The ghost of Mother's Day Future

Should you write about your kids?

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You might’ve missed these recent HONEY STAY SUPER posts: I’m looking for a buyer for a big vintage collection and I answered the latest reader question about selling the family home in a divorce (and in 44 succinct (?) points). And given today’s post, it’s with truly uncanny timing that I’m also in today’s A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, sharing a quick background on an old McSweeney’s piece inspired by my deep hatred of Goodreads!

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I don’t write about being a mother much anymore, at least not in a way that involves writing about my children specifically and in detail. It should be said they are also no longer children, or little ones anyway.

Being a mother feels like an organic but less urgent, less exhausting, and less chronically “on” part of my life now. I don’t need to be witnessed doing it. I do not need attention for it any longer. I no longer expect (virtual) cookies for a (superficially presented) job well done. I’m quite in the background now. It’s no longer my show. And I’m excited to see the Role of Mother find a more private, reasonable, and proportional place in my overall identity.

There are other reasons that I no longer write about my kids. Part of it is that I still feel burned — lighting the match myself to be clear — by writing about my kids previously. So many mothers have, because it is the most tempting and easiest of on-ramps to writing publicly. Of the many, many crossroads I’ve experienced throughout my career where I needed to choose between work and my family, becoming an author was the most clearcut and least nuanced example of not only choosing myself but using my children in order to choose myself.