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Books

Honors

November 15th, 2021 | by Nicole Lynn Lewis

Excerpted from Pregnant Girl:  A Story of Teen Motherhood, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families. Copyright 2021.  Excerpted


Gender

The back of a middle school-aged white boy's head. He wears a navy blue hoodie and is in a classroom.

Damaged, Like My Son

October 19th, 2021 | by Kimberly Dark

It’s even hard to watch our children struggle when they are not helpless, when they have simply messed something up and need to work to fix it.


Baby Dreaming

Body Lore: An Excerpt from THE OTHER MOTHERS

February 26th, 2021 | by Jennifer Berney

Culturally, we tend to conflate three disparate things: sexual desire, the impulse to nurture, the ability to conceive and bear a child. We act as if a woman’s longing is proportionate to her fertility. I longed deeply, and therefore I was fertile—or so my logic went



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  • “You’ve already told me that story,” he said. Switching gears, he asked, “Why isn’t my father around?” #breastfeeding #parenting #fuckit #protest #teenagers #sexualviolence “Over time, Anabelle learned to talk about her feelings. She said saw her birthmother in the sky. She drew a picture of grief moving through her body like water. When she had more language, she began to talk about her losses.” “I’m not sure why I read that poster and thought that it applied to other mothers, other people’s children. But it probably has something to do with the shock I felt two years later when a neurologist confidently diagnosed “Autism Spectrum Disorder” and I responded with at least twenty “What about…” type questions. I had described my dynamic, interesting, loving toddler to this doctor, and her response sounded dire and clinical. That poster was the same. All of it seemed so unfortunate.” “Someone hit the call button. No one came. Someone rushed to the nurses’ station; still no one came. The contractions, a creature, twisted my uterus, lancing its nails. I tried to breathe through them, but there was no space, no time.” “But when, one-by-one, natural disasters ransacked too many of the communities we visited, including my home-state of California, I began to spiral into a grief I didn’t know how to support. I came to realize that our climate crisis wasn’t off in some far-flung future. It was here. Now. I’d birthed two perfectly good humans, boys who wanted to set up lemonade stands and play soccer, but who would be tasked instead to worry about rising seas and firestorms.” “I have to say,” my doctor said. We were still in the OR. He seemed saddened. “There was a uterine rupture. A large one. I have only seen something like this four times in my career.” “This is the part where I am supposed to articulate that taking time for myself allows me to be a better a parent, which is true. But the compulsion to footnote derives from accepting the baseline that I should feel guilty at all for taking time for myself, which I do not. I’d meet my pals for dinner, go to a movie alone, or attend a weekend bachelorette trip even if it resulted in worse parenting. Parents deserve pleasures unattached to their children.”

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