well... this is a fucking mom blog

A couple months back, cracking my knuckles, settling in to write about baby Bruce (again), I had a sudden thought, followed swiftly by a panic attack.  

I closed the computer. Spit pooled in my mouth; nausea twisted through my belly and a hot/cold horror spread across my skin. My giant education, my insatiable brain, my thirst for adventure and power and GOD!!!

And I’ve been writing… a mom blog.  

I’ve had a lot of big dreams in my life and this was not one of them.

Joan of Arc by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Image credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum

As a kid, I didn’t fantasize about being a mother—Lily and I played ‘church’ instead of ‘house’ and I was always the priest. I wanted to be potent, in charge. When I climbed out of my window to scoot across the tar roof, I was Indiana Jones. Domestic pretend would’ve felt stifling. How many times can you fake-fill a teacup? In my teens and twenties, thoughts of motherhood appeared, but always with a hotspot of dread that announced an internal friction. How could I have kids and stay free? 

My psychic blister was—at least partly—circumstantial.

When I was young, my mom spent years traveling across the country to work. As far as I could tell, she had two selves: the one who came home to be a mom, and the one who left to be Somebody. I never doubted Mom’s love or commitment: her stints away were three weeks long, but she regularly took the redeye home for a weekend. But when she was gone, it felt total. Vocations are complicated, I figured. Nobody can be in two places at once, parent or not. We make choices, and we live with the rub. 

I wanted to be a writer but was terrified of failure, so I went the way of many misguided literary dreamers and got a law degree. I took the bar exam twenty-weeks pregnant with our first son, Max. I worked as a domestic violence prosecutor in Brooklyn. I got pregnant again, and my mentor warned: “Don’t take a break. The women who take breaks never come back.” I kept “Lean In” on my desk and one eye on the door.

I loved that DA job. It was everything my little-girl self had wanted: theater, with a human purpose. My high heels went clickity clack down the halls of justice and I, like my mother before me, was Somebody: important, successful, independent. But I felt an unexpected friction that wasn’t from missing Max and baby Augie. It took a while for me to realize I was torn because of my unrealized creativity. I was split not because of the kids, but because I was a writer, pretending to be a DA. 

To ease the tension, I started scribbling in the court benches between cases. The head of the bureau caught me with a Moleskine every day at Hale and Hearty Soup where we both got lunch. When I went to her office to quit, I blamed it on the boys. We didn’t talk about my Moleskines until she walked me to the door. She paused, looked me in the eyes and said: “I also want to write a book.”

It took me ten years to appreciate what she was saying: the kids are your off-ramp; your permission. Go live your dream. No conflict.

**

I wrote during preschool naps and mothered in the afternoons, always with the support of our caregiver, Cherry. I was still young; wide-eyed enough to think it might all come easy. The years went on. A third son. A second novel about families and longing, drafted and declined.

I’ve written before about crying myself to sleep in the weeks after my favorite novel didn’t sell. My throat felt knit with wire. The world didn’t want my story, but silence hurt. So I did what any desperate writer would: I blogged. 

I created TNT to explore the shadows of self-doubt; to keep my dignity in the face of the uninterested literary gatekeepers. But the weirdest thing happened. I’d sit to write about writing, and tales of motherhood leaked out instead.  

**

It’s easy to meet a weekly deadline when you write what’s most alive and immediate. Nothing’s more vibrant than a bunch of boys, kicking me in the guts (not always metaphorically), making me laugh, offering up epiphanies like: “We’re uploading the operating system into a set of human brains! Parenting is the ultimate creative act!” Motherhood is comical and muscular and heartbreaking—excellent material. I just hoped you wouldn’t notice.

So I kept ‘mother’ out of my bio. I only put ‘motherhood’ in the descriptor next to ‘ambition’ because it made the role seem more… serious? About six months ago, my friends

Noha Beshir

and

Marc Typo

encouraged me to own the parenting aspect of this space and I joked, “What’s next? Promos for nonstick cookware?”

The comment surprised me. What are all these internalized prejudices? Why don’t I believe motherhood is a worthwhile, literary subject? Then I remembered Jessi Klein’s “I’ll Show Myself Out,” and this viral excerpt from The Cut:

I invite you to investigate your gut reaction to the term “mommy blog.” Personally, I’ll confess, it always strikes me as mosquito-ish, something small and trivial. If this rings true for you as well, don’t feel guilty; we’ve all just internalized that the word “mommy” automatically diminishes whatever noun comes after it. I guarantee you if Ernest Hemingway were alive and writing an online column about his experience of being a father, no one would call it a “daddy blog.” We’d call it For Whom the Bell Fucking Tolls.

