My Mother’s Day was, truly, very lovely. Our seven-month old had a great night’s sleep and was up around 6:45 am, which is my favorite time for him to wake up. I fed him, we got him dressed, and we loaded up the stroller to walk to the neighborhood donut shop to get coffee and donuts. This donut shop is a fun little piece of our parenting story - the morning I went into labor, my husband went there to grab a coffee because I told him that I was likely too nauseous to deal with the smell of brewing coffee at home. When he got there, he excitedly told them that his wife was in labor, and they gave him a free donut in addition to his coffee. That donut ended up coming with us to the hospital and providing him with a midnight (or 3am? I don’t remember) snack after a long and arduous delivery process. When we came back home after our son was born, he went back there a few days later and told them we’d had the baby. They sent him back with more free donuts, a little gift to our new family. Starting our Mother’s Day there just felt right.

After the baby went down for his first nap, my husband went to church and my parents made their way to our house so we could get the cars packed up and drive to a local farm that was having a plant sale. My husband and I are starting a few little vegetable garden raised beds this year, and we were excited to pick out our assortment. My mom also loves doing gardening and outdoor related things for Mother’s Day, so it was a win for everyone. It was still early in the day, but I already noticed a prickling sense of disappointment. Yes, we had gone to the donut shop, but at my suggestion. The day had started with my husband wishing me a happy Mother’s Day and then immediately saying he was going to go downstairs to have some cereal, and I had to be the one to propose we do something a little nicer. His going to church and my staying home with the baby had always been the plan, but it felt entirely like any other day. Which, to be fair, it was. Planning things with a baby is tough. I thought that maybe a productive nap would make me feel a little better, but the baby woke himself up with the lingering cough from his cold barely 25 minutes in and wouldn’t go back down. I’d barely even settled on the couch with my book before I was back in mom mode.

By 10:30 am I already felt burnt out. The short nap meant the baby was cranky, and by the time we were ready to get in the car for the 20 minute drive to the farm he seemed like he was ready to go back to sleep. My husband asked me how I wanted to handle it, but as I was answering his question revealed that he had already plopped the baby in his sleep sack and started the sound machine, so the question was a little hyperbolic. Another prickle. I thought this was supposed to be the one day where I didn’t have to run the show. I knew what I wanted - I wanted my husband to bring the baby downstairs, dressed in his cute little jacket with the unnecessary pockets. I wanted him to grab the diaper bag (that he would have already inspected to make sure we had everything we needed) and put him in the car seat and say “let’s just go, and we’ll figure it out! If he gets tired, we’ll abandon ship, but maybe he’ll be fine”. I wanted him to say “this is what you want to do today, so we’re going to make it work”. And then I wanted him to drive us to the farm, to bring us to a cute coffee shop to pick up lunch to bring home, to go home and discover that he had planned a sweet little gift or surprise for me, or for him to say “go take a bath, you earned it”. Instead, we picked up the plants (which was really fun and satisfying), piled back into the car (the baby fell asleep almost instantly on the drive home, so all napping drama was avoided) and exhaustedly debated whether we should stop at the Taco Bell drive through or just reheat some leftovers when we got home.

This is where I pause my own story to relay a very important element of all of this, and that is the fact that no one was more surprised by my own disappointment than myself. I’ve talked a big game in the leadup to parenthood, and in the ensuing experience, about the fact that not only do I not really care about gendered parenting roles but I actively seek to avoid them. Whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to do for my first Mother’s Day I, quite genuinely, answered that I didn’t really have any designs on the day. I truly hadn’t thought about what I wanted, and pretty much assumed that I would be fine with it being a relatively low-key day, because why would I want everyone to fuss over me just because I’m a mom? For someone who writes almost entirely about motherhood, I really do believe that in a two-parent household both parents play essential roles and are equally deserving of praise and celebration, so why did I suddenly find myself feeling like I was being slighted by not having a day that was all about me?

This is what I was thinking about in the shower at the end of the day (the rest of which was made up of planting our new vegetables, my husband running an errand and coming back with a bottle of Fernet and a 12-pack of Miller High Life for me, a family FaceTime with my sister, and a lovely dinner made by my parents that we all enjoyed together at my home) and I came up with two reasons.

