and receding, and me in the haze between. Trying to find solid ground that keeps getting pulled back out to the raging sea.

When it’s over I clean the parts. Not because I want to. I don’t want to. But because in two hours my future self will need to do this again, and if I can spare her four minutes of work I will do it. She is worth that. My future self, who is also me, who is also exhausted, who is already on her way.

I move back through the bedroom the way I left it. Slow motion, reversed. The same superstition, the same languid care, retracing every step as if the night is a thing that can be folded back exactly as I found it.

Then I stop at her bassinet.

She is so small. After all of that - the waves against the marble halls, the milk counted like currency, the rage that visits me over and over as if its keeping appointments — she is so improbably, almost insultingly small. A small animal in its small bed, breathing in and out, asking nothing of me right now.

I love her. I resent what’s happening to my body and I love her. I am so tired and I love her. Why wouldn’t you latch, I think, and I love her. I’m furious at myself for not being able to give her the thing I was supposed to give her and I love her. I wish I were asleep and I love her.

The pendulum swinging so fast it stops looking like a pendulum and starts looking like somethings that’s simply always both.

Then she yawns.

I freeze. Every cell suspends. If I do not move, if time agrees to hold still, if I can simply remain —

She settles. Her small mouth closes.

My heart goes backing to doing the thing hearts are supposed to do.

I’m back in bed and the next alarm is set. In two hours the clockwork will stir me before the buzzing starts, and I will roll out of this bed again, slow and deliberate, and the machine will pull and the wave will crash through the marble hall and I will sit in the haze that serves as temporary reprieve from the storm.

I did not know then it had a name. That somewhere there was language for what my body was doing to me in that bathroom in the amber light. That this fury was not a verdict, not the truth about what kind of mother I was. That it was a reflex. That the body does things without your knowledge and without your consent and sometimes without mercy, and this says nothing about who you are.

I learned this much later.

In that bathroom, at 1am, the waves moving through the halls without pause, I was just a woman sitting in the only light available, doing the only thing she knew how to do.

Cleaning everything before she left. So her future self would have a little less to carry.

more like this:

the creature at the end of the string →

on ambition, Motherhood, and the interrupted pursuit

Someone asks: “How are you?” and before the answer comes there is a second — less than a second, really, a sliver of time that by any reasonable measure should hold nothing — and it holds everything, the way grief does, the way you can be fine and then a song comes on and you understand that fine was never the whole story.

Two nights ago she woke at 12am, 2am, 3am. And you went to her and wedged yourself on the foot of her bed, cramped into the space her five-year-old body left you, and you rubbed her back and then her feet and then her back again with your neck bent at an angle that you knew you’d regret in the morning. But you held that ache without moving because moving would disturb her, and you stayed like that, fixed and folded into yourself, listening to her breathing slow, and then you stayed past the slowing because leaving required a decision and you somewhere past the place where decisions live. You were in that country past exhaustion that had no good word for it. The one where your body is present and doing the necessary things and something essential has slipped away. You eventually move. You went to bed. You don’t remember the moment you fell asleep because there was no moment, just the dark and then the morning and the feeling of having missed something in between.

That night is in the second with you now. Along with the appointment you moved to next month because you couldn’t face the logistics of it, and the way your voice came out yesterday. Too sharp, too fast, wrong in a way you felt in your chest even as it was happening. And the look on her face after, which you are still carrying around like a debt. The tab open on your phone since February. The thing you meant to do when you had a moment, and the creeping realization, that the moment was never going to come the way you’d imagined it, that the moment was always going to be like this: partial, interrupted, already ending.

All of it alive inside the second between the question and your answer. The person who asked has no idea. They asked the way you ask someone how they are when you are passing them in a hallway, when the question is a form of greeting and the expected answer is a form of greeting back, and they are waiting, warmly, for the greeting.

You look at their face and without deciding to you begin the math.

How much time they have, whether their attention is the kind that opens or the kind that is already moving toward the door, what it would cost you to begin, and you are thinking about beginning very modestly, just one true thing, just letting one true thing cross the air between you and arrive somewhere, but even that requires a calculation. What will happen to their face when it lands, whether the concern that follows will become another thing you have to tend, another set of feelings in the room that are now your responsibility to manage, and you are already managing so much, the word tired doesn’t reach it, you have thought about this and there is no word that reaches it, there is just the sensation, which is its own country, which you live in.

