The Mere Fact of BoyMoms

If you woke up today wondering what I've been up to, then boy howdy, you're in luck!

Hello!

Somehow, we are nearly halfway through 2023, a fact that makes me a little dizzy. Temporality, man! Somebody should theorize it.

It’s been a busy few months for me: I completed three essays, two of which required significant amounts of reading and research. And of course, I wanted all three of them to articulate my ideas in the most compelling and precise ways possible. One complicating factor: My husband and I still do not have childcare for our now-18-month-old (although, mercifully, this is very likely to change at the end of the summer). A second complicating factor: a two-bedroom apartment suddenly feels impossibly small when you need to write a coherent sentence, and your toddler, who knows you’ve barricaded yourself in the bedroom, is banging on the door, yelling, “MAMAMAMAMA” with the full force of his tiny, yet terrifyingly robust lungs.

[Before I go any further, I’ll link to the two pieces that have already published: “The Mere Fact of Her,” on Emily Dickinson’s legacy, which you can read at Poetry Foundation and “The Case Against BoyMom,” which you can read at The Washington Post (I’ve used a gift link so you won’t need a WaPo subscription to access it). More on both essays in a bit.]

I finished my assignments with my sanity relatively preserved thanks to a few crucial aids. The first is my friend Becky, or as most know her, brilliant Holocaust historian and writer Rebecca Erbelding, who, in a gesture of staggering generosity, gave me a key to her house so that I could come over to write in the blissful quiet, even when she and her lovely husband, Ron, were out and about. What’s more, all three of their cats offered exemplary emotional support by checking on me and, when appropriate, insisting that I take breaks for pets and purrs. I genuinely am unsure that I would have made my deadlines if Becky had not come to my rescue in this way, and I am humbled by the way she offered me a harbor when I dearly needed one.

The second (but not secondary) reason I made my deadlines is that Paul is a tremendous co-parent. When he was not teaching a class, he was relieving me of childcare responsibilities so that I could either pack a lunch and go to Becky’s for half the day or, if time was short, hide in the bedroom with the noise-cancelling function on his headphones turned up to maximum intensity. By the time I filed my last piece, we were both very tired, and—I must confess—I was rather cranky. In the future, I should probably try not to tackle three different writing projects almost simultaneously, no matter what our childcare situation is.

Yet if one is a non-wealthy working parent living in America, these sorts of grueling circumstances are often difficult to avoid, even with buttresses of privilege. This country fetishizes the nuclear family; it wrings its hands over declining birthrates and begs us to breed. But ultimately, it’s all political bluster—sound and fury without underlying legislative substance. To be quite frank, being a parent in the United States of America often feels like being told to go fuck oneself in twenty different ways. I could opine endlessly about the why and how of it all, but you’d be better served by reading Caitlin Gibson at The Washington Post: She’s doing phenomenal work on the dire straits faced by so many parents and children in this country. It goes without saying that our dismal conditions are fomented by some pretty noxious ideologies. At every level, right-wing members of the government are working assiduously to restrict, or altogether abolish the autonomy of people with uteruses. Republicans certainly are not going to make it easier for women to pursue non-domestic careers. And with the backdrop of unremitting gun violence and the systemic attacks on trans kids, it lately feels difficult to focus anything beyond the labor of keeping one’s child(ren) alive and relatively free from trauma. Like so many other parents, I am often exhausted by the effort required to use my brain in ways unrelated to primal feats of protection, because day-to-day survival in this country feels so perilously tenuous.

Perhaps I’ll write more on this another time. But it’s nearly 10 p.m., and this missive will descend into gobbledegook if I don’t wrap it up before I’m too tired for verb tense agreement. So allow me to tell you what I’ve been up to, professionally speaking!

As I mentioned, two of my three essays have published, and I’m very excited for you to read them. The first of the two focuses on a recently reissued memoir by Emily Dickinson’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, as well as the recent glut of Dickinsoniana (that’s right, folks—I wrote about the show “Dickinson” again). Dickinson jealously guarded her privacy; it was, to her, the purest form of freedom. And yet, we are preoccupied with excavating her. I tried to think through why that is.

The second essay is a delightful change of pace. Some time ago, I unleashed a brief Twitter screed about the term “BoyMom,” after having learned about it from a friend. Amy Joyce, the parenting editor at The Washington Post, saw that screed, and rather than roll her eyes and block me, she invited me to develop it into something more cogent. I’m frustrated by the mawkish, infantilizing, often essentializing qualities of so much parental vocabulary, of which BoyMom is just one example, and I demand that we do better. Again, you can read that essay here.

Finally, I was thrilled to join my pal Sally Tamarkin on their excellent podcast, Oh, I Like That, to discuss too muchness in the context of “Gentleman Jack.” You can listen to our episode here.

That’s all for now. I do really enjoy writing in this medium, so I’ll try to do it more often (hopefully that is amenable to all of you). In the meantime, sleep well!

Yours,

RVC