Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood, Pregnancy

Hole

September 17, 2018

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…

#metoo, Guest Posts, motherhood

Learning to Say No: #MeToo and Mothering

September 3, 2018

CW: This post addresses unwanted sexual advances and may contain explicit language.

By Lilly Bright

“Mommy, I love this beautiful person staring back at me from the mirror!” my five-year-old daughter exclaims from the bathroom where she stands facing the sink. Inwardly I rejoice, then wonder how many of us women think that on a daily basis, or ever? An honest exclamation, wild joy for the person staring back at us in the mirror?

For the past year, I’ve been contemplating how to make a meaningful contribution to the #MeToo movement, a personal experience that could illuminate, an allegory, some teachable moment. Then last week, walking the streets of Santa Monica, an uncomfortable memory surfaced. One of those that never actually left but that also wasn’t a regular visitor. But there it was- Proustian in the way it overwhelmed my senses and severe in the way it challenged held notions of categorization. The event isn’t murky yet it’s felt this way whenever I’ve attempted to package it. For years I diminished what happened because I didn’t say “no” and the harassment didn’t strike me as apparent. But the truth is, a line was crossed, a red zone rife with sexual power-play and coercion. And it went like this: Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, parenting

Leaning Into The Pain

June 27, 2018

By Claudia Hinz

“Ooh, look at the babies!” my daughter exclaimed at dinner. I hurried around to her side of the table from which she had a clear view of the park outside. Over the years, we have all held to our assigned spots at the dinner table, although my husband has moved into my 19 year-old daughter’s chair since she left for college. The other seat, my son’s seat, has been vacant for a while, but I leave a fresh cloth napkin and a placemat for him.

The baby goslings tottered around after their mother who nosed them in the right direction of the water. The sun was low in the sky and my eyes are not what they once were, so the goslings appeared as electrified yellow balls. Cute, as my daughter pronounced, but also dangerous in their vulnerability. I knew that in mere days they would be transformed into gawky, unsteady juveniles, the cute baby stage left behind.

This morning, there is the smell of perfume in the kitchen. She has left but I still smell my daughter in here with me. It is her voice on our answering machine. A message recorded when she was probably in middle school, the voice of a young girl, my baby. She is now 18. She just voted in her first election and will be headed off to college in less than four months. Still, I can’t change the message. We never use the home phone, but I am reluctant to cancel the service because I cannot bear to lose my daughter’s voice on the machine. Continue Reading…

Fatherhood, Fear, Guest Posts

All Fathers Want to Hurt Their Sons

June 17, 2018

By Brian Zimbler

“I feel like you’re doing everything in your power, verbally and non-verbally, to tell me not to say anything negative,” I say to Randy, my therapist.

We’re doing a phone session. I’m propped up on Nora’s side of the bed against an ornamental IKEA pillow. Nora and Myla are downstairs, watching Elliot. It’s his 12^th day. It’s a snow day. I have my jeans on, which is a total Nora no-no (no outdoor clothes can touch the duvet) but I am being passive aggressive because I want her to love me more than the baby.

“I’m not forcing you to be positive,” Randy parries, “If anything, I’m asking you to stay in — “

“I know, I know, stay in the good feelings. I am. I’m trying. You gotta admit, I could’ve spun into the real dark telling you the parents-at-the-bris story just now, but I stayed good.”

Elliot’s bris was last week. My parents came down. The mohel, in the prep documents she sent us, let us know she would need an assistant to stay by her side throughout the process. Nora and I decided this would either be my father the doctor or my mother the therapist, we would decide day of; however, day of, I decided – though I can’t really call it a decision, more a clear loud message from inside – that I would never ever let either of my parents be with my son at his most vulnerable, ever, and that I would be the one to usher him through.

“It’s never the dad,” said the mohel.

“This time it’s the dad,” I said.

And I did it. I stayed with my beautiful new son even through the part upstairs where she pulled my beautiful new son’s foreskin back and clamped it, to prepare him to be cut. Even through the part where he was brought downstairs covered in a tallis on a sick infant’s gurney. Even through the part where all the sugar water in the world could not put my strong son to sleep. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood

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, Mental Health, No Bullshit Motherhood

But, What If…?: Confessions of an Anxious Mother

April 4, 2018

By Catherine Jones

I suffer from anxiety, which is debilitating at times. I have suffered for as long as I can remember, both mentally and physically. And while I’ve tried many methods that help to alleviate my symptoms, I know my anxiety will never completely go away. It only got much worse after my child was born. I had a lot of time during my maternity leave to come up with some truly unreasonable, completely invalid fears. One of my biggest issues with anxiety is that I know I’m being silly, but I can’t help it. I know there’s no reason to be afraid to ask for help finding an item at the grocery store and there’s definitely no reason to contemplate all the awful things that may happen to my child. I hope some anxious mothers out there can relate, or at least be relieved that they’re not nearly as imaginative (cuckoo) as me.

