My best and worst trait is that I seek meaning everywhere. Everything is a sign, a lesson, a bread crumb trail toward a deeper understanding of life and all its many complexities. After 36 years, I realize this makes me: a good but scattered friend to have, a sometimes difficult person to be married to, a halfway decent writer and a restless, but attuned human being.

I have felt this pull toward meaning a lot as of late. Maybe it’s motherhood. (After all, isn’t it always motherhood?) Maybe it’s because summer sun slits through the blinds at 5:38AM and the day demands that I get up and make something of myself. Maybe it’s because raising toddlers takes everything from you and then somehow, miraculously, offers it back to you sticky, snotty and better than you could have ever imagined. Maybe it’s because the direction of my career feels like mud these days, as unclear and soggy as it’s ever been. Maybe it’s because I never got my brain back after giving birth, but I instead got a new brain, one with a million daises and fresh ideas bursting out from my cerebrum. Maybe it’s because I’m closer to 40 than I am to 30, and life is asking new and different things of me that I am unsure how to answer.

Whatever the case, I am in the thick of meaning-making, which also means I am in the thick of creative exploration. More specifically, I’m co-developing a podcast and I am halfway through a 10-week fiction writing course. These things are each amazing in their own right, and yet, I have recently realized my brain has one too many tabs open.

I was first in denial about this. My common internal refrain for the past year and a half has been, “I gave birth vaginally and via c-section on the same night, I can do anything.” But just because you can doesn’t mean you should, and that’s a lesson I have had to learn the hard way many times over.

Once I’d moved past my denial, I took stock of all of the creative projects swirling in my orbit and realized the one place I could really afford to rest for the time being is here on Substack. I’d like to think that’s the beauty of Substack—consistency matters, but community will always be there. Spring was beautiful and busy, with my first podcast interview, a lot of essays and the summer reading list to end all summer reading lists. This little Substack tree of mine has borne some tasty fruit, and it feels like a good time to take a breather.

Throughout July and most of August, I won’t be writing here. I’ll be dipping in and out to say hey, to comment when the mood strikes, to save everyone’s lovely essays for a time when my brain can more fully contain them. Instead, I’ll be writing elsewhere, off dreaming up imaginary worlds in short stories where I can say a lot of things I don’t always get to say in personal essays, things I want to say about marriage, identity, race and the messy middle of life. I’ll be developing a yet-to-be-named podcast with one of my closest friends about hefty, hard-to-pin-down motherhood topics. But perhaps most importantly, I’ll be having a lovely time with my two kiddos, immersed in a sea of storytimes/splash pads/grandparent visits/indoor playgrounds/outdoor adventures/play dates. I will be doing my best (no promises) to close just a few tabs in my unquiet brain so that I might make space for these delicious and creative dog days of summer.

Xoxo,
Tyece

Before I go, I’ll leave you with a few of my personal faves, things I’ve written that may be worth reading or revisiting while I’m away. Until August, friends.

To my little ones:

All winter long, I waited for the third Saturday in April. Except I didn’t quite know I was waiting for that specific day, April 18 to be exact. And you all didn’t know it either. I just knew I was waiting for the weather to break just right so that our regular visits to see Grandma and Grandpa would migrate from indoors to outdoors. I was waiting for that first Saturday when we all could sit together in the backyard and watch as you both ran wild and free.

Before becoming a parent and even in the earliest days of being one, I did not anticipate how much of a role seasonality would play in motherhood. It’s a theme that’s appeared again and again in my writing. Before having you both, I always assumed the weather was nothing more than a benign topic to discuss on elevators with strangers. But, as a mother, seasons and their transformative properties have become a central thesis in the story we are authoring together. The arrival of spring meant something to me this year, perhaps for the first time in a long time. Perhaps for the first time ever.

On that third Saturday in April, we loaded up later than usual. Now that your former two naps have melted into one (RIP to the two-nap life, you were so good to us and I did not thank you enough while you were here), I tried to align our departure with your nap schedules because—thank goodness—you both kind of, sort of sleep in cars. However, this was a terrible call on my part for a few reasons including the fact that by that point in the day, you both were too cranky to function. Plus by early afternoon traffic in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area starts to swell. Even on weekends. It was a recipe for disaster if ever there were one.

So we crawled and crawled along Interstate 295. You both slept a little bit in the beginning while I listened to Lena Dunham’s new memoir Famesick. But, eventually our crawling slowed to a complete stop when I realized I-295 was shut down completely and we needed to take a detour. A change in the traffic pattern woke you both up, and it was pretty hot and awful from there on out. When my GPS alerted me we still had 56 minutes to go after we’d already been driving for an hour, I thanked my lucky stars when I saw a McDonald’s nearby. I stopped for what can only be described as a classic and undefeated McDonald’s order to get me through: small Coke, large fries and, of course, an ice cream cone. There was still a lot of crying, but at least I had carbs and a fizzy drink to calm my nerves.

We kept going and eventually made it to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, an hour and a half later than the 1PM arrival I had so naively promised them. But, once we got there, the abysmal car ride quickly faded to black. The weather was perfect. We all sat out on the back patio. Grandma and Grandpa fed you both like a king and queen…graham crackers, chicken nuggets (you know, all of the hits that you would rarely get at home). After you finished eating, you started exploring—running around, being chased, staring quizzically as we all blew on dandelions and tried to get you to join in. You rode on Auntie’s shoulders, you sat on Grandma’s lap, you trotted up and down the driveway with Grandpa. You were almost two different little people, your budding selves somehow made even more ebullient in the great outdoors.

My good luck is not lost on me when I consider that I get to bring you both to visit Grandma and Grandpa in the same house I grew up in. It is a rarity these days that someone lives anywhere for that long. There was a time when Grandma and Grandpa talked about retiring in Florida, but for so many reasons—including (I suspect) the birth of you two—they decided to take a pass on that particular version of their golden years.

And so as I watched you both run in the backyard and then eventually the front yard too, I was reminded of the greatest gift I had growing up, which was playing outside. Watching you both play where I once did reminded me of that time Auntie Lex and I threw a Barbie on the roof and stared widely when we realized it was stuck up there and we had screwed up royally. It reminded me of countless games of Play at the Plate (a makeshift version of baseball) and Red Rover, Red Rover when our cousins would visit. It reminded me of playing in the snow, of making snow angels, of learning that you should not, in fact, run your freezing hands under hot water…bad, bad, bad idea. It reminded me of countless games of tag and the day Auntie Lex slipped on freshly cut grass and broke her thumb.

On that third Saturday in April, I became convinced it was time for us to move somewhere with more outdoor space. Your dad and I are saving slowly but surely in hopes of making that a reality sometime soon.

I didn’t care much about outdoor space before you both were born; I was perfectly content to drink a glass of rosé on my apartment balcony in the sticky heat of a summer’s night and call it day. But I didn’t care about a lot of things before you were born, and the surprise of what now interests me is quite delightful (outdoor space, gated parks, the ease through which a stroller can fit through a door). Before becoming a mother, there was so much I cared about that didn’t actually matter. Now, only a few things really matter, and it’s a joy to care about them all.

Until we have outdoor space to call our own, we will visit new spots and return to old ones, with Grandma and Grandpa’s house on the top of the list. In fact, we’re going there again this weekend and they told me they bought you a water table! Pretty cool, huh?

You all will continue to make new memories there that somehow manage to remold and sharpen my own. And I will watch with my bursting and beaming heart as you two grow up somewhere underneath the same sky that I once did.

Xoxo,
Mommy

Leave a comment

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Sky."

