Thanks for this thoughtful piece. It was unexpectedly encouraging to me on a hard morning in baby jail but also put into words the distressing emotions I've been feeling regarding my own life choices and state in life.
Predictably. Trenchantly. Beautiful. I want to lay claim to gently urging Alex to write this piece. When she shared with us the emotional slog she's enduring as a bit of an apology for being off our radar, I of course expressed my concern. Alex is one of my very few favorites and as the trial lawyer son of a Latin teacher...I'm hard to please. She caught my concern. When she contextulized it as "mere" Mommy stress and was grasping for an issue to write on, I urged Alex to tell us - knowing full well it would be, well, predictably, trenchantly beautiful.
And so, predictably, here I sit, a crusty and childless trial lawyer with tears in his eyes. A real story told with vulnerability and insight. As Alex foretold, I did indeed feel my caution rise as she spent a painful amount of ink on the impositions, regrets over privations of lattes and langor. And then I realized both are little boys.... I began fussing against still worse angels. I began to ask myself how does this differ from managing calls from twenty-five clients in crisis, from marshalling the quiet time draft a motion to suppress versus the wham to back down a dishonest prosecutor? Is this going to be the time I object to Alex' take - and I asked for it?
Then I reached, "But here's the thing about Baby Jail I failed to understand,...". And as I've come to expect from this thinker, this piece bared both compelling vulnerability and novel insight into circumstances we read so much about today. As Alex' piece turns to the marvel of this moment in motherhood, she manages to tell it in a way that all of us recognize ourselves in it, fighting to salvage that "hologram of our former selves" all while peering cautiously into the possibility that self may, in fact, have been less than the whole story, after all.
Toddler as Schumpeter! Creative destruction, indeed...! Thank you, Dear Alex, for this bit of true humanity shared.
Really beautiful writing. You capture it so well! and as fellow mom to only boys I understand the day dreams of mothering quiet, feminine creatures that might just color at a restaurant instead of having to turn salt and pepper shakers into action figures, or have a reason to stand on chairs every 2 minutes. But I'm also thankful for and deeply in love with being mom to my little boys, watching them and guiding them as they navigate this wild world. They think my Lego building abilities are the greatest in the world and that I am the most excellent finder of sticks that can become a sword.
Every tired day, my heart breaks a bit with the knowledge that it's all over very soon, and I'm more than certain I'll miss baby jail the second it's over.
Oh yeah! It’s a comfort and a terror all at once! I want to have one more, but it may not happen. I’m thinking it might be both terrible and wonderful if it happened 5-7 years from now when my boys are heading into adolescence. One more tiny, feral creature that we can all oooo and ahhh over
I have boys, but I also have a daughter. She is in fact a very good girl. Always has been.
But -- when she was irritated/unhappy, despite appearing very tiny she was capable of emitting screams of skull-shattering intensity. It was like a military-grade sonic weapon.
On the balance girls and boys even out in terms of difficulty level. That's my experience anyway. They're equally lovable, too.
Ha! Very true. I have one niece, who I adore. She’s usually very chill, calm, even maternal toward her brother and my boys. But when she gets hurt or feels slighted her screams are earth shattering. So yes that seems correct. It evens out in the end.
Well…as a mother of three girls, they are hard in a different way. There is less of the physical danger sort of thing, but a lot more of the whining, crying, screaming, and clinging to your legs constantly. Girls are all about the relationship, so they can suck the life out of you with the need for attention, interaction, affirmation, and the constant complaining about all of life’s injustices.
“They just follow me around all day complaining and crying!” I would wail to my husband, as I followed him out to the garage when he tried to escape my litany of maternal woe. “yeah…I have no idea what that’s like!” he responded, and I burst out laughing because following people around and being constantly upset at them is WHAT WE GIRLS DO.
With boys, you have to manage the physical safety and what we always called the Stupid Male Gene that makes them think jumping off a wall with a soup tureen on your head is an AWESOME idea. But with girls, you have to manage all the feelings - and they have very strong feelings about EVERYTHING. Asking “what did you do at preschool today?” would unleash a torrent of grievances; Caitie wouldn’t sit next to her in circle, Ashlyn didn’t share, Michael kept grabbing all the beautiful colors of crayons, and Olivia wanted to play unicorns instead of rainbow kitty cats and it was all so very upsetting that even the memory is now making her cry…
My next-door neighbor had four boys and one girl; she always said the girl was more trouble than all the boys combined. Not nearly as many ER visits as the boys - but she was totally unprepared for all the girl drama!
