(00:00:00):
The uncertainty inherent to trying to get pregnant,

(00:00:03):
the being and the not being,

(00:00:05):
the never really knowing who is or is not with you,

(00:00:08):
was torture for me.

(00:00:09):
Factor in hormone treatments,

(00:00:11):
condescending doctors,

(00:00:12):
the fact that it all fell to me,

(00:00:13):
and yet everyone acted as if my partner was a saint for not leaving me,

(00:00:17):
and it just about broke me.

(00:00:19):
I wish we could talk more about the grief and trauma of trying to get pregnant.

(00:00:23):
Hi, I'm Zan Balines, and this is the Liberating Motherhood Podcast.

(00:00:28):
As always,

(00:00:29):
I'd like to encourage you,

(00:00:30):
if you like this podcast,

(00:00:31):
to support it by leaving a positive review on your favorite podcast platform,

(00:00:35):
heart reacting it on Substack and sharing it on social media and with your loved

(00:00:38):
ones.

(00:00:39):
These actions really do make a difference and they help the podcast to continue.

(00:00:44):
I am here today with my amazing guest, Ruthie Ackerman.

(00:00:47):
Hi, Ruthie.

(00:00:49):
Hi, it's so good to be here.

(00:00:50):
So I think you guys are going to love Ruthie.

(00:00:54):
Let me tell you a little bit about her.

(00:00:57):
An award-winning journalist,

(00:00:58):
Ruthie Ackerman's writing has been published in Vogue,

(00:01:01):
Glamour,

(00:01:02):
O Magazine,

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The New York Times,

(00:01:03):
The Atlantic,

(00:01:04):
The Wall Street Journal,

(00:01:05):
Forbes,

(00:01:05):
Salon,

(00:01:06):
Slate,

(00:01:06):
Newsweek,

(00:01:07):
and more.

(00:01:08):
Her modern love essay for The New York Times became the launching point for her

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memoir,

(00:01:12):
The Mother Code,

(00:01:13):
My Story of Love,

(00:01:15):
Loss,

(00:01:15):
and the Myths that Shape Us.

(00:01:17):
Ruthie also launched the Ignite Writers Collective in 2019,

(00:01:21):
and since then has become an in-demand book coach and developmental editor.

(00:01:25):
Her client wins include a USA Today bestseller,

(00:01:28):
book deals with big five publishers,

(00:01:30):
representation by buzzy book agents,

(00:01:32):
and essays in prestigious outlets.

(00:01:35):
She has a master's in journalism for New York University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

(00:01:39):
But today we're primarily here to talk to Ruthie about her book,

(00:01:43):
The Mother Code,

(00:01:45):
and also whatever else comes out about motherhood,

(00:01:48):
pregnancy,

(00:01:49):
mother myths,

(00:01:49):
all of it.

(00:01:51):
So we're just going to go ahead and get started.

(00:01:54):
Ruthie, tell me about your book, which I know kind of began with your modern love essay.

(00:02:01):
How did you decide to write it?

(00:02:02):
Why did you decide to write it?

(00:02:04):
All of that.

(00:02:06):
So there's a lot of ways to answer this question.

(00:02:08):
The truest one is that I decided to write this book because it's the book that I

(00:02:17):
wish that I had.

(00:02:18):
I felt very alone in my 20s and 30s when I wasn't sure whether I wanted to become a mother.

(00:02:27):
And I felt like everyone else was either in the hell yes camp that they knew they

(00:02:31):
wanted to be parents or in the hell no camp they knew they didn't.

(00:02:35):
And I was very much in the middle.

(00:02:38):
And I ended up marrying a man who did not, adamantly did not want children.

(00:02:44):
And I thought that I could vow to not have children as well.

(00:02:50):
And I felt a lot of shame around ending up in a marriage where we were not on the

(00:02:56):
same page around this.

(00:02:58):
And I just felt like everywhere I turned, I was really alone.

(00:03:03):
And the truth is that I'd been writing many different versions of this book.

(00:03:07):
There was a version of this book that was about my relationship with my mother,

(00:03:11):
who I talk about in The Mother Code.

(00:03:14):
There's a version of this book that was about my great grandmother and my

(00:03:18):
grandmother and really about that kind of maternal history of my family.

(00:03:24):
There was a version of this book that had to do just about my divorce and the end

(00:03:28):
of my marriage.

(00:03:30):
And then I kind of wrote my way into this version of the book,

(00:03:34):
which felt like the book that I needed.

(00:03:37):
I love that.

(00:03:40):
I love the idea of sort of writing your way into what works.

(00:03:43):
And I also like it that you mentioned your relationship with your mother and sort

(00:03:48):
of your foremothers,

(00:03:48):
because that was something...

(00:03:50):
that stuck out to me about the book, and that I've also heard you talk about quite a lot.

(00:03:57):
You talk earlier in the book about how you come from a long line of women who

(00:04:01):
abandoned their children,

(00:04:02):
or at least that's what you had been told.

(00:04:05):
Tell me how that affected you,

(00:04:08):
why that feels so salient,

(00:04:10):
and why that's maybe not the whole truth.

(00:04:15):
Yeah,

(00:04:15):
so I thought that there was some sort of flaw in my genetic code,

(00:04:22):
some sort of curse that sort of hung over my family because of the narratives that

(00:04:29):
I'd been told about the sort of abandoning mother syndrome or whatever we want to

(00:04:34):
call it.

(00:04:35):
This curse that...

(00:04:40):
I guess I'm just hesitating a little bit because I'm thinking about how Claire

(00:04:44):
Jeter wrote this amazing book called Monsters,

(00:04:47):
A Fan's Dilemma.

(00:04:48):
And one of the things she talks about in her book is sort of the worst crime a

(00:04:53):
woman can commit is to abandon their children.