The second is still open. You are standing in it running numbers.

You close it.

Fine, you say, and the word is a door closing. The conversation moves and you move with it, and no one watches you do it because you have been doing it long enough that it looks like nothing. Like the most ordinary thing a person does when asked, a breath, a small smile, a word, and you are good at this. You’ve been practicing since before you knew you were practicing, since the first time you understood that the full answer to how are you would change the temperature of the room and you have never wanted to be the one who does that.

What goes back into the drawer has weight, and it has been accumulating since before you can name the beginning of it. Years of the honest answer folded flat and pressed into a space you did not know you were building, though you can feel it straining now. The constant fact of everything that has nowhere else to go.

The day it stops holding you don’t see it coming.

You’re in a grocery store with your hand on a box of something and a song comes on, twelve unremarkable bars of something you don’t even really like, and your eyes fill before you have understood why. You stand there in the cereal aisle with your face doing something you didn’t authorize. What moves through you is closer to recognition than sadness. The way you recognize a room you haven’t been in for a long time.

Oh, you think, here! And it has been in there since the night bent at the foot of her bed, since every fine that pressed a door shut on a room full of something real, and you have been filling that room for so long that now it is simply full, and the fullness has found the seam. And here is the seam, apparently, here in the cereal aisle, your hand on a box, your face doing its unauthorized thing.

Later it will come out in other places too, the middle of an ordinary sentence when your voice goes strange and you find yourself somewhere much larger than where you started, and some part of you watches this from a small distance the way it always does, the part that witnesses, the part that is always slightly outside the body noting what the body is doing, and both of you are surprised by the volume of it, by how much was in there, though you were the one who put it there, one closed door at a time, every second you calculated that the cost was too high and pressed fine into the space where the real answer lived.

It has been doing a lot of work, that word. More than a word can hold. And it held it, for a long time it held it.

And now here you are, eyes full in the cereal aisle, finally running out of room.

more like this:

what vigilance does to the mind →

on the cognitive cost of always listening

I hold her anyway. I shift my weight to accommodate hers. My body makes the calculation without my asking it to.

This is something I think about — the way the body has been keeping its own record. Every time I lifted her from the crib in the dark. Every time I carried her from the car to the bed, trying not to wake her, that long walk from the driveway, the weight of her distributed across my arms and chest, her slow breath on my neck. The body absorbed all of it. Filed it somewhere I don’t have conscious access to. And now when she climbs into my arms there is something in my muscles that already knows her. Her exact weight and her unique distribution. The way she lists slightly to the left.

There’s a physical archive. The record the body keeps of all the carrying that never made it into language.

There is also the other kind. The weight that has no location in the body but lives there anyway. In the shoulders, in the jaw, in the way you set your face before you walk into a room. The mental load is a phrase people use and it has always struck me as slightly wrong, slightly insufficient, because load implies something you could put down. This is not a load. It is a density. A change in the composition of the air around you that you move through all the time and have stopped noticing because noticing it does not make it lighter.

Read more

The Morning Routine - It did not work.

The Full Account - Everything that happened, in the order it happened, without anyone asking you to reframe it as growth.

What It Took - A record.

Before - A memoir.

The Institution: How Motherhood Was Built, By Whom, and Who It Was Built For - Not a parenting book.

Dissolution Is Not a Feeling, It Is a Design - Essays.

You Were in the Middle of Something - On interrupted thought, unfinished sentences, and the cognition no one is measuring.

The Sound That Means Something Is Wrong: A Field Guide to Maternal Vigilance - What it costs to be always listening. What it costs to stop.

The Carnation - On celebration, compliance, and what we are actually honoring when we honor mothers.

Sleep: A History of Loss - Chronological.

Touched Out: A Physical History - Every hand, every hour, a complete accounting.

The Nap: A Philosophy - What it means to need one. What it means to not get one. What it means to finally get one and spend it thinking about everything else.

You’re So Patient - I am not patient. I’m managing a situation.

