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So many knotted, twisted feelings

Happy Mother's Day? Also: slut-shaming Stormy Daniels, dating as a Sims game, and more.

Tracy Clark-Flory

May 12

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Happy Sunday, which also happens to be That Other Day. Before I get to the links, I’m re-upping this from last Mother’s Day:

The other day I was standing in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s when a card caught my eyes. There was an illustration of succulents in a pot. All soft pastels and smudged edges. “Happy Mother’s Day,” it read. “Thank you for helping me grow.”
A succession of images in a flash: My mom’s beloved succulent-filled garden in the midst of her terminal illness from lung cancer. It had turned into a forest of weeds without her careful tending. A metaphor for our lives overtaken by illness. I attacked those weeds as such.
Me yanking up roots that passed through a network of other roots, dirt flying every which way, landing in my eyes, my mouth, falling down the back of my pants. I had no real sense of where the roots led, or what they belonged to. I pulled and yanked, indiscriminately trying to kill.
My own garden, filled with succulents that started as cuttings from my mom’s garden. Waxy leaves—lime green and dark purple bordering on black. They grow in rosettes, forming heads bigger than my own. I often marvel at the fact that these plants have outlived her—that they can still grow nearly ten years since her death. It is insulting. It is beautiful.
And then the cashier asked how my day was going and I made casual small talk while internally everything inside me had gotten knotted and twisted.
I know a lot of us are feeling that this week. Our moms are gone or never really were or are there but in all the wrong ways. Or we’re struggling with infertility or healing from a miscarriage or want a child but lack the systemic support we need to raise one. Or we’re afraid of being forced into parenthood. Or our parenthood is ignored through the insistence on gender binaries. Or we feel ambivalent, regretful, resentful, or lied to about motherhood.
So many knotted, twisted feelings that are made invisible in the checkout line and elsewhere.

To the links…

Angela Garbes writes, “All I can think about are Palestinian mothers holding their babies.” For Mother’s Day, she’s fundraising with Operation Olive Branch to support families in Gaza. I just donated and I hope you’ll do the same.

Elissa Strauss on ambition and motherhood. I’m about to dig into her new book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others.

Another book I’m about to crack open: R.O. Kwon’s Exhibit, a novel about “a woman caught between her desires and her life.” I feel like that’s emerging as a theme of the year.

Jessica Bennett on the slut-shaming of Stormy Daniels.

“It’s like Trump’s lawyer… preparing to grill Stormy Daniels, woke up this morning and thought, ‘You know, I’d like to be a villain in gender studies dissertations for *decades,*’” says Jeff Sharlet.

Modern dating as a Sims game.

Mistress Matisse says: “Anti-trans also means anti-abortion, anti lgbtq, and anti sex workers rights. All those things go together.”...