being a mother Archives | The ManifestStation

You Can’t Quit Motherhood: On Privilege, Motherhood, and Effort

April 16, 2018

By Laura Leffler

In bed one winter morning, when I was so pregnant with the twins that I spent hours each day icing my fat feet, propped high on pillows, I floated around personality traits as if they were names. I think the girl should be creative, I told my fiancé. She’ll carry a sketchbook wherever she goes. And the boy will be a bookish type with round glasses. They’d both be terrible at math and sports. I was laughing at myself, enjoying the ridiculousness of it, knowing that these little people growing inside me would be who they were no matter that I planned for them.

But my fiancé grew serious. “You know,” he said, “I want them to be scrappy.”

I recoiled – I could actually feel my lips twisting into a sneer. I scanned through the list of things I wanted my children to be: happy, healthy, and kind, of course, but also, more secretively, bookish, artistic, beautiful, popular. Scrappy made me think of a shaggy little dog. Scrappy made me think of the pugilistic kids I knew back home, kids who showed up uninvited to parties, straggly kids, kids who tried too hard. Scrappy was not on my list. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Miscarriage, Pregnancy

The Day Before You Will Be Born

January 29, 2018

CW: This essay discusses miscarriage.

By Anna Burgess Yang

Dear Baby,

This is it. The day before you will be born.

I sometimes feel guilty for my feelings toward you over the past nine months. Detachment, fear, anxiety… that these will hurt you in some unforeseen way in the future.

How could I avoid these feelings? When we lost your sister, Nelle, at 21 weeks of pregnancy, I thought that I would split open with grief. We had no answers as to what happened – why I inexplicably lost a baby after two previous uneventful pregnancies with your older brothers. Without any reason, we were told that we could try again right away. Then we lost your sister, Iris, not even six months later. Going through labor and delivery, twice, to give birth to your sisters when they had already left the world were the worst experiences of my life. It traumatized me. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, parenting

What Makes A Good Mother?

May 1, 2017

By Robin Rivera

Some of us are naturally drawn to children and mothering leaving the rest of us wondering where this domestic gene came from, and why didn’t I get it. It’s not fun to me to stay home and cook and clean and change diapers. Well at first it was because it felt like playing house folding all the tiny laundry… until shit got real!

Nights awake crying, college deadlines, welfare deadlines, dating nightmares, lack of sleep, and of the most challenging… Facing childhood trauma when I look into the face of my hysterical child feeling ever ounce of terror I used to feel as a child. I have worked so hard to learn a healthier way to nurture my child especially through difficult times. But when the rubber hits the road I gotta tell you, I tend to fall apart Inside.

I sometimes lose my temper and fear I am the monster I’ve been dedicated to shielding my daughter from. I shame myself for being ill equipped to be a mother. I tell myself I’m damaged, and I can’t do it. In those moments I feel devastated like I’ve failed my life’s mission by breaking down when she needs me.

But this is the dance. The dance through trauma, the dance of life. I pick myself up off the ground, usually after calling a trusted friend, and I do my very best to nurture the aftermath of a storm. I hold my daughter and validate her feelings, I admit my wrong within minutes, we make a plan of how to support each other better the next time, and we express love. That’s the best I can do with this healing heart of mine. Continue Reading…

Anonymous, Guest Posts, Pregnancy

I Could’ve Bought A Baby This Morning.

January 19, 2015

By Anonymous.

Pregnancy. Even my therapist is pregnant. She tells me this the day after I go to a fertility doctor, whose office is decorated like a unicorn’s sugar fart. It’s lavender, silver, acrylic, has tufted sofas, Barbie’s dream fertility doctor. If Barbie focused on her career for fifteen years and woke up mid thirties needing a haircut and a baby. The décor is the same as Kate Sommerville, where I get facials and once, botox! After the doctor who feels like she could be related to Melissa Gilbert/Laura Ingalls, explains how my tubes work and how at 38 even if I have buckets of eggs, I still “can’t rest easy because it’s all about age.” They’re old, these eggs. She explains all of it to me. She asks if I want a sperm donor. It occurs to me, while sitting across from her desk, with a savings account, and functioning eggs, I could say yes and be pregnant in a week. It blows my mind. I say no to the sperm, like I’m saying no to an after dinner cordial. “Oooohhkay,” she says. Like, you’re missing out. These cordials are the bomb. There you are sitting there acting like cordial is just gonna spring up outta the ground like a geyser, well sister, you gotta another thing coming.

“I’m conservative,” I say. Which is code for, I wanna do this with a partner who loves me enough to watch me get fat and stretchy and then hold our little love larvae in the middle of the night when I am so full of colostrum my teets are a proverbial cheese store. I want that. She nods, “So do you want to freeze your eggs?” I’d rather dye my eggs than freeze my eggs. “I just want to know how they are,” I said, hoping they aren’t little puffs of ovum dust. She nods, bored by me. I’m her regular customer. I just want a report. I’m not one of the outliers buying sperm or a little Japanese hotel for my eggs to rest in until I’m 47 and defrosting them. She cautions me, “the very best thing to do is freeze an embryo.” I nod, my seventh grade health textbook smashing through my head. “So that means?” “Yes, we would fertilize your egg with sperm from a donor and then freeze it.” I nod. The next scenario rolling out through my head. I meet my husband after doing this, when I really am only ovum dust, and I say to him, “Babe! Good news! I have a future baby waiting for us at a cryobank in Westwood! I’m as old as Methuselah, but you can raise your dream genetically mysterious modified baby and I wont even charge you the sperm donor fee, cause really, you donate your sperm to me, only in a different way, but it still totally counts! Whadday say baby? Babay!”

Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being.