(00:04:56):
And so I lived under this very heavy cloud that there was no way for me to be a

(00:05:01):
mother unless I was willing to abandon my children or maybe I wouldn't abandon my

(00:05:08):
children,

(00:05:09):
but I'd end up abandoning myself.

(00:05:11):
And so it just felt like the most radical act in a family like that would be to not

(00:05:17):
have children.

(00:05:19):
But as I got older and I became a journalist,

(00:05:22):
I was trying to figure out the origins of my mother's mental illness and the mental

(00:05:29):
illnesses that I'd been told ran through my matrilineal line.

(00:05:35):
I started to dig in and do some more research.

(00:05:38):
I'm a journalist by trade.

(00:05:41):
And I started looking through talking to family members,

(00:05:45):
looking through census records,

(00:05:46):
divorce and marriage records,

(00:05:48):
and starting to put together my version of the truth of the women in my family.

(00:05:55):
And what I discovered was that I don't actually think that

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my great grandmother and grandmother abandoned their children,

(00:06:03):
or at least not in the sense that I would think of abandonment these days.

(00:06:07):
I think that they were women who were trying to figure out how to make a life for

(00:06:16):
themselves in this country.

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My great grandmother came here when she was six years old and never went back to

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school and she only spoke Yiddish.

(00:06:26):
And what I discovered through doing all this research was that actually she was

(00:06:32):
trying to,

(00:06:34):
I think,

(00:06:34):
get citizenship for herself and her family and trying to make a life here.

(00:06:41):
And so what you asked me about that discovery,

(00:06:44):
because the reason why it was so monumental to me was that I spent my whole life

(00:06:50):
making decisions about very personal decisions about whether or not I was going to

(00:06:55):
become a mother based on these family mythologies.

(00:06:58):
And we all have family mythologies of some sort that shape our lives.

(00:07:05):
And I was so shaped by this idea that I couldn't be a good mother.

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And figuring out that,

(00:07:13):
oh,

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well,

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maybe these mythologies weren't even true,

(00:07:17):
helped me to understand it was like an unlock.

(00:07:20):
Oh, maybe I could be a good mother or at least a good enough mother.

(00:07:25):
And that was the kind of turning point where I said to myself,

(00:07:30):
oh,

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well,

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maybe I'll at least try to become a mom.

(00:07:35):
Well,

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I'm glad you did try because now we have your book,

(00:07:38):
which you were also kind of a mother to.

(00:07:41):
But I'm struck by,

(00:07:44):
yes,

(00:07:44):
these mythologies,

(00:07:45):
but also how we frame these mythologies because men abandon their kids all the

(00:07:50):
time.

(00:07:50):
I think the statistic is 27% of men have abandoned all of their children.

(00:07:55):
and when men do it it's framed as like oh you know grandpa was an eccentric or you

(00:08:00):
know daddy had you know his art called him or you know my cousin had to go off to

(00:08:05):
war it's it's always just a part of their story and never the most important part

(00:08:12):
but when mothers abandon their children like

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We can't tell any other part of their story until we find a way to redeem the fact

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that they abandoned their children.

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Because of course, in patriarchy, a bad mother is the worst thing you can be.

(00:08:25):
And you just can't be anything else if you're a bad mother.

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A hundred thousand percent.

(00:08:30):
Yes.

(00:08:32):
Yes.

(00:08:33):
And what I was that was part of my I mean,

(00:08:37):
I don't even know if I knew that I had a goal per se,

(00:08:40):
but I was trying to get to truth with a capital T.

(00:08:44):
And what I was figuring out was,

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yeah,

(00:08:48):
my great grandmother,

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my grandmother,

(00:08:50):
even my mother were all shaped by the times that they were born into.

(00:08:56):
And I had picked up on a lot of judgment against the women in my family by other

(00:09:04):
members of our family.

(00:09:05):
And yet I felt like, who was I to judge these women whose lives were so different than mine?

(00:09:14):
I went,

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you know,

(00:09:16):
my like I said,

(00:09:17):
my great grandmother didn't even go back to school after she was six years old.

(00:09:21):
And here I am with a master's degree, privileged, financially independent.

(00:09:25):
Our lives are so vastly different.

(00:09:27):
She also my great grandmother had her and my grandmother had their kids when they

(00:09:31):
were 17 years old.

(00:09:32):
I had my first kid at 43.

(00:09:36):
So yes,

(00:09:38):
this idea of using kind of the happenstance of women's lives as a way to judge them

(00:09:45):
and punish them is something we see every day.

(00:09:49):
Well, and there's also, there's this thread of shame that's kind of woven throughout your book.

(00:09:57):
You know, how we shame women even for the choices of their ancestors, but also

(00:10:02):
The shame of not knowing if you want to have a child,

(00:10:05):
not knowing how you feel about motherhood,

(00:10:07):
not knowing if you will be a good mother,

(00:10:09):
if you are a good mother.

(00:10:11):
And I think that this shame experience is really,

(00:10:15):
especially in a patriarchal society,

(00:10:17):
like integral to kind of the motherhood experience,

(00:10:19):
unfortunately.

(00:10:21):
And we see this a lot with women who either regret having children or are not sure

(00:10:27):
if they want to have them in the first place.

(00:10:30):
A couple of months ago,

(00:10:30):
I got an advice letter from a woman who said she loved her children dearly,

(00:10:35):
but that she regrets motherhood every day.

(00:10:39):
And I think that this is a common experience,

(00:10:41):
but one that women dare not ever speak out loud,

(00:10:43):
lest they be called terrible mothers.

(00:10:46):
And many women also struggle with uncertainty about whether to become mothers in

(00:10:50):
the first place,

(00:10:51):
sort of like you did.

(00:10:52):
And I think sometimes that gets projected forward to,

(00:10:56):
well,

(00:10:56):
if I'm not sure if I want to become a mother,

(00:10:58):
that must mean I'm already a bad mother.

