Last night I was reading a New York Times profile of Megan Rapinoe, a soccer star I really admire. The piece mentioned that she has a twin sister, and went out of it’s way to let readers know that her sister is “older by 11 minutes.” Cue the sound of a record scratching in my mind.
I have twin daughters. People love to ask us questions in public, and one of their favorites is “Which one is older?”
Let me stop right here. Say you meet someone. Say it comes up that you were both born on March 28. Would you ask that stranger what precise hour and minute he or she was born? Or would you just say, “Wow, we have the same birthday! We’re the same age!”
I think people ask this question because, like most of our first-meeting questions, we’re trying to “place” people and figure them out. Asking about birth order lets us know which one is supposed to be the bossy older sibling, and which one is supposed to be the attention-seeking youngest. People even seem to believe that the “older” twin should also be the bigger one, as if the 6 lb. size difference that currently exists between Etta and Claire could be attributed to a head start gained by a few extra minutes out in the world. These things are stereotypes at best, and they’re simply not useful in the case of twins, and, I believe, can be harmful. It attempts to impose a hierarchy where none exists.
I have heard about “older” twins lording it over younger twins, and about parents who truly treat their twins as if there is some sort of inborn difference that results from what is essentially the luck of the draw. Wherever an egg implants in the uterus, the twin closest to the “exit” is born first. And in the case of a c-section, isn’t it just whom the surgeon grabs first?
In a society that loves to label people and to lump twins together, I want my girls to feel loved and supported for the individuals they are, not shoehorned into some sort of role, be it birth order, or gender, or religion, or whatever. I don’t want strangers deciding that one is “the bossy one” because she’s “older” or something. I’m even thinking I may just keep mum on the whole thing if asked. Because really, from the moment of conception, their cells have been dividing the same. The entire time I was pregnant, they were the same gestational age. They still are. Who was first pulled out into the sterile brightness of the operating room really doesn’t matter much to me.
I’ve posted a little bit about feeding my girls, but after a few comments on Twitter and Instagram about Miss Etta’s eating habits, I thought it might be helpful to go ahead and write a more detailed post about my semi-Baby Led Weaning table-food-eating one year old.
We started introducing solids in the form of purees around 6 months, but from the start, Etta wanted little to do with being spoon fed. She likes to do things by and for herself, and the whole thing was largely a very messy battle with her wanting to control the spoon, and very little food winding up in her mouth. By about 9 months, she was still mostly not eating food, so we decided to try “Baby Led Weaning,” which I had mostly heard of on mama message boards. Basically, Baby Led Weaning is giving kids pieces of food that they can feed themselves. I never read the books on the subject, but there are many, as well as websites, so feel free to seek that stuff out. We just started giving her steamed hunks of sweet potato and carrot, about adult finger sized, and from there eventually wound up graduating to just feeding her foods.
These days, my entire fridge is full of little tupperwares of Etta meal components. Then her meals are basically just multiple choice problems. Breakfast is usually fruit+grain+dairy, and lunch and dinner are protein+veggies+grain, with an occasional dairy item thrown in.
Fruits:
No sugar added applesauce (the only ingredients are apples and apple juice, but I may start adding cinnamon to give her some flavor), served in a Yummi Pouch.
I buy canned/jarred fruit a lot, and either give it to her to feed herself in chunks, or puree it in my Ninja Blender and serve it to her in a Yummi Pouch, often adding oatmeal baby cereal to it. We like peaches, pears, pineapple, and mixed tropical fruit in juice (not syrup).
Fresh fruits like pears, sliced into wedges she can hold and gnaw on. Hunks of banana or mango, sliced berries, and clementine segments have also gone over well. I’ve even bought frozen berries, thawed, and served them to her, though they were a huge mess. In the future, I may restrict berries to purees in the Yummi Pouch so she looks less like an extra from a zombie flick.