When my children were two weeks old, I looked at a row of my books on a bookshelf and burst into tears. Deep in the midnight of baby blues, I wondered how on Earth I would ever read again, how my brain would manage to absorb anything new or interesting or intellectual. My husband did not see me in that exact instance, but he did see me through the dizzying and dim haze that was postpartum, and a few weeks in, he said, “You should try to read something you enjoy. Maybe re-read something you already know.”

And so I picked up my tattered copy of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, a book I have loved for twenty years. In the middle of the night in between one baby falling back asleep and waiting for the other to wake (the joy of twins), I I would pull it out while inhaling Starbursts. And for those few minutes, I would get lost in the exquisite coming-of-age story of Lee Fiora. In so many ways, she’s a protagonist who reminded me of myself back in 2005 when the book debuted and somehow still reminds me of myself so many years later: diffident, deeply human and dying to be loved. Re-reading Prep less than a month after giving birth helped me to trace a line back to myself in the depths of postpartum.

Books have magical properties. They transport us, uplift us, educate us in ways we didn’t know we needed. They sometimes bring us to far-flung places and they often ship us to the softest spots of ourselves that are most in need of repair.

I firmly believe that you cannot be a good writer unless you are also an enthusiastic reader, and I have been searching for ways to bring that conviction to life in this newsletter. With that in mind, I have toyed with the idea of a book list for awhile, and summer seemed like the perfect time. Whether it’s lounging by a pool, staying up later than usual or taking more trips to the library, summer and reading have such a romantic and inseparable relationship.

Unread on the Nightstand: A Summer Reading List for Mothers Who Contain Multitudes is inspired by the Japanese word tsonduku, which means a delightful habit of buying books and letting them pile up unread. When I considered the spirit of this idea, I immediately thought of motherhood and reading. Because I firmly believe a book does not have to be finished, logged on an app, or read in pristine silence for it to still carry weight and meaning in our lives. Imperfect conditions can still yield considerable impact.

Reading, like everything else, took on a different and distinct shape when I became a mother. The books I read while on maternity leave (Long Island Compromise, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap) were novels that allowed me to get lost in different worlds while helping me feel like a human being with a brain…a feeling that was scarce in those early days. Then, for a long time, I didn’t read. I went back to work and got lost in the labyrinth of working a 9-5 while trying to keep two little humans alive. At the end of the night, I would collapse on the couch with a ‘90s sitcom playing in the background and fall into a deep sleep that would inevitably be interrupted by one (or both) of those two little humans I was trying to keep alive. By the time I had the capacity to start reading again, it was late 2025 and my choices so clearly reflected the ways I felt burned by the flickering flame of my own career drive (Ambition Monster, Life After Ambition). And of course this year, there was the requisite reading because I was curious and wanted to be fluent in the current cultural conversation (Strangers, Yesteryear, Famesick).

At each of these turns, reading brought me closer to myself and the world around me, an orientation that is very easy to lose in the midst of motherhood.

And, yet, there are still so many books I want to read. These days, I am migrating back toward non-fiction for the first time since I finished grad school in 2022. And not the memoir kind but the heady, I-have-to-read-most-sentences-at-least-twice-to-fully-grasp-the-idea kind, in part because of a new project I’m co-creating but also because my brain finally feels ripe enough for more dense ideas. My reading list will remain endless; my appetite for words is never fully sated. That is, I believe, the great beauty of books. Not that we can’t read them all, but that we were never meant to. Sometimes it is OK to have something unread on the nightstand, ready and waiting for life’s next milestone or maelstrom.

Who Contributed to The List and How It’s Categorized

For this list, I called upon a few incredible writers and thinkers whose words and ideas have helped me feel inspired, uplifted, clear and connected. They are all mothers who so graciously agreed to provide their recs.

We divided the list into four sections, based on what all seem to reflect the many multitudes that mothers contain. Perhaps Lucy Jones put it best in her book Matrescence when she wrote,

“Blindsided and increasingly isolated, I fell down a rabbit hole. I had gone, but I didn’t know where, or if I would return. I found I was confronted with my selves anew…”

We did out best to capture our many selves anew with these categories:

Many thanks to the women who contributed to this list. You’ll see their names not only below but woven throughout the list, accompanied by who they most recommend the book to (“perfect for”) and a few thoughts from them (in the gray boxes) about the meaning and impact these books have had on their lives and motherhood journeys.

Subscribe now

Unread on the Nightstand Contributors

of The Nap Trap, who can write just about anything about just about anything, with stunning photos to match and a penchant for making you cry, laugh and think

of El Barrio Reads, who writes about the challenges and beauties of raising a bilingual child with a perfect mix of storytelling and deep study

of The Point, who took Substack by storm with her essay “How Hot Are We Supposed To Be?” and has been pulling stories from the deepest parts of herself ever since

of Human Over Perfect, who I go WAY back with from my previous blog days, and who is encouraging us all to be the most human versions of ourselves

of Five More Minutes, who writes and captures life (images, quotes, etc.) in the most brilliant, humble, nostalgic and unvarnished way

of Mother Love Letters who is the unofficial poet of Motherhood Substack and has a gift for fitting an entire stratosphere of emotions into 10 lines of poetry

of Writing the Layers, who I also go WAY back with from my previous blog days, and whose wisdom, teachings and equanimity always keep me grounded and guided

of Promoted to Mother, who is the unofficial professor of Motherhood Substack with a gift for combining research and storytelling to illuminate the complexities of work and motherhood

of In the MOTHERhood, whose essay, “Raising Light in a Burning World” haunted me in the best way and kept me hooked for more

My friend Taylor, who I met on an elevator in our apartment building last year when she had a baby propped up on her hip who was about my kids’ age, and it’s been a match made in heaven ever since. Here tastes in books and podcasts are unmatched, and that’s the real key to our near-weekly playdates (and, yeah, sure, the kids have fun, too).

Unread on the Nightstand: A Summer Reading List for Mothers Who Contain Multitudes

Books for the Selves We Inherit

Books about lineage, girlhood, womanhood, family patterns and the stories we carry inside of us as we come of age.

Daughterhood: A Memoir By Emily Adrian
Recommended by: of Five More Minutes
Perfect for: Moms that desire a new lens for exploring the maiden to mother transition, one that’s softer, more narrative, and not at all didactic or instructional.

The Mamas: What I Learned About Kids, Class and Race From Moms Not Like Me by Helena Andrews-Dyer
Recommended by: of Human Over Perfect
Perfect for: Black mothers who find themselves in predominantly white spaces (neighborhoods, schools, and sports teams) and feel the quiet weight of being the only one in the room

But What Will People Say: Navigating Mental Health, Identity, Love and Family Between Cultures by Sahar Kaur Kohil
Recommended by: of In the MOTHERhood
Perfect for: Moms who are daughters of immigrants, people married to immigrants/children of immigrants, people raising children with a spouse from an immigrant culture (to the U.S.), and the culture-curious.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Recommended by: of Mother Love Letters
Perfect for: Women, mothers, sisters. The whole of womanhood, at any age.

Cecily: An Epic Feminist Retelling of the War of the Roses by Annie Garthwaite
Recommended by: of Promoted to Mother
Perfect for: Anyone who loves a good historical fiction read where you actually learn something!

Books for the Selves We Create

Books about becoming, improvising and shaping a life while actively living it.

If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair by Anya Hindmarch
Recommended by: of The Nap Trap
Perfect for: Mothers who don’t yet know what comes next. I’m currently on a career pause and this book makes me feel like I’m allowed to take my time to figure out what will bring me joy and allow me to passionately re-enter the workforce, whenever that will be.

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
Recommended by: of The Point
Perfect for: Literally anyone, but especially someone in the throes of a big life change.