(00:11:01):
Talk to me about this maternal ambivalence and the experience of it and why it's so

(00:11:05):
important to talk about.

(00:11:08):
Yeah,

(00:11:08):
I think the maternal ambivalence for me was so tied into the images I had seen of

(00:11:14):
mothers all around me in media,

(00:11:17):
TV,

(00:11:18):
movies,

(00:11:18):
the sort of Brady Bunch or I guess trad wife type of mother that seemed like she

(00:11:24):
was all in.

(00:11:25):
She was self-sacrificing and saccharine and self-annihilating.

(00:11:30):
And I...

(00:11:33):
told myself or I thought to myself, I'm not that person.

(00:11:37):
So I guess I can't be a mom if I can't be this kind of perfect mother that's

(00:11:42):
willing to give everything up for my child,

(00:11:45):
then I shouldn't be a mother at all.

(00:11:47):
And I didn't really question that idea for most of my life until I started to do

(00:11:55):
this research around my own family.

(00:11:57):
And a lot of the ideas that I had around motherhood sort of unraveled.

(00:12:03):
And then I started to ask myself the question, who says?

(00:12:08):
Who says motherhood has to look this one certain way?

(00:12:11):
Who says that we have to be all in to be mothers?

(00:12:15):
Who says we have to annihilate our dreams?

(00:12:18):
And really, that became the impetus for the rest of the book.

(00:12:24):
And the chapter 10 is a real turning point for me in the book.

(00:12:29):
It's called I think it was chapter 10.

(00:12:30):
But anyway, it's the chapter on outlaw motherhood.

(00:12:33):
And that was the turning point because I started to say to myself,

(00:12:39):
OK,

(00:12:39):
so who are the role models for the kind of mother I would want to be?

(00:12:43):
And I started digging into the literature and read this amazing anthology called

(00:12:48):
Revolutionary Mothering and started looking for those role models.

(00:12:51):
And a lot of them came from the black,

(00:12:53):
brown and queer communities who had always needed to create different shapes,

(00:13:00):
alternative shapes for what motherhood could look like.

(00:13:04):
But it surprised me because I'm someone who is a women's studies minor.

(00:13:08):
I'm a feminist.

(00:13:09):
I care about these ideas.

(00:13:12):
And yet I never really knew or didn't let myself fully digest that there were these

(00:13:20):
other types of motherhood or other portrayals of what motherhood looked like.

(00:13:25):
How could I have not known that?

(00:13:26):
I was in my mid-30s and even in my early 40s by the time I figured that out.

(00:13:32):
And so to answer your question,

(00:13:34):
I wanted to both figure out for myself,

(00:13:40):
did I need to be all in order to be a mom?

(00:13:43):
Did I have to be one of these perfect mothers?

(00:13:45):
But also,

(00:13:46):
I started questioning the larger patriarchal society that told us that motherhood

(00:13:52):
had to look one specific way.

(00:13:56):
I love that you mentioned that you had not really thought about alternative ways of

(00:14:00):
being a mother,

(00:14:00):
because this is the thing that I go back to over and over again in my own work,

(00:14:05):
that we are really not taught to view mothers as people,

(00:14:09):
as human beings who are anything other than mothers,

(00:14:13):
or to think about motherhood as something we consciously shape.

(00:14:17):
And I don't know how to get out of that.

(00:14:21):
I'm constantly obsessing over like,

(00:14:24):
How do we get this generation of young women to care about mother's issues?

(00:14:28):
Because those are the issues that will eventually affect them.

(00:14:32):
So I guess,

(00:14:33):
what do you think women who are considering having kids,

(00:14:38):
especially those who are like really uncertain and dealing with this kind of

(00:14:41):
ambivalence,

(00:14:42):
need to consider,

(00:14:43):
need to know,

(00:14:44):
what do you wish you knew?

(00:14:46):
What wisdom do you wish you could just like inject into everybody?

(00:14:49):
Yeah.

(00:14:52):
So I'm going to kind of answer this in a little bit of a winding way.

(00:14:56):
But I had been mentioning to answer one of your earlier questions about this

(00:15:01):
genetic flaw I thought existed in my DNA.

(00:15:05):
And that's what the mother code,

(00:15:08):
the title of my book,

(00:15:09):
referred to was this kind of personal flaw.

(00:15:13):
And as I was writing the book and learning more about these other motherhood

(00:15:18):
narratives,

(00:15:19):
the mother code came to mean to me the fact that we each have our own motherhood

(00:15:26):
narrative or motherhood story.

(00:15:28):
And I like to say not just motherhood, but personhood, humanhood, whatever we want to call it.

(00:15:35):
We have our own motherhood.

(00:15:37):
person code story too and that we don't have to this idea of the binaries of trad

(00:15:45):
wife or childless cat lady and these very rigid kind of cages we put women into

(00:15:51):
when it comes to women womanhood and motherhood I want to do away with those and I

(00:15:57):
want to like the takeaway from my book I hope is that we each get to write our own

(00:16:03):
mother code story

(00:16:05):
that there's as many stories and narratives as there are people.

(00:16:09):
And so that to me is what the mother code of the title came to represent.

(00:16:18):
I love that.

(00:16:18):
So,

(00:16:19):
okay,

(00:16:19):
I have to tell you,

(00:16:20):
right before I talked to you,

(00:16:22):
like maybe 10 minutes beforehand,

(00:16:24):
I was still mad about this by the time I was recording with you.

(00:16:28):
A doctor's office called me to schedule an appointment with my kids.

(00:16:33):
And I answer the phone and she says, is this mom?

(00:16:37):
And I'm like, no, my name is Zahn.

(00:16:39):
And,

(00:16:40):
you know,

(00:16:40):
I don't say,

(00:16:41):
but I'm thinking,

(00:16:42):
and it's right there next to the number you had to use to call me.

