Hi friends! A quick note to say that I’ve grouped both newsletters together over Write More, Be Less Careful. At Write More, you’ll find lots of tips and encouragement about sustaining a creative practice in the midst of a busy life. And because I’m particularly obsessed with the intersection between caregiving and creativity, I bring that lens to Write More. You’ll find interviews with creative people about how caregiving influences their work in the new good creatures section there, and I’ll also be sharing my research findings and progress on my new book, The Good Mother Myth.
If you’re interested in good creatures, I think you’ll love Write More!
(And you find me on instagram, where I’m also sharing snippets of research, cute pics of my kids, and writing progress.)
Welcome to good creatures, a newsletter about the history of our bad ideas about motherhood and the emerging science and social science that can help us learn to think mothering differently. If you think your actual kids are (mostly) great but being a mom is kind of a scam, I think you’ll love it here.
Subscribe here to join us.
Hi there. It’s very nearly the most wonderful time of the year! I love the holidays—and I also know this can be a high-pressure time of year, especially for folks with complicated families, or kids, or jobs that ramp up right as the holidays are getting going.
So this year, a modest holiday proposal: instead of looking to the mom who’s doing the most and feeling bad because our light display/holiday whimsy/elf on the shelf/ etc etc etc doesn’t live up—let’s find a messier role model and aim for that.
I wanted to share two (fictional but beloved) moms I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
For Catapult, I wrote about Home Alone’s Kate McCallister (played with impeccable 90s shoulder pads by Catherine O'Hara) as a model of a kind of messy, chaotic approach to motherhood that I think we should look to for encouragement now:
All things considered, Kate McCallister probably isn’t a “good mom” by the standards of our time, or hers. But her example shows the shallowness of those standards. She loves her kid. She proves it. While the rest of the family fritters, she’s doing what I’ve always understood moms do: fighting with gate agents, snatching the last seat on a flight to Scranton after failing to bribe her way onto a direct flight with all the cash in her wallet and the earrings and bracelet she’s wearing. She spends a good bit of the movie driving across the Midwest with John Candy and his polka band in the back of a box van. There’s nothing she won’t do to make her way home to her son.
The piece is also a love note to my mom and aunt, who were single moms for most of my childhood and who raised my sister, cousins, and me with no-nonsense, unwavering love. I’d love it if you would click on over to read.
And one more nomination, for another unlikely mom inspiration: Ash, from Catherine Newman’s really phenomenal new novel, We All Want Impossible Things. Ash is kind of a mess. Her best friend Edi is in hospice, and she spends much of the novel caring for Edi and remembering their long friendship. But Ash isn’t as saintly as that might sound: she’s separated from her husband, sleeping with a handful of slightly inappropriate people, worrying about her teenage daughter, Belle, who’s skipping too much school, but not really doing anything about it. Even as she’s flailing a bit in her own life, though, Ash is truly present in the lives of those she loves. She drives over to Edi’s hospice in the dark of a New England winter to take her outside to see the snow. She walks in the woods with Belle. I don’t think she cooks a single meal in the novel—Belle is a remarkable cook, and Ash’s husband Honey frequently shows up with takeout—but they all sit down together to eat. Ash tells her family that she loves them, and she shows it with her attention.
I spent a long time re-reading the novel and trying to find a scene that would capture Ash as a mother. It’s hard to find one excerptable passage, because what I love about her is the quality of her attention. She has such wonder and love in her descriptions of her daughter as she cooks dinner or lounges on the couch with their cats. Perhaps I’m projecting, but it feels to me like Ash loves her kids the way I’ve always felt my mom loves me, the way I aspire to love my own kids: not as children or as extensions of herself, but as their own wondrous people.
(Also the book, for being about the death of a dear friend, is hilarious. I laughed and cried through almost all of it, something that’s a special skill of Catherine Newman’s.)
Cindy DiTiberio just wrote a great piece for Mutha Magazine, When the Icons of Motherhood Fail You, about how the books she read as a girl taught her that “motherhood was letting others’ needs subsume you.” She closed by arguing that “We need more depictions of mothers who are allowed to be human and have lives apart from their children. Mothers who are flawed and fallible and yet still loved; mothers who are ambivalent and yet still present. Mothers who are mothers and also themselves.” I love this line of thinking, obviously, and I’d nominate Kate McCallister and Ash.
Who’s your literary or pop culture messy motherhood role model?