Advanced Snack Preparation: A Waste of a Graduate Degree - With foreword by the author’s mother, who did not go to graduate school and is fine.

Against Presence: Why the Demand That Mothers Be Fully Available Is Neither Natural Nor Neutral - With a preface the author wrote in eleven-minute increments over the course of four months.

Your Body: An Archaeology - Excavations from the site.

Enjoying Every Moment: A Refutation - Peer reviewed.

Rage: A Defense —

She Seemed Fine - Case studies.

Still Here - A finding.

more like this:

the morning routine →

on optimization culture, caregiving, and the first hour that was never yours

There was a string that ran from somewhere below my sternum. Thin, taut, always slightly warm. And at the end of it lived something.

You never saw it directly. You didn’t need to. You could feel it. The tension of a thing that knew where it was going, that had opinions about direction, that would give a small steady pull when you started to drift. Not necessarily with urgency or pressure, just: this way. The way a compass doesn’t shout.

You built your life around that pull without knowing you were doing it. Took the job that fed it. Left the job that didn’t. Stayed up past the hour when reasonable people slept because the creature was away and wanted something and you had learned to trust that wanting. That hunger. The same animal logic. The body knowing before the mind catches up.

You didn’t think of it as ambition then. Ambition sounded like a suit someone wore. This was more interior than that. More cellular. It was just the thing that made you you in a particular direction, the thread of self that ran through every decision you made about your own life, pulling gently, always pulling, toward whatever it was you were becoming.

Motherhood didn’t arrive and cut the string. That would have been a different story, cleaner, with a clear before and after you could point to. This was a Tuesday, and then another Tuesday, and then a year of Tuesdays in which the string was still there but the tension had changed.

A newborn in 2020, a pandemic sealing the walls in, a body that had just done the largest thing a body can do and was now being asked to do it again continuously, invisibly, without end. The creature at the end of the string had not left. But the string had gone slack.

I didn’t notice at first. I was too inside the enormity of the thing. The feeding and the not-sleeping and the love that arrived with its change in pressure, total and without warning, a pop of the ears. Disorientating and larger than anything I had prepared for. By the time I looked down for the string it had tangled somewhere in the weeks. I picked it up and followed it a little way and then she needed something. I set it down. I cam back and it had moved. I swear I left it right here.

Ambition after Motherhood doesn’t leave in a way that fully allows for grief. It just becomes harder to hold. The days fill with the gravity of a small person’s needs. The relentless ordinary weight of being someone’s entire world and the string slips through my fingers while I’m doing something else entirely. Something necessary. Something that is also, genuinely, what I want (most of the time). That’s the part that makes it so hard to name. I wanted this too. The creature at the end of the string doesn’t disappear. It just stopped being the only creature in the room.

Now finding it looks like this.

You locate it in the car pool line. A flash of knowing exactly what you want to make and how. You follow it — mentally, ravenously — for six minutes. The door opens. Someone gets in and needs to tell you something important about recess and you turn toward them completely because that is what you do, because they are five and the recess thing matters more than anything else in that moment. And when you reach back for the string it’s somewhere else. Again.

You find it later at 10pm when the house is finally still. You see it there in the corner. You approach slowly, slinking in the dark. You don’t want to startle it and send it scurrying. You pick it up and it’s warm and you think: I’m tired… tomorrow. Tomorrow you will follow this properly. You write three words in your notes app. You sleep. Tomorrow the words are there but the feeling that attached to them has migrated and you spend twenty minutes trying to reconstruct where it was going before you have to make breakfast.

Sometimes you find a knot. You sit down with the genuine intention of following the thing and discover that somewhere in the weeks it has wound back on itself, that what you thought was a clear line is actually a tangle of half-finished and abandoned attempts and the residue of every time you had to put it down mid-sentence. Undoing a knot takes time. Uninterrupted and patient. The kind of time where you can hold the whole thing loosely and work at it. Motherhood does not reliably produce that kind of time. So sometimes the knot stays. Sometimes you carry it for months, the string wound around your hand, waiting for the hour that doesn’t come.