(00:16:45):
And she's like, okay, mom, well, let's go ahead and get your kid scheduled.

(00:16:48):
And I'm like, no, you can call me Zahn, please.

(00:16:50):
Like, that's my name.

(00:16:52):
And we go through like three or four more iterations of her just insistently

(00:16:56):
calling me mom until I'm like,

(00:16:57):
can you please just call me Zahn because I'm not your mom and it's weird.

(00:17:02):
And then she tells me I'm being rude and hangs up on me.

(00:17:05):
And this is not the first time this has happened with like pediatricians offices

(00:17:10):
referring to me as mom and then calling my husband by his name when they talk to

(00:17:14):
him.

(00:17:15):
And like,

(00:17:16):
this seems like such a small thing,

(00:17:17):
but to me,

(00:17:18):
it's kind of relevant to this idea that our identity must be collapsed into nothing

(00:17:24):
but mom.

(00:17:25):
And then mom must be devalued because we have this idea of moms as like,

(00:17:30):
Cringe and uncool and not very smart and motherhood not involving any skill.

(00:17:35):
So like I love this idea of like the mother code is somewhat of an antidote to that.

(00:17:41):
And I guess, you know, the thing that I...

(00:17:46):
think about a lot and then I know listeners think about a lot is like how do we

(00:17:51):
break out of that box because society is really aggressively putting us into it and

(00:17:58):
it is really hard to make a life outside of motherhood perhaps even doubly hard if

(00:18:05):
you're working a job because then it's like very hard to have hobbies and friends

(00:18:10):
um

(00:18:10):
They're like real institutional structures trying to force us into this being our only job.

(00:18:16):
So how do we push back?

(00:18:19):
Absolutely.

(00:18:21):
There is no question in my mind that there are real policy and structural issues

(00:18:28):
that there are people that are trained in that.

(00:18:32):
I don't even want to say way smarter than me, but are just experts in that area.

(00:18:36):
I think one of the things that will help is

(00:18:40):
is this,

(00:18:41):
I don't even know what to call it,

(00:18:42):
but maybe like permission that I'm hoping we can give ourselves that we are allowed

(00:18:50):
to have a good life while giving our children good lives.

(00:18:57):
And that I know for myself that I...

(00:19:02):
always thought that I would have to put the question of what do we owe our children

(00:19:08):
over what do we owe ourselves?

(00:19:10):
And again,

(00:19:11):
as I was doing the research for this book and just thinking through these ideas,

(00:19:15):
I thought,

(00:19:16):
who says it has to be that way?

(00:19:19):
Who says we have to give up our dreams or our identities?

(00:19:23):
And when we...

(00:19:24):
create or when the patriarchy creates this idea of this kind of zero sum game I

(00:19:30):
guess of motherhood that you can't have your dreams and mother too it's an either

(00:19:35):
or then we think that creates these sort of I don't know what to call them you know

(00:19:42):
Stepford wife type robot moms that think that we have to um that we can't uh uh

(00:19:51):
have our own ambition and embrace our own selves outside of motherhood so it like

(00:19:57):
it i'm like struggling with the words but it um it creates the exact kind of um of

(00:20:05):
life that that the patriarchy wants for women which is to basically stay small and

(00:20:11):
to not vie for for power and autonomy

(00:20:15):
Yeah, absolutely.

(00:20:16):
It just drives me bonkers that we are using motherhood as a way of shrinking women

(00:20:23):
because motherhood is a position of power.

(00:20:26):
You are making the next generation.

(00:20:28):
You are continuing the species.

(00:20:30):
You are doing all of these really challenging, intellectual, important acts.

(00:20:34):
And I don't think it's a coincidence that we use all of these

(00:20:39):
really important sources of power as a way to oppress women.

(00:20:42):
And it just, it makes me so angry.

(00:20:45):
So yeah, that's a whole other rant.

(00:20:50):
Let's talk about fertility treatments.

(00:20:52):
You know, that's what our opening vignette talked a little bit about.

(00:20:55):
My husband and I dealt with infertility for three years and it was like a living nightmare.

(00:21:00):
And I know you talk a lot about this in your book and especially about the fertility wealth gap.

(00:21:06):
So tell me about that.

(00:21:10):
Yeah.

(00:21:10):
So the fertility wealth gap has always referred to this idea that as countries and

(00:21:18):
people get wealthier,

(00:21:20):
we tend to have fewer children.

(00:21:22):
And that is true.

(00:21:23):
Yeah.

(00:21:25):
What I wanted to look at in my book was another type of fertility wealth gap,

(00:21:30):
which is this idea that the fertility preservation,

(00:21:35):
so egg freezing mostly,

(00:21:38):
is something that paying for egg freezing,

(00:21:41):
I should say,

(00:21:42):
is something that mostly falls on women and young women at that.

(00:21:46):
And also the age which women are freezing their eggs is getting younger and younger.

(00:21:54):
And we already know that women make less money than young men at their first jobs.

(00:22:01):
They don't ask for promotions or raises as much.

(00:22:03):
We don't save as much for retirement.

(00:22:06):
So to now,

(00:22:07):
on top of that,

(00:22:08):
put this huge burden,

(00:22:10):
financial burden,

(00:22:11):
onto young women in order to preserve their fertility,

(00:22:15):
that to me is...

(00:22:20):
I mean, I was going to say disservice, but that word doesn't even seem harsh enough.

(00:22:26):
We know as a country and as a society that having women having children later,

(00:22:33):
families having children later benefits everyone.

(00:22:36):
And yet,

(00:22:37):
why is it falling on young women to pay to preserve their fertility so they can

(00:22:43):
have their families later?

(00:22:45):
And of course,

(00:22:45):
we know that there are some companies,

(00:22:47):
some big companies like Google and Facebook and tech companies.

(00:22:50):
Apple is another one that do pay for some of the fertility preservation, but not always all.