Grains/starches:
We are big fans of toast+spreads, both for breakfast and dinner. Toast is usually a halved multigrain English muffin or multigrain bread. Spreads include guacamole, butter, hummus, jam, pumpkin butter, tahini, almond, and peanut butter. I cut the toast into strips of about adult finger size, and she goes to town.
Tortillas, spread with any of the above spreads, or as a cheese quesadilla.
Earth’s Best baby crackers or graham crackers
Veggie pastas, like the kind with spinach and tomato in it, either plain or tossed in some simple tomato sauce (this is messy). Bowties and Penne seem easy to hold.
Spinach and cheese raviolis, cooked and cut into quarters.
Rice
Mashed potatoes, though this is a messy proposition and usually necessitates a bath as she smears it in her hair.
Roasted potatoes.
The occasional French fry.
Proteins:
BEANS! Etta loves beans. I buy organic canned beans (I admit, I’m not stressing about BPA in canned foods at this point, though I buy BPA free items whenever possible), and she likes kidney, pinto, black, and garbanzo beans. I just rinse them and keep them in a container in the fridge. She gets a handful at a time. Hummus on toast, as mentioned above, also counts as a serving of beans. Warning: you will see the bean peels when you change a poopy diaper. Do not be alarmed!
Cooked chicken, shredded or cubed. She usually only gets this if we’re having chicken for dinner.
Fish. So far she’s just had salmon when we were having it for dinner, but she was a fan. She loves flavorful stuff.
Scrambled tofu. She loved scrambled eggs until we had a pretty strong allergic reaction, and she likes scrambled tofu almost as much, particularly flavored up with chili powder and cheese.
Veggies:
Frozen mixed veggies have been a staple. They’re easy to steam in the microwave and store in a tupperware, and she gets to try a large variety. I often add butter or olive oil and some sort of spices or herbs, because I’ve discovered through serving her bits of our meals that she really loves flavor. Peas, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, zucchini, squash, butternut squash, edamame, and lima beans are all easy to get in the freezer section.
Sauteed, steamed, ora roasted fresh veggies are great too– whatever we’re having for dinner, she often gets some. Zucchini seems to be a fave.
Halved cherry tomatoes. She loves these. The acidity often irritates the skin on her face and hands though, so I can’t give them to her as often as she’d like. She noms all the goodness out and spits out the peels.
Weird stuff, like hearts of palm from a salad we had, are always fun for her to try, and she often ends up loving them.
Cheese. Cubed cheddar, jack, or mozzarella are easy, as is pre-crumbled goat cheese and feta. She loves them all.
When I have several of the above components, meals just become a simple matter of pulling out the containers and giving her a little of each category. Any time I don’t think she’s eaten a lot of the food, I give her a pouch of yogurt or apple sauce to round out the meal and fill her up. So far, she’s pretty willing to try just about anything, and she’s not very picky. I will be sure to update with a new post once we’re further into toddlerhood!
Well, it’s official. My baby girls are now leaving the baby stage behind and headed toward toddlerhood, as they are ONE! I’d be sad about how quickly time has passed, and continues to pass, but they are mostly so much fun right now that who can be sad about that? They’re exploring and learning and growing and really coming into themselves personality wise. They interact with each other more than ever, and their relationship is so cool to watch. Etta will be walking any day now, and we hope Claire will be catching up soon, as she’s getting started with PT and OT (I promise a complete Claire update soon). Basically: having one year old twins is just crazy and busy and cool, and I don’t have time to be too wistful.
We celebrated the first year of their lives, and the fact that we survived it, with a fiesta full of people we love and who love us. My fashionista sister not only came all the way from Nashville with her new FIANCE and two pugs in tow, but she also took lots of pictures with her big fancy camera. So, now you get to share in what was a truly lovely day, despite gray, drizzly skies that forced what was supposed to be a back yard party indoors. Not that location matters much when you have a margarita machine, you know?
