Browsing Category

No Bullshit Motherhood

Guest Posts, Friendship, motherhood, No Bullshit Motherhood

What We Remember: Epistolaries To Our Daughters

September 15, 2019
remember

By Jill Talbot and Marcia Aldrich

Water

You know that photograph, the one I’ve kept on the refrigerator of every Somewhere we’ve lived? The one of you—at maybe two or three—standing on the edge of a pool? You’re wearing a tiny blue bikini, the bulk of a yellow life vest snapped tight, one of your hands held to it. Are you checking it before you jump? Or are you gesturing, the way you still do when you speak, your arms floating up and down, almost flapping at times (like a bird). The water shimmers in the sun, and your short, blonde hair is wet, and there’s a puddle on the pool deck, so this must be jump two or three or ten. Your sweet knees bent, your tiny feet. There’s the dark blue tile at the water’s edge and three bushes line the flower bed behind you. Do you remember how Gramma would stand in her black swimsuit, moving the hose back and forth, back and forth over the bushes? Here, in this moment, she’s behind the camera, catching your joy. You’re all glee, giddy, but it’s the certainty that gets me every time, a pinch of tears in the back of my throat. Because I’m the one in the water, the one you’re watching. I haven’t always been something you can be so certain of, someone steady. I’ve told you this, but you claim not to remember. Your memory of those years an empty pool. Everywhere we’ve been, everywhere I go, I tack this photo on the fridge to remind myself—it’s my job to catch you.

Possession

When we moved back to Seattle, you had just turned two. I wouldn’t say the terrible two’s in the sense you didn’t throw regular tantrums, but you did have moments of supreme willfulness, and I couldn’t predict them for they came out of nowhere and caught me off guard. I remember one such fit staged in a public space to devastating effect. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Child Birth, No Bullshit Motherhood

Do You Remember

August 3, 2019
shock

By Emily Neuman Bauerle

“Do you remember that moment?” Kalie asked me, “Do you remember what you kept saying?”

As social workers in the emergency department, Kalie and my friendship had been birthed out of a shared experience of “How the fuck do you sleep at night?”

We both knew trauma well, too well. We both knew what shock looked like, how the brain and body respond in moments of catastrophe. We both knew because, for a living, we sat with people in their darkest hours. Every day we went to work, we greeted tragedy, illness and death, like a familiar friend.

“You just kept repeating yourself, over and over. Do you remember?” she asked again.

My mind drifted back to earlier that month when I had held a man who had lost his wife to an unimaginable accident. “You’re telling me my wife is dead?” he said, eyes vacant, voice distant, as he held her limp body. “She’s dead? She’s dead? She’s dead? Just, completely, dead?” Over and over he said the words. As if he was telling himself for the first time, each time

Kalie and I, we knew what the textbooks said. We knew about how the brain gets stuck in a loop and cannot get out. We knew that trauma triggered these responses, that it was the body’s way of dealing with something the brain could not quite process. We knew all about it. And in our own ways, by nature of the work we did, we had both experienced our own vicarious trauma and the subsequent shock that resulted.

“Do you remember?” She asked again, and I realized I didn’t know what she was asking about, my mind had been back in the rooms, with all the families. “Do you remember what you said?”

She was there. She remembered.

“The moment you first touched him. The moment you first held him in your arms. Do you remember?” Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Grief, No Bullshit Motherhood

Absence

May 22, 2019
eyes

By Rachel Greenley

Green is the rarest of eye colors—only two percent of the world’s population. My children had a fifty-percent chance to be born with green eyes. When the twins were born with blue, I was blue. I lie in one hospital bed. My green-eyed husband, Jim, lie in another. We were thirteen miles apart. He was undergoing total body irradiation as I gave birth, his pale hospital gown tied in the back just like mine, his own plastic hospital bracelet around his wrist just like mine.

Melanin is pigment. It makes hair, skin, eyes light or dark. Absence of melanin is a palette devoid of color—a blank slate, an empty canvas, a hollow grief. Have you seen the eyes of someone grieving? They carry a particular look—as if pain’s sharp layers could live in an iris.

Stroma is a layer of tissue in the iris. The amount of melanin or pigment in one’s stroma creates eye color. Albino eyes lack pigment. Blue eyes have a touch. More melanin leads to green. A healthy dose delivers brown. From faint to blue to green to brown. Inherited from parents’ genes. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood, parenting

Obsessed

May 6, 2019
nails

By Katherine Sullivan

My mother’s pinky toe is her favorite. The nail never grows longer than a quarter inch. She would sit there not in plain view but off to the side of the room. Biting her lip in satisfaction with her knee in the crook of her elbow. Her callused heal gripping the edge of the chair. Thumbing the corners of her toenails, picking at it until she created a small nick in the edge of her pinky toe.

I’d watch her when she thought I was watching Full House or Happy Days. I bet the Tanners or the Fonz, used nail clippers in the privacy of their bathroom. I’d just sit there with her in my peripheral stealing glances of her. Watching how once she was able to grip that nail with her thumb and forefinger she would look delighted. Then she would peel the nail across that little toe, it didn’t matter how far down the angle would be, often times ripping the nail from the flesh causing it to bleed. I assume it caused her great satisfaction because she would do it over and over again. Causing her to walk on her callused heals, hobbling from room to room. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood

Potty Training in a Typhoon

April 12, 2019
potty

By Melissa Kutsche

I scramble to fill pitchers, water bottles, and vases with water, creating a mosaic of receptacles on the kitchen counter. In the bathroom, I give the tub a quick scrub before plugging the drain. As cold water creeps up the side of the tub, I listen for chaos to erupt from the living room, where I’ve left the circus. My son is strapped into his bouncy seat, and my two-year-old daughter is sitting next to him, poring over board books. Naked. The typhoon has hit on Day 2 of what mommy bloggers call “potty training boot camp.” Like the kitchen counter, our living room floor has also been taken over, but by blankets – knitted, fleece, lady-bug-covered, and fringed. A plastic potty sits in the middle of the blanket patchwork.