And still you reach for it. On the morning the house is empty you stand in the kitchen in your coat and feel it stir and something in you startles at your own wanting. It has been there the whole time. It has been surviving on whatever it could find.

It is not what it was before. It would be a lie to say otherwise, and the mothers who need it to be the same thing are protecting something real but not quite true.

The creature before Motherhood was fed regularly. It knew the schedule of your attention. It lived in a life that was organized, at least partly, around its own requirements. It was domesticated in the way that anything is domesticated by being tended to. Softer at the edges, quicker to come when called.

This creature is now feral. It has learned to live in the margins of a life that was not designed for it. It eats when it can. It sleeps with one ear pricked up. It has developed patience that looks from the outside like absence and is actually more like faith. The faith of a thing that has been dropped and picked back up enough times to know that the hand always returns.

When you find it now it is different in your hands. Denser somehow. Less interested in your reassurance. The tug it gives is not the gentle compass-pull of before. It is the pull of something that has been waiting in the cold and has things it wants to say. The work that comes from following it now has a quality the earlier work didn’t. Something earned in the interruption. Something that knows the knot from the inside.

This is not a better story than the one before. The before was easier, and easier has its own value, and there is nothing noble about the difficulty. But the creature survived Motherhood, which is not a small thing, and it is not the same creature that went in, and what it wants now it wants with the particular hunger of something that had to wait a long time to be followed.

You pick up the string. You follow it as far as the day allows. You put it down carefully so you can find it again.

more like this:

she ran out of room →

on what we mean when we say we lost ourselves in Motherhood and why the search keeps failing

My daughter is on the floor, mid-meltdown, her whole body a fist, and I am crouched beside her, attempting to be a shoreline. Steady, present, unbroken.

This is what I have practiced. It’s what I’m supposed to know.

Except my skin is beginning to prickle. A low heat, starting at the surface, moving inward. The tingling is a warning.

I am aware, in the specific way you become aware of things you’d rather not know, that I am not regulated. That I need to regulate. That I need to regulate so she can co-regulate, so that I become the tuning fork her nervous system learns to match. So that I can model for this small person who has only been in this world for less years than I can hold in my hand what it looks like when a feeling moves through a body without destroying anything.

Now I’m thinking about how cruel it is that we call it a nervous system.

My skin is getting hotter. I want to take off my sweater. Then my shirt. As if the fabric is conspiring. As if I could peel off the discomfort along with it, leave it in a pile on the floor beside the Legos and the half-eaten crackers.

And then they arrive. Every mother who came before, every mother still to come. Seating themselves uninvited at the edges of the room, patient and unblinking. A thousand eyes that have been waiting for exactly this moment. The collar around my throat tightens.

My daughter is still crying. I am still crouching. The afternoon pins us both to the floor.

And then a question arrives.

Who is this for?

The answer requires more than an afternoon. It requires looking backwards.

Every generation of mothers inherits a parenting philosophy. The assumptions arrive like debt does. Pre-loaded and accumulated before you were born, yours to carry regardless.

The early twentieth century gave mothers authoritarian parenting. The child as a small adult, expected to contribute, to comply, to be useful. Emotion was not the point. The mother managed.

The postwar decades brought a different directive. Routine and structure. Your pediatrician as authority. The schedule was scripture. Mothers who had just survived rationing and absence and the grief of waiting were handed a clipboard and told to write down feeding times. Authoritative parenting. The mother enforced it.

The sixties and seventies pushed back like every generation before. And permissive parenting arrived on the scene. Warmth! The child as a person with an interior life worth attending to. Women were also being told their own interior lives were worth attending to, were entering the workforce, were filing for divorce in numbers that frightened everyone. The mother softened it, and was immediately blamed for the softening.

Then the eighties. A child’s face on a milk carton at breakfast. Then another. The news arriving in the kitchen every morning. Stranger danger calcified into fences, rules, schedules packed so tight there was no unstructured hour in which anything bad could happen, ever again. Helicopter parenting. Mothers became the infrastructure of safety, vigilance their primary output. The mother monitored it.

The nineties and early aughts handed her the research. Bowlby’s work on infant separation (originally observations of children warehoused in wartime orphanages, rocking themselves in cribs with no one coming) was repackaged into attachment parenting, an expectation of total maternal availability, continuous attunement, the self as something to be indefinitely deferred in service of secure base theory. The mother held it (all).

