Right here with you on your tagline. Look forward to reading this. This is my first substack experience—so a blog that can be a podcast when you want. I like it.
“The two scripts are to have kids or to have made a righteous feminist decision to live child free, and everything in the middle is treated as unfinished, unresolved, incomplete.”
This really hits home. Not childfree, not struggling with fertility, had a wonderful childhood myself…I feel shocked and frustrated and angry at the universe at how, exactly, this didn’t happen for me.
I’m really enjoying this new collaboration you have with Nancy (or is it Nancy has with you?)
Prior to our marriage, my wife of 24 years told me that she wasn’t interested in having children and I was okay with that. She has a reaction, much like the one you cited, to being told “Happy Mothers Day”.
Yes yes yes. I can remember sticking a plastic dolly in a shoe box with some Kleenexes and feeling the oxytocin course through my veins. Raggedy Ann was more of an action figure with her floppy limbs. Then thirty years of ambivalence, three years of panic and pills, and now an 8 year old daughter. I'm still reading about the choice of motherhood perhaps more than motherhood itself. Heti (Motherhood), Cusk (A Life's Work), this poem* by a dear friend.
Right here with you on your tagline. Look forward to reading this. This is my first substack experience—so a blog that can be a podcast when you want. I like it.
“The two scripts are to have kids or to have made a righteous feminist decision to live child free, and everything in the middle is treated as unfinished, unresolved, incomplete.”
This really hits home. Not childfree, not struggling with fertility, had a wonderful childhood myself…I feel shocked and frustrated and angry at the universe at how, exactly, this didn’t happen for me.
I’m really enjoying this new collaboration you have with Nancy (or is it Nancy has with you?)
Prior to our marriage, my wife of 24 years told me that she wasn’t interested in having children and I was okay with that. She has a reaction, much like the one you cited, to being told “Happy Mothers Day”.
Wallace is lovely. He counts.
Yes yes yes. I can remember sticking a plastic dolly in a shoe box with some Kleenexes and feeling the oxytocin course through my veins. Raggedy Ann was more of an action figure with her floppy limbs. Then thirty years of ambivalence, three years of panic and pills, and now an 8 year old daughter. I'm still reading about the choice of motherhood perhaps more than motherhood itself. Heti (Motherhood), Cusk (A Life's Work), this poem* by a dear friend.
*https://poets.org/poem/goodnight-moon