Now that I'm pregnant, my husband ignores me: Bad Advice Friday

The vast majority of resources on pregnancy and motherhood direct our eyes and minds to issues that don’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things. The problems we face are much bigger: a culture in which men hold nearly all of the legal and economic power; a society in which whiteness is considered the norm and superior to other races and cul

It’s hard for my wife not to feel cursed. Instead of a warm and welcome space for her children, she can picture her body to be dangerous and uninhabitable. She wants to think of Aiden as our miracle child, the only one to survive the harsh climate of her broken body.

For all the talk of “empowered birth,” in American society mothers and expectant mothers have far less power than we should. Everything we do is measured against an impossible standard of what we ought to do, what is “best.” Variation is seen not simply for what it is, biological and cultural variety, but as a deviation from what is perceived as no

Women go into childbirth unaware of physical realities of delivering a placenta, of recovering from a C-section, and of the possible physical implications of birth. We hear almost nothing about the emotional landscape of the postpartum experience: the alienation from your own body, the massive identity shift.