A Literary Prescription for
For the love that unmakes and remakes you, and for everything that comes with it that nobody warned you about.
Motherhood is one of the most written-about experiences in the world and one of the most honestly-written-about only recently. For a long time the literature tended toward the beatific or the tragic, skipping the exhausted, ambivalent, furious, funny, overwhelmed, fiercely loving middle — which is where most mothers actually live. The books, poems, and words gathered here are for that middle.
“Making the decision to have a child — it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”Elizabeth Stone
Books
Books that tell the truth about motherhood — the full truth.
Lamott’s journal of her first year of single motherhood is one of the funniest, most honest, most irreverent books about new parenthood ever written. She is terrified, exhausted, besotted, grateful, resentful, and completely herself throughout — and her refusal to perform competence or beatitude is both hilarious and deeply reassuring for anyone who suspected the whole thing was more complicated than the books made it look.
Rich’s landmark work distinguishes between motherhood as institution (what society requires and expects) and motherhood as experience (what it actually feels like from the inside). Written partly from her own journals, it is one of the most honest and intellectually rigorous accounts of maternal ambivalence ever published — and it opened a space for every honest book about motherhood that came after it.
Hrdy, an evolutionary anthropologist, examines what science actually knows about the mother-child bond — and in doing so dispels several myths that have made mothers feel inadequate for not conforming to them. For anyone who has been told what a mother is supposed to feel and found the description did not match their experience, Hrdy’s science provides useful permission to be more complicated.
Ng’s novel sets two very different mothers against each other — the controlled, rule-following Elena and the free-spirited, peripatetic Mia — and uses the collision between them to explore what it means to raise children, to be raised, to hold on and let go. It is a book about motherhood as a practice and a philosophy, full of sharp observation and genuine moral complexity.
Poetry
Poems that tell the truth about the love and the weight of it.
“Morning Song”
Sylvia Plath, 1961
Plath’s poem about the arrival of her daughter is one of the most honest ever written about the early days of motherhood — the love present but not yet warm, the mother feeling blank and uncertain rather than immediately transformed. For anyone who did not experience instant maternal rapture and wondered what was wrong with them, Plath was there first.
“Those Winter Sundays”
Robert Hayden, 1962
Hayden’s poem is about a father, but it is also about every parent whose love was expressed through unglamorous, unacknowledged acts — the fires banked before anyone was awake, the labour that looked like nothing. For mothers who wonder whether their efforts are seen, and for those reflecting on what their own mother gave them, this poem quietly insists that love was there, even when it went unnamed.
“For My Daughter”
Weldon Kees, 1943
Kees’s brief, unsettling poem about the terror inside parental love — the way love makes you newly aware of everything that can go wrong — is a companion for the anxiety that tends to accompany deep maternal attachment. The fear is part of it. Kees names that, plainly.
Quotes & Prose
For the hard days and the overflowing ones.
There is no way to be a perfect mother, and a million ways to be a good one.
Jill Churchill
A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.
Agatha Christie
You don’t take a class; you're thrown into motherhood and you sink or swim.
Pamela Anderson
From Georgia
A short practice for sitting with motherhood, whenever you need somewhere to land.
Morning Mindfulness & Intention Setting
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