I know blogging’s been sparse around here lately. I fell off the vegan wagon and the blogging wagon at about the same time. It’s a good thing though: I’m studying feverishly to try and pass the last step between me and an MA in English Literature: the dreaded comps exam. So, expect blogging to resume something resembling regularity sometime after the first week of April, at which point I’m sure I’ll have cute Bufflo Gals’ 1st Birthday photos.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a new routine going in my kitchen, and it involves living organisms.
No, I’m not raising goats or something out in our rented back yard. I started making my own yogurt and now I don’t even know who I am anymore. I distinctly remember a friend saying she made her own yogurt one time, and thinking to myself, “that’s nutty. Just buy the yogurt, ya weirdo.”
But then I got my almost-one-year-olds off formula, discovered they love whole milk, and discovered further that they REALLY REALLY love whole milk yogurt. And that YoBaby shiz ain’t cheap.
Yogurt faces.
Another problem: though Claire loves to be spoon fed (she lives on purees, after all), Little Miss Feeds Herself wants no part of me lovingly spooning yogurt into her mouth. If I let her try to spoon feed herself, every end but the end with the yogurt gets in her mouth, and it’s an epic mess. If I try to feed her myself, it’s an insane battle of waving arms and yelling at me as she tries to grab the spoon while I’m trying to stick it in her mouth. About every 5th bite gets in there, which is nuts.
So, to solve the “my kids eat 8-16 oz of yogurt per day” problem and the Etta loves yogurt but eating it with her hands is difficult problem, I have discovered two solutions.
The first, as I mentioned before, is making my own yogurt. I basically follow this process from Annie’s Eats. I heat half a gallon of milk to 180 degrees to denature the proteins in it (which is apparently important). Then, I pour it into a Pyrex glass bowl and cool it to between 110 and 120 degrees. Then I add a couple of tablespoons of yogurt (at this point, I use the last bit of my homemade yogurt, but my first batch used plain Stonyfield Farm whole milk yogurt), and stir. Then, I preheat my oven for one minute (which gets it to about 120 degrees) turn it off, and turn on the light. Meanwhile I put a lid on the Pyrex and swaddle the whole thing with a few kitchen towels.
I leave the Pyrex in the oven with the light on overnight, for about 12 hours. In the morning, when I wake up, I go in, take off the lid, and it’s yogurt. Well, yogurt swimming in whey. So, I line a colander with either a couple layers of cheesecloth or a thin dishtowel like a flour sack towel, and set it in a bowl (you could just do the sink, but I’m saving the whey because I’m crazy and want to try making whey ricotta cheese), and strain the yogurt until it’s nice and thick and creamy. Half a gallon of milk left overnight yields 1.5 quarts of yogurt and 2 cups of whey. Scraping it off the towel with a spatula is really as tough as the work gets here.
What the yogurt looks like when I take it out in the morning, pre-straining.Straining yogurt through a colander lined with a flour sack towel.Resultant strained yogurt and whey.
Taste-wise, the homemade yogurt is just as good as the plain whole milk yogurt I was buying. It works great as a sour cream substitute, too. To serve it to the girls, I usually mix it with some pureed fruit and some oatmeal baby cereal so they get a complete breakfast. For snacks or when they need a little something after dinner, I just stir in a smidge of agave syrup for sweetness (because they can’t have honey yet).
This brings me to: how do I get the yogurt into the girl who won’t be spoon fed?
I had seen on Pinterest some reusable baby food pouches that are basically the same as those Plum baby food pouches, except the spout is on the side and the top is like a Ziploc bag. So, after searching on Amazon and reading some reviews, I decided to go with the Yummi Pouch (consider this a mini-review, I guess) because they were cheaper than the Little Green Pouch, which I was also considering. They are awesome, y’all. I just fill them with 4 oz. of yogurt, zip up the top, hand it to Etta, and she knows exactly how to hold it and suck the yogurt out of the spout, a feat she figured out within seconds of having the first drops squeezed onto her tongue and realizing that sweet yogurty goodness was inside that thing.