It’s pretty much a crap shoot every morning as to which of the eleventy-million of my emails I’ll actually get around to reading that day. I’m glad I landed on this one today. I raised three boys, and looking back, it was the best period of my life. Well, that and the period I’m in now with my grandkids.
I remember when my oldest two - born back to back - finally started sleeping through the night. I'd be so exhausted by the time I got them to bed that I'd pass out immediately after them.
But then I'd wake up early, before dawn, and have a couple hours to myself. That was a special time of day in a special time of life.
You'll look back on it all fondly. When they get bigger you'll wonder what you'll have to do without them around.
The problem with these little scraps of time is that I do a lot of revenge procrastination when I should be sleeping. My friends ask if my kids gave me a rough night. No, I gave me a rough night! Last night I slept for maybe 2 hours. After staying up late having an existential crisis about my seeming inability to cook and researching all the different food processors I could be buying, and then stressing myself out seeing how bad the local housing market is for us, then I failed to sleep, then I played the keyboard, then ranted to AI about what’s causing me to lie in bed and not sleep (that’s the other thing I stay up late doing, other than practicing on my keyboard, doomscrolling or watching endless YouTube videos. I have crises about my mom fails or the near future), I didn’t sleep until 5 AM. My baby and toddlers slept GREAT🙈
Beautiful, Alex. I’m nearing the due date with my sixth, and sometimes I feel like the romance has left me. Words like these bring it right back. Thank God for these beautiful, dependent, messy, irreplaceable creatures and for the “slow metamorphosis.” (sanctification!)
This whole thing was gold. You perfectly capture the feeling I get during that one week each summer when my kids are in day camp. I scramble to prepare our upcoming homeschool year during those 5 days. It takes a good 20-30 minutes before I can fully concentrate, but when that moment hits I feel euphoric. I'm so productive....until I realize how much I miss their company and it's time to do the pickup-run.
'The nuclear family is a recent quirk, and sometimes it feels like we're all participating in a massive social experiment'
Hey man speak for yourself; we Anglos find it perfectly natural.
no no only joking!
As I type she's running around making real loud panther sounds* while he pursues her with one of those guns that fire soft tipped play bullets, occasionally firing and most times hitting her in the face....
I know exactly what you mean about losing the ability to be, or even to appreciate, fun that has any source other than the kids' delightful antics. I was talking to the missus about exactly this last night She's far worse than me--perforce; she does most of the kid-work--despite being a good deal younger. I'm also fillin the guilt complex--eg I've learned not to so much as *look* at a strawberry with intent to do anything other than wash it so he or she can eat it.
I think, maybe you disagree, that Romanians still love and value the holiness of childhood in a way that is nearly lost in the west. The downside is that when you have children *everything* is socially expected to revolve around them ('copiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!').
This is is a piece stright from the heart. I wish I could write with such sincerity.
Children are still part of the natural landscape here more than in the West, I agree! Parenting standards are also ratcheting up quickly to match the West in neurosis with copycat attachment and gentle parenting influencers cropping up every day.
My goodness, this speaks to me so much to where my life is right now. We also both work remote. It’s great, it’s also not great. Everyday repeating in its chaos. Oooff, so relatable.
Thank you for this. Now that we have eight (!!) living kids, I realize that baby jail is gone, replaced with—a cocoon? A campsite? Some kind of communal, metamorphic juggle that involves our older kids and our younger ones, including the baby, now 13 months old. And now the years are so, so fast. I can barely remember the exhaustion of last year, though one night’s interrupted sleep will give me a taste. :) All this is to say that you are right. And if God continues to bless you with children, you will someday look up and realize the bars are gone, transformed into ever changing service that still limits but also inspires and, amazingly, frees you.
In 1970, an anthropologist argued that across societies, "women's work" is whatever can be done while 50% of your attention is on the kids not killing themselves. If you're a hoe agriculture society, then women farm; if you plow, it's men. &c.
Thank you! Big fan of your work too; we once purchased a product unfortunately known as "love buds" so that we could spend a roadtrip listening to one of your interviews with a less delicate guest without the children eavesdropping...
Beautiful and honest essay. So well-written and precise that all I can think is "wow, how did she have time to write this?!" 😂 Thank you for describing those opposing trends of resentful mom versus saintly mom so aptly.