(00:22:58):
And there are some states and through insurance companies that pay for fertility preservation.

(00:23:06):
But it's definitely not across the board.

(00:23:09):
And it's something that I think we need to be looking a lot more closely at because

(00:23:14):
until we can't have a full equality if we are putting this sort of like biological

(00:23:24):
penalty on women.

(00:23:26):
Yeah, it's just wild to me that we treat having kids as like a women's project.

(00:23:32):
It's just some silly little thing that women do that has no bearing on anybody else.

(00:23:37):
And we see this in the notion that like children are a public nuisance,

(00:23:41):
that women who expect to be treated with decency when they have children are like

(00:23:45):
entitled princesses.

(00:23:47):
I also think that this kind of twist on the fertility wealth gap that you talk about

(00:23:54):
extends not just to actual money, but to time.

(00:23:57):
You know, I think about how we voice the entire risk of fertility treatments onto women.

(00:24:03):
And this is already in a context where we have a terrible maternity care system in

(00:24:07):
the US and women are literally risking their lives to continue the species.

(00:24:12):
And then on top of this, we have fertility treatments that are painful, sometimes dangerous.

(00:24:18):
There's physical suffering, there's mental suffering.

(00:24:21):
You know, there's been all these horrible stories about women abused at fertility clinics.

(00:24:26):
And we're just kind of like collectively fine with the price for this being

(00:24:32):
limitless and also with not demanding that men have to sacrifice anything for it.

(00:24:39):
Yeah.

(00:24:40):
Absolutely.

(00:24:41):
There's the other pieces of what you're saying that are also important.

(00:24:46):
I don't know where you went through your fertility treatments,

(00:24:50):
but I'm remembering having to go very early in the morning.

(00:24:54):
I think it was like 7 a.m.

(00:24:56):
to the clinic to get my blood work drawn every day.

(00:24:59):
At first, it was like every other day and then it was every day.

(00:25:02):
Which meant being late to work and putting my job at risk.

(00:25:05):
It also was like all the way up to,

(00:25:07):
I live in New York City and it was like all the way uptown to come all the way back

(00:25:10):
downtown for work.

(00:25:12):
And so just the time and emotional energy put on women as well.

(00:25:17):
And then having to keep it a secret because you're probably not going to tell your

(00:25:22):
boss or the people at your work or maybe even your friends because of the shame

(00:25:27):
thing,

(00:25:27):
which you were talking about earlier.

(00:25:28):
Yeah.

(00:25:29):
And so just all of these factors that fall on women.

(00:25:35):
Yeah.

(00:25:36):
I mean, I don't even know what to say, except that it feels so heavy.

(00:25:43):
Yeah.

(00:25:44):
Well, it's like we have this patriarchal idea that

(00:25:48):
You know, women should never have to ask men to sacrifice anything.

(00:25:51):
So it's like she has to go through all the fertility testing before he goes through

(00:25:55):
any,

(00:25:55):
for example.

(00:25:57):
It's just it's so enraging.

(00:26:01):
So, OK, tell me a little bit about what you think might change this.

(00:26:06):
What sorts of policies, what sort of shifts are you calling for?

(00:26:12):
Yeah,

(00:26:12):
when you just said so enraging,

(00:26:14):
it reminded me that I had done an Instagram post because I did a control F search

(00:26:21):
for the word rage in my manuscript at one point.

(00:26:25):
And there was like 20 something, you know, references to the word rage.

(00:26:29):
which made me happy.

(00:26:32):
I did not expect it to be a rageful book, but it's also a funny book, but there's a lot of rage.

(00:26:37):
So sorry, what was your question?

(00:26:40):
Well,

(00:26:41):
I actually,

(00:26:41):
I feel like 27 mentions of rage,

(00:26:43):
that seems to me very low,

(00:26:46):
given my own experience of motherhood.

(00:26:50):
I don't know.

(00:26:50):
I mean,

(00:26:51):
maybe we should do like an analysis,

(00:26:52):
but to me,

(00:26:53):
27 mentions of rage in like a 200 page book feels like a pretty good,

(00:26:57):
happy, easy book giving like the state of how we're mothering.

(00:27:02):
Absolutely.

(00:27:03):
But there are other, I mean, there's anger, there's other words, but just the word rage.

(00:27:08):
So I saw this,

(00:27:09):
this is completely off topic,

(00:27:10):
but I saw this really hilarious interview a couple of years ago with somebody who

(00:27:15):
had gotten into a fight with his homeowners association,

(00:27:18):
some really trivial thing,

(00:27:20):
like his Creek was too tall or something.

(00:27:23):
And, and the interviewer was, you know, asking him how he felt.

(00:27:28):
And he was like, and he's this like old Southern guy living in like Appalachia.

(00:27:31):
And he's like, well, there are many layers of anger.

(00:27:34):
And then he goes through and like itemizes the layers of anger.

(00:27:38):
He's like, the first layer is that I'm angry.

(00:27:41):
The second layer is that I'm resentful.

(00:27:43):
The third layer is that I'm bitter.

(00:27:45):
And it like went on and on and on.

(00:27:46):
You could see the interviewer's eyes getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

(00:27:51):
And I've just like always wanted to have that as a meme because that's motherhood.

(00:27:54):
Totally.

(00:27:57):
Absolutely.

(00:27:58):
There's nothing truer than I could say.

(00:28:03):
All right.

(00:28:03):
So one of the terms that I'm constantly beating is how we just have this culture of

(00:28:08):
ignoring and deriding mothers.

(00:28:11):
We treat mothers like they're stupid.

(00:28:12):
We treat mothers like they don't know anything.

(00:28:14):
Like motherhood is not an intellectual exercise.

(00:28:16):
Like it's not challenging.

(00:28:17):
It doesn't require skill.

(00:28:19):
Mothers aren't cool.

(00:28:20):
They're cringeworthy.

