mother of newsletters

Hi, hello, I’m back. I started writing what follows in late April and early May, before my brother died, and before a lot of other news that felt connected in strange ways happened. I had started writing about Mother’s Day, about how much I dislike the consumerist, performative thing it has become, and about how my problems with that kind of celebration reflect some larger ambivalence I have toward motherhood and particularly toward some of the ideas we have about families in this country.

My brother’s death made me both understand in a new, sad way how fierce my love for my nuclear family is – even though I’d spent the day before he died drafting a critique of the American idea of the nuclear family. But it also helped reaffirm the idea I’d been writing about, that we should expand the notion of family beyond the simple idea of mothers and fathers (or mothers and mothers or fathers and fathers) and their own children. My true family is larger than that, and more strange and lovely than we often think about families, and I feel that now even more strongly.

It’s awful to be in the middle of writing about why you don’t want your own kids when you’re suddenly confronted with your parents’ grief over losing a child and your own grief over losing a sibling.

But, right now, in the midst of it, I don’t think my feelings have changed – I still don’t think I want kids, or at least I don’t need to have my own biological kids. That caveat is important, because as I’ve gotten older and spent more time reporting and thinking about public education, the more I’ve felt it’s important – for me at least, but also as a moral case for everyone – to care more about other people’s children.

The reasons I don’t necessarily want my own kids are complicated. A few months ago, I read Sheila Heiti’s book “Motherhood” – a long meditation on whether or not to have children in the form of a novel-that’s-not-really-a-novel – and was struck by how thoroughly she catalogued almost every thought I’ve ever had about whether or not to have a kid. Is it selfish, or is it selfless? Will I regret never knowing that kind of love? Will I regret not having the physical experience of being pregnant, of giving birth? Or, on the other hand, will I regret all the things I might give up in order to care for a child? Would I resent the child for those things, and wouldn’t that be unfair to that child, who had no choice in the matter? And what does it mean to bring a life into the world, now, in the face of our politics and climate and everything else?

Heti said in an interview when the book was released that she didn’t want to spoil the decision she came to, but also, she noted, she does not have a child now, so take from that what you will. (Honestly, it’s not a spoiler; that could mean a lot of things. But also, it’s kind of a spoiler.) Her decision, in the end, came down to her gut.

“All the times I contemplated children, I felt a giddiness and wobbliness that are nothing like the commitments that come from a deeper, more solid place,” Heti writes in the book. “Those commitments feel dark, unfantastical, mixed up equally with the good and the bad. But the thought of having children always made me feel dizzy, or as elated as sucking helium, like all the things I’ve rushed into, and just as impulsively, left.”

That’s more or less how I feel, too. That urge that I hear so many people talk about – as I’ve gotten older, I had wondered if I might feel it more, but instead I feel it less, or less seriously.

But for me, the question of whether or not to seek motherhood also feels political, about how much I want to give myself over to a role that is so dependent on how other people feel about mothers, and children, and the contradictory ways that American society cares (or “cares”) about women.

All of the recent news about abortion laws and the closure of clinics in Georgia, Alabama, and Missouri, plus Joe Biden’s dithering around the Hyde Amendment – news that, for me, played out in the way that headlines in movies sometimes play on televisions in the background of movies, secondary headlines that give terrible but important context to the story – threw a lot of my feelings about that question into sad relief.

None of the politicians who crafted these grotesquely extreme policies seem to care about the full humanity of women facing this choice. Recently I spent a weird afternoon going down a rabbit-hole of anti-choice writings to see how they wrote about women’s health. I found, for example, that Focus on the Family makes a clear distinction between abortions to save the life of a mother – in those cases, women should be treated with “compassion,” the organization’s website notes (compassion in other cases, it seems, is unnecessary) – and abortions to protect the health of the mother, which are not okay. A woman’s life is important, apparently, but not her health, as if those two things are completely separate.

I’m also always struck by the simplistic refusal of anti-choice advocates to understand how choosing abortion can be a pro-life stance. For the health of a woman, as an act of mercy to an unviable child, to help a woman be a better mother to the children she wanted and already has – to me, those are pro-life decisions. Life is complicated, and if we really value mothers in this country, it follows that we’d give women who may or may not want to become mothers the power to figure out what’s best for their lives and those of their families.