The Yummi Pouches claim to be dishwasher safe, but I’m not sure I trust my dishwasher to hold it open enough to get clean. So, I’ve been washing them by hand using a bottle brush, and drying them on my bottle rack. Works fine. One tip I did read in one of the reviews: the lids are easy to lose, but are the same diameter as the disposable baby food pouches, so if you use those, just save the lids in case you lose the lids to your pouches. I’ve tried the lids from a GoGoSqueez applesauce pouch and they worked just fine!
Overall, my newfound yogurt-making hobby is saving me money– a 32 oz. container of Stonyfield Farm plain whole milk yogurt costs me $4ish, while an entire gallon of milk, which yields 64 oz. of yogurt, costs the same. So the homemade is literally half the price, with none of the trash of the packaging. And since I also mix it with fruit purees, we can compare the cost to the YoBaby yogurt, which would be almost $11 for the amount a gallon of milk yields in homemade yogurt! Maybe I’m not as crazy as I once thought my yogurt-making friend was!
Rep. Andy Mayberry is making national headlines by trying to ban abortion after 20 weeks of gestation (that’s the halfway mark, FYI). He claims this is because this is the point at which a fetus begins to feel and respond to pain, and he cites some studies, but this is hardly an established fact, and is controversial in the medical community. In the committee today, he testified that 98% of abortions happen before 20 weeks. Why would the minority get such a late abortion? It’s not because they just didn’t get around to it or had a sudden change of heart. Something big happens at 20 weeks. It’s the point in a pregnancy when the “big ultrasound” happens. The one that tells you if you’re carrying a boy or a girl (or two girls, in my case), but also the one that tells you for the first time that there could be something seriously wrong, even life-threatening, with your fetus. I know what it’s like to sit in that ultrasound room and get bad news. Like Andy Mayberry, who also has a daughter with spina bifida, I am fortunate that our news wasn’t as bad as it could have been. My daughter and the Mayberry’s daughter have a condition that is treatable and manageable and won’t stand in the way of a full life. Many parents are not so fortunate. For many parents, that moment in the ultrasound room is what turns a wanted pregnancy into a nightmare of heartbreaking news and difficult choices. Placing an abortion ban at that point in a pregnancy leaves these parents without options right when they need them most. It places a legislature between families and their doctors, right when those families most need compassionate care.
I know some will say that the bill has been amended to include exceptions for the health of the mother, for fetal anomalies, and for rape and incest. But as one of my own doctors testified before another committee, when we’re talking criminality for doctors who provide abortions, how much of threat does there have to be before it’s “enough” to justify an abortion? I have a congenital heart defect and a previous severe cardiac pregnancy complication, but no one can say exactly how risky another pregnancy would be for me. My doctors agree that I should not have more children for the sake of my health, but my condition is very very rare, and there isn’t much data on it, let alone actual odds of my survival. Do you think my doctors are willing to risk jail time and the loss of their career and livelihood on my chances of survival? I don’t. And yet I am not willing to risk leaving my girls motherless, and should my IUD fail (as it could, I personally know people who became pregnant with an IUD), I would not think twice before terminating to protect my own life and stay here to care for the girls who need me.
The bill passed the committee despite my testimony. It will probably pass the Senate. The governor will probably sign it. I fear for the state my girls will grow up in, and I fear for their rights and mine.
For every mother who testified that she’s glad she carried her anencephalic baby to term (that’s a baby with no brain and a damaged skull, with no chance of survival outside the womb), there are mothers thankful they had the opportunity for a post-20-week abortion (essentially an induction of labor), to prevent needless suffering for her and her doomed child. For everyone like Andy Mayberry and me, whose kids will have challenges but lead full and happy lives, there are people who got literally fatal news. For everyone like me who survived pre-eclampsia and peri-partum cardiomyopathy, there are people whose fatal complications developed too early to save themselves and their babies, and were forced to deliver to save their own lives, meanwhile their babies could not be saved. For everyone on the other side who calls themselves a compassionate conservative fighting for life, there is someone like me, literally fighting for her own, asking for compassionate choices when we need them most.
