To read an excerpt from Mother Doll, go here. The bright-yellow cover of Katya Apekina’s acclaimed sophomore novel Mother Doll is an extreme close-up of a Russian nesting doll. The dolls play no concrete role in the book, but they are a perfect metaphor for the overlapping identities and relationships between Zhenia, a 20-something Russian-American who is newly pregnant with a baby her husband doesn’t want; and Irina, the dead great-grandmother who appears one day to tell Zhenia about her years as a revolutionary and her reasons for abandoning her daughter, Zhenia’s beloved babushka.  Mot ..read more

To read a Q&A with Katya Apekina, go here. When her grandmother, still occasionally lucid half a year ago, asked Zhenia whether she loved Ben, Zhenia had said that he treated her really well.  Her grandmother had wanted more than anything for Zhenia to get out into the world, to get away, and only now did it dimly occur to Vera Osipovna that maybe there was no getting away. This listlessness and strange inertia had followed her granddaughter out west; it was not, it appeared, something that could be outrun. Zhenia had chosen to marry a person whom she held at arm’s length, whom she he ..read more

After returning from the hospital, I started to understand what had happened. In the moment, though, it was all about the endgame. I was nearly 41 weeks, bursting at the seams, and I had to deliver. I knew something was wrong when the doctor said—not humorously—“Let’s get this baby out.”  I had been lying on the bed for hours. After receiving the epidural, I started shaking uncontrollably (this sometimes happens after an epidural; I wasn’t aware of this side effect until experiencing it). In a short period of time, my body temperature shot up five degrees. Teeth chattering, hands like ear ..read more

The post Thermometer appeared first on Mutha Magazine ..read more

Sitting in the dark of a plane, in that liminal space between departure and destination, I recognize that I have successfully left my child for only the second time in our lives. Fellow passengers’ lights blink on, but in the disorientation of the separation from my child, I allow my mind to wander in the dark.  One year postpartum and a few months into a stint of stay-at-home parenthood, I find that I am once again thinking of the word matrescence. This is unsurprising; the term, first used by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s to describe the developmental process of becoming a mo ..read more

Reporting for my book School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education not only brought me to hot spots where school board meetings felt like rowdy sporting events and sober-mannered librarians faced attacks. But it also, as I traveled around the country—Texas, Tennessee, Florida, New Hampshire, Eastern Pennsylvania—forced me to revisit with fresh eyes the role that moms play in school communities. Certainly, I knew the terrain. I have been a journalist covering education for over 30 years. And I have been a mom of school-aged children, lunch-packing and all ..read more

Jennifer Baum’s book Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right was both a delightful and insightful read, which blends memoir and social commentary as she looks back at the unique time and community of her upbringing in an Upper West Side, NYC, subsidized cooperative building. Her personal narrative really resonated with me, even though we grew up in much different circumstances. My mother was from the Bronx and my father was from Brooklyn. Her mother was from Brooklyn and her father was from the Bronx. She is Jewish and I am Italian. She grew up in Manhattan ..read more

A few days ago, your friend asked if she could list you as a reference on a job application, and you peppered a form with superlatives and specific, relevant examples of her wonderfulness. Talking up other people is one of your true joys and strengths. Like many women of a certain age, you are not so good at talking up your own joys and strengths. Case in point: After your youngest son’s daycare teacher suggested looking into early interventions for some “tiny, ant-sized” issues your son was dealing with, you texted multiple friends versions of the following. I was JUST finally getting to a po ..read more

I make that first winter a diamond in my memory, something adamantine and buried safe in the dark earth. How new motherhood feels on me, like an animal skin I wear. The language of instinct is blood-warm and gruesome. Like mothers of every kind, I learn to hunt, to make milk. We find each other in the hinterlands of the internet. On the subreddits of r/sleeptraining and r/breastfeeding, we are howling. The mothers of Reddit use a lot of acronyms. PPA is for post-partum anxiety. That’s what they call it when a new mother senses too much danger, but I know it is the wilderness in me. An undomest ..read more

I’ve always been drawn to writing and used it to better understand myself. Writing was a passion of mine before I became a mother, and it remains a passion now. I started writing nonfiction pieces before I was pregnant with my daughter and progressed to short children’s books after she was born. None of these were published. I let go of my desire to publish the children’s books and nonfiction pieces I’ve written, both unconsciously and consciously, once I became a mother. There was a time when I felt like being a mother was the only role I could fulfill. Despite the fact that my daughter is th ..read more