(00:28:22):
They're responsible for their own bad outcomes and bad choices.

(00:28:25):
And this kind of like separates mothers from everybody else so that we don't have

(00:28:29):
to listen to them.

(00:28:33):
And I feel like that is a big part of how we get into this world where we're like

(00:28:39):
30 or 40 and having kids and we just walk in and we're shocked.

(00:28:43):
Like, what do you think about that?

(00:28:47):
Yeah,

(00:28:48):
I remember reading,

(00:28:49):
I don't know if you read Rachel Cohen's article in Vox about maternal dread.

(00:28:54):
It was such a good way of talking about how we're told, so we focus so much.

(00:29:04):
I mean, I don't know if this is exactly where you were going with this, but...

(00:29:07):
I think we focus so much when we talk about motherhood,

(00:29:12):
people that are already mothers,

(00:29:15):
on all of the...

(00:29:18):
exhaustion the overwhelm the lack of policies and support systems all of that stuff

(00:29:23):
is true um and there is another whole piece of motherhood the the joy the small

(00:29:34):
intimacies that are uh maybe harder to describe in words like words just don't

(00:29:40):
capture it

(00:29:41):
that we don't talk about.

(00:29:43):
And one of the things I was thinking about with my own ambivalence,

(00:29:48):
and the thing that Rachel was talking about in this Vox article,

(00:29:52):
was if we were given space as women to talk about the joys as well as the dread,

(00:30:00):
and as well as all the policies and structural issues,

(00:30:05):
then we...

(00:30:08):
We can show the whole kind of human experience of motherhood,

(00:30:13):
which might help other women who are kind of on the fence about it to see like,

(00:30:20):
oh,

(00:30:21):
you know,

(00:30:21):
it might not be all bad or,

(00:30:23):
oh,

(00:30:24):
we don't have to be all in.

(00:30:26):
The thing that I don't like about that is that it puts on women another emotional

(00:30:31):
labor of having to message motherhood.

(00:30:36):
to each other and to the world,

(00:30:39):
as opposed to if these structural and policy issues were taken care of,

(00:30:46):
and if some of the other pieces were taken care of,

(00:30:48):
then maybe we'd have more room to talk about the joys.

(00:30:51):
I don't know.

(00:30:52):
This doesn't really answer your question, but it's just bringing up all these ideas for me.

(00:30:56):
Well,

(00:30:57):
I definitely do think it's beneficial if we feel like it to talk about the joys of

(00:31:01):
motherhood.

(00:31:01):
There's also kind of like a

(00:31:03):
shaming aspect of that,

(00:31:05):
because whatever is joyful for me is going to probably be a source of stress for

(00:31:09):
somebody else because nobody's experience is the same.

(00:31:11):
So it's just tricky.

(00:31:13):
But what I'm kind of referring to here is that the moment I became visibly

(00:31:19):
pregnant,

(00:31:20):
I noticed a change in the way people treated me.

(00:31:23):
And it accelerated once I had a baby.

(00:31:26):
You know, you could sense it in like the judgment

(00:31:30):
of like the barista and you know random people you encounter who just are like oh

(00:31:35):
you know and have a whole host of stereotypes about what you must be like because

(00:31:40):
you're a mother and they're all deeply rooted in misogyny we see a lot of this kind

(00:31:45):
of stuff in like the misogynistic child-free community not child-free generally but

(00:31:49):
the misogynistic areas of it and I

(00:31:53):
I think that that serves to separate other women from mothers and to treat mothers

(00:32:00):
as like fundamentally different types of people whose problems are because of their

(00:32:05):
own shortcomings rather than the structural challenges that motherhood imposes on

(00:32:11):
us against our will.

(00:32:13):
And I would just like to see more of people acknowledging those structural

(00:32:18):
realities rather than like,

(00:32:20):
oh,

(00:32:20):
mothers are just kind of cringe and they're in these mommy wars that are so silly.

(00:32:25):
When in reality,

(00:32:27):
the issues that we face are like often literal matters of life and death and they

(00:32:30):
just get totally trivialized because they're happening to mothers.

(00:32:35):
A hundred percent.

(00:32:36):
Yeah.

(00:32:37):
And I think that, I mean...

(00:32:40):
There's so many levels of, you know, structural supports.

(00:32:45):
I mean,

(00:32:46):
one of the things I was thinking about for myself,

(00:32:48):
and this is,

(00:32:48):
of course,

(00:32:49):
like,

(00:32:50):
not the biggest issue,

(00:32:51):
but just something that I thought about was the...

(00:32:58):
As a freelancer,

(00:32:59):
as someone who works for myself,

(00:33:01):
just trying to get,

(00:33:03):
figure out how to get maternity leave at all was something that,

(00:33:11):
and of course,

(00:33:12):
A lot of people, even people who work for companies, don't have maternity leave.

(00:33:18):
I'm not the only one.

(00:33:20):
But what was interesting to me about this was that actually New York State does

(00:33:26):
have maternity leave for freelancers,

(00:33:29):
but it's so kind of...

(00:33:32):
Unknown, and nobody talks about it.

(00:33:34):
And even as a journalist who's like savvy at doing research,

(00:33:38):
it was so hard for me to figure out.

(00:33:40):
And eventually I did figure it out.

(00:33:42):
But the I guess my point is just that there are

(00:33:47):
aren't any across the board policies,

(00:33:49):
whether it's about like healthcare for mothers and children,

(00:33:53):
whether it's about paid leave,

(00:33:56):
all of these things that should be like so obvious and so like basic.

(00:34:02):
And yeah,

(00:34:07):
I mean,

(00:34:08):
it's like such a bigger issue and no,

(00:34:10):
and not only it's just getting worse and having now,

(00:34:14):
I mean,

(00:34:15):
I hate men that are like,

(00:34:16):
now that I have a daughter,

(00:34:18):
but I'm going to say like,

(00:34:18):
now that I have a daughter,

(00:34:21):
it's like worse for her than it is for me.