The gulf between some politicians’ complete disregard of women as thinking, feeling human beings capable of their own ethical decision-making and the commercial fetishization of motherhood around Mother’s Day tells us a lot, I think, about how American society really feels about mothers. Mothers are important – if you’re rich enough to afford brunch and perfume and flowers or whatever. If you’re not rich (or in some cases, even if you are), well, it’s probably okay to put you at unnecessarily elevated risk of dying. It’s not a coincidence that the maternal mortality rates in many states working to restrict abortion are very high – Georgia’s was second highest in the country last year, for example, and that’s of course in a country with the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world. The racial disparities are also disturbing; in Alabama, black women are five times as likely to die as a result of pregnancy than white women.

For me, the question isn’t so much, "do you want kids?” but instead, “do you want kids strongly enough to opt into a system that doesn’t value you, and that values other women even less, so much so that they frequently die in the process of giving birth?”

There’s no right or wrong answer to that question, and lots of women would, I imagine, disagree with my premise. Even if you think my premise is correct, even if you’re infuriated by the way the United States treats mothers, I understand why you might choose to have kids anyway – in some ways, it seems like a brave act of defiance and love and hope that I respect with all my heart. I just don’t know that I can make that choice. Maybe I’m not that brave.

Recently I stumbled on a book by the cultural critic Jacqueline Rose, “Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty," that I think helps explain the contradictions in American fights over motherhood. Rose’s argument is simple, familiar, and, to me, persuasive: that we blame mothers for many of our our social and personal ills, hold mothers responsible for fixing them (without ever giving them the tools or power to do so), and then blame them again when they cannot.

That’s just not a burden I’m willing to take on, and I don’t think it’s fair to expect me or any other woman to do so – and it’s especially unfair to ask women with considerably less privilege than I have to accept it.

Early in the book, Rose describes an uproar in the UK in 2016 and 2017 when two conservative newspapers published scathing investigations into the cost that National Health Service hospitals pay when non-European women give birth there. This happened at the same time, Rose notes, that tens of thousands of children and teenagers were landing in Europe, alone, without their parents — parents who, in the news coverage of the crisis, were rarely mentioned.

“These absent, missing mothers are the other face of the pregnant ‘health tourists’ lambasted by The Sun — mothers who are either overlooked completely or are the targets of blame, with migration and its miseries being the the true story behind both,” Rose writes.

Rose’s passage obviously reminded me of what’s happening right now on our American border. The Trump administration’s rhetoric around the choices the families trying to enter the United States are making is double-edged: these families choose to cross the border illegally, so they are criminals, and we think it’s okay to take the children of criminals away from them. The implication is that these families should take better care of their children.

But, given the violence they’re fleeing from, trying to enter the United States is the way these parents are trying to protect their children. Because these parents are trying to shield their children from devastating violence in the only way that seems possible, our government has branded them unfit parents. The burden of decades of violence and instability in Central America — violence and instability the United States played a large role in creating — is being placed on these mothers, and their children.

A few weeks ago, Slate ran a piece that posed a question I’ve been obsessed with for a long time: how can conservatives be “pro-life” but be okay with the way we are detaining and neglecting children at the border? The answer, the writer Rebecca Onion argues, lies in the way conservative Americans think about government and families.

Families, conservatives believe, are supposed to fend for themselves, and government should provide any services that families should provide for themselves. Onion quotes Kristin Luker’s 1984 books Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood: “Programs like those that provide state-supported day care, free school lunches, or nutrition assistance for pregnant women didn’t meet with support among the anti-abortion activists Luker interviewed, because ‘they resist the idea of letting the state into the sacrosanct territory of the home.’”

I find that view both hypocritical (preventing me from choosing an abortion feels like a pretty strong invasion of the sacrosanct territory of my home) and troublingly related to patriarchal structures. The only families who do well under this conception are ones with two parents, probably one of whom is a father who can benefit from his privilege and secure a high-paying job that allows a mother to stay home to care for their children.

