Re-productivity

So there’s a reason I have barely written here in the last year: I recently had a baby.

When I was in my first trimester, back in the fall, my capacity to produce writing was severely diminished because I felt like shit (due to what is considered normal morning sickness, i.e. feeling exhausted and horribly nauseous every waking minute), plus I had just gone back to teaching in person. I couldn’t finish an urgent work writing project, much less write anything here. It was very strange to feel ill for months for a reason that’s supposed to be “normal,” or even healthy (there’s some correlation between morning sickness and not miscarrying), yet also a reason that is socially controversial to share, especially in professional contexts. I did wind up telling the editor for the urgent project that I was ten weeks pregnant and sick and needed more time to finish the piece, but it felt pretty weird to tell him that at a time when very few people in my life knew. By the end of the fall I felt better, and during my second trimester I finished out the semester, completed the piece I couldn’t work on first trimester, went to some conferences, wrote a paper about repentance, caught my breath a bit, made a registry. And then third trimester my family dealt with some ultimately fine but still very disruptive things — a seriously ill cat, orthopedic surgery for Phil, and moving apartments. Also the fetus was small which meant constant ultrasounds. (The baby is totally healthy, he is just petite.) But more than any specific emergent life event, I just felt like my brain was directed inwards and not outwards, more so towards the end of my pregnancy but really more or less the whole time.

This inwardness was hard to square with the fact that I experienced both the beginning and end of my pregnancy against the background of national events that highlighted the degree of my own fortune as a gestating and birthing person. I found out that I was pregnant the week that Texas passed the “heartbeat bill” banning abortions after about six weeks. Our baby was born 35 weeks later, a few days after the leak of the decision that has since overturned Roe v Wade. I’ve been reading and listening to reporting about Dobbs while holding a baby who likely wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t had continual access to good reproductive healthcare for the last 15 years.

On the one hand, these national events have felt like a call to return to more outward-facing activities like writing, teaching, activism. This also seems to be a moment for people writing about motherhood/parenting, which feels like an opportunity for me to contribute to The Discourse. On the other hand, I’m on leave and breastfeeding an infant, and I am very aware of how little our society values my (or any mom’s/parent’s) desire to focus my energy on caring for myself and my baby. The right obviously doesn’t care about paid family leave, universal childcare, healthcare for parents and babies, etc. And plenty of well-meaning liberals are bought into a “lean in” style feminist framework in which it’s unfathomable that I would truly not do anything towards my career for several months, even if I am technically on leave. This is even worse in academia, where most men use their parental leave as essentially a paid sabbatical and so there’s real pressure for women to do that too.

So now here I am sitting at a bar between feeds while my mom watches the baby, writing this newsletter that is outward-facing yet more or less useless for my career, that mentions politics without being actually politically effective in any way. I think it’s an appropriate manifestation of the ambivalence I currently feel about working and about engagement with the larger world. I’m down to lean into ambivalence right now, though, so watch this space; I think there will be more to come.