Megan O’Grady in The Yale Review:
I had failed to grasp an obvious fact of parenthood: that I had bound myself irrevocably to the world and made myself freshly vulnerable to it. Nothing had prepared me for the cruelty of a culture that aggressively advocates breastfeeding and attachment parenting but has no federally mandated paid family leave. (Working wasn’t optional for me, as it had been for my mother; as a writer under contract, I was back at my desk within ten days.) I had not really understood, before giving birth, that parenthood was where society met my body, and that caregivers were continually making up for civilization’s many lacks, expected to embody all things lovingly boundless, unconditional, and selfless in a bottom-line world. I felt reduced to a symbolic ideal that didn’t align with the values of the society in which I existed as an actual woman, under real circumstances.
More here.
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