If you’re in Arkansas, please start writing to your senators and the governor and urge them not to let this bill pass. Post 20-week abortions are rare because they only happen in the most dire of circumstances. These people deserve compassion.
It’s hard to believe the Bufflo Gals have gone from this:
To this:
And as they’ve grown, things have changed with the way we feed them around here. Some things have worked great, others haven’t worked out.
I really wanted to make my own baby food.
And then I met my babies. One wants nothing to do with being spoon fed (as I mentioned in an earlier post) and the other vomits the minute she tastes my homemade food. Not just spits it out. Vomits.
At first, I was sort of offended by this. I thought I had a picky baby, since she would happily gobble down jars of purees both veggie and fruit, and then immediately gag and choke on my homemade stuff that, to my eye, seemed exactly the same as the stuff in a jar. In fact, I remained irritated and offended by this for a few months.
And then I finally googled “spina bifida texture issues” and learned that this is common to many babies with spina bifida, and often requires occupational therapy to fix. And then I felt like a jerk.
We’re looking into our OT and PT options and will be getting a referral soon, but in the meantime, I have accepted that homemade baby food is just not our thing. I can make a few very thin varieties that she will eat (like tomato carrot!), but, since straining every puree through a fine mesh strainer is a huge hassle, I will just be buying jarred purees for Claire. There’s a huge variety of organic Earth’s Best foods available, so that’s mostly what we’re going with. I even got over my aversion to pureed meat, because if she’s gonna be on these things for longer than average, I want to let her have some proteins, and the only other option is lentil dinner.
Meanwhile, Etta is doing a sort of half-assed version of Baby Led Weaning. I haven’t read the books, but I’ve read about it on the internet, and, like most of the rest of my parenting, am sort of doing what feels right. She gets soft chunks of things cut into pieces she can hold in her fist. Sweet potato, pasta, carrot, watermelon, cantaloupe, cheese, and toast are all favorites. It’s going pretty well.
Etta loves eggs. Or did. Until she had an allergic reaction this morning. No more eggs for a while.
Next step: transitioning from formula to milk in about a month, and also trying to transition from bottles to sippy cups. Anyone have tips on that? Both of my girls still have issues with fast-flow nipples, and they nearly drown in sippy cups.
See, when we got our first dog Bessie, we just went to a shelter one day, found a pretty cute pup who seemed playful and friendly, and took her home. There was some puppy chewing of throw pillows and Playstation controllers, but for the most part, she was a freakishly good dog– well behaved, friendly, easy to get along with. Naturally, we thought this was all our doing. We’d go to other people’s houses and encounter unruly dogs who jumped up or begged for food or used the bathroom in the house, and we’d leave thinking to ourselves, what is wrong with them? They’re clearly doing a terrible job as pet parents! We’d think, if only they were as good as we are, they wouldn’t allow that behavior.
Then we got a second dog.
Olive, it turns out, is a vastly different dog, despite our clearly superior dog parenting abilities. In the years we’ve had her, we’ve been completely unable to teach her not to put her paws on us or attempt to climb in our laps or onto the furniture, both places she isn’t allowed. We have had to come to a very shocking conclusion: it’s not that we’re amazing dog owners, we just had a really amazing first dog.
This is a realization I think more first time parents need to come to. It’s a realization we’ve come to yet again as we parent twins who, at every turn, seem determined to remind us that they are very distinct individuals. It started when Claire began sleeping through the night on her own at about 3 months old. Etta still hasn’t mastered that feat. Baby sleep in particular seems to be an area in which everyone fancies themselves an expert. Particularly if they have one kid, the baby equivalent of a Bessie dog, they’ll happily tell you that all you need to do is exactly what they did, and you too will have a baby who sleeps through the night. I hope their next baby is an Olive, every time. Because even though we use the exact same techniques and parenting styles on both of our girls, one sleeps and one doesn’t. We can’t anymore take credit for Claire’s awesome sleeping abilities than we can the blame for Etta’s lack thereof.