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The first was that while I do believe that both my husband and I play essential and praise-deserving roles in my son’s life, my first seven months of motherhood have revealed something to me that goes a little bit counter to what I wanted to think and that is the fact that there just are parts of this whole experience that are harder on me. I’m exclusively breastfeeding, and this is the caloric equivalent of running a 5k every single day. My brain has rewired itself to be oversensitive to my son’s needs, so when he wriggles around at 2am or spits his pacifier on the ground and whines about it I am instantly awake while my husband snores away. Our household income differences mean that, as is often the case in heterosexual partnerships, the finances made sense for me to take a step back from full-time work rather than put our son in daycare, so I am home with the baby four full days a week as opposed to my husband who is only home full days with him on the weekend. This means I know more. I know which of his clothing items go in the dryer and which ones get hung on the line. I know where the blankets for the stroller are, and the right cycles for each stage of washing his cloth diapers, and how to mix his rice cereal, and when he is ready for a nap versus when he just needs to go outside and look at the garden. When we talk about the mental load of motherhood, this is exactly what we are talking about. And when I was thinking about what I wanted on Mother’s Day, it wasn’t really about the opportunity for praise and gifts, it was about the promise of a day of relief from that mental load. Being a mom is amazing, but it is exhausting, and I realized I had been looking forward to a day where someone said “I get how exhausting this is, and I see that you take on more, and I’m going to run the show today so you can get a little break”.

The second reason for my disappointment was that in that one day, I started to clearly see the next decade of my life. Maybe this was a little dramatic, but I started to imagine Christmas mornings with nothing in my stocking because no one thought to get anything for me while I was getting things for everyone else. I could picture Father’s Days that were meticulously planned that felt even more crushing in comparison to Mother’s Days that consisted of a Hallmark card and nothing more. I thought about the hard work of putting together a child’s Halloween costume, of designing Easter baskets, of planning birthday parties and coordinating family vacations and all of the fun and memories that make up a magical childhood. And I started to see a version of that childhood for my kid where the magic was all me. And if I was the one making all of the magic, how would I get any magic for myself?

When I got out of the shower, I told all of this to my husband. And I’ll be honest, it didn’t feel great to bring it up. I felt self-conscious and ungrateful. What was I really complaining about? I spent a lovely day with my amazing son, my husband (who, for the record, does a TON to support me in motherhood and make sure I have breaks even during the week when he is working), and my parents. I received so many sweet text messages wishing me a Happy Mother’s Day and telling me what an amazing mom I was. I definitely had been celebrated, so admitting that I didn’t feel celebrated enough felt gross. But you know what happened as we started having the conversation? My husband agreed. I told him that I loved the Fernet and the High Life but that it didn’t really feel like he had planned anything, and he admitted that his “plan” had been to grab some things while he was out, and that he could see how that didn’t really feel special. He validated my discomfort, told me not to apologize for feeling let down, and it turned into much more of a conversation than a confrontation. I told him I was surprised I felt this way, but that I guess it turns out I actually am one of those moms who wants her partner to plan something sweet. We talked about the fact that I hope that our son will grow up to be the type of person who still calls me and maybe even takes me out to dinner on Mother’s Day even when he’s older and out of the house, and how so much of that depends on what he sees when he’s growing up. If he grows up in a house where his dad takes him to CVS and helps him pick out a card and some grocery store flowers and that’s it, that is the way he is going to handle things. But if he grows up in a house where his dad tells him how amazing his mom is, and how hard she works, where together they craft a day of appreciation and showing their love, that becomes his view of things instead.

Creating childhood magic can be done by just one parent. I could give my son all of the magic in the world without my husband ever even lifting a finger. But I don’t just want the magic for him. I want it for all of us. I want my son to feel the biggest and brightest joy on Christmas morning, and on his birthday, and on every day that we do anything even remotely special for him, which I hope is as many days as possible. I also want him to see his parents experience that kind of joy. We aren’t just the creators of his world, we are also his first glimpse into what love and care and happiness look like, and I want him to always remember us as doing the most when it came to those things, and when it came to each other.

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I also feel like I cannot overstate the importance of having conversations when things feel off. I absolutely could have just shrugged the day off and pushed it aside as me being overwhelmed, overstimulated, and burnt out. But these things build, and if I didn’t say something this year, who is to say that it wouldn’t just come back with a vengeance next year? I’ve seen far too many stories on the internet from moms who become bitter and passive aggressive over too many cumulative years of their partners asking them to plan their own Mother’s Day, or feeling like they never get what they really want. You know how you get what you really want? You ask for it. My husband is not a mind reader. He did a few nice things, equal in effort to what I was probably projecting that I wanted, and if I had never said anything he would have continued to do a few nice things for years and I would have let that little fizzle of resentment and confusion at my own feelings of being underwhelmed build and build until I felt unseen and undervalued. Instead, this year, on my first Mother’s Day, I learned that I actually do want to treat this day like a big deal. I want people to celebrate me and all of the hard work that I put in to raising my son. Specifically, I want this from my partner, and I want him to set this example for our child. And it’s not really about the gifts or the praise. It’s about feeling seen. It’s about feeling like the effort that is put in on a day like this is equal to the effort that I am putting in every single day as a mom. When I can feel seen and valued and cherished as a mom, that’s where the magic gets to happen for me as well. And I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.