When my son was first born, he hardly slept, or if he did it was for maybe an hour at a time. He was always hungry and wanted to be nursed for hours and then be nursed again after a short catnap. He never seemed particularly tired, but I was getting loopy from a lack of sleep. When he did manage to sleep at night for a few hours at a time, I kept getting up to check on him, straining my eyes in the darkness to make sure his little chest was still rising and falling. When he switched to formula and actually started to sleep through the night, I was terrified. Why was he sleeping so much? Was something wrong? Infants are supposed to sleep for most of the day, but not my baby! I slept on a cot in his room for months. Continue Reading…

#metoo, Guest Posts

The “Me” in #MeToo

March 25, 2018

By Jessie Kanzer

#MeTooButNotMyGirls. That is my declaration today, on this blistery New York Sunday, after my three-year-old’s swim lesson, and before my one-year-old’s gym class. I’m not here to go into the sordid details of my own pain body: the minutia of inappropriate sexual contact when I was a wee girl, the play-by-play of getting seduced (date raped?) by my college internship supervisor. We can talk about our wounds until we are blue in the face—and we should—because change is happening as we speak. But, for me, an eternal self-help’er, it’s also important to look at the “Why.” Not why they harmed me — that’s their problem, and that will be their reckoning. But why I was the easiest of prey. Why I often relinquished my power before I was even asked. What messages did I absorb during my childhood and young-adulthood? I need to know. Because, #MeTooButNotMyGirls.

“Be nice.” “Be pretty.” “Know your place.”

My formative years took place in the Soviet Union. I was taught to obey authority from very early on (I still have an inexplicable fear of cops and principals). The strictness of a Soviet daycare center was just what you would imagine it to be. And then in school, we were further stripped of our individuality and self-esteem. I was a born people-pleaser to boot, and I worked very hard to please my young parents and stoic grandmother. My strict teachers, my relentless gymnastics coaches. The passersby who expected me to smile. The family friends who expected hugs and kisses. “I’m a good girl, a very good girl,” was my motto since the age of two. Polite? Check. Cute and neat? Check. Obedient? I bucked that one at times, but not without consequence. Continue Reading…

Grief, Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood

The Thing About Grief Is…

March 21, 2018

By Stacey Shannon

The thing about grief is:

I can’t trust myself.

No matter how I rail against this part of my life/year/self, that is the bottom line. It is part of me. And though I may disregard it for 11 out 12 months of the year, it’s always there. It WILL come at me like Shane Stant came at Nancy Kerrigan with a club. When it arrives, it does what it always does. It hobbles my knees and runs away as I fall to the ground, asking “Why, why?”.

No, I’m tired of asking why. I’ll never really know. Moving on, next question:

When? Nope, done asking when. When will it be over? The answer to that one is always the same and it is this: never.

How? That’s a good one. Let’s unpack that. (Don’t you hate when people say that? It’s so douchey. “I know you are feeling rotten right now, let’s unpack that’! How about, NO?) How best to navigate these two weeks every winter, every fucking winter, 18 winters and counting. How? I’m not going to answer that. Because when I do answer that question, I immediately discount my own answer. Simply because: I can’t trust it. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, parenting

Pinned

March 16, 2018

By Elizabeth Newdom

“Would you act like that if you were having dinner with the queen?” my dad asked me from across the kitchen table, his eyes framed in black rectangles, his brows two arched wings.

Behind him, I could see my reflection in the display case housing my grandmother’s gold-rimmed china plates. A rush of blood filled my cheeks. For three impossible seconds, I resembled a captured animal, stuck in the blinding light of someone’s headlamps.

My eyes fell heavily upon my place mat as I continued chewing a piece of steak, trying to work through the meat’s toughness. Had I spoken out of turn?

“Don’t touch those,” he continued, pointing at the centerpiece – a glass bowl filled with ceramic vegetables.

Had I touched them? I might have nudged the fake asparagus a little closer to the pea pod and artichoke. But I said nothing. Instead, my eyes returned to the mat, my cheek color deepening into a crimson sunset.

And were we in fact royalty? I was only seven, so naturally I was confused. Perhaps, when I turned eight, the queen was going to show up with my prince. Maybe all of the table manners and social etiquette were preparation for life in someone’s faraway castle: every linen napkin, crystal water glass, and salad fork, part of an elaborate grooming process. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Relationships

Time’s Up

March 9, 2018

By Jennifer Lang

Six years ago this summer, I upended my life and moved halfway across the world from New York to Israel after my French husband announced he couldn’t spend one more year in America. Our son, eighteen, had enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, and neither one of us could imagine sending him off alone, to a country where parents revere and pamper their teenaged soldiers. We never consulted our girls, twelve and fourteen, who cried and complained and came because they had no choice.

My yes included a ten-year clause: from the start of first child’s army service to the end of last child’s service, from my mid-forties to my mid-fifties. Philippe, desperate to return to the country where we’d met and married, accepted my conditions.

