As always, The Trans Advice column is helpful. The latest: Should cis folks use gender neutral pronouns?
Your pronouns shouldn’t be some sort of political statement or show of support for others, they should be how you want to be referred to.
Posts in "Notes"
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Raising Us Wrecked Her Career But My Mom’s Thriving In Her Second Act romper.com
Read: www.romper.com
My mom was just hitting her second act stride when leukemia knocked her down. I hope that as the treatment side effects are better managed, she’ll be able to get back into it.
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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
It’s a rough time right now so I’m trying to notice small joys and one of today’s is that I learned how to use regular expressions in advanced text editors to remove timestamps and extra lines from Zoom transcripts.
I just wrote the beginning of a fiction story after being inspired by Amanda Cook’s “Weaving Serenity” in issue 1 of @wyngraf. I also found a writing tagline for myself: “Kimberly Hirsh writes about badass moms doing awesome shit.” 📝📚
📚 I joined Austin Kleon’s Read Like an Artist book club today and am also going to read his past choices. I’m starting with a re-read of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing.
🎙️ I listened to the first episode of A Beautiful Anarchy on my way to pick up the kid. It was about imposter syndrome. There were some really beautiful bits that I’ll add to this post later.
🔖📚 Kate McKean writes in today’s Agents and Books about professional jealousy. Her advice applies to academics, too, and probably any field. “No one is being successful AT me.”