The Motherload
It’s pub day, and I’m emo
Today is the day of the release of The Motherload. It’s six in the morning, I’m up uncharacteristically early, and while the light is still blue, it’s warm inside. I’m sitting at my kitchen table with an earl gray tea, looking out of the same window at the same view, staring at the same gray rooftops of Nolita buildings—strange clouds of winter steam floating by, the occasional pigeon—just like I was six years ago, when I contemplated walking off the ledge and slipping into the sleeping patchwork quilt of backyards below. Today, my second kid, Fred, sits perched in my view, and her tiny, gum drop toes are wriggling while she giggles—she’s never had kiwi before.
Fred is a living reminder that trauma can heal with examination and work, and that the work takes time, and resilience, and help from the right people. She’s a living reminder that there are reasons to commit to that work, reasons you can’t know when you start it. And I hope that in her own life, when men and systems and mean girls and people who lead with their own damage all steal the sparkle from behind her eyes, that she knows she can do this work to get it back.
I did not process my story on the pages of that book—I was able to write that book because I’d already done the dirty work.
At this same table six years ago, with the suicidal thoughts growing in my brain, the soft murmurs of ideas, gentle wishes whispered to me from an alien in my head, came an immediate realization that something was very wrong. Maybe it was god, or my intuition deep down, kicking into gear with help from the ancestors, the witches, my great grandma Sadie who left Poland for a better life and never gave up on herself; maybe it was just dumb luck and coincidence, but a part of me immediately shouted back: this isn’t ok and you need help.. And that launched me into finding a CBT therapist I liked, and then she introduced me to EMDR therapy, and another friend introduced me to ketamine therapy. I tried them all. I tried anything and everything. I wrote in my journal. I remembered The Artists Way book and did it again, and I liked the morning pages ritual so much that I reconnected with an old friend who had started a writing class and signed up.* I even asked my husband for honesty. I wanted to really hold a mirror up to myself, even though it stung.
By the time I decided to write The Motherload, my own stories did not make me emotional. At the same time that I said to myself I think I wanna write a book, I also said Ok, but you have to push through and ignore any feelings of shame. Doing one felt pointless without doing the other! So while I was writing, I was in a mental place where I could talk about the worst of it as if it was someone else’s tale; it didn’t bring up the past and trigger me. Whenever I did start to blush, or hold back on something I really wanted to say because my chest clenched up, I made myself do it anyway. Sometimes I made myself read out loud the things I cringed at, into a mirror or alone in my bedroom, so I’d get used to saying them. Soon, those feelings started to go away. And once I got used to copping to my shame on the things I was writing about, it became easier elsewhere in my life, too. Especially because the more I said them out loud, the more other people nodded along, or told me their own versions—the more I realized I wasn’t alone. I did not process my story on the pages of that book—I was able to write that book because I’d already done the dirty work.
A spoiler for you is that I had a surprise miscarriage in between my pregnancies. It made me so sad but it mostly made me want another baby so badly I can only describe it as a craving. In therapy, I had written letters to my old OBGYN, to the rude anesthesiologist, to all the people I’d felt wronged me in my first experience, and I thought about them a lot when I envisioned another birth and another postpartum period. I knew I couldn’t let it all happen again the way it had the first time, and I made a list of criteria I had that I knew would make me feel safe. I spent the next three years in fertility drama but it gave me plenty of time to find a provider who could match the requests I had for my care. And it gave me a lot of practice at walking into an exam room and expressing my needs to the practitioner. In that time I also made friends in the medical community who helped me craft scripts for how to talk to doctors (shout out to @thefeministmidwife)—I go into some of that in my book. And when I finally did get pregnant and it came time to have the baby, I found a doula I loved this time (my first doctor had been pretty against it) —@doulaterry—and she helped me work through a lot of trauma-based fear with a practice called havening.
A last thing I’ll say is that getting through it all was tiring and arduous and a lot of work—and a constant source of joy for me in the face of all of that was art and artists—many of whom had, for centuries before me, worked out their own trauma in other mediums. Take Nan Goldin, for example, the photographer and activist. Born in 1953, in Boston, Nan’s childhood was plagued by a tense family dynamic wherein her parents fought bitterly over the mental health of her older sister, who ultimately committed suicide when Nan was 11. “I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction. Because of the times, the early sixties, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behavior, beyond control. By the time she was eighteen, she saw that her only way to get out was to lie down on the tracks of the commuter train outside of Washington, D.C.”
Nan left home and was in and out of foster homes in her teens. At school, Polaroid had donated some cameras, and she started to become obsessed with taking photos as a way to preserve her loved ones and her memories. By the age of eighteen, in 1973, Nan was living among the gay and transgender community of Boston and had her first solo show of photographs, a body of work about her friends. When she moved to New York a few years later, she began to document the post-punk new wave music and gay scenes.
By 1979 Nan was documenting the hard partying, drug using, sexually liberated gay scene around the Bowery in New York’s downtown. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency works depicted, in a snapshot aesthetic that would predate Terry Richardson and Wolfgang Tillmans by twenty years, her friends, her stories, her traumas. In “Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984”, we see her after being beaten. In images like "Gotscho kissing Gilles," Paris 1993, we see humanizing, tender images of her dear friends lost to the AIDS crisis. “AIDS changed everything in my life,” she said. “There’s life before AIDS, and after AIDS.”
After recovering from a horrific addiction to pain killers, originally prescribed to her for 2014 wrist injury, Nan founded the activist organization P.A.I.N. and led the charge in the fight against Purdue Pharmaceuticals and its owners, the Sackler Family. The protests she organized inside art institutions—in lobby of major museums around the world, where she encouraged protestors to throw empty medicine bottles into fountains and lobbies, alongside her—were instrumental in the art world’s rejection of Sackler money, and the subsequent massive trial that changed the way Americans view, use, and prescribe prescription painkillers. (There is a great documentary about Nan’s activism called All The Beauty and the Bloodshed). I think of Nan all the time when I ask myself what kind of power art can have. And she is such incredible proof of its ability to change our existence.
My job as a mother is to help build the world I want for my children. With my art form—writing—my goal is to help alleviate shame and judgment for women. I hope you will be able to buy and read The Motherload—on sale today!—and participate in my mission.
*First at Brooklyn Writers Collective, then at Downtown Writers Workshop. Sign up!!!
The book is fantastic. I feel energized by the vulnerability of other women in their writing. Thank you for sharing it all — and from someone who relates to a gruesome PPD mental war, thank you!
Reading your book inspired me to write again, and to start publishing it on substack! Thank you, Sarah!!!