I cling to my hobbies as though they are proof that a version of me subsists, and perhaps even thrives, outside of being a parent. “I lift twice a week,” I say. This is true. “I read a lot.” This is also true. Sometimes, I write.

Lately, though, as in this year, I have gravitated toward books about mothering, specifically, and mothering journeys that are dramatically different from my own. I read Maid by Stephanie Land. I read I’m Sorry for My Loss: An Urgent Examination of Reproductive Care in America, by Rebecca Little and Colleen Long. I read My Mother’s Daughter by Tracy Clark-Flory. Most recently, I read All Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Lee.

In short, the above four books contend with the following: mothering and poverty; mothering and pregnancy and infant loss; mothering and mourning your own mother’s loss of her firstborn child due to teenage pregnancy, placement in an unwed mothers home, and subsequent forced adoption; and mothering before and after the loss of two teenage sons to suicide. Whether consciously or unconsciously, I am pulled to books about mothering and am to that end pulled to wonder whether even my hobbies have been subsumed into the singular identity of mothering, usurping any existence of a separate, singular self, a self that has existed and persisted since I was born in 1992. Continue reading →