And today. The framework I crouch inside on so many afternoons. Gentle parenting. Emotionally regulated. Curious instead of reactive. Validate the feeling, name the behavior, repair the rupture. The research is real. The insight is genuine. The point is not that the framework is wrong.

It’s what happens once Motherhood gets a hold of that framework.

Each generation looked at the last and found what it got wrong. Each generation built a correction. They repaired and the correction became a standard. The standard became a measurement. The measurement became a new and more sophisticated way for mothers to fall short.

We have have been optimizing the instrument for hundreds of years. The structure underneath hasn’t moved.

We treat mothering as a personal practice when it is operating inside a structure. The structure — no paid leave, no subsidized childcare, a medical system that routinely dismisses maternal pain, the baseline assumption that one person absorbs it all — does not change when the framework changes. What does change is the vocabulary mothers use to measure their own inadequacy.

The framework doesn’t disrupt the institution. It updates it and gives it new language. It also gives mothers a new and more refined way to fall short.

I think about the mothers in every era before mine, absorbing their generation’s correction with the same sincerity that we do. Who read carefully, adjusted, and really tried. Who crouched on their own floors beside their own children, feeling the heat rising, the eyes of every generation arranged along their own walls. They were doing exactly what the structure asked. Which was to keep locating the problem inside themselves rather than inside the conditions they were mothering in.

The next framework is already being developed somewhere. A university, a wellness account, a book with a soft pastels and watercolor leaves. It will arrive with a new vocabulary for what a ‘good mother’ does and a new measurement for how she falls short. It will contain genuine insight. Mothers will absorb it earnestly with an unconscious hand on the belly as if to transfer this good will to their soon-to-be-born child.

And somewhere in an ordinary afternoon, in the specific silence that opens up when you stop performing and start noticing, a question will arrive.

Who is this for?

The pressure changes. And suddenly it’s just the two of us on the floor.

more like this:

the presence myth →

what the wellness industry calls mindfulness, Motherhood has always called something else

I have been walking past it all day.

At some point I will wipe it up. At some point the counter will be clean and the handprints will be gone and the oats will be in the trash and this morning will be further away than it is right now. But there is something in the looking at it before it goes. Something in the registering of it, the deliberate seeing of a thing that is already almost over. It feels necessary. Bearing witness to your own life before it becomes the past.

This is what the exercise is about. What happens when you make something with your hands that you already know will be gone and you make it anyway, and you stay with it, and then you let it go.

Read more

A black hole opened under me on the afternoon I had three free hours.

A mouth in the floor, and sound and light bending away at the edges, keeping their distance the way animals do before weather. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t panicking. I was something prior to those words. A surface that repelled sensation rather than feeling it. The absence of signal. The nothingness that lives just beneath the numb.

I had been waiting for free time the way you wait for a package that keeps getting delayed. Finally. Space. And in that space I went looking for myself. The one who knew how to fill an afternoon, who had opinions about how to spend a Saturday, who wanted things and found: nothing. Not grief or even the sweet ache of missing. Just static where a person used to be.

I stood in my kitchen trying to remember what I did before her. What I liked. What made time move in a way that felt like mine. And I could not retrieve a single specific thing. I must have been interesting once. I had thoughts that were my own. But the file was corrupted, or compressed, or moved somewhere I could not locate. And what remained was a woman holding a cup of coffee in her empty home, completely at a loss.

the story we’ve been told

There is a sentence that moves through every Motherhood conversation eventually. It travels in different directions. Sometimes as a confession, sometimes as a warning, sometimes as the thing women say when they finally let themselves be honest in a room. I lost myself.

It is a good sentence. It is the right reach toward something true. But it is built on a map that doesn’t match the territory, and following it leads women to a search that cannot succeed. Because the thing they’re searching for is not lost. It changed. Or more precisely: it was changed. And some of what it was got left behind, and some of what remains doesn’t yet have a name, and neither of those is the same as disappearance.

