the real-talk baby shower
MOTHER BRAIN author Chelsea Conaboy on being "the Debbie Downer of the baby shower"
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.
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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ran in Slate, where we talked about the emerging science of brain changes in fathers, why maternal instinct is an outdated and unhelpful concept, and what she wishes legislators and policymakers knew about the caregiving brain.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?
a little more Mother Brain elsewhere:
Chelsea had a great guest essay, Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created, in The New York Times recently, in which she argued that
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).
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