Made me think of this from a while back: if you haven't read this yet, you might enjoy it..
Beautifully written and definitely my experience in some particulars (the fragmented time!), but … as someone who is in it for the “long haul” (I’ve had a baby or toddler or both and more for 13 years now), this hasn’t been our situation overall. And I’m not sure it ever was, as we planned to live this way and knew lots of other people who did.
This works if you “do the Baby Thing” for a relatively short part of your life, but if Babies are just an ongoing part of your life, you can’t really stay in Baby Jail for 13+ years. And knowing we wanted to live this way, with lots of children, from the very beginning we’ve just gone on with life — taking babies along, letting them nap in the sling and nurse on the go, etc. And once you have older ones you’re responsible for, you can’t really consign them to Baby Jail along with you.
I've read many articles about motherhood over the course of my parenting journey, but this one was one of the best (if not THE best) Really hit the nail on the head. You articulate the human condition so beautifully and creatively, yet in a way we can all instinctively understand. In a way that feels deeply personal, but yet everyone can relate to in their own way. As a mum of three (almost) grown kids, I think a lot about what a journey it's been, how it's changed me and and how it's still transforming me as the kids graduate, fall in love, become adults, and make their own way in the world. Even now, new challenges and fears occur (Will that girl break his heart? Will she get that job? Is she happy in the big city? How many pot noodles do they actually eat?? ) It's now a dance of trusting, letting go and embracing our relationship on a whole new footing. I don't think there can be a more defining or conscious-shifting life event or process as raising a child. With all the beauty, love, worry, sleepless nights and humdrum tasks that it involves, it's totally worth all the blood, sweat and tears. Thank you for helping me reflect on this today.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. It was unexpectedly encouraging to me on a hard morning in baby jail but also put into words the distressing emotions I've been feeling regarding my own life choices and state in life.
Predictably. Trenchantly. Beautiful. I want to lay claim to gently urging Alex to write this piece. When she shared with us the emotional slog she's enduring as a bit of an apology for being off our radar, I of course expressed my concern. Alex is one of my very few favorites and as the trial lawyer son of a Latin teacher...I'm hard to please. She caught my concern. When she contextulized it as "mere" Mommy stress and was grasping for an issue to write on, I urged Alex to tell us - knowing full well it would be, well, predictably, trenchantly beautiful.
And so, predictably, here I sit, a crusty and childless trial lawyer with tears in his eyes. A real story told with vulnerability and insight. As Alex foretold, I did indeed feel my caution rise as she spent a painful amount of ink on the impositions, regrets over privations of lattes and langor. And then I realized both are little boys.... I began fussing against still worse angels. I began to ask myself how does this differ from managing calls from twenty-five clients in crisis, from marshalling the quiet time draft a motion to suppress versus the wham to back down a dishonest prosecutor? Is this going to be the time I object to Alex' take - and I asked for it?
Then I reached, "But here's the thing about Baby Jail I failed to understand,...". And as I've come to expect from this thinker, this piece bared both compelling vulnerability and novel insight into circumstances we read so much about today. As Alex' piece turns to the marvel of this moment in motherhood, she manages to tell it in a way that all of us recognize ourselves in it, fighting to salvage that "hologram of our former selves" all while peering cautiously into the possibility that self may, in fact, have been less than the whole story, after all.
Toddler as Schumpeter! Creative destruction, indeed...! Thank you, Dear Alex, for this bit of true humanity shared.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment, Don, and for the inspiration!
Ah, the great constants in life ... death, taxes, dishonest prosecutors.
I write on Boasberg’s turnaround order in my SS. Love to hear your thoughts.
Really beautiful writing. You capture it so well! and as fellow mom to only boys I understand the day dreams of mothering quiet, feminine creatures that might just color at a restaurant instead of having to turn salt and pepper shakers into action figures, or have a reason to stand on chairs every 2 minutes. But I'm also thankful for and deeply in love with being mom to my little boys, watching them and guiding them as they navigate this wild world. They think my Lego building abilities are the greatest in the world and that I am the most excellent finder of sticks that can become a sword.
Every tired day, my heart breaks a bit with the knowledge that it's all over very soon, and I'm more than certain I'll miss baby jail the second it's over.
Oh yeah! It’s a comfort and a terror all at once! I want to have one more, but it may not happen. I’m thinking it might be both terrible and wonderful if it happened 5-7 years from now when my boys are heading into adolescence. One more tiny, feral creature that we can all oooo and ahhh over
Have one more. Don't think about it. Just do it!