The lost-story is a retrieval narrative. It implies a before and an after, a departure and a possible return. It promises that if you do enough therapy, take enough walks alone, read enough books about matrescence, you will locate her — the real you, the uninterrupted you — and bring her home. Some version of you that was buried under the bottles and the night wakings and the years of being needed continuously, and just needed to be excavated.

I don’t think she’s there. I think that version of you already knows she doesn’t live here anymore. And the kindness is in stopping the search.

what actually went missing

Here is what Motherhood took. Not the self. The conditions the self requires to be legible to herself.

Space to think. Space to sit inside a half-formed idea long enough for it to finish forming. Space to process what happened yesterday before today has already happened. Space to decompress, to discharge, to let the nervous system come back down from its permanent low-grade alert. Space to be bored, like, actually bored. Not the compound overwhelm that masquerades as boredom. Space to simply be, without the being constituting a task someone else is waiting on.

That space is structural. Thinking happens inside it. Identity happens inside it. The self does not exist in the absence of space the way a river exists without its banks. It stops moving in any direction at all. And what remains is not the self, but the self’s substrate… waiting.

She did not go anywhere. She ran out of room.

And here’s the part nobody says slowly enough: running out of room, over time, starts to feel like never having been there. The self becomes the thing you can’t quite remember clearly. The file corrupts. You stand in the kitchen and try to reconstruct a preference. Something as simple as how you want to spend an afternoon. And there’s nothing to retrieve. Because the conditions for knowing you were there have been systematically removed, and now you’re trying to read by a light that’s been out for years.

the mothers who say it didn’t change them

I want you to hold this carefully.

There are women, who you’ve likely met, who say Motherhood didn’t change them. Who insist that they are exactly who they were before, just with a child. Who become almost urgent about it, the way you become urgent about something when it needs defending.

I don’t think they’re wrong, exactly. I think they’re protecting something real. If I haven’t changed, I don’t have to grieve what I was. If the before-version is still here, still intact, I don’t have to look directly at what got set down. The insistence is a form of armor, and armor is built around something tender. There is a whole wound inside that sentence that I won’t press on here.

But the cost of that insistence is that you also cannot account for what’s different now. You cannot name what the years of vigilance did to your cognition. You cannot look honestly at what it means that you cannot finish a thought without fragmenting, that you can scan rooms involuntarily, that some part of you is always calculating risk, always counting heads, always half-somewhere-else even when you are here.

That is the shape Motherhood pressed you into. Calling it anything else is kindness to yourself that eventually curdles into confusion.

what is actually true

She changed. She was changed, by years of continuous demand, by interrupted thought and fractured time, by the cost of never being unreachable. Some of what she was got set down and didn’t come back up. Certain ways of moving through the world that required more room than she now has. Certain capacities that depended on a continuity of self she no longer gets. Those things are worth grieving. They were real.

Something else is here now. Different in the way that anything is different after sustained pressure. Knowing things you can only know from the inside. An awareness of the body’s limits that reads like fluency. A relationship to time that is broken and also, somehow, more honest than it was before. Because time was always breaking, you just didn’t have to know it yet.

The woman in the kitchen with the corrupted file and the static where her preferences used to be: she is not excavating a buried self. She is standing at the edge of a self that hasn’t been named yet. The blankness is the thing that precedes language. It is what it feels like to be between one version and whatever comes next, in a culture that has no ceremony for this passage and no word for what you are in the middle of it.

more like this:

the presence myth →

what the wellness industry calls mindfulness, Motherhood has always called something else

Sound is the sense we filter most aggressively. We have to. The nervous system cannot hold all of it. The refrigerator’s hum, the car outside, the specific pitch of your child’s hunger cry versus a tired cry versus the cry that means something is actually wrong. We learn to sort it fast, to let most of it fall away, to hear only what requires a response. This is survival.

What we stop hearing we stop feeling. And somewhere in the ruthless efficiency of a life with children in it, the soundscape of your own home became wallpaper. The particular acoustics of this specific place you live. The way sound moves in the morning versus the evening, the noises that mean everyone is okay, the ones that mean they’re not. All of it collapsing into background.

This exercise is about bringing it back to the foreground. Just for ten minutes. Just to hear where you are.

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