Like a Mother

We are still at a point where we lack stories—diverse stories—about pregnancy and motherhood. Only if we tell and hear these stories do we have a chance at understanding the experience, of making progress. Only if we see these stories as inherently valuable will we appreciate women as we should. Only then will we have the chance of creating a society that listens to, champions, and supports us for the marvelously strong and vulnerable beings that we are.

To be a mother is to be on intimate, daily terms with conflict, sadness, joy, anger—all the big emotions, all of them urgent, right there under the skin ready to jump out. You can’t live in the close proximity of an infant’s cries, a toddler’s frustration, a child’s squeals, without some of that intensity affecting you.

hen it comes to motherhood, we tend to gloss over, ignore, judge, or, even worse, pathologize difficult emotions. Intentionally or not, we shame and isolate women who don’t have the joyful pregnancy and postpartum experiences our culture expects rather than helping or really making an effort to understand them.

Becoming a mother may be one of our most culturally traditional acts, but it is also the place where we can break with our most limiting, oppressive traditions.

Becoming a mother may be one of our most culturally traditional acts, but it is also

ecoming a mother may be one of our most culturally traditional acts, but it is also the place where we can break with our most limiting, oppressive traditions.

I wonder why we need new mothers to look like we did before we had babies. Why we push ourselves to “get our bodies back.” My body will never go back to what it was; it’s made a person, traveled to another dimension, and given birth to another world. The journey has left more than a few marks. I want to embrace that.

being a mother means honoring the distinct people we have always been and recognizing that, as members of a family, we’ll be finding our way apart and together, again and again, for a lifetime.

“Why can’t we guarantee that a woman always feels well cared for?” Penny Simkin asked at one point during our conversation. “All we need is a human being. And she doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist.”

“It’s not how you give birth, it’s how you’re cared for that really matters,”