The War of Art: Break Through the Block and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
Recommended by: of In the MOTHERhood
Perfect for: Anyone who wants to be a writer. An artist.

The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times by Michelle Obama
Recommended by: of Human Over Perfect
Perfect for: Mothers who are balancing ambition, identity, and uncertainty and need proof that they can carve out their own path

The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo
Recommended by: of In the MOTHERhood
Perfect for: Anyone hesitant to just get out there and try something new, different, daring.

Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste by Bianca Bosker
Recommended by: of The Nap Trap
Perfect for: Anyone who likes good story telling and wine. The author reminds me of Bourdain, if he went on a wine exploration journey.

Books for the Selves We Shed

Books about release, disillusionment, transformation and the complicated grief of outgrowing identities that once felt essential.

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Recommended by: My friend Taylor
Perfect for: Anyone who appreciates intelligent, witty, insightful cultural analysis, particularly as it relates to gender, race, beauty, and capitalism.

The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna Wiest
Recommended by: of El Barrio Reads
Perfect for: Anyone feeling stuck, lost, or confused.

The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown
Recommended by: of The Nap Trap
Perfect for: Absolutely everyone. I’ve read this one in so many different chapters of my life. We’re all human and this book makes me deeply aware of that.

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson
Recommended by: of Human Over Perfect
Perfect for: Mothers who recognize the way they were parented impacts the way they parent and are ready to break that cycle before it reaches their children.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Recommended by: of Mother Love Letters
Perfect for: Readers who want to dip a toe into English literature without feeling overwhelmed, readers who enjoy satire, readers who appreciate absurdist humor

Books for the Selves We Rebuild

Books exploring what it means to reconstruct a self after rupture, exhaustion, change or uncertainty.

Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff
Recommended by: My friend Taylor
Perfect for: The person who thinks that beating themselves up is going to lead to change or improvement. The person who is preoccupied with perfection. Any parent, but especially moms.

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo
Recommended by: of Writing the Layers
Perfect for: Anyone who wants a better understanding of complex PTSD, whether for themselves or someone they love. The combination of the author’s personal story, the research, and the societal/cultural context will help readers better understand their own stories and feel less alone.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden
Recommended by: of El Barrio Reads
Perfect for: Anyone enduring a betrayal of any kind.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
Recommended by: of Mother Love Letters
Perfect for: Anyone who loves art and their life sprinkled with a little bit of magic

Matrescence by Lucy Jones
Recommended by: Me! of Ampersand Motherhood
Perfect for: Any women who are pregnant or newly postpartum and are wondering what the heck just happened and where did my former self go?

Story Work: Field Notes on Self-Discovery and Reclaiming Your Narrative by
Recommended by: Me! of Ampersand Motherhood
Perfect for: Anyone who is doing or ready to do the messy, hard work of reclaiming themselves

Phew, what a list! Many thanks again to all of the women who poured so much time, thought and love into the recommendations here. I hope there is something on this list that sparked your interest, maybe something that you’ve read already and were heartened to see, or something that you have already stopped to purchase or put on hold at the library.

Feel free to drop a comment and share what YOU are reading and/or have read that speaks to your many multitudes. What books speak to the versions of yourself you have inherited, shed, created and rebuilt over time? The beauty of this list is our chance to keep building it with your recommendations.

Leave a comment

Xoxo,
Tyece & The Unread on the Nightstand Contributors

Download the List

If you’d love to have all of these recs in one place without having to scroll through our lovely but endless Substack post, you can download a PDF of the list here.

Unread On The Nightstand Reading List Pdf

55.2KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Back in November 2024, I sat in the comfiest corner of our sectional couch and wrote my birth story. And I didn’t write it so much as I ushered it into the world, the words a deluge spilling out from me before I even really knew what I was doing. That moment was somehow both a relief and a joy in the midst of postpartum grief, a remembrance of the writer I was and a revelation of the writer I might become.

I went back not long ago and re-read that essay, and there is a rawness to it that almost makes me wince. My heart is so clearly poured all over the page with little room left for inhibitions or misgivings. The details are specific; I recognize the voice as mine and mine alone. And when I re-read that essay, I think, “Yes. That’s me. That’s me starting this journey of writing about motherhood.”

That is how I often feel when I read some of my favorite writers, both writers here on Substack and writers out in the wild. Like they’ve poured their hearts onto the page, like they have shared their stories with vivacity and verve, like they have mined their memories for the most poignant details of their precious life. These are writers whose words feel like an invitation into their living room, whose sentences feel like they’ve offered me a cup of tea and asked me to stay awhile. These writers are specific and vivid, instinctive and unique in their storytelling. I often save their essays for later both for delayed gratification and also so that I can give their words the proper time and attention they deserve instead of a mere skim. And often when I read those essays, I can’t help but comment because the writers have managed to create such an inviting space with their reflections.

It is impossible not to be privy to the rise of anti-AI rhetoric that has befallen many platforms, including, and perhaps especially, Substack. It is hard not to notice how essays no longer have typos (which is somehow both a blessing and a curse). It’s tough not to raise a brow when you see one too many em dashes in a piece. (RIP to an incredible workhorse of punctuation marks. It’s too bad that the dead giveaway of AI isn’t, say, a semi-colon).

And all of this just makes me a little sad, mostly because writing is a life raft that has kept me afloat for 36 years, the place I go to get lost and then to be found. Writing is so integral to my personhood, and writing about motherhood has helped me to trace a line back to my truest self. So, the idea that this act that is personal and beloved for so many of us can be pulled from a shelf, bought in bulk and sold at three times the price breaks my writerly heart.

And because I’ve curated a very specific Substack feed focused on motherhood, most of my “Wait, is this AI?” whodunnits come, of course, from motherhood stories. It bums me out when I begin reading an essay about motherhood, which is arguably the most human experience there is, and I notice the writing lacks a certain specificity and texture. It’s the written equivalent of a store-bought cake. Sure, it will do the job and it’s not going to hurt anybody, but it’s probably never going to be remembered as the best cake anyone’s ever eaten either. People will stand around eating it at someone’s retirement party, making small talk and saying it tastes good just to fill the silence, and then they will move on and never consider that cake again.

I mentioned my AI dismay to a friend recently. I sent her a screen shot of the first two paragraphs of an essay and bemoaned that I believed the writer had not actually written it. She asked with genuine curiosity, “How can you tell?” And I wanted to say that it’s just a feeling, a feeling you have after you’ve spent a lifetime with words and are intimately familiar with their vastness and, occasionally, their limitations. You know after you have spent years challenging yourself to understand voice and nuance, detail and restraint, the push and pull of trying to iron out and articulate a rumpled feeling inside of you.

When I think about motherhood stories, they are not store-bought cakes. I believe so deeply that they deserve to be made from scratch, baked at home with the ingredients and handwritten recipes that you and you alone possess.

Let me say this: I do not want to cosplay as an anti-AI evangelist. Of course I have used AI! I have used it to help craft a strength workout when I was tiring of Peloton. When I got my annual work bonus in March, I used it to come up with several options for how to best use the money as a supplement for our daycare costs so we could get the most bang for our buck. I used it to strategize how to preserve my energy one day day when I had back-to-back meetings. Once, based on the recommendation of a colleague, I used it to try and style an outfit (not successful).

