"We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood. In the division of labor according to gender, the makers and sayers of culture, the namers, have been the sons of the mothers."
--Adrienne Rich
No other great human experience is as systematically diminished as motherhood. Though we are all, to draw from Rich, “of woman born,” motherhood has long been shoved out of the domain of critical inquiry and artistic relevance in patriarchal societies. This is in keeping with a greater tradition: The experiences of women have historically been ignored, suppressed, and trivialized into clichés or branded as taboo. The depths of female experience are belittled as precisely that: female, not fundamentally human. And yet every single human has spent his or her first months gestating in the belly of a woman.
The universality of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood offers enormous potential for women to speak to one another across culture, class, ethnicity, and race, and yet also tends to mire complex discussions in truisms. The depths of individual women's experiences are too often blurred into received wisdom and, shushed and sidelined, women have not been encouraged or allowed to challenge this by plumbing the complexities of their lives. As Tillie Olson details in Silences, women–and mothers in particular–have also simply been too absorbed in sustaining life to take aim at the brittle and antiquated stereotypes.
Thus there has been and continues to be a dearth of literary writing about motherhood by women, although this trend is being challenged by a new generation of writers, including Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, Jenny Offill, and Eula Biss. This column wants to encourage more women to explore the depths and possibilities of this fundamental subject, exploring motherhood as milestone; as consciousness; as daily routine; as radical or gradual shift; as feminist awakening; as voyage; as challenge; as corporeal and spiritual and intellectual condition. Milestones is a space for women who are interested in both the inhibitions and potential of motherhood, its quotidian and epic elements, the way it restricts and frustrates, and also the way it liberates and enlightens. It examines motherhood as the human experience writ small in the belly, and huge in the scope of families, societies, and generations.
Exactly one week before my first book came out, my daughter weaned and potty trained. She did this in a day. After months, maybe even a year, of my hand-wringing about a possible eternity of diapers, about when and how to perfectly ease her off the boob, she woke up one morning and became a kid.
SAN FRANCISCO Orange, she says. I am standing next to a punch bowl talking to my husband’s boss. We have told too many people…
Nowhere is the neontocracy more present than the playground, which is as much an anti-space as it is a space. There is no drinking, no in-depth conversation, no reading of books. There is no consumption of food that hasn’t been cut into tiny pieces and shuttled in tiny containers. There are no adults unattached to a child or children. And, at the same time, in bars and many restaurants and galleries and parties and coffee shops in the U.S. there are no children, there are few parents of young children, and the parents of young children present have put their parenthood on mute. A neonatocracy, I discover shortly after arrival in the U.S., is very spatially segregated
was driving a winding Ohio country road while my husband was at his mother’s funeral in Mexico. I was driving by myself, listening to…
hen you lose something you want desperately to find, you begin to see it everywhere, just before you actually turn to look. These visions…
The most surprising aspect of motherhood for me has been my desire, often fierce, often voracious, to defend it.
How to shower when alone with baby, I type into Safari. 21,500,000 results flutter back at me, a ticker tape parade of anxiety and confusion. My favorites are the forums, rife with desperation, spelling mistakes, and a slew of unfamiliar acronyms.
My baby was 18 months old when I joined Instagram. I figured the platform would be a way to connect with other mothers and…
I have never been good with my hands. By this I don’t mean, “Oh, I can’t handsew little cat ornaments to gift at birthday parties,” or, “I could never make my toddler a homemade dinosaur costume for Halloween.”