After we settled into our house in Raanana in the center of the country, I told anyone who asked that I didn’t intend to stay in Israel if even one of my children left, especially for my birthplace. If I couldn’t carve out a professional niche for myself. If I felt scared of the never-ending cycle of violence. If I couldn’t handle the distance between my aging parents and me. If I reached a stage when the “ifs” keep me up at night. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, parenting, Yoga

This Surrender

February 26, 2018

photo courtesy of Suzi Baum

By Suzi Baum

I go to a yoga class with babies.

A college student tends a cluster of children in a room behind the yoga studio while mothers, fathers, people who I don’t know well enough to know if they have kids or not and it does not matter at all, here we are with students, elders, people of all shapes and abilities-all of us stop on our mats for an hour, stop all the else we are about, and center, together.

We are marbles off track.

We run the edge of the singing bowl that is this class, spinning around the rim until the centering pull of breath and asana brings us to the center, of the bowl, of our selves, of this moment.

There is often a shout or a cry at just the perfect moment. We chuckle. We breathe. We go on.

I did not always attend yoga classes with babies. Continue Reading…

Addiction, Guest Posts, Tough Conversations

Have A Rib

February 18, 2018

*Max (front) with his brother Jake (in Mickey ears) at Disneyland 1994

By Suellen Meyers

My son Max is sensitive and particular about certain things. The day he is born I swear he looks at me from his bassinet, smirks, and begins to cry for a bottle.

As soon as he is able to articulate his needs, he insists on wearing only Fruit of the Loom low-cut socks, as any other type drive him crazy. He pulls them as tight as his little hands can, then thrusts out his feet so the nearest adult can fasten his shoes securely over the taut material, to the point I fear his circulation might get cut off. When he rides in the car he cries, “My waist, my waist.” He tells me the seatbelt smothers him. I feel helpless and perplexed by his pleas for relief. In the front seat, I cannot manage much more than a “We’ll be there soon,” hoping that will calm him. It never does.

I become aware of Max using drugs when, as a freshman in high school, he is expelled. Higher than a proverbial kite on eight Xanax, he is found doling out peachy colored pills like candy to classmates as they passed him in the halls.

He does his first rehab stint at nineteen. Outpatient. He lists heroin addiction on the intake form, albeit I don’t think he ever met a mind-altering substance he didn’t like. I beg the doctors to put him in an inpatient program, but insurance won’t cover it.

By the time he is twenty-one he’s been using for years, still, I am surprised when I receive the phone call. Continue Reading…

Divorce, Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood

Where the Love Is

February 16, 2018

By Danielle Scruton

Her voice was muddled by dreamsleep, but I heard the words nonetheless: “This is where the love is…”. She had that look of peace about her. The one that melts me every time. The one that helps me feel less like a mother who can never get it right and more like a hand of love: helping her, guiding her. Her face lit softly by the nightlight, she looked years younger than ten. She would lose this babyface soon and while- as a mother- I was far from ready, as a woman I smiled within at what the tween and teenage years would bring.

It’s a bit unusual, her situation. Her father and I are divorcing and she has two other men in her life. It’s not something I give much thought to, but it is different I suppose. She will never have a stepmother, though it is very likely she will have two stepfathers. My bond with my daughter is as unshakable as any other mother-daughter relationship, but it’s possible she needs me even more because of where the chips have fallen. I could be wrong. In any case, I feel the importance of my influence in every exchange we have.

And her slumber-filled words meant more because the day had been hard. It was like that sometimes and more so with her than with my son. She had spent a weekend with her father. Her emotions loomed around her and came at me with defiant words. Tons of attitude. She was annoyed and yet wanted me close, only to push me away again moments later. Continue Reading…

#metoo, Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood

Dear Little Baby Girl Child Nestled In My Arms

February 5, 2018

By Kimberly Valzania

Dear Little Baby Girl Child Nestled in my Arms,

I see you looking up at me, with big brown eyes. I see you smiling. Happy to be clean, cradled, and loved. Safe, innocent, with your tiny, feminist fist already flailing and pumping.

A girl baby without a story. No stories at all to tell, just yet.

An empty canvas of a life, just waiting for paint.

Maybe by the time you are older, old enough to do all the things you will surely dream of doing, all of this sexual predator stuff will be a thing of the past. Maybe you will grow up in a world where people do not behave this way. Where men, especially, do not prowl and prey. Where some men do not look for a way to pounce first, and then deny or downplay.

Maybe you will not know how it feels to be bullied by a boy, or passed over for a boy. Maybe, for example, you will raise your hand to answer a math question in class, and you will be called on by your teacher. Maybe your teacher will champion your worth, your potential, your intellect…at the very same time you recognize it in yourself.

If something happens, maybe you will be believed the first time you tell your story. Maybe your words will be all the proof they need. Maybe your voice will not ever be muffled, or bought. Maybe your body will not be consumed, or judged, or hurt, or caught. Continue Reading…

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