A new tattoo

And a Big Thing.

This one is going to be pretty raw, but something is telling me to put it out there and not keep this to myself.

I’m writing this at my kitchen table, 24 hours before I catch a train into New York to get my first tattoo in 10 years. I have two tattoos, both on my left arm, one like a square stamp on the inside of my wrist that I got the summer after living in South Africa and spending time in Eswatini (then-Swaziland) and Senegal, and the other an arching botanical illustration of lichen on my bicep after driving solo through Iceland for 10 days. Both marking moments of travel, filling my creative cup, and self-determination.

They were also moments when I thought, “Surely, this will be the last time I can take a solo trip like this, just for myself.” Because my future, always on the near horizon, was an imagined future with kids.

Baby Jess, in then-Swaziland, 2008.

As a young teenager, my first job was babysitter. I set up a summer camp for neighborhood kids, and was celebrated as “entrepreneurial” for role-playing as caretaker. I even traveled on trips to Cape Cod with a family as a young, underpaid nanny. Everyone told me I would be a great mom some day; my friends and even my therapist tell me that now. When I was 18, my grandmother began asking me when I would give her great-grandchildren and has made quilts for those non-existent babies, folded away in a cedar chest. I was the first woman in my direct lineage to go to college and get a bachelor’s, but my grandparents’ graduation gift to me was a sewing machine.

Intentional or not, consciously done or not, the message was clear. No matter what you do with your life, you are a girl and your end goal is “Mother.”

In retrospect, non-motherhood was never presented as a viable alternative. It was an invisible, and therefore unavailable, life path. At 37 years old, I look back at the last 20-30 years of my life and realize how fucked up that is. There were very few models of women without children in my life, married or single. (Now, I’m surrounded by them; most of my female friends, ranging from 35-55, are child-free.) Older, married, and child-free family members were explained away as “immature” because they weren’t parents, as though becoming a parent is a critical cognitive and emotional developmental stage. I’ve spent the last 15 years actively ruminating over a “will-I-won’t-I” decision that never seemed like a choice between two desirable options. It seemed more like delaying the inevitable.

This all makes the decision I’ve made with my partner, a non-action action to not have kids, feel anti-climatic. I’m not going to throw myself a party or make a fake registry for my child-free life. But I can’t continue to live this way, floating in liminal indecision over a major life decision for next five years of my life. Enough. Actively closing the door on one reality is already giving fresh air to the alternate reality we’re just now allowing ourselves to dream of.

In the past, motherhood felt like a binary choice—you either have kids or you don’t. Now, non-motherhood doesn’t feel like a white canvas of non-something, but like a painter’s palette of choices, portals that are opening up and can be filled in dozens of ways.

There are many reasons we’ve chosen not to be parents and I could fill an entire book with those reasons (and many women, like Ruby Warrington, have). I could also talk about the enormous grief of this decision, of letting go of futures you’ve fantasized for yourself. I might write more on this or I might not. But it’s been helpful for me to read substacks from other millennial women veering off their primary substack theme—be it crafting, writing, or otherwise—to take on this topic that has, at times, felt all-consuming. For the same reasons I chose to speak up about my BRCA1 diagnosis, I feel compelled to talk about this Big Thing as a life-shaping, irreversible, existential decision—to actively choose to create, raise, shelter, and love a brand new human in a world that’s becoming increasingly hotter and unstable—that we don’t talk about enough.

New tattoo! My body is a galaxy!

What I’m writing

Writing a scene from an a secondary character’s point of view to see if I want to spend more time there. Journaling about aforementioned Big Thing.

What I’m reading

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes and re-reading The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu after watching the Netflix series.

Listened to Jonathan Haidt’s interview on the Hard Fork podcast about what social media is doing to kids’ brains and mental health. Listened to Caitlyn Collins’ interview on the Ezra Klein podcast about how American societal and policy constructs make parenting very, very hard in the U.S. and especially for women (both she and Ezra are parents).

Added Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich (already on my bookshelf) to the top of my to-read stack. Also added Count Down by Shanna Swan and The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and two books by Judith Butler: Who’s Afraid of Gender? (her newest book) and Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, which I picked up at the totally fabulous used bookstore, Human Relations, in Bushwick yesterday. It’s great and everyone should go if you’re in Brooklyn! Also! Also! Got two of the three books from this feminist sci-fi dystopian trilogy by Suzette Haden Elgin that I’d never heard of. The back cover had an endorsement from Ursula, the only endorsement I need.

What I read

Women Without Kids by Ruby Warrington. This book changed my life (obviously). I get a little cringe at her repeated praise of the “unsung sisterhood” (honestly, I get cringe whenever white cis women talk about “sisterhoods,” as a rule) and have some other small nits, but on a whole it hit on every little thing that’s raced through my head for weeks, years. If any of this post has resonated with you, read this book. Maybe read Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, too, which is more anxiety-inducing but smart as a blade.

It’s also worth noting that Ursula K. Le Guin was a mother. She has written several essays about maintaining and feeding a writing life while parenting. Many can be found in Space Crone, a new compilation of her essays on gender, from UK-based Silver Press. “The Space Crone,” “Bryn Mawr Commencement Address” and “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter” are especially potent. In writing in “The Space Crone” about the life changes of menopause, on life after childbearing, Ursula writes, “The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself, at last.” (Emphasis mine.)

A helpful thing

Get some art from your favorite writer and frame it on your wall.

And one more long quote from Ursula, just because, from her 1986 “Bryn Mawr Commencement Address.” Full thing available online here.

But when you look at yourself in the mirror, I hope you see yourself. Not one of the myths. Not a failed man - a person who can never succeed because success is basically defined as being male - and not a failed goddess, a person desperately trying to hide herself in the dummy Woman, the image of men's desires and fears. I hope you look away from those myths and into your own eyes, and see your own strength. You're going to need it. I hope you don't try to take your strength from men, or from a man. Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot. I hope you'll take and make your own soul; that you'll feel your life for yourself pain by pain and joy by joy; that you'll feed your life, eat, "eat as you go" - you who nourish, be nourished!

If being a cog in the machine or a puppet manipulated by others isn't what you want, you can find out what you want, your needs, desires, truths, powers, by accepting your own experience as a woman, as this woman, this body, this person, your hungry self. On the maps drawn by men there is an immense white area, terra incognita, where most women live. That country is all yours to explore, to inhabit, to describe.