Readers Report: Mommy Dearest
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Mommy Dearest.”
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Posts Tagged: Mothering Outside the Margins
A Part of Me
Now my not wanting men to be front and center in my life capitalized sperm into a rare commodity. Empowered reproduction is largely a myth.
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The Abattoir
This is what my mother doesn’t want me to see: the death rattle in a forbidden room. This is what she doesn’t want me to know: how one life is sacrificed for another to live.
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Mixed Feelings: Your Divorce Won’t Ruin Your Kids
Marriage is one way of housing love. But there are a hundred other houses—sometimes you just have to build them yourself.
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The Ritual
It’s not easy being the mother of a dead child. In fact, it may be the hardest kind of mothering there is.
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Learning to Grow Where Planted: Maggie Smith’s Good Bones
Part of looking closer is seeing what is hard to face, and part of having courage is addressing what seems futile.
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My Son’s Tutu
The thing I’ve learned about kids is that you only ever get a glimpse of the grown-up people they’ll become.
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Voices on Addiction: Spontaneous Combustion
I remember hunger the way other children remember love.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: She Hated the Child
She didn’t want anything to change. She understood it would be easier if she loved the child. But she did not want to love it.
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Mothering Our Children and Ourselves: Molly Caro May’s Body Full of Stars
As May moves through what she now calls her “postpartum challenge,” she does not return to her old self, but instead becomes someone new.
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Splintered Doors
This journey is ongoing. But I know this: my daughter will never have to break down a door.
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I Can’t Shake the Guru Bhagwan
In 1979, my mother decided she wanted to join Bhagwan’s ashram in Pune, India.
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Jennifer Givhan
Good thing we hadn’t held the chrysalid funeral yet. The two butterflies emerged. Damaged wings but reborn.
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Effacement of the Mother
When I came home from war, I felt relief. Now that I’m home after childbirth, I’m still waiting for relief. War ends. Motherhood does not.
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The Thread: Goddesses and Monsters
Let’s take the women in our lives, and the women who came before us, off the pedestals but also, out of the graves of irrelevancy.
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The Color of Discipline
The violence inflicted by black parents onto their children was born out of both love and a deep, abiding fear for that child’s ability to survive the American caste system that devalues black life.
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The Depths We Don’t Have Words For: Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s Echolocation
[R]eading these poems feels like looking down into deep water, being able to see only so far and no farther.
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The Emotion of the Moment: Talking with Terese Marie Mailhot
Terese Marie Mailhot discusses her debut memoir, Heart Berries, crafting trauma on the page, and her views on motherhood after writing her memoir.
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Inheritance
I married a man who is related to me. I started dating him when I was seventeen and of course, my mother immediately liked him. He grew up in my parents’ hometown.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: RememberYou
They had begun studying memory hoping to find a cure for Alzheimer’s, the doctor explains. But instead, they found other results.
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Like Juggling Knives: Talking with Rumaan Alam
Rumaan Alam discusses his new novel, That Kind of Mother, the limits of the employer-employee relationship, and the grossness of heterosexual sex.
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A Truer, More Holistic Understanding of Ourselves
What myths or distortions have you been told about your own family?
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Spotlight: “Survivors” by Aubrey Hirsch
But more and more I began to wonder if you needed to be human to be a person.
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Mom Vagina
When the physical therapist explains the electric dildo she holds in her hand will reset the nerve endings in my vagina so I won’t need to pee every hour, I say, “Get it in me and let’s go.”
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Both Insider and Outsider: Victoria Chang’s Barbie Chang
Barbie Chang is an intelligent, lively portrayal of the pressures on contemporary women (especially mothers), and a breathlessly entertaining read.
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On Birds, Cats, and Children
My devotion to the cats was not an imitation of human motherhood. To confuse the two, I thought, was an insult to both.
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R.I.P.: Labor In, Labor Out
Being reminded of your mortality on a constant basis makes your life so much better.
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