The same thing happened with food. Claire took happily to purees quite easily (around 6 months), while Etta has always refused to let us spoon feed her. Several months later, at 10 months, and Etta has only recently decided that while she still hates purees, she’ll willingly chow down on any food she can hold in her own fist. Truly baby-led Baby Led Weaning. I can’t take credit for how either of my girls eats, really, either– they each just do their thing, and I figure out what that thing is through trial and error.
So, you parents of one baby who think you’ve got the whole sleeping and eating figured out through your superior skills? Your kid is probably a Bessie. The next one just might be an Olive.
It’s been months since I posted. It turns out life with twins as a grad student is a little busy, and then you add in the holidays, and you end up with a bit of a hiatus. I also think I’ve sort of been stuck in this rut where, unless a post is some sort of profound meditation on life and parenthood and whatnot, I don’t post it, and frankly, inspiration isn’t easy to find for the sleep deprived whose days are an endless cycle of feeding, changing, snuggling, and playing with babies. So, I’m going to try to get back into posting with less pressure on myself for every post to be some sort of major epiphany.
I figured I’d start with showing you the girls’ room lately, which has gone from a baby space to a space that better functions as a twin toddlers’ room. We’ve changed it around a lot to meet their needs as they are now very nearly ten months old. I know. Two months away from ONE YEAR. It’s insanity how the time has both crept and flown. (You can find the original nursery reveal here.)
I wanted the girls’ room to be more of a play space as they are now starting to be mobile and into everything, and I wanted them to have a safe space to explore. They got a lot of awesome toys from friends and family for Christmas, so we desperately needed some toy storage. Luckily, my husband is a super handy guy, and he built something amazing after seeing a few of my ideas on Pinterest.
To make space, we took out the futon and put in a secondhand chair. I will say, I am SO GLAD we had the futon for the first 8 months. Just to be able to lie down in there, or to rest the babies on either side of me in Boppies and feed both at the same time, was wonderful. I highly recommend a bed or couch in a nursery.
Anyway, here’s the space now, with before and afters for comparison.
Then:
Now:
Then:
Now:
Here’s a closeup of the new toy storage, built by my awesome husband!
The girls can crawl right up and grab blocks and toys out of the bottom bins, and if they’re sitting up, they can reach the shelf. As soon as they’re pulling up, it will be even more accessible. It was important to me that the toys be in view so they could easily see their options and get them for themselves. I had a feeling this would work better than a box or bin, because stuff on the bottom of a bin would be forgotten and never played with.
Then:
Now:
Here you can see the bucket we got to store stuffed animals, as well as one of my favorite things in the entire room, the canvas with the Vonnegut quote. It was a gift from a friend I met through Twitter, a “you survived” gift after all I went through getting the gals into the world. It is from a story in which a character is delivering a baptismal speech for twins, so it’s super apt. It says, “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies– You’ve got to be kind.” I think it’s a great rule.
Overall, the girls have the best-decorated room in our house, and we still haven’t bought a single new piece of furniture beyond the cribs, which were a gift from their grandparents. As I type, the girls are playing in the floor and I’m sitting in the chair.
I’m in my next to last week of classes for my MA program. I’m in the middle of a bunch of academic writing on books like Beloved, Ceremony, and Salvage the Bones, all of which explores the power and ferocity of woman- and mother-hood.