“This schism — between those who believe that all children deserve to be protected by society at large and those who do not believe that other people’s children are everyone’s responsibility — partially accounts for the argument emerging on the right that these migrants’ deaths are sad, but they’re the fault of the parents who decided to bring the kids here,” Onion writes.

That question of blame — do we blame the parents who decided to bring the kids here? — gets at the biggest problem I have with this line of thinking. Personally, I think we should blame the people who created the problems these families are fleeing from. And that’s the heart of it: these problems are social, not personal. In my view, that means that even if you’re a member of one of those perfect patriarchal units that does a fine job caring for your own children, you still have a responsibility to help other people’s.

I often wonder if the logic used by the Trump administration to justify detaining children at the border – we can only care for our own children – is similar to the kind that justifies the “opportunity hoarding” routinely practiced by affluent American families. Rich families, using the justification that they have to do what’s best for their own kids, make decisions that then hurt other children — they segregate and deny schools resources, lobby for exclusionary zoning policies, expect and receive tax policies that allow them to create inequities and pass their privilege down to their children.

Take for example, the case of the Malibu-Santa Monica public school district, which was recently the subject of an episode of the great “Future Perfect” podcast (and which the journalist Dana Goldstein, who is featured in the podcast, has also written about).

There are some fairly large disparities among the public schools in this district. Santa Monica has some schools that serve a wide range of kids, privileged and less privileged. Malibu has the type of schools that throw “Big Little Lies”-style parent fundraisers. (Incidentally, that show gives an example of why you shouldn’t assume that just because a school is full of rich families that it’s “good;” Otter Bay is a bad school and if you email me I will talk to you at length about why.) In those schools, large parent donations have gone a long way to supplement the district’s public funding, greatly increasing the opportunities students in Malibu have, especially when compared to their peers in Santa Monica and other parts of Los Angeles.

In 2011, the Malibu-Santa Monica superintendent proposed that all parent donations in the school district be pooled and distributed equally throughout the district. The podcast shares audio from a school board meeting where this policy was debated, and it’s sadly unsurprising how brazen wealthy families were about their unwillingness to allow their donations to help schools where parents have fewer resources.

“I attend a school that is fortunate to have a lot of parents who donate, and unfortunately if the superintendent’s proposal is passed, we will stop donating,” one man said.

“You cannot add height to a short person by cutting off the head of a tall one,” another woman said, as if equalizing school funding was equivalent to decapitation.

“I will speak for myself,” another man said. “I will give less.”

I’ve noticed that this impulse seems above reproach in our society, at least among affluent people, even progressives. It seems uncouth to question a parent’s decision to help their children get ahead. I’ve heard parents get offended by even the suggestion that their avoidance of their neighborhood public schools might even be slightly un-progressive, much less immoral. We’re a very far way away from a point where wealthy people consider what effect their decisions have on other families. But I think we should try to get there.

While I was thinking about these questions, an interview by Anna Holmes with the journalist Dani McClain crossed one of my feeds. McClain recently published a book called “We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood.”

Holmes asks McClain to explain a contradiction: black women have long been heralded for their work caring for others – as domestic workers raising white kids, for instance – but their work caring for their own children has been overlooked or slandered by negative stereotypes like the “welfare queen.”

McClain explains that often black women have suffered not just from direct racism towards themselves that has erased their contributions, but also, because of other forms of racism — the over-incarceration of black men, for example — have raised their families in structures outside of patriarchal norms. McClain, for instance, was raised by her mother and an aunt, who took care of a group of kids and cousins together.

“Black women haven’t necessarily only formed family within a nuclear structure—a mom and a dad and two kids—because we’ve had kind of a more expansive understanding of what constitutes family,” McClain says. “I think that we do mothering in a different way, and that can sometimes be illegible to those who have a very narrow understanding of what family looks like.”

McClain cites the scholar Patricia Hill Collins, who described the “motherwork” done by women of color that expands far beyond their own family units and serves public as well as private functions. Many black women, mothers, have been on the forefront of activism against gun violence and police brutality and for environmental and educational justice, for example. These mothers see their own role not just as caring for their own kids, but everybody else’s, too.

