Category: Motherhood
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Saint Elsewhere
This past Friday, while walking through Cobble Hill, I watched kids in twos and fours and ones and sixes fizzing over with weekend, with bodega soda, with croissants and single baca di dama from the new espresso place whose vapors their mothers like to inhale appreciatively, decisively, this is like Milan / I remember when…,…
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Does a Body Good
Listen, if spring’s not well and truly arriving in the upper mid-Atlantic, her simulacra is pretty darn convincing. Normally, I’m a stickler for seasons starting and stopping when they ought to (said primly, like an old schoolmarm), but now that I’ve got a wee baldie in my care, I say to heck with the Gregorians,…
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Talk to the Hand
Last week, I finished Sing, Unburied, Sing, the novel by Jesmyn Ward, and today, I’ve been mulling over baby talk. Sing, Unburied, Sing won the 2017 National Book Award — the author’s second, in only three novels! — along with heaps of critical acclaim. The story concerns racism, and its impact on three generations of…
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Peregrine, or a Long Wander through Baby Names
Like many women (and maybe men, too?), I’ve been thinking about what I’d name my children since childhood. Early on, I had a fondness for long, flowery names — Priscilla and Narcissa were particular favorites — as well as actual flowers: Camellia, Dahlia, Poppy. Later, the names came from whatever book I was currently reading,…
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Vestiges
If I were to make a pie graph of my activities in the 24 hours following my son’s birth, it would be: 35% holding him and staring at his miniature, perfect features — the button nose, the seashell ears, the outsized fingers and feet, 28% watching family (three and then four of them, crammed into…
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Are You Supposed to Be to Eating That? An Analysis of Pregnancy Food Guidelines around the World
It started with raw fish. I was ten weeks pregnant and riddled with low-lying nausea that reared up at the very thought of vegetables — any vegetable, though the leafy green ones were especially noxious. After a lifetime of balanced eating, it was hard, mentally, to recast mac&cheese and buttered pasta as daily staples. No,…
éclaircissements 