(00:34:24):
Like, you know, abortion.

(00:34:26):
There's so many structural policies, structural issues and bigger policy issues.

(00:34:31):
But it's like, where do we even begin?

(00:34:34):
It's so scary.

(00:34:35):
And it just feels like

(00:34:37):
digging as stones continue to pile on top of you.

(00:34:41):
One of the scariest statistics that I have seen is that it's now more dangerous to

(00:34:46):
give birth for us than it was for our mothers and now even our grandmothers,

(00:34:52):
because that's how much worse things have gotten over the last couple of years.

(00:34:56):
But I just want to highlight the New York freelancer maternity leave thing.

(00:35:01):
If you're in New York and you're a freelancer, definitely look into this.

(00:35:04):
If you are

(00:35:05):
part of the international audience,

(00:35:07):
I want to draw everyone's attention to the abject horror that is the fact that

(00:35:12):
there is no legally guaranteed paid maternity leave at all in the United States.

(00:35:19):
Companies can give it contractually, but most don't.

(00:35:23):
And even those that do only give a couple of weeks.

(00:35:27):
It's horrific.

(00:35:28):
You know, I'm self-employed too.

(00:35:30):
And

(00:35:31):
had to save and plan and all of that to take time off to have a baby.

(00:35:36):
And then of course you get hit with the bill for having a baby,

(00:35:39):
which somehow everyone I know has paid significantly more to have their child than

(00:35:44):
what the average supposedly is.

(00:35:48):
It's wild.

(00:35:50):
And then we deride women for talking about money and saying like, we can't afford to have kids.

(00:35:57):
There's just, it feels like there's no winning.

(00:36:00):
Yeah.

(00:36:02):
I mean,

(00:36:02):
the thing about the – just to go back to the New York City freelance maternity

(00:36:08):
leave that – I don't know.

(00:36:11):
I'm, like, thinking back about it.

(00:36:12):
It was so long ago now.

(00:36:13):
It was five years ago.

(00:36:14):
But –

(00:36:15):
I'm remembering that I would have had to have paid into it for two years before

(00:36:22):
becoming pregnant in order to be able to access the full benefits.

(00:36:26):
So just like the hoops,

(00:36:29):
as progressive,

(00:36:30):
I guess,

(00:36:30):
as it is to have freelancers and insurance for maternity leave,

(00:36:37):
it's like the hoops and the things you have to know in advance that

(00:36:42):
um, were so maddening.

(00:36:45):
And so ultimately I ended up needing disability insurance.

(00:36:48):
And I'm like, I'm not disabled, but pregnancy is considered a disability.

(00:36:52):
And so that's how I was able to get, I think it was four weeks.

(00:36:58):
Um, so anyway, I mean, four weeks.

(00:37:02):
Yeah.

(00:37:02):
I mean, I was fighting for four weeks.

(00:37:04):
Exactly.

(00:37:05):
Um,

(00:37:06):
and it's four weeks based on your freelance income from,

(00:37:09):
I think it was like the year before,

(00:37:11):
um,

(00:37:12):
I don't remember exactly,

(00:37:13):
but it was like the year before I have to had to show my income in order to prove

(00:37:19):
that I,

(00:37:20):
you know,

(00:37:21):
could get four weeks.

(00:37:23):
And I think it was a little more if I had had a C-section.

(00:37:26):
So it's all crazy.

(00:37:28):
But all of this is to say that I was just listening to the retrievals podcast.

(00:37:33):
Oh, my God.

(00:37:34):
The retrievals.

(00:37:35):
I'm glad you brought it up.

(00:37:36):
I was going to bring it up.

(00:37:38):
Oh my God, season two.

(00:37:39):
I mean, season one, I loved and was like obsessed with.

(00:37:42):
And now I'm listening in my hammock here,

(00:37:45):
like yesterday by myself,

(00:37:47):
just like,

(00:37:49):
oh my God,

(00:37:50):
C-sections in this country.

(00:37:52):
And everything you and I are talking about is reminding me of the retrievals,

(00:37:56):
dismissing women,

(00:37:57):
women's pain.

(00:37:58):
Women are just hysterical, the whole thing.

(00:38:01):
Yeah, it's, I mean, it's wild to me.

(00:38:06):
And

(00:38:07):
You know,

(00:38:07):
this is another area where until you enter the healthcare system,

(00:38:11):
it's very easy to victim blame because you don't want to believe it can happen to

(00:38:15):
you.

(00:38:17):
But it's everywhere.

(00:38:18):
It is...

(00:38:19):
So unsettling how abusive our medical system is to women generally and people in

(00:38:27):
the process of giving birth or undergoing fertility treatments specifically.

(00:38:32):
I had my own experience with that.

(00:38:34):
We lost a baby.

(00:38:36):
And then after she was born, I had a delayed postpartum hemorrhage.

(00:38:41):
And when we called the emergency line, the doctor said, oh, you're not really hemorrhaging.

(00:38:47):
It's just an emotional reaction.

(00:38:49):
You're just hysterical.

(00:38:52):
But I was hemorrhaging.

(00:38:54):
And that sticks with me because at the time,

(00:38:58):
I was running a nonprofit organization that educates women about their childbirth

(00:39:03):
rights and self-advocacy.

(00:39:05):
And so if that could happen to me, it could happen to

(00:39:09):
anybody there's there's no advocating your way out of a broken oppressive system

(00:39:16):
and it's just it's so scary like no wonder so many women do not want to have

(00:39:20):
children we act like it's some big mystery but look at what we do to them a hundred

(00:39:25):
percent yeah yeah of course and not only that but

(00:39:32):
you know, financially, what happens to women once we have kids, emotionally, health-wise.

(00:39:38):
I mean, every – I feel like every metric is worse.