But, recently, all of that started to feel icky, started to feel like my brain wasn’t mine anymore, started to cheapen my thought process, started to feel like I had become too reliant on the artifice of consciousness in place of my own. And so I took a bit of a break. And you know what? I was actually a little bored without the dopamine hit of it all. I was a little bored when I had to sit with my own restless self and figure something out instead of having a perfectly coherent idea materialize in a matter of seconds. But, I was also smarter. I was also able to access my own thoughts more freely, feel my own feelings more deeply, and know my flawed and foolish self more profoundly. I was more clear and sure of what I was thinking and why I was thinking it, more in tune with the specific tug of war the comes from wrestling with a thought and then arriving at one’s own messy and incomplete conclusion.

And I think sometimes, especially in an essay like this, we need to just fess up to the fact that most of us have used this terrible and convenient thing. We should fess up so that we defang it and strip ourselves of the shame that accompanies seeking convenience and speed in the inconvenient, slow and sometimes painful reality of being a person in the world. That being said, I am realizing these days that the inconvenient, slow and painful reality of being a person in the world is, well, actually kind of the point of it all.

In this little online home of mine, the point has always been to examine the interior life of motherhood. Not to write what is topical, but to write what feels most true and unexpressed inside of me. To see the glistening surface of motherhood’s ocean and inquire about the exquisite creatures that lie beneath. And so when this particular essay first danced across my mind, I hesitated. I stopped to consider what, if anything, AI has to do with the interior life of motherhood. Why are a few motherhood essays that don’t seem to be written by the mothers who publish them sticking in my craw? Why am I disheartened by this, and why can’t I just get over it?

What I ultimately landed on was this: there is nothing artificial about a mother’s intelligence. A mother’s intelligence is hard-earned wisdom. It is blood, sweat and tears. A mother’s intelligence is the gumption that comes from discerning what a baby’s cry means, the grit that comes from cupping your hands just as your child is about to vomit, the grace that comes from surviving to mother another day. Mother-writers have earned every bit of the solidity that lives in their sentences and the soul that lives in their stories. I arrived at my stories not because I came up with a perfect prompt and asked Claude to do it for me but because I labored for 17 hours and pushed a baby girl out, and because I then got cut wide open and they pulled my baby boy out too (my son is nothing if not unpredictable, flipper that he was). AI couldn’t do that, not even on its best day.

A mother’s intelligence is the most human and real kind of intelligence there is. Everything we write should reflect that humanity. Because using AI to write a motherhood story cheats the reader, but it cheats the “writer” too. It robs them of the confidence that comes from hearing one’s innate wisdom and discovering the unique melody of one’s own voice. What did Maya Angelou say? “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Every use of AI perpetuates that agony and leaves that story untold. No wonder there is so much suffering in the world.

Our motherhood stories deserve to be messy and human, jagged and unfinished, packaged imperfectly with a typo or two. They deserve to be written by us from some of our most guttural and primal places. When we write our birth stories, it should bring us to our knees. When we write on Mother’s Day, it should bring us to tears. When we write about OUR mothers, it should wreck us just a little. When we write about an ordinary Tuesday or a family vacation or the light beams that are our children, we should have to work for it. We should have to sit with it and discern what we are really trying to say, why something is especially meaningful for us, what a particular detail illustrates about our parenting, what the stories of motherhood reveal about our broader arc in the story of humanity.

Our stories deserve the patience and contemplation it takes to write them, and the time and attunement it takes to read them.

Motherhood stories are not store-bought cakes. They are deep dish apple pies, two hours in the oven and made with love so that you may savor every bite.

A wholehearted, full-throated piece of writing has the capacity to serve as the lighthouse we didn’t know we needed during the moments when we are most lost at sea. That writing deserves to be the poetic work of humans and not the prosaic work of machines. This is especially, painstakingly true when it comes to writing about motherhood.

And so may we all write the stories that only we can tell, and to do so in the ways that only we can. May we have the patience to let the words arrive in due time and in their own way. May we struggle, may we wrestle, may we write terrible first drafts and fix them up later. May we sometimes not write at all! Instead, may we eat, drink and be merry, may we take beautiful photos, may we get a little frisky when the babies go to bed. May we go to the theater to see the movie, may we listen to our favorite song from 19981 on full blast and then once more for good measure, may we open up the book and stop to smell the pages, may we drink from the mug while the coffee is still piping hot. May we do all of the things that make us human and keep us human so that we can write what’s human too.

Xoxo,
Tyece

I’ve been bursting at the seams for weeks, patiently awaiting the chance to share this conversation. And it’s finally here! I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Keltie Maguire of The Kids or Childfree Podcast to talk about all things twin motherhood, the relationship between motherhood and creativity, and even some of the ambivalence I felt in the lead up to becoming a mother. (I even spill the tea about the terrible nanny we had early on.)

This conversation is one that makes me smile; is an incredible and gracious interviewer, and I could have talked to her all day. The space she creates for parents and childfree individuals alike is unique and important, especially in light of how polarizing parenting rhetoric can be. This episode represents an artifact of public thought I am deeply proud to share as I continue discovering and honing my voice in the motherhood sphere.

The story behind how this episode came to be also feels like an important story to tell. Because the story of how this all came to be reminds me of the power of continuing to create, even, and perhaps especially, when it feels like you are shouting into the void.

It goes a little something like this:

• Each month (or most months, anyway), I write an essay as part of the Blog Hop with Exhale Creativity, a community made up of creative mothers of all kinds who believe creativity enriches motherhood, and motherhood enriches creativity. (Hard to argue with that.) I discovered Exhale Creativity last fall as I was easing into writing about motherhood and seeking a community of support. The Blog Hop is something I look forward to each month, eagerly awaiting the prompt, getting lost in the essay I write and then getting lost in the ways other women interpret the prompt through their own storytelling.
  

• For the February Blog Hop, the prompt was “unscripted” and I wrote the essay, “Tending Toward a Truer Life.” As of my publishing this, that essay has 13 likes and 10 comments (and about half of the comments are me responding to people’s comments). Those numbers are probably about average for me. I have one post with 44 likes and when that happened, I thought I’d died and been reincarnated as Beyoncé.
  

• In early April—nearly two months after I’d published Tending Toward a Truer Life—I received an email from Elissa Strauss, author of When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. I’m a big fan of Elissa (I gushed about her book and my love for her work in an earlier essay), and I’m always heartened when I engage with her on Substack. She reached out seeking permission to republish Tending Toward a Truer Life as part of her monthly “The Restack” series. This detail is important for a number of reasons, including the fact that The Restack is a pretty brilliant and generous idea. It goes further than simply restacking someone’s essay on Substack in the usual method of clicking that circle/arrow thing, and instead includes a direct “reprint” of one’s essay on Elissa’s Substack.

  • When I first joined Substack, I remember talking to my good friend GG Renee Hill about how this place works, and one of the things she instilled in me was the importance of engaging generously. It’s so easy to find empty reasons to play small here. To “like” sparingly. To comment only ever once in a while. But, when I think about something like Elissa’s “The Restack” it is the epitome of generosity.
    

• Shortly after Elissa restacked my essay, Keltie read it there and reached out asking if I would be interested in joining her on her podcast. (Elissa had also previously been a guest on Keltie’s podcast.) I did, for a moment, think she might be a bot. Someone wanted me to come talk on their podcast about my very, very short time as a mother?
  

• But, Keltie was not in fact a bot. She was a real person who did a stellar job helping me feel comfortable and courting us through a delightful discussion about twin motherhood and creativity. She gave me space to feel more rooted in my lived experiences and parse through ideas I didn’t even know I had.