“I think of motherwork in terms of understanding that our responsibility is not just to what’s happening inside the walls of our home, but that we need to connect our own family’s needs and our own children’s needs to the needs of other young people in the community,” McClain says. “Not just on behalf of our own small family unit, but on behalf of community needs and demands.”

I love this idea, and I think we all should be doing motherwork — or parentwork, really, because why should it be limited to women?

Sometimes people I know express surprise that I’m ambivalent about parenthood, because I love kids. I love them a lot. I’ve spent the last decade helping make journalism about whether or not we’re serving kids well. Part of the reason I chose this career is that I genuinely enjoy talking to children, learning about the way they see the world; I find joy in it.

Just after my brother died, I was fascinated by how much I just wanted to hang out with my friends’ babies and young children. They helped me remember that life just goes. Babies are happy and sad and goofy and needy, no matter what.

And my friends helped me; they handed me their babies. The afternoon I found out my brother had been hurt, was probably going to die and there was nothing anyone could do, some friends took me in and I spent the rest of the day, helpless, goofing off with their preschooler and playing peekaboo with their baby, while I also drank wine and talked about scary things with my friends, these kids’ parents. Later, my college roommate flew across the country with her infant so I could meet him, so her baby could distract me with his very happy babbling. Many of my friends texted me photos and videos of their kids; there were very small babies flopped on sofas and there were toddlers pushing raspberries onto each of their fingertips, waggling them in front of their faces. It was great.

None of those pictures or videos or real-life hangs with babies really changed how I felt about kids of my own, though. In the wake of losing my brother, I still don’t want kids.

What I do feel, though, is that I hope those kids grow up learning that there are a lot of people who care about them, even beyond the primary love of their parents.

In her book about mothers, Rose asks another question, an intriguing one that has helped me think about what I might want in my own life and would want to advocate for everyone. What are we missing out on, she wonders, when we buy into this restrictive, harmful notion of motherhood, one that expects mothers to be obligated to do so much work? What if, instead of abdicating so many responsibilities and laying them on the feet of mothers, we took those burdens on more collectively?

“What are we doing – what aspects of our social arrangements and of our inner lives, what forms of historic injustice, do we turn our backs on; above all, what are we doing to mothers – when we expect them to carry the burden of everything that is hardest to contemplate about our society and ourselves?” Rose asks.

There’s an alternative, she suggests – one that would not only help children, but mothers too.

“Mothers do not have a monopoly of love in the world,” Rose writes, “nor should it be asked of them.”

If we did a better job caring for children, if individuals and communities and governments cared for all children as if they were our own (which they are), what might that free up mothers to do? How much healthier could all of our families be?

My brother died because, allegedly, some stranger didn’t value his life, maybe wasn’t even thinking about it. What I want is for all these other kids to grow up in a world where they trust that adults value their lives, and for that to be true no matter whether that person is related to them or knows them or not. I want my friends’ children, and all children, to grow up knowing that, even though I’m not their mom or dad, I care that they feel safe and happy and well fed. And that all adults should care the same way about all children.

I increasingly feel that as long as I know a bunch of kids who know that I’m an adult who cares about them, that I’ll be there for them – even though I’m not their immediate family, that I care about them just because, not because I’m obligated to – then I think I’ll be cool with my place in the world.

By extension, I’ve been thinking, what would it look like if many other people felt about their relationship with children the way that I do? More specifically, what if parents cared about other people’s children the same way or close to how they care about their own? What if we all thought of ourselves as caretakers, or people doing parentwork, for children in our communities, or for other kids who need our help? What would the world look like?

Tell me why you want to read

Two more parenting, or at least parenting-adjacent, recommendations for folks this week.

First, for Kristin Jones, one of my Denver Lois Lanes. Kristen asked for three different kinds of books, and I’ll return to her non-parenting ask later, but one of her asks is directly related to my thoughts this week. “I want a novel about being a mother in which being a mother is not (or not only) a burden but a deep joy, without being sentimental.“

I think Kristin should read “Golden State” by Lydia Kiesling. I don’t know what it’s like to be a mother, obviously, but this book came the closest of anything I’ve read to depicting motherhood the way I’ve heard so many of my friends describe it — an experience that subjects you to the whims of an unpredictable, repetitive, crazy-making human, but also a human who is a complete joy and who you’re obsessed with.