I’ve been thinking about all this in connection with another essay I read recently, Sarah Hunter Simanson’s Taking on the Feminine Labor of Creating Holiday Magic. It’s a really moving tribute to her late mother, and it’s about finally realizing as an adult how much work her mom put in to making their holidays magical. In her essay, Simanson describes how, as she became a mother as her mother was dying, she took on the labor of holiday magic:
One of the last nights she was alive, I sat by her bed and breastfed my baby, using my phone to order everything that she would have ordered. There were stocking stuffers and gift-wrapping materials and, of course, presents. As my mom was slipping out of consciousness, I found myself unconsciously slipping into her role as the matriarch, the family glue.
Which is why, not even a week after she died, I was wrapping gifts and tying bows and making her brownies and peppermint ice cream for Christmas Eve and preparing her casseroles for Christmas brunch and setting out a few presents from Santa for my infant daughter—even though she’d never remember it.
And listen: I’m not here to judge anyone’s parenting or holiday rituals, and I’m certainly not here to weigh in on how anyone should mourn. If a holiday ritual brings you joy, go for it. But those rituals can easily become one more burden for moms to carry alone.
When we talk about holiday magic, I think we’re often lumping together two pretty different things. On the one hand are the beloved family activities that make the season special. Those might be ones passed down from one generation to the next, like the advent candles we lit in my childhood or the roast beef my grandmother brought every Christmas Eve, or invented on the fly, like my and my sister’s ritual of stopping for free coffee at Sheetz on Christmas Day as we drove across Pennsylvania from our mom’s house to our dad’s. Activities like those are done together. You can see your loved ones’ faces while you do them. But on the other hand is the invisible labor of the holidays—the presents purchased and wrapped, the special meals cooked while the rest of the family relaxes, the planning that’s underneath all the holiday wonder. And that kind of holiday magic is meant to seem effortless, created in the wee hours of the night, in time stolen from sleep or leisure. The children go to sleep and wake up to find Santa’s arrived. A wand has been waved to create holiday wonder while they dreamed.
For Simanson, and for many daughters and mothers, I suspect, the holiday magic is proof that
My mom did love me so damn much and proved it—especially at every holiday. No matter how many hours she had to bill by the end of the year or how many boxes of Hamburger Helper we’d been eating to save money, the holidays (particularly Christmas) were an Ozian season of homemade shortbread cookies and twinkly lights and tissue-paper-wrapped ornaments and extravagant presents and elaborate meals.
But you know what? I, too, love my kids so damn much, and I think there are lots of ways to prove it. I’m already a mom; I don’t want to be a magician or a house elf. And I don’t want my kids to think that’s what love looks like. I don’t want my kids to think that maternal love is the same as self-sacrifice.
What parts of the holiday are really meaningful for you and your family? Are there things you can let go? There might be some traditions that are more stress than they’re really worth, or ones you can re-imagine in a lower-stress way. My kids like making gingerbread houses, for example—but I for sure buy a cheap kit from Target, rather than baking the gingerbread and mixing up the royal frosting and laying out little bowls of individually selected candies for decoration. Will we ever end up in Martha Stewart? Nope, but that’s not what I’m aiming for anyway.
Are there places where you can share the labor? Can you make some of the invisible labor visible? Earlier this year, Virginia Sole-Smith wrote about Family Meal Planning—basically, getting each member of her family to pick a meal for the week, rather than doing it all on her own—as a way of making the invisible labor of meal planning visible, and I bet you could do the same with much of the holiday magic you’ve been making on your own.
I’d love to hear your ideas and how your holidays have evolved. (Unless it genuinely brings you joy, we can probably all quiet quit Elf on the Shelf.)
And remember: as long as you don’t leave a kid at home as you jet across the Atlantic, you’ll already be ahead of Kate McCallister.
Do you have an unlikely motherhood role model? A great tip for managing holiday expectations? I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).
If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, I’d love it if you would share it or send it to a friend.
There’s been so much talk about quiet quitting in the workplace—also known as work-to-rule, or just doing your job and not giving all your time and brainpower to your employer. This NPR piece quotes a TikTok made by engineer Zaid Khan explaining the concept:
"I recently learned about this term called quiet quitting, where you're not outright quitting your job, but you're quitting the idea of going above and beyond," Khan says. "You're still performing your duties, but you're no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it's not — and your worth as a person is not defined by your labor."
I love this, AND ALSO: let’s extend it to the home. Let’s refuse to subscribe to the hustle culture mentality of motherhood.
(Amanda Montei over at Mad Moms had a great essay on moms quiet quitting housework, and that’s really worth a read if you’re interested in domestic labor, the 1975 women’s strike in Iceland, and the Wages for Housework campaign. )
Here’s my underlying grand theory of motherhood: a lot of what’s hard about motherhood as an institution and mother as an identity has a hell of a lot more to do with a performing a particular kind of motherhood—homemade organic baby food, Montessori-approved wooden blocks, kids enrolled in so many enriching after school activities that a whole logistics team can’t map the carpool—than it does about what our kids actually need from us. Kids are hard. Babies are basically impossible. But trying to perform good motherhood is work we can quit.