**

If I had to name the moment this became a mom blog, it’s when I power-squatted our last baby. 

Right after Bruce was born—in our bathroom—my nostrils flared. “It’s the smell of birth,” Tanya, one of our midwives said. I’d smelled it before, three times. But the midwives didn’t race in with bleach, so the copper blood stayed on my legs, the salty amniotic broth on the floor and the blue, twisted umbilical cord kept pulsing between me and Bruce, smelling flat and alkaline. The rawness of an unmediated birth hit me hard. The experience was so carnal, with labor itself a trip through the bardo. When I was transitioning, I clutched the edge of the bathtub and stared into the green eyes of our other midwife, Sarah. “I’m dying,” I said, and I was sure. Sarah didn’t blink.

It took an experience of that physical magnitude–a trip all the way to the edge of my twisted little psyche and my mortality to realize… Motherhood is the most serious business. It is holding life and fearing constantly that it will morph or disappear. It’s being immediately responsible for that, at all times. But somehow—even through three other kids—I hadn’t admitted the immensity of the task. It has taken ten years to realize how mothering has forged me in quiet totality. I’ve spent hundreds of days plotting my escape—imagining myself spelunking through the Temple of Doom, or getting ordained so people would LISTEN TO WHAT I HAVE TO SAY. But I’ve made the choice—requiring all my bravery and psycho-spiritual athleticism—to remain.

I’ve stayed, in no small part, because of women like Klein—great writers who treat motherhood as worthy material. My favorite part of The Cut essay is when Klein wonders why we’ve collectively overlooked motherhood as a hero’s journey: 

You’d have to realize that while you were blissed out on your mother’s lap, one of those epic battles, the kind that envelops heroes as they fight their way out of a ring of fire, was raging just above your head. No one wants to believe that in the moments you felt the most peaceful, the woman cradling you so softly was shielding you from a sword that she herself was holding.

The adventure is a gradual unfolding marked by sudden urges to cut and run. But you don’t. Because deep down, you know the real power and challenge is what’s right here.

The mothering journey isn’t unlike a writing career, honestly. I’ve been told ‘no’ so many times I can’t remember every rejection. At the end of those disappointing work days, I’ve been shouted at so loudly, my ears ring all night. But I hold the sword steady. I thank the agent who declined my idea; I peer at our boys’ sleeping faces and, in their silence, I remember the way they looked as newborns—like weirdly shaped wisemen who deserved the best of me. If you show up long enough, with everything you’ve got, you get transformed. 

Writing is a controlled mystery and motherhood is active chaos. The sword is always dangling. It’s weight is my exhaustion, my depletion, my frustration that, unmitigated for long enough, turns to clumsily wielded rage. Every day is a mix of gratitude so deep it feels like grief. Both writing and motherhood can feel intensely lonely, even when I’m surrounded. Doing both well means letting my biggest emotions roil around and transmute me in ways I can’t control or imagine. I don’t know what’s on the other side of this trip. I don’t know where I’m going. Normally, I’d run just to feel like I had a plan. But I don’t do that anymore.

Klein again, on mothering:

For most of us it’s not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn’t know was there.

The frontiers of my work are my own edges. Every day I think of the selves I’ve given away to stay, holding the boys tender, vital hearts so openly it’s like they’re beating in my hand. Then, I mine the experience with the best words I can find. I fuse myself together. No conflict.

And here’s where the melding happens. In this fucking mom blog. 

**

In another life, I might’ve been an itinerant archaeologist. I might’ve stood at an altar, robes dangling from my open arms. But I’m home, in pilling stretch pants, cross-legged at my laptop, about to get a toddler from his nap. I’m proud of who these callings have made me.

Motherhood didn’t take my potential and waste it—even if I, myself, undervalued the job. I’m the writer I want to be because I’ve been tenderized and shot through with white hot love. And I’m the mom I want to be because I make meaning of the slow motion days that race into years. What’s the goal if not to be in awe of what’s in front of you? And you, reading this, make it possible.

In gratitude, 

Isabel

PS: Now that I’ve shouted my mothering identity on the Internet, I’ll wrestle this dark question—

“Fuuuuuuck! Am I a trad wife?!”

Next week.