I’m also quietly in the trenches, dealing with a sick baby who’s been running a high fever and barfing so much she had three baths in one day yesterday. It’s a funny thing, the juxtaposition of all of my intellectual thinking about motherhood as some sort of abstract force against the raw power of literal motherhood as this thing that I do, this person I am as I hold a tiny person and just go ahead and let her finish vomiting all over me, just sit there and let it happen, because I know she’s not done yet and attempting to move, or get out of the path of the flow will just exacerbate the mess.
The last lines of Salvage the Bones (which, I swear, this isn’t a spoiler) are “She will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought…She will know that I am a mother.” In this case, I am the she. I am the one who knows. And I am the one who is. In caring for my sick baby, just as I have already many times before in my 8 month stint, just as I will many times to come, I just become unblinkingly confronted with this new fact of my existence. I am a mother. I am the heart that beats the rhythm of comfort under the skin and bones upon which rests the fevered cheek of the one who is flesh of my flesh. What a strange and wonderful privilege it is to provide that resting place. To encircle that tiny, weary person with my arms. To know that I am her mother.
Reading Salvage the Bones with Claire resting in my lap. Etta was napping in the bouncer that I rocked with my feet. It’s how this mother gets her schoolwork done.
Me and one of my sick, sweet babies. Still smiling!
The other day, I wrote a really honest post about the exhausting hardness that is being a parent to two small children and trying to do just about anything else. I was feeling incompetent at life, and because I’m a writer, because literally that is who I am, because even the code of my DNA probably spells words, the way I worked out those feelings was to write them. And cry.
And then something amazing happened: that post got (as of this writing) 21 amazing comments. And on Facebook, where I also shared it, I got 12 other amazing comments, plus a couple of supportive private messages. And the support continued on Twitter. And this morning, a lovely friend took the time to send me an email that warmed my heart and brought tears to my eyes. While one commenter called me a downer, every single other woman who commented did two things: they affirmed that my feelings were normal and OK, and they assured me, things do get better. Time passes. Nothing stays the same. It was an amazing experience of the best of the internet and its power to bring us together and let us know we are not alone. I am beyond grateful. Today, even though I’m home, still in my pjs at 3 pm with two sick babies who have croup and are just beyond pitiful, my heart is lighter. And I feel strong and confident.
Buoyed by this love and more than a little indignant at the downer comment, I posted this on Facebook:
And while I’m actually kind of proud of that line and think it really says it all, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a writer, and what it means to put my heart out into the world through my words, and I’ve found (shock me shock me) that I still have some more to say.
Despite a comment that would minimize and silence my giving voice to my experiences with the more painful side of motherhood, I will not be minimized and silenced. Tellingly, that comment, the only one that wasn’t encouraging in some way, came from a man. I’m taking a course on women writers this term, and over and over in the works I’ve studied, women writers depict women writers with men in their lives who don’t understand why they can’t just be content, grateful even, with their lives as wives and mothers. Why they feel a yearning for more, why they simply must write. Any woman who, like me, attempts to express anything but sweetness and light concerning motherhood feels the need to qualify it with caveats about how much they really do love their children, husbands, and homes, for fear of being criticized by a society that constantly tells us to be grateful and enjoy every moment.
All that does is leave you feeling guilty when you inevitably fail to live up to that standard.
Based on the love that was poured out to me when I poured out my heart, I have to say: it is worth that risk. Because when you pour out your heart, you invite others to do the same, and they will, and you will feel less alone. The great Flannery O’Connor wrote in one of her letters: “In the face of anyone’s experience, someone like myself who has had almost no experience, must be humble.” We don’t get to tell other people how to understand, frame, or feel about their experience. But we can let them know that they’re not alone in having it.
I’m so thankful to all the folks who let me know that I’m not alone this week or in this life. You have been a model for how I hope to respond the next time the shoe is on the other foot and someone opens themselves up.
Last night I was reading a New York Times profile of Megan Rapinoe, a soccer star I really admire. The piece mentioned that she has a twin sister, and went out of it’s way to let readers know that her sister is “older by 11 minutes.” Cue the sound of a record scratching in my mind.
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