The parenting blog compels an action: to minimise the risk of choking, give a baby a steamed wedge of sweet potato with skin on, allowing them to grip it in their fist and mash it with their gums.
Both stories are, in a small way, about the same thing: our responsibility to take care of children’s bodies. Like mothers don’t have enough shit to worry about, I think.įor a moment, the two stories merge. As I scrub mashed sweet potato off the floor for probably the tenth time today, I contemplate all the hours of work and worry and damage control that I imagine go into caring for a baby in a place where the water isn’t safe. And yet I have often felt frustrated that the quotidian work of mothering saps my energy and turns my attention inward, toward the smallness of my children’s lives: changing diapers, wiping sticky banana handprints off the furniture, keeping track of all the finger- and toenails that need to be trimmed, and falling behind in the Sisyphean cycle of children’s laundry.įrom my laptop in liberal, predominantly white Madison, Wisconsin, I experience this cognitive dissonance: in one tab, a parenting blog counselling me on how to safely give my eight-month-old baby various solid foods so that he doesn’t choke and in another tab, an article about how, less than 100 miles away from me, in neighbourhoods that are predominantly Black, the water that comes out of the taps is contaminated with lead and has been poisoning children. Caring for children brings me in touch with vulnerability, fear, and love deepens my awareness of the brutality and cheapness of life in America and heightens my sense of urgency to fight for a better world.
No experience in my life has radicalised me as deeply as motherhood.
It resonates with me not only as a writer but also as a political person. I’ve pictured that bar graph many times over the past few years as I’ve mothered my two babies into childhood. “Line one the multiplying size and need of her expression-held up against line two-the rapid dissolution of time.” “Here is the artist-mother’s bar graph,” writes the novelist Claudia Dey.
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