I also loved that while it’s absolutely a book about motherhood, the plot really has very little to do with motherhood at all. The narrator goes to stay on her family’s property in the high desert of California while she waits for her husband, who has been ensnared in an immigration limbo. While she’s there, she becomes entangled both with an older woman in town for mysterious reasons and another woman involved in a movement brewing in the town to secede from the rest of the state. It shouldn’t feel so refreshing for a novel to say so much about motherhood while also demonstrating that the mother is a fully-formed human with many other interests and concerns, but it does.

I also want to come back to the prompt from Evan that I introduced last week: do we, especially as parents, owe the world anything, or is not making it worse good enough? I have some additions to that recommendations, two that — unlike last week’s recommendation of “American Spy” — don’t really have that much to do with parenting.

The first is the podcast I mentioned earlier, “Future Perfect.” The current season, which ended this week with the episode about PTAs I described, is about the dangers of philanthropy. We tend to think of philanthropy as an uncomplicated good, but in nine episodes, the host Dylan Matthews complicates this idea in a variety of ways. If you do decide you need to make the world a better place, the series is an excellent way to explore the risks and rewards of the techniques you might use to try.

The second thing I’d recommend is a book of short stories called “Prodigals,” by Greg Jackson. I did not think I was going to like this book because generally it falls under a genre I intensely dislike — stories about extremely wealthy, hip “creator-types” and which convey how hip they are using lists of the rappers they listen to and the brands they consume. But Jackson’s stories are specific enough and weird enough that I found myself taken in in spite of my reservations. The first story in particular, “Wagner in the Desert,” gets directly at Evan’s question. A not-very-successful writer accompanies a group of rich screenwriter friends on a weekend in Palm Springs. They do coke off of the keys to somebody’s Nissan Leaf. They spend a lot of time worrying about being good people but not very much time actually being good people. “We were not heroes,” he writes. “We were trying to find ways not to be villains.” Is that enough?

Finally, a bonus recommendation for everyone, just because I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and in the spirit of paying it forward: “The Lesser Bohemians,” by Eimar McBride.

I haven’t conscientiously recommended this book to anyone in a while, but I did tweet passively about how great it was after it was mentioned in an essay about reading in bars (funnily enough, I read much of the book in bars myself). My friend Michael Zinshteyn picked it up after he saw the tweet and has been sending me his reactions as he works through it, which has been delightful. I also came to this book on a recommendation from my friend Meredith Gaglio, so it seems like a book that has some passing-it-along kismet.

“The Lesser Bohemians” is not an easy book. It’s about a young acting student who begins an affair with a much older, more successful actor, but the pain of the book is much different from what you might expect from that description. Both of these people have unspeakably horrible backstories. (“Brutal,” Michael kept texting me. “Like Catholic purgatory.”)

But it’s just so beautifully emotional, about two people finding a meaningful connection that surprises them both. When I finished it, I thought it was the most romantic book I’ve ever read. I want to find a person who makes me feel like this book did, just a clear blue mix of desire and love and forgiveness and surrender. Since I read it, I’ve been searching for another book that will make me feel that way again, and I haven’t found anything quite right. (If you can recommend one to me, please do let me know.)

Michael texted me this morning that he had been hyping the book to another one of our friends: “I said if you’re in need of a pure emotional purge, a universe of feeling built up and sucked out of you like a life-ending black hole, read this book.” I think that’s exactly right. I also think everyone needs an emotional purge once in a while; it’s good for you.

The book is also fun because it’s written in an experimental Irish vernacular that, for the first few pages, I found nearly impenetrable. (I know, I’m really selling this book.) But I love the experience of learning a book’s language, succumbing to something that will teach you how to read it. By the end, I was flying through it, and that’s also an experience I would recommend.

Thank you for reading. Next week I promise you I will not be so heavy; I have some things to get off my chest about celebrity conspiracy theories, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift. And as always, if you like this kind of dispatch from my brain and know someone else who might like it too, please do share it. You can subscribe here.