Why tell this long and drawn out story? Why not just say, “Listen to this podcast, thanks, bye!” Well, for starters, I think how opportunities come to pass is fascinating and important; nothing materializes out of thin air, and it benefits us all to shed light on that fact. Two, something about this whole thing feels like the delicious domino effect that is creative opportunity. One thing leads to another leads to another, and sometimes serendipidity can do things that we alone cannot. Lastly and especially, this story reminds me that numbers—subscribers, likes, comments, restacks—can only tell a small sliver of each of our stories. There is also depth to how we can choose to engage with one another here, beauty in the communities we might find and clarity in the sense of belonging that takes shape. That depth, those communities and that clarity are what, I believe, unearth new paths for each of us.

Let me be clear: me being on one podcast does not mean I have reached Nirvana. I’m not quitting my day job, not selling the rights to a book, not being booked on Good Morning America. But, after almost a year of writing here with my humble 144 subscribers, this story feels like I have managed to make my online house a home, like I’ve laid down the rugs and patched up the roof, like I’ve found a few reasons to keep the faith and stay awhile. I did not feel any of that when I started writing here. I did not even feel that at the beginning of this year. I do not know how long I will feel it either. But, I feel it for now, and it feels good.

Ok, now…listen to this podcast, thanks, bye!

Xoxo,
Tyece

Welcome to Sunday Kind of Love, a soft place to land every other week or so. These (typically) shorter and more intimate essays aim to hold the ordinary fragments of motherhood up to the light. Thank you for being here.

Do you know how to stop time?

Recently my daughter learned how to say “all done.” She has been signing it for months, but now the signing is accompanied by her cotton-soft baby voice announcing “All done.” Or, rather, “Ah dun.”

And I sometimes wonder when did we get to this point? When did the gestures become words, when did words become phrases, when did the utterances become something I could actually understand and respond to, and not just smile at? When did my children begin to become people in the world? Two souls with their own sensibilities and sensitivities. Two unique human beings, one who loves music and another who loves building blocks. One who stares unhappily at her fingers when they prune up in the bathtub and another who refuses to leave the bath by any means necessary.

Do you know how to stop time?

Because I texted my husband the other day, and I said this:

“I was just thinking about when we become empty nesters and how sad it’s gonna be to go from 2 kids to 0. Like usually parents have their oldest leave and then they still have a kid around.”

And it was a realization that hit me hard and all at once, the realization that we are, in fact, done having children. But not the realization (I already knew that) so much as the grief-inducing implication of our two birdies some day leaving the nest around the same time, transforming our beautiful mass of twigs and moss into an empty one overnight. I know it’s such a long time from now, but, my goodness, how does one breathe through such an undoing?

Do you know how to stop time?

Because at least once a week, I open up the Photos app on my phone in search of a very specific fix. And if that app could talk, it would say, “Ah, yes, I know, Tyece. Welcome back. I will open up October 2024 for you, just one moment.”

And then I don’t stroll down memory lane so much as I stumble, my eyes becoming glassy as I sit dumbfounded wondering how there was ever a time when my children were small enough to fit in the crook of my arm. And then I watch a video from 8:24PM on December 8, 2024 at least three times, the one where my daughter is cooing while wearing a Santa sleeper, her tiny tongue covered in the thrush that drove us nuts for weeks and refused to respond to antibiotics. And I watch her, but I also listen to me, my voice sounding both saccharine and foreign, like I was still getting to know her and I hope she liked me at least a little. I notice how different that voice is from the voice I use with her and her brother now, a voice that is confident and familiar, a voice that reflects a 19-month history of nicknames and late nights, of the inexplicable love that comes from knowing the specific sound and signal of a baby’s laugh or cry without even having to lay eyes on them.

Do you know how to stop time?

Because every time I was pregnant and I heard the days were long and the years were short, I wanted to scream. I wanted to ask what that really meant, what were people actually trying to say. But, it turns out they were saying exactly what they meant. They were saying that there are days where the minutes crawl, days where you watch the clock and pray you can make it till nap time so you might have just a moment to breathe, days where you are held together with nothing but Scotch tape and Ms. Rachel, days when you close the door at bedtime, turn to your husband, sigh and announce, “We made it.” (And then promptly pour a glass of wine.) But then the years, oh the years, where do they go? How does January become June, how does the snow melt and give way to 80-degree days? How does all this becoming and progress and metamorphosis happen when it sometimes seems like all we’re doing is eating breakfast and getting dressed, searching for lost shoes underneath the glider?

Do you know how to stop time?

Because I went to my girlfriend’s baby shower today, and as I said goodbye to her, I started to weep. I knew that instance when I hugged her in her gorgeous, layered white dress would probably be the last time I would hug her before she becomes a mother. And I felt like a madwoman and like myself all at once, because those tears were the tears of a woman who sees another woman and knows that woman is about to propel through a portal unlike any other. And how do you tell her that? How do you convey the transformation she is about to experience, the way life is about to simultaneously crack her open while also making her whole? How do you tell her that she is about to embark upon the best and hardest thing a person can do? And, the answer is that you don’t. You just cry. You cry because you remember spring break in Miami with this woman and crammed hotels after festival nights with this woman and all of the life that happened with this woman before this version of life happened not with her but, instead, from a distance. You cry because when people say time flies, it used to make you think of birds, but now you think of bullet trains instead.

Do you know how to stop time?

Because not long ago, I was digging through our coat closet trying to find something, and my eyes landed on the pink and blue snowsuits that my mom bought my children. I didn’t have the heart to get rid of them. Because while I knew they both would never fit or wear them again, those snowsuits will always be the emblem of Super Bowl Sunday. Those snowsuits will always remind me of the moment just as the game was starting and the apartment building’s fire alarm went off. We rushed to get outside into the raw of a winter’s night, thinking it might be a prank but not wanting to take our chances. We put the babies in the snowsuits and held them both close and tight, their eyes wide with fear and a hint of curiosity. Eventually management let us all back into the lobby of the building, and I observed as a group of twenty-something girls in tight jeans and tiny tops tried to impress a group of twenty-something guys. Seeing them yanked my memory back to a Super Bowl party in 2014 when I very much did the same, and I left that night a little embarrassed and sick at heart. And I just remember sitting there with all four of us bundled up in that lobby, my babies in their puffy snowsuits, and I felt the immense gratitude and mooring of our boring, beautiful life together.

Do you know how to stop time?

Because if you, dear reader, do possess such a skill, will you please do it for me? Will you pause the stopwatch right here and right now so that I might savor this moment for just a second longer? Will you let my babies stay babies, will you let us preserve this lightning in a bottle? And If you know how to stop time, I’m sure I’m not the only mother asking. I’m sure there’s a mother of a newborn who just smiled for the first time or a mother of a three-year-old who learned how to ride a tricycle or a mother of a five-year-old who is about to finish kindergarten or a mother of a ten-year-old who always wins Connect Four during family game night or a mother of an eighteen-year-old who is about to leave for college or a mother of a 27-year-old who is about to walk down the aisle. And they all would like to implore that you stop time for them, too.

So, I ask on our collective behalf…do you know how to stop time?

Xoxo,
Tyece

Sunday Kind of Love: A Few Things to Hold

Sunday Share: An Essay That Lingered With Me

Not an essay this week, but a poem. Shawn Smucker’s “Please Use AI” has been liked nearly 10K times, and every single one of those likes is so deeply justified. I can’t even find a quote to share…just go read it.

The Courage to Live It

Please Use AI

Be sure to use AI when making…

Read more

3 months ago · 9696 likes · 269 comments · Shawn Smucker

Something the Kids Are Delighting In

The song L-O-V-E by John Legend. Bonus: The video includes Ms. Rachel.

An Invitation

While I’ve made my plea in today’s essay, I’m skeptical that you can actually stop time. But I do think you can savor it. And so I invite you to find a way to savor time this week…stare at your babies, spend the extra few minutes with your spouse, whatever. Let whatever it is feel good for a little longer than you usually allow it to feel good.