Although they advertise pregnancy as nine months, for many people the reality is closer to ten. In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich posits that “to ‘mother’ a child implies a continuing presence, lasting at lease nine months, more often for years”. I found out that I was pregnant on January 26th; in some regards, childless Emmery did not so much as step foot into the year 2025. My son was born at the end of September, exactly one week before his due date. This past weekend, he turned three months old. This marks the end of what many people consider to be the "fourth trimester” - the first three months of infancy, and, correspondingly, parenthood. If we consider the fourth trimester a valid companion to pregnancy (which, if you have been through it, you most certainly do) then my entire 2025 was consumed by the forging of new life. 2025 was, for me, the year of being born.

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I didn’t plan these clean margins, but it allows me a very unique opportunity to reflect on what has transpired in my physical, mental, and emotional self over a neat period of exactly one year. There is, in fact, no way to reflect on 2025 without it being entirely about the conception, growth, delivery, and subsequent parenting of my child. Over the last twelve months I have undergone the cautious and tedious transformation that one must go through in order to become a parent - specifically, a mother. While there have been and will continue to be many milestones to celebrate the arrival and continued growth of my child, reflecting on my own passage into motherhood is a responsibility that is left entirely up to me. As Lucy Jones so aptly observes in her book Matrescence - “..we still barely acknowledge the psychological and physiological significance of becoming a mother: how it affects the brain, the endocrine system, cognition, immunity, the psyche, the microbiome, the sense of self”. My year was dominated by these changes, little by little and then all at once.

During pregnancy, I used an app that allowed me to track everything - how far along I was, what my pregnancy symptoms were, what things I needed to be preparing for and aware of at each stage of gestation. When I updated the app to indicate that I had given birth, all mention of the mother vanished. In place of anything even remotely to do with me arrived a list of things to track for him - when he had last eaten, slept, how many diapers he had gone through, what developmental milestones he should be working towards. All attention was on the baby, but when my son was born, so was Emmery: the mother. She, too, had been forming over the previous 38 weeks, and has continued to learn, experience a new world for the first time, and grasp entire universes of change in the weeks that have followed. I think of this and return to Rachel Cusk, who writes

Birth is not merely that which divides women from men: it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.

Before talking further about this “mythic snare”, I feel obliged to note that I have, by all accounts, managed to walk into this identity with a relatively easy baby. By six weeks he was sleeping five or six hour stretches overnight with relative frequency. He took to breastfeeding instantly, but was also completely receptive to the occasional bottle when we introduced it. In his entire existence on earth so far he has only kept my partner and I awake for more than two hours overnight twice. In an attempt to maintain some normalcy, we began bringing him to our weekly bar trivia nights at ten weeks and he behaved himself for the entire nearly three hours; staring and smiling at our teammates, calmly taking his bottle at the table, napping in his stroller during a round of “guess that song”. When he fusses, it is most frequently in longer car rides, and my husband has discovered that if he plays his favorite grindcore band the baby almost immediately ceases with his crying and falls into a calm and relieved sleep (this is such a reliable trick that I no longer know if “his favorite” refers to my husband or my son). We are, truly, lucky.

Even with this ease, the duality of personhood vs. parenthood is still staggeringly present in every moment of every day. Cusk describes the feeling of attempting to go about the business of her previous self and leaving her child behind as such-

It is not love that troubles me when I leave the baby, like a rope and harness paid out behind me wherever I go. It is rather that when I leave her the world bears the taint of my leaving, so that abandonment must now be subtracted from the sum of whatever I choose to do.