(00:39:45):
And we just – we blame it all on women.

(00:39:47):
You know,

(00:39:47):
if you post somewhere complaining about how you just brought a life into the world

(00:39:53):
and you are bleeding from a dinner plate-sized wound and your husband now wants you

(00:39:58):
to make him dinner –

(00:39:59):
The first response is, have you been screened for postpartum depression?

(00:40:02):
Not like, have you been screened for like your husband should probably get murdered?

(00:40:10):
So yeah, I just, I hate it.

(00:40:12):
It's just awful.

(00:40:14):
But your child is older now.

(00:40:16):
So tell me what motherhood is like for you now.

(00:40:21):
So, yeah, she's going to be five in August, which is absolutely crazy.

(00:40:25):
So one of the things that I talk about in the book is that you had asked me about

(00:40:32):
maternal ambivalence earlier.

(00:40:34):
And I had said in the book that I had gone to my therapist and she had asked me on

(00:40:41):
a scale of zero to 100,

(00:40:42):
how badly did I want to have a baby?

(00:40:44):
And at the time I was on the fence, I said 55%.

(00:40:48):
And so that 55% number has become the seed in my book of all the stuff you and I

(00:40:58):
just talked about,

(00:40:59):
about,

(00:40:59):
oh,

(00:41:00):
is 55% enough?

(00:41:04):
Do I need to be 100% in?

(00:41:06):
Do we need to be all in to be mothers?

(00:41:09):
All of this is to say that a lot of people when I've been in rooms traveling around

(00:41:14):
the country on book tour have asked me,

(00:41:17):
when did you have the aha moment?

(00:41:19):
When did you know for sure that you wanted to be a mother?

(00:41:23):
And what I keep – what I was grappling with in trying to answer this question is

(00:41:27):
that there never was a moment before I became a mother that I was like –

(00:41:33):
you know, aha, there's a light that went off or an alarm clock or anything.

(00:41:39):
It was only once I started taking the steps to become a mother and then like all

(00:41:45):
the fertility treatments,

(00:41:47):
all of the,

(00:41:48):
we eventually ended up using donor eggs to become parents.

(00:41:53):
So all of those steps were,

(00:41:56):
Only once my daughter was born and in the sort of months and years after that,

(00:42:03):
did I realize that I decided that I wanted to become a mother through the act of

(00:42:10):
becoming a mother.

(00:42:12):
So that 55% has now gone up to 155%.

(00:42:17):
But that was really through the commitment and caretaking and loving that came from

(00:42:27):
being and becoming a mother.

(00:42:31):
Yeah,

(00:42:31):
yeah,

(00:42:32):
I do feel like it generally trends toward better,

(00:42:35):
at least with kids my age,

(00:42:37):
minor or eight and three.

(00:42:39):
So it's gotten better every year because it does get

(00:42:42):
Less overwhelming.

(00:42:43):
And I also have a lot of structural advantages,

(00:42:46):
starting with the fact that my husband's not a piece of shit,

(00:42:49):
which most husbands are.

(00:42:50):
So,

(00:42:51):
you know,

(00:42:53):
like we really need to talk about that is the primary structural disadvantage most

(00:42:57):
women are dealing with.

(00:43:00):
Yeah.

(00:43:01):
Yeah, absolutely.

(00:43:02):
I mean,

(00:43:03):
we,

(00:43:04):
whether it's Eve Rodsky or,

(00:43:06):
you know,

(00:43:06):
anyone like that I'm reading these days,

(00:43:09):
we talk a lot about,

(00:43:11):
we hear a lot about,

(00:43:12):
you know,

(00:43:12):
the most important relationship is going to be the one you have with your partner

(00:43:16):
and your partner's support for you and your work and motherhood is critical.

(00:43:24):
Yeah.

(00:43:24):
Yeah.

(00:43:25):
Yeah.

(00:43:26):
All right.

(00:43:26):
So I always like to wrap up with a book recommendation.

(00:43:30):
So do you have a book recommendation of any genre for readers or for listeners?

(00:43:35):
I always forget that they're listening rather than reading because I started as a writer.

(00:43:41):
Well,

(00:43:41):
one thing I'm going to say is that,

(00:43:43):
and I should send this to you,

(00:43:44):
on my bookshop page,

(00:43:46):
I have a shelf called The Mother Code Canon.

(00:43:51):
And those are all the books that inspired me in writing my book.

(00:43:57):
And I have so many good ones on there.

(00:44:00):
And also that my when my copy editor was reading my manuscript and said it was the

(00:44:05):
biggest bibliography page they'd ever seen because I just read so many amazing

(00:44:11):
books.

(00:44:11):
So so take a look at that.

(00:44:15):
And then I'm trying to think of something that.

(00:44:19):
I read more recently, but the book that I really feel like my book is in conversation with

(00:44:31):
There's so many.

(00:44:31):
I think Elise Lonan's book, On Our Best Behavior, really comes up for me.

(00:44:35):
I don't know if you read that.

(00:44:39):
Yeah, I really, really liked it.

(00:44:41):
Yeah.

(00:44:42):
I feel like that's the one that's coming up for me in this moment.

(00:44:45):
But there's so many.

(00:44:46):
Also, Liz Lenz's book, Belabored, is a book that inspired me so, so much.

(00:44:53):
All right.

(00:44:53):
Well, Ruthie, thank you so much for coming on.

(00:44:55):
This has been lovely.

(00:44:58):
Listeners,

(00:44:58):
I will put all of Ruthie's information in the show notes,

(00:45:02):
her books,

(00:45:03):
her sub stack,

(00:45:03):
her all of it.

(00:45:05):
So you can find her.

(00:45:07):
Please comment.

(00:45:08):
Let us know what you think.

(00:45:09):
I know that we'll both be reading and engaging with the comments.

(00:45:13):
And I will be back with you guys in two weeks.