In other words: your worth as a mother is not defined by your labor.
(or at least make your kids help. Mine sort their clothes, then toss them into their drawers. It’s chaotic, but they end up with clean clothes they can usually find, so it’s fine. Making your kids help with this kind of work is also a way of making the labor visible, something Virginia Sole-Smith wrote about in her recent newsletter on meal planning. There are no cleaning fairies living in my house. Nobody gets to just have clean folded clothes whooshed into their drawers while they play their bajillionth hour of Roblox.)
stop packing lunches. My 9 year old decided he wanted to start packing his own lunch, so we told him he had to do his younger brother’s, too. Turns out he can peel and slice a cucumber and put an Uncrustable in lunch boxes just as well as his dad can.
stop being the family holder of all the knowledge. There’s a great Nora Ephron (I think!) thing that I cannot for the life of me find about how you should never know where the milk is, because once you do, you’re responsible for finding it, noticing when you’re running out, and buying more. (Her version is zippier; please let me know if you can find it!) But here’s the lesson: if you know how to pay the karate teacher, you’ll end up being responsible for knowing when classes are and how to tie the belt and checking the facebook group to see if the schedule has been changed again. (I’ve learned almost nothing about karate in the nearly two years my kid has been doing it! So much extra space in my brain that’s not cluttered by knowing sensei’s Venmo.) Let someone else know things.
Over to you: what are you quitting at home?
(And I’d love it if you would invite a friend to come chat with us! Let’s quit together!)
Welcome to good creatures, a newsletter about the history of our bad ideas about motherhood and the emerging science and social science that can help us learn to think mothering differently. If you think your actual kids are (mostly) great but being a mom is kind of a scam, I think you’ll love it here.
Subscribe here to join us.
I recently had the chance to talk with Chelsea Conaboy, whose new book Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, is a revelation. Her book looks at the complex and fascinating research into what pregnancy, birth, and caregiving do to the brain. It challenges much of our mythology around (gag) “mommy brain” and shows that while pregnancy and birth do set off a complex set of changes in the brain, caregiving itself—distinct from gestation or biological connection to a child—changes us, too. As Conaboy puts it in her book, “It's not only just gestational parents who experienced profound neurobiological changes, but rather anyone who is deeply invested with their time and energy in caring for children.”
Our conversation ran in Slate, where we talked about the emerging science of brain changes in fathers, why maternal instinct is an outdated and unhelpful concept, and what she wishes legislators and policymakers knew about the caregiving brain.
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But there was also a lot I couldn’t get into the Slate piece, so I wanted to share one fun kind of bonus piece here:
the real-talk baby shower
I mentioned, when I talked to Chelsea, that I’d recently written a card to good friends of ours are expecting their first baby later this month, and that I always struggle with just how real to be in that moment. (We were at a not-shower breakfast get-together, so we at least were relieved of the pressure to make babies out of play-doh or whatever foolishness I’ve done at showers in the past.) But still, no one wants to open a present of onesies and baby joggers alongside a card that’s like, “you’ll love your baby and also you might sometimes feel like you’re a husk of a person.”
Chelsea told me, “I always feel like I’m the Debbie Downer of the baby shower card because I want to be like, ‘It’s beautiful and wonderful, and it’s really hard. So if you need to talk about it, just let me know.’” (I think that’s a perfect sentiment, actually, though she told me, “I wrote one of those recently and my husband was like, ‘Too dark. Too dark.’”)
So I’ve been thinking about what a real-talk baby shower would look like. I threw my sister’s baby shower a couple years ago, and we had great food and fun games about baby animal names, and it was so lovely to have friends from a bunch of parts of her life all together. But what would it look like to have that ritual be a little more real about the dramatic upheavals that basically all new parents experience?
What advice would you give, or what perspective might you share?
The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.
Chelsea also talked to Amanda Montei of Mad Moms, and their conversation, about maternal bonding and what new parents actually need, was so great. I’ll share just a little tidbit here, in the hopes it will encourage you to read the whole thing:
The point is that humans exist in community. They always have. For early human babies, mothers mattered a lot. And, in most cases, they were not enough. So babies relied on other adults to care for them, and a mother who was willing to let them. In that way, I like to think of ambivalence as important. Not a character flaw at all. More like the thing that propelled human sociality.
(Chelsea’s also starting a great newsletter called Between Us, which promises to be about “the stories and science of parenthood and its changing place in society.” Her first newsletter was about how the women who entered evolutionary biology changed the field in important ways, and I’m so looking forward to reading more. You can sign up below.)
