From the outside, there appear to be two kinds of single parents. You can do it all, strive for perfection, and pull it off. Or you can barely get by, almost fall apart, and struggle for breath. For me, though, it has always been both. Strength and struggle seem to go hand in hand.
Back in D.C. after fourteen years, I felt bracketed on one end by the visceral memory of the first time I felt, with the fullest force, how much motherhood could compel me to behave in ways unforeseen and uninvited by my previous self, and on the other by a decade-and-a-half of living with and for two humans I had created inside me.
Adoption has such a huge effect on how I see gifts now. If I am expected to be grateful for anything, I would rather not have it. I don’t want to feel in debt. I find it hard even to write the word grateful in an email. I feel both overly thankful for any offer, for any help, and yet extremely stressed out about having to pay it back.
Previously by Teri Vlassopoulos: Odds and Omens: Superstition and IVF
After my daughter was born, I thought about getting her astrological chart done. It would be fun for her to have the information when she was older, if only to roll her eyes at her mother. I realized, though, that maybe it wasn’t really a present for her.
When he goes to her in the morning, I listen for the words I know: buenos dias, ojo, pelo, bébé. The morning words will be simple ones. Nouns. I remember nouns. I can remember most numbers, too, when we sit on the floor and count blocks. I often forget siete, so I start over, hoping it will come back the next time around. “The way you go about helping your child become bilingual isn’t…
For the Creative-Anxious Parent™ the world is a veritable junkyard of nightmare futures just begging to be collected-- what if my child is bullied ferociously? What if my child makes some disgusting sex party urban legend indisputably real? What if my child keeps large, seemingly-immortal snakes as pets? In developing one’s irrational, ultimately pointless parental anxiety, it’s important to integrate less obvious, more esoteric fears into one’s 2:30 am worrying practice. Here, some…
Aubrey Hirsch's previous Loco Parentis columns for The Butter can be found here. In June, I gave birth to a baby boy. His father, his big brother and I all welcomed him home together. He is pink and perfect. And he’s my last baby. Even through the electronic ether of cyberspace I can feel you tearing up at those words, those incredibly loaded words: LAST BABY. But please don’t. I’m not sad. I’m not…
Kelly Davio's previous Waiting Room columns for The Butter can be found here. As a woman, you never know when the question is coming—only that it is. You may be having a perfectly innocuous conversation about the traffic, your favorite brand of peanut butter, or even your latest dental work when someone springs it on you: “You have kids, right?” This spring, while I was representing the literary journal I co-edit at a small…
Ester Bloom's previous work for The Toast can be found here. She also dispenses wit and wisdom as Aunt Acid, The Toast's advice columnist. Pregnancy is like going through puberty again, only in fast-forward: your body, without seeking your consent, becomes cartoonishly, attention-grabbingly feminine. And I was sub-par at going through puberty the first time around. When I was almost 12, I auditioned for a suburban summer camp production of Into the Woods and…
AXIS 1 Anxiety as Birthright So Jesus asked [the mute boy’s] father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood.” —Mark 9:21 For Maren and Nathaniel—may you be spared. —Scott Stossel’s dedication to his children, My Age of Anxiety We entered in together. Not like a man and woman in marriage. Nor a boy and his saw at the base of a tree. I’m convinced that even as my head…
What does it mean to have a crazy mom? In the Feb. 2015 issue of JAMA Psychiatry, researchers published their findings from an extraordinary longitudinal study. “Familial Pathways to Early-Onset Suicide Attempt: A 5.6-Year Prospective Study” followed 701 children of 334 parents who had attempted suicide. This study is unique in both its scope and its duration. Its findings show that having a parent who attempted suicide, even controlling for other factors, “conveys a…
Karen W. first talked about her nonsense terrible experience of FMLA here.
Hi, everyone! It is I, the FMLA Lady*, here with some interesting updates to the state of working motherhood. When last I transmitted general thoughts in this regard to you via the Toast and electrons, things were pretty dire. My employer, [redacted], had screwed me out of a month and half of sick leave due to an FMLA
Today, my son Indrek was supposed to bring a candle and two hardboiled eggs to school for an art project. In his school planner, he had written “pikk küünal,” which means “long candle,” so I’d bought a long, white taper candle. When I double-checked his school’s messaging system this morning before school, however, the teacher had written that students should bring a “piklik küünal,” which, as far as I know, means “oblong candle.” Shit, I thought…