On a plain and unremarkable Sunday afternoon, I am blowing bubbles with my daughter. I watch as she chases one with an earnestness that only a toddler can exhibit, so fervent in her desire to catch it and keep it forever. The bubble, of course, has other plans. But, her delight in the entire 10-second experience makes my heart swell, and I feel an unexpected tear form in the corner of my eye.

A few days later, I am changing my daughter when I feel a small pair of arms hug my calf. I look down to see my son smiling up at me, and my heart once again swells in the way it did days before with the bubbles. It is the same sensation I feel when I catch the eyes of one of my children while they’re eating breakfast and they smile that toothy smile back at me, food still fresh in their mouths, yogurt smeared all over their faces. In those moments, my heart both aches and blooms, undone by the ever-present nostalgia of motherhood and uplifted by the surprising joy of an ordinary life.

I’ve considered writing about April 2, 2024—the day we learned we were having twins—often. I’ve considered telling the story of how much it rained that morning, the story of how we parked in the blue garage instead of the purple one and had to walk the length of the hospital’s campus until we made it to the right building. I’ve considered mining my memory for exactly right words to describe the moment when the sonographer told us, “So, there’s two of them.”

And maybe in due time, I will write that story to its fullest and most deserving extent. But, for now, I am in a different headspace, the kind of headspace brought on by a slow crawl toward midlife. Which is to say that I am swimming in a particular sea of nostalgia and ennui these days, reminiscing on the memories of early pregnancy while ruminating on the realities of parenting twin toddlers.

Finding out we were having twins was, undoubtedly, the biggest surprise of my life.

It is easy to write about that day. It is harder to write about what comes later. Because what happens after you receive the biggest surprise of your life?

Well, the lukewarm reality is that there are few big surprises left.

But, I am learning the good news is that there are still a million little surprises to follow. And it’s those million little surprises that stitch together the golden threads of this one wild and precious life.

Share

In combing through the Internet to find inspiration for this piece, I came across an essay by Stephanie Fallon entitled, “Alternative Ways to Measure the Quality of Your Life.” In it, Fallon writes:

What happens when you run out of milestones, or you stop having things to announce? What about people who might never be able to afford a house, or remain single their entire lives? Are they doomed to never knowing what it is to be?

And even if we check every box, hit every milestone, and soak up every possible accolade: Is the quality of our lives determined only by our proximity to these few things? Is the value of our lives diminished without them?

Fallon’s words hit me hard, illuminating a myth I believed for too long that the value of my life up until recently was determined by its proximity to key milestones. Early adulthood is chock full of prescribed moments, and perhaps it was wildly unoriginal of me to live through many of them. Career! Marriage! Babies! But I did. In doing so, my life sustained a certain level of momentum without my having to generate much of it myself. There were tailwinds that pushed me up, through and onward, each milestone more flashy and Instagrammable than the next until I reached the Holy Grail of announcements: surprise, we’re having twins!

And now that these moments have come and gone, I am left asking myself what makes a life when the last burst of confetti has been swept up, but the living has, in many ways, only just begun.

If you’re lucky in this life, the manufactured momentum of early adulthood slows and gives way to something greater: the freedom to create your own current. If you somehow find yourself no longer subject to a societal checklist of what makes a life worth living, you begin to realize that midlife is not the end of becoming, but a new variant of it.

In creating my own current, I am opening myself up again to wonder, often through the eyes of my children. I’ve realized that adulthood has dulled my sense of awe; years of being so singularly focused on achievement and forward motion eclipsed my capacity for astonishment. But, my children have reawakened my senses, uncovering everyday miracles in places where I long stopped looking.

And so I’ve started to more keenly notice my life’s small and simple surprises: a spontaneous dance party to Blink-182’s “All the Small Things” on a Wednesday night, the first time my daughter nodded “yes” when I asked her a question, watching my kids pick up and hand my dad rocks so earnestly you would think they discovered The Ark of the Covenant. In these instances and more, I am reminded that perhaps there is nothing more delightfully surprising than children. They inspire a unique brand of awe thanks to their innocence, curiosity, absorption and zest for a life that so many of us believe we have already figured out.

I am genuinely, truly surprised by the things my children say and do, by the people they become both when I’m watching and when I am not there. There is something about these small, simple surprises that feels so much more genuine and heartfelt than the big life surprises that came before them, a kind of amazement that reminds me of my own humanity as I watch theirs emerge.

With my children, I am my most vulnerable and wide open self. And aren’t those the key conditions required for surprise? To be peeled back and unsealed enough to let life dazzle you and shine a floodlight on something you could never expect. In that unguarded space, new versions of myself emerge: impatient in ways I didn’t expect, tender in ways I didn’t know were even available to me, curious in ways I had long since abandoned, and capable of a kind of joy that feels almost disorienting in its magnitude.

My children surprise me and, in turn, I surprise myself.

I am touched. I am moved. I am unfastened enough so that the light can spill in.

And that’s often what it feels like to be a mother, like letting all of this light I didn’t know was hidden behind closed doors finally, finally spill right in.

Xoxo,
Tyece

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Surprise."

Welcome to Sunday Kind of Love, a soft place to land every other week or so. These (typically) shorter and more intimate essays aim to hold the ordinary fragments of motherhood up to the light. Thank you for being here.

If you’d like to experience this piece differently, if you’re curious what my voice sounds like, or if your hands are full (mine usually are), you can listen instead. This is a longer one, and I’m making an effort going forward to record audio for my longer essays so they can reach you in more ways than one.

I am my grandmother’s granddaughter.

My grandmother was pink dollhouses and cream sodas, a $10 bill on the last day of summer to buy whatever you wanted when the ice cream truck came. She was boxes and boxes of canned goods donated to shelters during the holidays, a bottomless well of love for anyone who came her way. My grandmother was a woman who laughed so loudly one day when I sat on the edge of her pedestal bathroom sink talking to my sister and the entire structure swiftly collapsed. While I was shaking in my boots preparing to be scolded, she thought it was the funniest thing in the world. My grandmother was a safe haven who was soft to hold, a delight through all of my elementary school days, the first person to really encourage my imagination to run wild. She was the person who bought me and my sister our first American Girl dolls, and I can only imagine what it took for her to save and scrape to buy two of those things, but what she wouldn’t give to make any of her grandkids’ little dreams true.

It has been over 25 years since she was gone too soon from this Earth after what seemed like a routine hospital visit from a fall gave way to the last weeks of her life. I do not think of her every day, but when I do think of her, the memories are always warm and pure and sweet because she was always warm and pure and sweet. And I cannot imagine how a woman who raised six kids in the projects with only enough money to buy them each one pair of shoes a year could somehow manage to emit all that warmth, all that purity, all that sugar. But she did. So I can think of no greater accomplishment in life, no higher mountain to climb than to raise your kids and then their kids with a once-in-a-lifetime, unmitigated kind of love.

I am my grandmother’s granddaughter, and I carry her with me always and forever, but especially now as a mother.

I am my mother’s youngest daughter.

Growing up, my mother was a hugger and a yeller, a lover and a fighter, a God-fearing woman who might also drop an f-bomb at just the right moment. My mom was tough as nails and she didn’t take any junk, which meant my sisters and I were always a little afraid of her, or maybe it was just a really, really healthy dose of respect? My mom was church on Sundays and choir rehearsal on Tuesdays and Vacation Bible School during the summer, and whatever else was being offered so as to keep us out of trouble and on the up and up. She was proud and beaming, always coaxing us to sing, dance and speak in front of other people—at church, in school plays, wherever. She is the reason I enjoy public speaking as much as I do; she gave me the confidence to believe in my own voice and the permission to use it.