This passage captures a divide of self that I have otherwise struggled to articulate. In the past three months I have tapped into a presence of care I’ve not known before, but I’ve also discovered that a trip to the nail salon, a regular and uninvolved monthly trip in years past, is no longer a simple hour away from home but a test of how long I can bear being out in the world in such a way that no one knows that I am a mother. In pregnancy, my role was easily observed. It was clear that I was undergoing the change from an individual to someone tethered to another. Now, the moment I go out without my child I can only wonder if anyone knows my secret; that my infant child is at home without me. I imagine what he is doing. I fret over if he realizes that I am not there. I feel guilt at being perceived as someone who does not have a child because that feels, somehow, like a slight against him. I wish that it could be true that rather than someone else taking care of my baby for me they could take my place in the salon chair. I want someone else to shower for me, eat breakfast for me, go to physical therapy for me, all so I do not have to step away from my mother-self for even a moment to take care of the me-self. In reflecting on the lessons of her own first three months of motherhood Cusk writes of the discovery that “all that is required is for me to be there; an ‘all’ that is of course everything, because being there involves not being anywhere else, being ready to drop everything. Being myself is no compensation for not being there”.

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Despite having had the majority of the year to anticipate this divide, nothing really prepares you for this adjustment. I remember being wary of “just wait” comments, and the further I get into this relationship the less I am able to recall a single thing I was told prior to now that has given me any real boost or relief. This is, I believe, largely because these comments and the preparation that you receive are entirely focused on the mechanics of motherhood and the realities of caring for a baby. Again, there is very little recognition of the second entity that has just been born. You are told what to expect when it comes to changing diapers, giving a first bath, dealing with a fussy infant, taking care of swollen breasts and tired nipples. If you are lucky enough (like me) to get an easy baby someone will still, no doubt, tell you to “just wait” because one day this good baby will be teething, or have a sleep regression, or decide they hate you and will only tolerate being held by their father, or something.

None of this tells you anything about what to do with the daily realization that you are responsible for another human being’s existence; and the realization that the permanence of this responsibility both thrills and horrifies you. It doesn’t guide you through how to process the mixture of willfulness and personal failure you will feel each time you try to load a screaming baby into a stroller. No one is helping you navigate the combination of very real pride and total self loathing you will feel each time you answer the question “how is it going?” or “how are you feeling?”. In Matresence, Lucy Jones continues

As I tried to reorient myself, I realized how much of my angst had emanated from an existential crisis. Not in the cliched sense that I couldn’t find meaning in my life; rather, that the weight of my choices and responsibilities, combined with a new, sustained confrontation with mortality, was bamboozling. This was a world tilted.

2025 was the year in which my world did, in fact, tilt. There is no other logical response to the birth of both a child and a mother. I spent so much time worrying that I might resent being a mother that I never considered what would happen if I became enraptured with it, if I created not only a child I adored but a new and brilliant self who was full of love and purpose and utter confusion. What could have prepared me for this? What can prepare me for it now, as I continue to evolve with it? Each month of age that my son acquires I, too, continue to develop. Soon I might be able to smile, to laugh, to delight others with my radiant bliss at my new existence. But this is something I will have to learn. No one has done this before me; my son and I can only continue to explore a birth and ensuing existence that is entirely our own.

I am looking forward to learning this new existence in dialogue, and in particular through the project I’ve set out for myself this year on this page. In revisiting the sections from these texts that I marked over my pregnancy I found yet another passage from Lucy Jones that I had found notable on first read -

It was interesting to me that this state that I now knew intimately - the closest I had ever been to death, to birth, to growth, to the coconscious, to rapture, to rupture - was, according to the world around me, boring, or at least not worthy of serious artistic or critical attention until very recently.

I wonder if there could have been art, writing, music, companionship that would have prepared me for the last year. There is a part of me that thinks that even the most loving, earnest, brutal, or revealing portrait of motherhood in any art form would still somehow come up lacking once I found myself face to face with the real deal. Maybe I will have about as much to learn from Lynne Ramsey and Agnes Varda as I do from What To Expect When You’re Expecting. Or (and this is my supreme hope) maybe this next year will help me to feel just a little less tilted as I continue to get my bearings and recover from the birth of not one, but two beautiful and eager young lives.

Join CineMom for a yearlong exploration of motherhood on film. Feel free to watch along, or just subscribe for monthly newsletters on motherhood and cinema.

As one final note - I recently added a paid tier option to my newsletter! For those who choose to opt in, I will be doing an additional quarterly newsletter. I wish I could offer more, but being fairly new to this whole parenting thing I don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver. If there is interest later on I may add a subscriber chat in the paid tier for folks who are watching along to discuss the film(s). But, for the most part, the paid tier is just a way for anyone who wants to support me to give a little something (just $5 a month!). Consider it your sponsorship of the additional daily coffee I am consuming to find the time to write these! But also - thanks for being here regardless. I’m so glad to share this journey.