I have boys, but I also have a daughter. She is in fact a very good girl. Always has been.
But -- when she was irritated/unhappy, despite appearing very tiny she was capable of emitting screams of skull-shattering intensity. It was like a military-grade sonic weapon.
On the balance girls and boys even out in terms of difficulty level. That's my experience anyway. They're equally lovable, too.
Ha! Very true. I have one niece, who I adore. She’s usually very chill, calm, even maternal toward her brother and my boys. But when she gets hurt or feels slighted her screams are earth shattering. So yes that seems correct. It evens out in the end.
Well…as a mother of three girls, they are hard in a different way. There is less of the physical danger sort of thing, but a lot more of the whining, crying, screaming, and clinging to your legs constantly. Girls are all about the relationship, so they can suck the life out of you with the need for attention, interaction, affirmation, and the constant complaining about all of life’s injustices.
“They just follow me around all day complaining and crying!” I would wail to my husband, as I followed him out to the garage when he tried to escape my litany of maternal woe. “yeah…I have no idea what that’s like!” he responded, and I burst out laughing because following people around and being constantly upset at them is WHAT WE GIRLS DO.
With boys, you have to manage the physical safety and what we always called the Stupid Male Gene that makes them think jumping off a wall with a soup tureen on your head is an AWESOME idea. But with girls, you have to manage all the feelings - and they have very strong feelings about EVERYTHING. Asking “what did you do at preschool today?” would unleash a torrent of grievances; Caitie wouldn’t sit next to her in circle, Ashlyn didn’t share, Michael kept grabbing all the beautiful colors of crayons, and Olivia wanted to play unicorns instead of rainbow kitty cats and it was all so very upsetting that even the memory is now making her cry…
Yes. 😆 Very accurate.
My next-door neighbor had four boys and one girl; she always said the girl was more trouble than all the boys combined. Not nearly as many ER visits as the boys - but she was totally unprepared for all the girl drama!
It’s pretty much a crap shoot every morning as to which of the eleventy-million of my emails I’ll actually get around to reading that day. I’m glad I landed on this one today. I raised three boys, and looking back, it was the best period of my life. Well, that and the period I’m in now with my grandkids.
I remember when my oldest two - born back to back - finally started sleeping through the night. I'd be so exhausted by the time I got them to bed that I'd pass out immediately after them.
But then I'd wake up early, before dawn, and have a couple hours to myself. That was a special time of day in a special time of life.
You'll look back on it all fondly. When they get bigger you'll wonder what you'll have to do without them around.
The problem with these little scraps of time is that I do a lot of revenge procrastination when I should be sleeping. My friends ask if my kids gave me a rough night. No, I gave me a rough night! Last night I slept for maybe 2 hours. After staying up late having an existential crisis about my seeming inability to cook and researching all the different food processors I could be buying, and then stressing myself out seeing how bad the local housing market is for us, then I failed to sleep, then I played the keyboard, then ranted to AI about what’s causing me to lie in bed and not sleep (that’s the other thing I stay up late doing, other than practicing on my keyboard, doomscrolling or watching endless YouTube videos. I have crises about my mom fails or the near future), I didn’t sleep until 5 AM. My baby and toddlers slept GREAT🙈
“Revenge procrastination” is exactly what I do if I get a second wind after bedtime. Finally getting to eat my well deserved slice of brainrot
Beautiful, Alex. I’m nearing the due date with my sixth, and sometimes I feel like the romance has left me. Words like these bring it right back. Thank God for these beautiful, dependent, messy, irreplaceable creatures and for the “slow metamorphosis.” (sanctification!)
This whole thing was gold. You perfectly capture the feeling I get during that one week each summer when my kids are in day camp. I scramble to prepare our upcoming homeschool year during those 5 days. It takes a good 20-30 minutes before I can fully concentrate, but when that moment hits I feel euphoric. I'm so productive....until I realize how much I miss their company and it's time to do the pickup-run.
'The nuclear family is a recent quirk, and sometimes it feels like we're all participating in a massive social experiment'
Hey man speak for yourself; we Anglos find it perfectly natural.
no no only joking!
As I type she's running around making real loud panther sounds* while he pursues her with one of those guns that fire soft tipped play bullets, occasionally firing and most times hitting her in the face....
