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.

Yiyun Li’s book about the loss of each of her sons to suicide in their teens has forced me to sit with the inevitable, eternal uncertainty of parenting—the fact that you can do anything and everything for your children, but at the end of the day, you cannot keep them alive. The book is more hopeful than the subject matter may suggest, in a way that is both beautiful and graceful but also disconcerting at times. Because how could it not be? It is stripped down, both in its prose and emotionally, to the core of feeling, to the core of the experience of losing both children but life and the self carrying on regardless.

My Mother’s Daughter by Tracy Clark-Flory similarly contends with an experience I have no personal familiarity with and does so with grace and rage, simultaneously. In the book, Clark-Flory tells the story of her mother sharing with her that she became pregnant as a teenager, sent to an unwed mothers’ home, and forced to put her newborn daughter up for adoption. She explores how her mother’s grief and loss seeped into the pores of Clark-Flory’s own childhood and eventually, into her own experiences of motherhood. The book is also unabashedly joyful, as Clark-Flory ultimately meets her half-sister, Kathy. But, again, that joy is tempered with the knowledge that Clark-Flory’s mother never got to know her firstborn daughter.

All of the above underscore the range in experiences that all fall under the umbrella of mothering and parenting. Although there are, of course, some universal experiences in parenting, at the end of the day, each person’s parenting experience is unique, a fact in which I find comfort. Because if my experience is unique, is at the end of the different from everyone else’s because it is mine and mine alone, perhaps that alone anchors my role as a mother to my core self, one that has existed and subsisted since 1992, albeit in different eras and stages and iterations.

As the above books, and my own experiences, have taught me, motherhood is tinged with possibility and loss simultaneously. Losses big and small—of the life-altering variety and of the small-at-the-time variety, such as a child declining help squeezing the ketchup out of the ketchup bottle because, guess what, “I can do dis myself, Mommy.” The above books all capture experiences that are incredibly disparate from my own. Yet, I feel comforted, seen, and held by each of them, albeit in a different way by each of them. And, perhaps, that is the core of a hobby anyway—a place to feel comforted, seen, and held, even if it means the hobby and my role as a mother, whether unconsciously or consciously, collide in the books I pick up.