Do you have a great idea for a real-talk baby shower or other way to welcome folks into early parenthood? Do you have an excellent go-to gift for new parents? I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).
If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, I’d love it if you would share it or send it to a friend.
Well hello there. I hadn’t meant for it to be so long between posts, but here we are.
A lot has happened since mid-May, when we were talking about a formula shortage and the fact that mothers have always gotten abortions, and so much of it seems bad. I’ve got posts on abortion and contraception and gun violence and patriotism in draft, and I’ve honestly just been too sad to finish them. So I’ve been sitting in the sun and revising my book proposal and reading tons of thrillers of widely varying quality (any recommendations?) and hanging out with my kids. Basically, I’ve been trying to take a break.
I also wanted to share something I’ve been telling myself, just in case it helps you: there’s no threshold for deserving a break. Just because lots of other people have it worse, or you could maybe power through a couple more tasks today, or you’re not totally burned out yet, that doesn’t mean you have to keep going. (Work is a scam, anyway.) It’s summer, it’s a bajillion degrees and humid, it’s a good season for slowing down. My brain’s going about half speed these days, and I’m just leaning into it.
In any case, I thought I’d pop in today to share a snippet of a book I’ve been reading and loving, Bitch: The Female of the Species, by zoologist Lucy Cooke.
Cooke’s book, which I first discovered when I happened to catch her on 1A, aims to unsettle the assumption, going back to Darwin, that male animals are the ones worth watching, with female animals being basically passive and predictable. The book follows Cooke on adventures from observing spider mating in a London zoo to fostering a wild baby owl monkey in the Peruvian Amazon to visiting the field station on the Isle of May in Scotland where thousands of grey seals gather to give birth. The book focuses on the diversity of animal life—and what she finds challenges a lot of received wisdom about gender and sex across the animal kingdom.
One of the enduring obsessions of the book I’m working on now is how animals have informed our understanding of what’s “natural” about human mothering, and Cooke’s book speaks really brilliantly to that theme. As Cooke explains, early evolutionary biology operated, where female animals are concerned, on a bit of a feedback loop: male scientists, going back to Darwin, set out into the wild expecting to see female animals behaving the way they believed the women they’d left at home should, as devoted, passive, monogamous partners and mothers. Because that’s what they were looking for, that’s what they found, even when they significantly twist the evidence before their eyes to make it work. And then, they had ostensibly empirical evidence to support the thing they’d believed all along: that females are by nature docile and submissive. An angel on the savannah, if you will.
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I’ll share one particularly delightful example of the lengths scientists have gone to in support of this wild and unfounded assumption about the essential nature of female animals.
Ornithologists John Marzluff and Russell Balda set out to study pinyon jays, and they began by looking for the “alpha male.” When they couldn’t find obvious conflict among the males, they worked to gin some up by creating special feeding stations stocked with all the tastiest-to-jays treats, like greasy popcorn and mealworms. But even that didn’t do much to stir up fights among the males, and the subtler signs of conflict didn’t point to the clear social hierarchy they’d expected.
Here’s what they did find: “dramatic airborne battles where dueling pairs became locked in combat mid-air.” But this posed a problem for their alpha male theory because the battling birds were all female. Rather than adjust their hypothesis about the naturally aggressive and dominant nature of the male pinyon jay, they came up with an explanation for this belligerent female behavior. They waved it away as a wild, seasonal anomaly: “their hormones surge as the breeding season approaches giving them the equivalent of PMS which we call PBS (pre-breeding syndrome)!” (!!!) (As you’ll see below, the original exclamation point is in the original, but the supplemental ones are mine.)
My dudes, there is no such thing as PBS. Rather than accept that the sex roles of birds didn’t align to their anticipations, these very smart, well-respected scientists invented bird PMS.
And, as Cooke’s book so eloquently demonstrates, this isn’t just about birds. The “accidental sexism,” as she puts it, that’s baked into the sciences has filtered out into the culture, reinforcing longstanding stereotypes about gender roles, male aggression, promiscuity and monogamy, mothering, and more. What I love about her book is how it illuminates all the surprising weirdness and wildness of the animal kingdom—and how considering those animals can help us rethink our own lives.
I was on the fun podcast Mother Plus recently, talking about writing and mothering, the nonsense of parenting styles, and our bonkers expectations of mothers in this country.
I got to talk with my colleague Cynthia Arrieu-King, who hosts the poetry podcast The Last Word, about my new book, Pocket Universe. I also read two poems from The Long Devotion and may have cried a little (January Gill O’Neil’s poem has a line about her love for her son that always gets me), but I hope she edited that out.