Nowadays, my mother is much more of a hugger than a yeller, more of a lover than a fighter, and still a God-fearing woman who will on occasion drop an f-bomb at just the right moment. She has softened in her older age, which is a beautiful thing to witness. She is a doting, loving grandmother, buoyed in her seventies by the chance to love on a second surge of babies in the family now that my nieces are much older. I text her every morning, talk to her every night, and FaceTime her and my dad (with the kids, of course, we know they don’t want to just see me) at least once or twice a week. My mother is a woman whose health always feels like a seesaw between OK and hospital stay, and so I never take her being here for granted. Mother’s Day is still first and foremost her day, and I am more than happy to play second fiddle to her. I know these are her golden years, and it is an honor to help keep her sun shining for as long as that bright star will stay in the sky.

I am my mother’s daughter and I carry her with me always and forever, but especially now as a mother.

I am my oldest sister’s little sister.

My oldest sister is fourteen years my senior, which means that growing up, she straddled the fence between cool older sister and mother figure. We visited her in New York during our summers, and inevitably halfway through our weeklong stay, I would suffer bouts of all-consuming homesickness and beg to go back to Maryland.

My oldest sister had her first kid when was 19, so she had to grow up hard and fast, and it’s an edge she has maintained throughout her life. That and a lifetime spent in New York have made her tough, wise and opinionated, unapologetic and unafraid in her stances. She is a fierce mama bear of the ones she loves. I’ve seen her take on corporate giants when they have wronged her or her loved ones—everything from being followed in a store and wrongly accused of stealing (her husband) to trying to sweep an injurious golf cart accident under the rug at a resort (our parents). In these instances and more, she summons a courage and nerve like I’ve never known, writing letters up the chain and demanding repair for the people in her life who are often too reluctant or exhausted to advocate for themselves.

By the time she had her two youngest kids, she was older and more mature, softened and steadied by the love of a reliable partner. It was not a do-over from her first parenting experience, but she did in many ways do better, and it was a lovely sight to behold.

Share

The weekend before I learned I was pregnant, my older sister and I treated our oldest sister to a spa weekend for her 50th birthday. They inadvertently upgraded us to the Governor’s suite and after dinner, we spent the evening sitting at a long dining room table drinking wine and telling stories from the past. I drove home that Sunday afternoon not even considering that I might take a pregnancy test the following day and definitely not considering the test would be positive. Which is to say I drove home that Sunday afternoon not knowing that the following day my entire life would change, and so that weekend in the upgraded Governor’s suite would prove to be an enduring and important memory when I think about my sister and all she means to me.

I am my oldest sister’s little sister, and I carry her with me always and forever, but especially now as a mother.

I am my older sister’s little sister.

My older sister and I are exactly 18 months apart to the day—April 12, 1988 and October 12, 1989. This makes us a little more than Irish twins, despite my reluctance nowadays to call anyone twins if they are not in fact twins (but, I digress). My older sister and I are thick as thieves, joined at the hip and bonded through a lifetime of shared experiences and memories, and maybe some trauma sprinkled in there too. For the first two years of my sister’s life, my grandmother raised her, so I like to think she inherited all that warmth, all that purity, all that sugar.

Growing up, we fought like sisters do, but we loved like sisters do too, so she was both my security blanket and also the safe for my secrets (except for the one secret she did not keep when my mom pressed her about what I doing at the library each spring afternoon of ninth grade and she offered up the hot lead of a boy named Richard). She was there on a cold winter morning in eighth grade when I got my first period, instructing me how to use a pad because our mom wasn’t awake yet. We ate breakfast side by side at the kitchen counter every morning before heading to school, her with a bowl of cereal, me with a Pop Tart or Toaster Strudel (do they still even make those?) When she was a senior in and I was a junior, she drove us to school each morning in her beat up 1990 Toyota Corolla, blasting Neyo’s “Stay.”

Nowadays, she is often the first person I call or text when anything major or minor happens—my engagement, a bad day at work, finding out my daughter bit someone in daycare. She is my safest place, the harbor that always feels like home and helps bring my ship back to shore. She is funny and bright and stylish, and even when life is unkind to her in ways that these paragraphs couldn’t contain even if they tried, she somehow still manages a joie de vivre that rivals Fran Drescher.

These days, she is also Auntie Lex—fun-loving, supportive and always armed with the latest Tik Tok song or trend to share with my kids. She is my partner-in-crime for the biggest J&J adventures like the first birthday party we attended last year or our inaugural trip to the pool last summer. Which is to say that when the stakes are high but I want to have fun with the kids and not overthink or over-stress it, I call her and she swoops in to save the day. Next up on our list: the zoo.

I am my older sister’s sister, and I carry her with me always and forever, but especially now as a mother.

I am so grateful and too lucky that I am not a mother all on my own. My motherhood is a blend of all of the women who came before me and the women who walk alongside me, the women whose journeys have each uniquely inspired my own. I am nothing if not my grandmother’s granddaughter, my mother’s youngest daughter, and both of my sisters’ little sister. I am nothing if I am not my grandmother’s encouragement for play and imagination, my mom’s fortitude, my oldest sister’s grit and my older sister’s spiritedness. I am the result of each of their stories and struggles, and the invisible string that has threaded us together.

On a day like today, it’s tempting to take credit for the mother I have become over these short 18 months, to pen a version of motherhood easily mistaken for a hero’s journey. But their story is my story and my story is theirs. I am the mother I am because of each of the incredible women I carry with me.

Happy Mother’s Day, my friends. To you and to all of the women who have traversed this path ahead of you, beside you and maybe even behind you.

Xoxo,
Tyece

Usually at the end of Sunday Kind of Love, I share a few things to hold, a little section devoted to recs, reflections and short musings. But, today’s essay feels especially poignant and personal, so I am going to leave it here for now. Thank you for reading and for being here. Until next time!

Notes on Multiplicity is a monthly essay series that aims to unpack the unique nuances, internal struggles and rich delights of twin motherhood. Thank you for being here.

“Stop In for Stories” is a cutesy, alliterative name that’s meant to sound casual for an activity that is anything but. For me and the other 20 or so parents and caregivers there on Sunday morning, we are not, in fact, just stopping in. We are not casually cruising by the library. No, I suspect for most, if not all of us, this is the thing we are doing for the morning, an anchor in our weekend plans so that we have an excuse to get outside of the house. A place to go. A departure from the norm.

For me and my toddling duo, we have to begin getting ready to “Stop in for Stories” a whopping 90 minutes before the event starts. And even that level of preparation only puts us at the library with 10 minutes to spare (which feels like the earliest I’ve arrived anywhere since the year 2000). We make our way over to Youth Services, park the stroller alongside the wall with a few others, and wander around at my daughter’s behest and despite my son’s reluctance. Then all at once, a bunch of adults and their kids swarm to the designated storytelling location. Despite my thinking we were early, by the time I manage to wrangle my children to the area, there’s only room on the floor, not in one of the surrounding plastic chairs. So I sit, and I am pleasantly surprised when my kids sit too, quizzically looking around at the other attendees as my son lovingly pets my daughter’s hair. They both ignore my encouragement to chase the bubbles blasting out of the bubble machine (I’m convinced my daughter does not trust bubble machines after the night I used one and she cried her eyes out and then, moments later, vomited. She threw up and we threw it away.)

