I deeply appreciate your unflinching honesty in this essay. So much of it was deeply familiar. And as I attempt to get pregnant now, it’s poignant and important to unpack all the messages I got around mothering. Thank y out for helping me do that.
Hey. I wish you luck and peace and support as you try and navigate. I know trying to get pregnant too can be quite a roller coaster of emotions. And if you do become a mama, how about we help you and support you? You will need it. (And as I write in later essays, I am only now coming to a more accepting place with my "choice"/journey to becoming a mother, and a lot of that peace comes from finally facing what led me here and getting rid of patriarchal standards and ideas about motherhood that I no longer have to have. Hopefully reading these essays can help you too be in a much better place than I ever was.
`All of the boys in the room said it was me--out of the girls in the room--who they’d want to be the mother of their children. We were in our early twenties, college students, friends, playing a silly question game.`
As a male outside of the Mormon community, this made me incredibly uncomfortable. The idea that I, let alone a group of friends, would vote, let alone publicly with the "options" in the room, for "person I would want to mother my children" is for lack of a better term foreign and weird. Our college experiences were obviously going to be very different, but from a social perspective I didn't think the difference would be so drastic.
Yes, it is messed up and stupid. And so wild to me now. I’m also thinking how hyper American this is, too, in terms or American class and hierarchies that make everything, including bodies, into a competition where there is only one best. The rest fall under. If you’re not on top, you’re losing!
Damn.
I deeply appreciate your unflinching honesty in this essay. So much of it was deeply familiar. And as I attempt to get pregnant now, it’s poignant and important to unpack all the messages I got around mothering. Thank y out for helping me do that.
Hey. I wish you luck and peace and support as you try and navigate. I know trying to get pregnant too can be quite a roller coaster of emotions. And if you do become a mama, how about we help you and support you? You will need it. (And as I write in later essays, I am only now coming to a more accepting place with my "choice"/journey to becoming a mother, and a lot of that peace comes from finally facing what led me here and getting rid of patriarchal standards and ideas about motherhood that I no longer have to have. Hopefully reading these essays can help you too be in a much better place than I ever was.
`All of the boys in the room said it was me--out of the girls in the room--who they’d want to be the mother of their children. We were in our early twenties, college students, friends, playing a silly question game.`
As a male outside of the Mormon community, this made me incredibly uncomfortable. The idea that I, let alone a group of friends, would vote, let alone publicly with the "options" in the room, for "person I would want to mother my children" is for lack of a better term foreign and weird. Our college experiences were obviously going to be very different, but from a social perspective I didn't think the difference would be so drastic.
Yes, it is messed up and stupid. And so wild to me now. I’m also thinking how hyper American this is, too, in terms or American class and hierarchies that make everything, including bodies, into a competition where there is only one best. The rest fall under. If you’re not on top, you’re losing!
Eternal perspective!!