I turn off the faucet and pray we won’t have to drink the bathtub water. Back in the living room, my son, only five weeks old, has fallen asleep in his bouncy seat. When he is older and doing the two-year-old version of American Ninja Warrior around our house all day, every day, I will miss these moments of his confinement. My daughter, the one without any pants on, is now over by her play kitchen. “What are you making, sweetie?” I ask the little chef, recently promoted to big sister. This week’s specials have been treats like blueberry-tomato tea and banana-corn soup. Instead of responding to my question, she lifts up her hands and looks at them with eyes gaping and lips curling. It’s getting dark, and I squat down for a better look. It’s the classic game of “Poop or chocolate?” I lost. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Adoption, No Bullshit Motherhood

Adoptive Parents are A**holes, Too

March 31, 2019
adoption

By Gina Sampaio

We didn’t exactly set out to have five kids. We had a girl, we had a boy, we had a vasectomy. Then we had a foster baby boy and adopted him. Then his birth mother had another boy whom we fostered and adopted and then a girl whom we also fostered and adopted.

Um, you know you can say no,” my friend said when she found out about the baby girl. “I know. But I can’t.” I replied.

But does that automatically make us really good people? Or does that just make us…suckers? Aren’t we actually just baby whores or, maybe more accurately…gluttons for punishment?

Because here’s something I realized after a four-year break between infants: there’s a lot about babies that really sucks. And the novelty of being woken up multiple times per night wears off just a little bit quicker with each kid. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Divorce, No Bullshit Motherhood

Seven Cupcakes

January 14, 2019
cupcakes

By Sara Rayfield

Seven is an odd number. It’s also prime.

“Hi, baby!” I greet my son warmly, as if doing custody exchanges at the police station is totally normal. Just like prime, odd numbers – this is our normal. It’s where shit like this happens when you have a restraining order against your ex. When things are bad enough, he’s not even allowed in the police station, so I get the pure sarcastic joy of my former in-laws every other weekend. That’s also what happens.

“How was your birthday party?” I ask, while getting a weekend’s worth of dirty clothes shoved into my arms. And cotton candy. And McDonald’s bags. And the packages of cupcakes that I had packed with care on Friday afternoon. Seven cupcakes: one for my son. One for his grandmother, one for his grandfather. Two for his aunt and uncle. Two final ones: one for my son’s dad, one for his stepmom. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood

Poop, a Story

January 8, 2019
poo

By Hannah Shreim

Once upon a time, in a Home Depot parking lot, my nephew had a poo. No, this was not a ordinary poo. This was a poo of nightmares. The yucky, sticky, awful color, way up the back poo. He was 4 months old at the time and this was mine, and my sisters first experience with a nightmare poo like this one. As we gathered the appropriate equipment to handled the nightmare poo, the crying begun. And you guessed it, this was not the sad whimpering sound  of a poor child covered in a normal poo. This was a howl, a I’m not ok, scream your bloody head off kind of cry. The kind of cry that makes people stare, and judge and the situation much worse.  And this is where the other crying started. Not from my nephew, from my hard as nails big sister. She’s was a new, first time mom sitting in the trunk of her car, with a screaming poo covered baby. This is where the laughing started. Not from my sister or my nephew. But from me. The single, care free, in charge of nothing human. This is where my heroism kicked in and took hold of my poo covered nephew to finish the job and offer useless information to my sister about not caring what others people think, and how you need to get more rest. And how the situation wasn’t that bad, and how we were grown woman who could handle anything. And of course that crying was stupid.  Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood, Pregnancy

Hole

September 17, 2018
hole

By Rhea Wolf

Forgotten already. Absorbed in the mystery.
Into the egg, I come. A mother,
Another one for the
turning, another one for the
wheel, under the ground,
burning waiting resurrecting
falling, singing the long high note and
descending Oh Phoenix oh fire walkers
now I am red and hot inside with
a fractured other,
many wishes,

and a fantastic losing mind.
Thinking those men
think it means enlightenment
but they are still free.
Making big scribbles and smoking sacred cigarettes
losing their minds to art and science,
while they are still free.
And my petals don’t fold out anymore. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Miscarriage, No Bullshit Motherhood

Things Unseen

July 25, 2018
exhausted

By Amanda E. Snyder

I’ve never done things in my life the way you’re supposed to. Or when you’re supposed to.

As an undergrad, I majored in fiction writing. (Seriously.) Then, after acing my first Big-Time Job Interview post graduation, which was as a copywriter for a restaurant food supplier in Chicago, I turned down the job because I knew that I’d be unhappy. I was 21 and financial stability wasn’t something I cared about.

Having a family wasn’t on the radar, either. In my 20s, it was always so distant; the idea of a family was nice, but I knew I wasn’t even close to ready. Dating in my 30s I had thought would be easier (aren’t we all supposed to be getting more mature by now?) but it proved just as difficult as ever. As for that far-away image of kids, that only diminished in my 30s. I loved being an aunt and I loved my freedom. I did want a partner, sure. But kids were not something I needed.

But then…oh, but then. At 39, I met a tall, dark, and handsome 27-year-old Brazilian man named Davi who remarkably had gone to college near my ultra-rural western Illinois hometown. We felt terrifically familiar to one another and less than three months after meeting, moved in together. One day when discussing our future, we broached the subject of children. We were at an Irish bar in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. We hadn’t moved in together yet. It was the 4th of July and we were creating our own pub crawl. It was early afternoon and we were two or three beers in. Continue Reading…