Again and again, the women in my stories feel confined by external notions of what they should be The post Breastfeeding is Dark Magic: Shannon Robinson on Motherhood, Beastliness and THE ILL-FITTING SKIN appeared first on Mutha Magazine ..read more

Summer is tough because everyone is pregnant. After Victoria Day Weekend, the official start to Toronto summer, when the sun starts to blast the city into the high 80s, layers of winter clothes strip away to reveal who’s carrying and who’s not. On the bus home today there was a woman, younger than me—now they [&hellip The post The Unbearable Ambivalence About Children appeared first on Mutha Magazine ..read more

The post Space from Her appeared first on Mutha Magazine ..read more

At my back, twenty or more women filled plates from dishes on a countertop. I unbuttoned and opened my blouse over the nylon whiteness of my Barelythere. As the women behind me talked, I pulled silky fabric over the mound of my right breast. Modestly plump, it spilled toward my girlfriend Cindy and our friend June. The party behind us hummed with the music of women’s voices and the yack of a sports announcer. A World Series game crashed noisily through a pre-Halloween gathering of our lesbian community.  The guacamole I brought sat green and unperturbed in a bowl among the offerings. A pl ..read more

A Picture Letter for J My dearest, when I first saw you on the ultrasound, you were a little minnow. Even though I couldn’t feel you move, your heart pulsed black and white like a beacon. Tiny and helpless, you needed me. It was then that I knew that I loved you. When you were born, you had so much hair, wild and tangled as seaweed. You were so light in my arms, a little bubble, a swirl of water. I knew I would do anything to protect you. As you took your first steps, I promised that my love would follow you wherever you went. Part of my love was the stories I told you: the hero with a cryst ..read more

I have always been a daydreamer. As a child, I would act out my daydreams in our living room. Amid red-navy Persian rugs and bowls of pesteh (pistachios), I would metamorphose into Robin Hood, a pint-sized champion for the common person. I have a vivid memory of drawing up an imaginary pail of water and distributing it to imaginary people who were thirsty. In those moments, I was a hero. I now wonder if this elaborate dream-acting was my young mind grappling with the discovery of water barrels in a storage room in our home. I was born in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war, to parents who had f ..read more

The night before my water broke, I began reading Louisa Hall’s Reproduction (2023). This was my third pregnancy. In the novel, the narrator weaves her fertility journey—one of miscarriages, nausea, molar pregnancy, and disability—with a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.   As I laid on the couch, fire crackling, legs aching, throwing up bits of my spaghetti dinner in my mouth, I had one repetitive thought:   I want her (my daughter) out.   I had reached the ninth month and was in a liminal space, my world a haze of brain fog ..read more

Excerpted from Smoothed Over with Feelings: Poems for New Parents The post Smoothed Over With Feeling appeared first on Mutha Magazine ..read more

Unabashed and unapologetic, Debora Kuan’s third collection of poems, Women on the Moon, takes us through the vertiginous journey of womanhood in reverse. Like a racecar driver gunning backwards, she seems to deftly hold the wheel with one hand and hit the gas, barely feeling the need to check the rearview mirror or turn her head to see what might be worth swerving around, worth avoiding. Traversing from motherhood to marriage to domestic coupling to campus life to adolescence—from kissing the top of a child’s head with its “sweet biscuit scent” to the precipice of a collegiate walk of shame t ..read more

At the end of May, my partner quit her day job. Her pivot from program manager for a college to full-time therapist has been years long, so slow that, at times, it has felt like a flat line. You can’t see the curve of the earth when you are walking along it. The pivot years contained health problems, adoption problems, behavioral-health-bureaucracy problems, and a pandemic. They also contained our two children, who are glorious, but of course come with 99 problems. We agreed we wanted to speed up the transition, so a year ago, she took on a demanding internship at a local clinic while continui ..read more