I know exactly what you mean about losing the ability to be, or even to appreciate, fun that has any source other than the kids' delightful antics. I was talking to the missus about exactly this last night She's far worse than me--perforce; she does most of the kid-work--despite being a good deal younger. I'm also fillin the guilt complex--eg I've learned not to so much as *look* at a strawberry with intent to do anything other than wash it so he or she can eat it.
I think, maybe you disagree, that Romanians still love and value the holiness of childhood in a way that is nearly lost in the west. The downside is that when you have children *everything* is socially expected to revolve around them ('copiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!').
This is is a piece stright from the heart. I wish I could write with such sincerity.
*She's now changed to neighing like a horse
Children are still part of the natural landscape here more than in the West, I agree! Parenting standards are also ratcheting up quickly to match the West in neurosis with copycat attachment and gentle parenting influencers cropping up every day.
My goodness, this speaks to me so much to where my life is right now. We also both work remote. It’s great, it’s also not great. Everyday repeating in its chaos. Oooff, so relatable.
Thank you for this. Now that we have eight (!!) living kids, I realize that baby jail is gone, replaced with—a cocoon? A campsite? Some kind of communal, metamorphic juggle that involves our older kids and our younger ones, including the baby, now 13 months old. And now the years are so, so fast. I can barely remember the exhaustion of last year, though one night’s interrupted sleep will give me a taste. :) All this is to say that you are right. And if God continues to bless you with children, you will someday look up and realize the bars are gone, transformed into ever changing service that still limits but also inspires and, amazingly, frees you.
This was healing to read. Thank you.
In 1970, an anthropologist argued that across societies, "women's work" is whatever can be done while 50% of your attention is on the kids not killing themselves. If you're a hoe agriculture society, then women farm; if you plow, it's men. &c.
https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/671420
This is a very illuminating piece of info, thank you! Also, I love your reviews, they are some of the most interesting content on this site.
Thank you! Big fan of your work too; we once purchased a product unfortunately known as "love buds" so that we could spend a roadtrip listening to one of your interviews with a less delicate guest without the children eavesdropping...
We have those too! A lot of not-so-child-friendly media is consumed in our household.
(I have a book review coming about this if I ever escape from Baby Jail long enough to write it.)
Beautiful and honest essay. So well-written and precise that all I can think is "wow, how did she have time to write this?!" 😂 Thank you for describing those opposing trends of resentful mom versus saintly mom so aptly.
Made me think of this from a while back: if you haven't read this yet, you might enjoy it..
The Relatable Mom Economy is Deranged and Poisonous https://open.substack.com/pub/radicalmomsunion/p/the-relatable-mom-economy-is-deranged?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2sgob
It has lingered in my drafts for many nap-snack-bedtime cycles, if that's any explanation
Beautifully written and definitely my experience in some particulars (the fragmented time!), but … as someone who is in it for the “long haul” (I’ve had a baby or toddler or both and more for 13 years now), this hasn’t been our situation overall. And I’m not sure it ever was, as we planned to live this way and knew lots of other people who did.
This works if you “do the Baby Thing” for a relatively short part of your life, but if Babies are just an ongoing part of your life, you can’t really stay in Baby Jail for 13+ years. And knowing we wanted to live this way, with lots of children, from the very beginning we’ve just gone on with life — taking babies along, letting them nap in the sling and nurse on the go, etc. And once you have older ones you’re responsible for, you can’t really consign them to Baby Jail along with you.
I've read many articles about motherhood over the course of my parenting journey, but this one was one of the best (if not THE best) Really hit the nail on the head. You articulate the human condition so beautifully and creatively, yet in a way we can all instinctively understand. In a way that feels deeply personal, but yet everyone can relate to in their own way. As a mum of three (almost) grown kids, I think a lot about what a journey it's been, how it's changed me and and how it's still transforming me as the kids graduate, fall in love, become adults, and make their own way in the world. Even now, new challenges and fears occur (Will that girl break his heart? Will she get that job? Is she happy in the big city? How many pot noodles do they actually eat?? ) It's now a dance of trusting, letting go and embracing our relationship on a whole new footing. I don't think there can be a more defining or conscious-shifting life event or process as raising a child. With all the beauty, love, worry, sleepless nights and humdrum tasks that it involves, it's totally worth all the blood, sweat and tears. Thank you for helping me reflect on this today.
What a kind and beautiful note, thank you!