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Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion? | The New Yorker newyorker.com

Read: www.newyorker.com

An amazing essay in conversation with Angela Garbes’s new book, Essential Labor.

a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a bunch of e-mails than she can to do a job so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy: to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability.

Her husband’s job provided health insurance and regular paychecks; Garbes writes that it “may take me a lifetime to undo the false notion that my work is somehow less valuable than his.”

It feels shameful to admit that I don’t have the desire to hustle up that same ladder.

Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own.

parenting toward a more just world requires more than diverse baby dolls and platitudes about equality.

She quotes the writer Carvell Wallace, who, after the 2016 election, told his children, “One of the most important questions you have to answer for yourself is this: Do I believe in loving everyone? Or do I only believe in loving myself and my people?”

How can mothering be a way that we resist and combat the loneliness, the feeling of being burdened by our caring?

motherhood has also granted me a chance to see what my life is like when I reorganize it around care and interdependence in a way that stretches far beyond my daughter.

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“This is the Book I’m Meant to Write Right Now” sarafredman.substack.com

Read: sarafredman.substack.com

This interview is huge. Life-alteringly huge.

Angela Garbes, who usually line edits as she writes:

I can’t revise an idea, no matter how good it is, in my brain. I can’t revise it if I don’t write it down.

Interviewer Sara Fredman says:

I personally feel torn between feeling like motherhood is the most significant thing I do and that I’ll ever do in my life and also feeling like that’s a trap of some sort.

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Angela Garbes Is Reclaiming Realistic Motherhood thecut.com

Read: www.thecut.com

🔖 Read Review: A riveting biographer — and mother — works to solve ‘the mind-baby problem’.

It’s out! The latest issue of Genetrix, a very occasional newsletter curating stories of creative mothers!

I highly recommend Sara Fredman’s Write Like A Mother newsletter, in which Sara interviews writers who are also mothers. Some bits from the recent issue with Kate Baer resonated especially with me, so I thought I’d share them here.

Mothers were so punished in this pandemic.

This. I’m playing the pandemic on easy mode - working part-time from home - and I still feel this. The social costs and lack of a village are what’s hurting me most. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, I hung out for a long time with other parents while our kids were at the park and it was huge. Pre-pandemic, M & I spent every weekday morning at a co-working space with a Montessori school on-site. My co-workers were almost exclusively fellow parents of young children, mostly moms and non-binary primary caregivers, and at the time I didn’t really appreciate how special it was.

…nobody cares if you’re a writer. Nobody, nobody cares if you’re a writer, except you. If you want to be a writer, then you have to take control of the situation. You have to think of yourself as a writer, you have to treat yourself as a writer. You have to treat this like this is a job… I have to be the one who cares so much about being a writer. And so I think part of that is just filtering out that noise and just taking yourself super seriously, taking the work super seriously.

I have only recently claimed the title of writer for myself, despite having written all my life and having my first paid byline 10 years ago, and I feel this so hard. I’m still working on taking myself and the work seriously.

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Portrait of the Mother as an Artist – Guernica guernicamag.com

Read: www.guernicamag.com

To think of the mother as artist does not necessitate a conflict, nor does it require a choice between passive domestic surrender or total domestic rejection, although for a long time the world demanded that it did. Such frames only reinforce hierarchies, limit her to merely a fragment when, of course, she is com posed of many pieces.

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Craft — a designation used to subjugate many art-making practices that have been the domain of women: needlepoint, pottery, quilt making. With their connections to the home, these mediums have been historically dismissed, supposedly lacking the rigor and intellectual complexity of high art.

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“I have drawn my children and painted them endlessly and I cannot distinguish them from my soul…"

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she sometimes wonders why an artist must inhabit turmoil or drama to be taken seriously.

🔖📝 The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer ‹ Literary Hub

if you’ve read a book penned by a woman with young children recently, there’s a significant chance it was written while hiding, losing sleep, or using inventive distractions. (Or even all three.)

there is no separation between mother and writer, nor can I tease apart the time I spend tending to my child from the time I spend thinking about my writing, or actually doing it.

Finding Literary Spaces Amid the Intensity of New Motherhood 🔖📚💬

🔖📚 Sara Fredman’s How Motherhood Helped Me Reject the ‘Father Tongue’ of Academia is both about writing the kind of thing I want to write and is itself the kind of thing I want to write.