Writing About Motherhood Without Writing About My Child

Before our child was born, my husband and I had a million conversations about how we would raise this brand-new human. How we would respect his individuality in a world designed to flatten it. How we would infuse our principles and values into parenting.

“Our child.”

As his birth approached, the child we planned for began to feel less and less theoretical. Believing in consent, autonomy and dignity—for everyone, but maybe especially for our child—we needed a concrete plan for protecting his privacy.

My husband and I agreed: no posting photos on social media or anywhere else on the internet. No embarrassing stories or videos. No identifying information (schools, sports teams, etc.). It seemed so simple, so straightforward.

But that was before this luminous being became a real, literal presence in our lives and home.

I soon realized that early motherhood came with a sense of being unmoored from my past self, a new identity where I needed to find my footing. My previous writing practice had focused on advocacy but not myself. But now I had two new selves to consider—my child’s and mine—and moments so heartbreakingly beautiful they longed to be recorded. To make sense of this phase of life, I needed a new writing practice and to write myself into it.

But how could I, a new mother, write about myself without writing about my child and violating the concrete plan I’d set with my husband? I had to confront a set of very real fears. Of my child being doxxed. Of violating my child’s trust (and inability to consent). Of writing something I couldn’t take back. The last thing I would do is knowingly betray my child’s trust.

And yet, I am entitled to my experience and to write about it. Mothers are often left out of the frame, literally and figuratively. And I felt a radical longing to take up space.

So I set about reconciling these truths and perspectives. I joined a closed writing group where I could write everything I wanted—to process first without an audience—without it ever becoming public fodder. I was simply chronicling, week by week, my becoming a mother. I endeavored to witness without ownership.

But I wanted more. I wanted to write into all the ways that motherhood had intersected all my existing selves: my queer, disabled, anarchist selves. And I felt an urge to publish.

Somewhere along the way, my child grew from a baby into a whirlwind of a first grader. How could I write about motherhood and the way it had irrevocably shaped my perspective without chronicling my child’s life for public consumption?

I devised a system. To keep him out of frame, I would shift my lens.

I needed to create a set of guidelines for myself, without much of a map. How do other writing mothers decide what they will share? Primary, as ever, my goal is to preserve his dignity and privacy. Next, I decided: no milestones or medical information. But finally, I needed to lean into celebrating moments in pride in myself as a parent—and to separate those from his achievements, which are not mine.

I would write not from myself as a mother, but toward my changing mother-self. I would unwrap the person I have been made into as a result of this person’s presence. Instead of telling his story, I would investigate the things I could not have seen or done or understood had I not made this person.

Now, when I write about him—and the way his years have shaped me—my child is just out of frame (probably playing with Legos).

I do not tell you what he is afraid of, but I do tell you all the new fears I have since entering motherhood. I will not recount his daily minutiae, the tiny details of a life that belongs to him, but I can tell you how it is gloriously precious. I will not tell you his favorite dinosaur (which is his), but I can recite facts about that dinosaur as if they were my own name (to show you what he has taught me).

This is how I honor him without invisibilizing myself.

I have a new curiosity. I see the world with a new specificity. I do not accept the world simply for what it is, but, like my child, I want to take it apart and put it back together and understand why things are. This precision has made me a better writer. “I don’t know” isn’t enough of an answer for my child or for me. When we see a bird, I do not think, “Ah, a bird,” but feel compelled to look up what kind, so that we can share that. Not just “cloud,” but cumulonimbus. Not a construction truck, but a crawler backhoe or orange-peel grappler.

To maintain this distinction, between what is his and what is mine requires self-inquiry. It is a matter of opposites sometimes. I am continually cultivating a relationship to my craft as a writer, which requires attention. And, that attention is constantly distracted by the small person who lives in my house.

I wrote an essay a while back about traveling with my son. It could have been full of the travails of solo travel with a toddler. Instead, it focused on the specific parts of travel with my son that bring me joy. I know so much about airplanes now. But it is also the intimacy of navigating the wider world with another person and the poetry found in the mundane parts of travel: eating our breakfast in the boarding area and waiting our turn to find our seats on the plane. This is the joy of being his mother, and a privilege that I do not take for granted.

Some days, my writing-self and mother-self are inextricable. This is natural and even wonderful sometimes. Because what I know is that I couldn’t have created this body of work at all if it hadn’t been for the way motherhood and my child have shaped me.

High Priestess of the Apocalypse, my book about climate change, activism, and motherhood (in part), and what it is to be a parent when it feels like the world is ending, would not have been possible without the perspective of motherhood, and mothering my child specifically. As critical as my son is to this book, and to my story, I needed to make sure, every step of the way, that I did not give too much of him away. Both for his safety and for his autonomy.

I went line by line through the manuscript to weed out anything that even walked the edge of embarrassing or that gave too much of him away. I blurred details that were not mine or gave things more of a feeling-tone where they were not mine.

This perspective will become even more important as we both age and grow apart: which is how raising a child is supposed to work. I do not want this child’s identity shaped by what and how I choose to write about motherhood. It is my job as both a mother and a writer to set him up for his own adventures—that he might choose to chronicle or not.