On Motherhood
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2023
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Book
More: Life on the Edge of Adventure and Motherhood
I had a plan for motherhood. It did not include twins.
For six years I kept the letters and the journals. Through pregnancy, through the fifth double-feeding of a single night, through ice climbing and building Legado, all of it at once. None of it went to plan. More is what those six years became.
I did not set out to write a book. I had a fiery ball of unknown angst and nowhere to put it, so I put it in writing. Years later I looked at it and thought, what if I stitched this together. What if I was willing to show it to someone.
"This is a deeply affecting book. It's a must read for anyone who has struggled through the feeling of losing yourself to parenthood and (hopefully) finding another version on the other side."
—
Emily Oster
I kept it in the form I wrote it, journal entries made in the moment, not smoothed over later. In hindsight everything rounds off. You tell yourself you probably weren't that mad, it was probably fine. I didn't want fine. I wanted it the way it actually was: the guilt of going back to risk-laden work, the marriage that nearly broke, my own mother's history in the background, and the fear that I was losing myself somewhere in all of it. Raw was the only version worth writing.
Here is the thing I came out the other side knowing: we don't have to give something up to go forward. We are all doing more than anyone sees, and we all have more we want to do. That's the whole book. We all have a more.
Kirkus called it "raw, passionate, and stinging." That's the review I wanted.
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