A librarian named Ms. Raquel begins the program and she encourages us to put our children on our laps so she can see them and, presumably, so they can see her. She gestures toward me: “Can you put them on your lap?” I want to respond, “Lady, we made it here by some miracle of miracles and they are sitting quietly on the floor, isn’t that enough?” But instead I say, “Ok, I’ll try…it’s a little hard with two!” A few people around me nod and smile. I pull my son onto my left thigh and try to do the same with my daughter on my right, but she instead falls into the dip in between my crossed legs and frowns.

Soon, the official storytelling portion of the program begins. Well…kind of. Before the stories, there’s a round of songs, one of which involves kids standing up based on the color they’re wearing. When “pink” is called, an impeccably dressed woman to the left of me helps her baby to her feet, the child equally as impeccably dressed in a pink headband, pink onesie, jeans and pink shoes. “Wow,” is all I can think. This woman seems like she has her act together in a way I never could.

After the color/stand up activity, we move into stories, which are really stories and songs, all of us adults singing in earnest as our children display varying degrees of interest, interruption and—in a few cases—downright meltdowns. The couple in front of me leaves and doesn’t return after their child begins crying uncontrollably. My kids are mostly quiet, willing to go along with the occasional clapping of hands or stomping of feet. But for what they lack in enthusiasm throughout, they make up for at the very end with a double whammy of a meltdown, two toddlers doing what they do best: throwing their heads back, bodies going limp, refusing any offers of water or consolation. Without even looking at a clock, I know precisely what’s happening: it’s lunchtime. My kids are nothing if not Pavlovian. As other families depart the story time area, I fish out a Ziploc bag of probably stale Cheerios and begin offering them to each child. They eat them the way they always do, which is to say my daughter eats fistfuls at a time while my son eats them one by one in a painstakingly ginger fashion.

By now, the area is mostly cleared out. As I try to scoop up my daughter and encourage my son to hold my hand so we can get back over to the stroller, I feel someone approaching. It’s the impeccably dressed woman and her equally impeccably dressed daughter. She stops and says, “I just want to say you’re an amazing mother. I can’t imagine doing it with two.” Her comment reflects a degree of public attention I am used to generally as a twin mom, but one that always catches me off guard in the specific moment. In that instance, I almost thought I might cry for all of the reasons a mother in public might cry…because parenting little ones in the wild is usually easier except when it’s harder. And when it is harder, it is really, truly, maddeningly hard.

I don’t know what I say back to her other than “Aw, wow, thank you”, maybe two or three times. We make our way back over to the stroller and—perhaps feeling a little too high from the compliment—I decide to venture quickly to the non-fiction stacks. By now, the kids have quieted down a bit and I assume I can grab a book of my own before we head out. I’ve been wanting to read Sarah Jaffe’s “Work Won’t Love You Back” as part of another project I’m working on, so before we visited the library, I jotted down the book’s call number in a jolt of wishful thinking (this is one of my favorite things in the world to do: checking the online catalog to see if a book is available, writing down a book’s call number and searching the stacks until I find it).

We take the elevator upstairs to non-fiction, but we are barely where we need to go before my kids start demanding more Cheerios by way of wailing. Unlike the first floor that was still buzzing with babies and their indiscriminate cries after storytime, the second floor is nearly silent. So I find myself slightly more panicked and aware of the noise we’re making. I alternate the dwindling bag between the two of them, acting as a human snack dispenser while working overtime to scoop up any of the stray tiny circular grains that their little hands can’t contain. When I finally spot the bright red text on the spine of Jaffe’s book, I feel a small, decisive snap of good fortune. Mission accomplished. Let’s get the heck out of here.

Somehow, my seemingly reasonable desire to browse the nonfiction stacks collided with a harsh reality: my margin was already up. Maybe with one kid, I could have stretched the outing a bit longer, propped the child on my hip as I fed them Cheerios while exploring an adult interest all my own. But as we rode the elevator back downstairs and I power walked to the door, I remembered that while our little trio is out, I am always hovering above three different breaking points: my son’s, my daughter’s and my own (and, of course, my husband’s too when the four of us go out). If one person reaches their breaking point, it can usually be managed and overcome. But if two or more reach theirs, the outing is probably skyrocketing toward its end. This is the arithmetic of twins that I sometimes miscalculate, as I did while storytime was ending. My children had reached their respective limits, and even something as benign as 10 minutes in the stacks would prove nearly impossible.

Leave a comment

What I am learning (slowly, begrudgingly and often only in hindsight) is that multiplicity doesn’t just change the scale of motherhood; it changes its math entirely. There is no quiet padding of time, no hidden reserve to draw from for “just one more thing.” As a recovering perfectionist and overachiever who became a mom of two, this reality is sobering at best and destabilizing at worst. “Just one more thing” is, after all, what I built my entire pre-kids life on: just one more email, just one more task, just one more minute turned hour. But in this new version of life, there is, instead, the ongoing calculation of thresholds, the constant negotiation between competing needs and the recognition that what I want must sometimes dissolve at the edge of what my children need.

And yet, there is something clarifying in this, too. A stripping away of excess, a forced presence in what is actually possible. We left without all of the books I wanted (I was looking for two others, but those will have to wait for another day) but not without understanding: that this life, in all of its chaos, love and absurdity, asks me to measure my days, time and markers of success differently. That is both hard and also OK, necessary even. This life asks me to see that enough is not always what I can add on, but sometimes simply what I can hold together before the cup tips over. There is value, depth, and wisdom in learning to shift my orientation away from what I am always moving toward so that I can instead recognize the significance of what I am moving both through and within.

Xoxo,
Tyece

You Might Also Like…

A familiar scene: On a weeknight around 6:40pm, I stand at my closet and sigh. All of the air I exhale is alive with dread, resignation and doubt as I attempt to piece together an outfit for work the following day. This is a practice my mother instilled in us when we were young, this habit of getting tomorrow’s outfit ready the night before as to quicken the pace for the next morning. It stayed with me through adulthood, and until recently, it seemed to work well. But, now in our small apartment, my closet is in our kids’ room. So doing anything in that space between the hours of 5-7pm that does not involve play or care seems impossible because, well, it is.

At my feet, my daughter appears first, curious as to what I’m doing and eager to participate. She finds a spot to sit in the bottom of the closet, next to a Christmas sweater that never found a permanent home after December. She thinks we’re playing hide and seek. My son makes his way over soon thereafter, demanding to be picked up, tiny arms outstretched. I prop him on my hip and ask, “What should I wear, Bud?” He laughs and smiles. A leopard-print skirt catches his eye and he grabs it off the hanger.

We go on like this for a bit, me trying to keep them entertained while also still wondering what the heck I am going to wear to work the following day. Sometimes I can quickly identify something that fits well and is wrinkle-free, thus it’s a winner. But most times, I agonize for longer than I’d like and for longer than the kids are willing to go along with. I pull things out. I put them back. I scrunch my face up. I worry something won’t flatter me, won’t lay still on my stomach the way it once did back when I was 27 and my body met every garment with an easy yes and a wink to match. I wonder why I have so many skirts with elastic waistbands when skirts with elastic waistbands look terrible on me. I hate everything. I want to burn my closet, bury the ashes and reincarnate my wardrobe as something 20 times more chic.

By now, my kids are crying. They are tugging at my legs. They have had enough of this circus show and so have I. I have wasted precious time with them being too precious about not-precious things.

The next morning, I will get dressed in something I’m not at all enthusiastic about, look at my reflection in the smudged bathroom mirror and a dour expression will appear on my face. I will think, without fail, “Ugh, I look like such a mom.”

Subscribe now

Clair Huxtable. Aunt Viv. Carol Brady.

Mom jeans. Leggings. Loungewear. Muumuus. Elastic waistbands. T-shirts repping the Dodgers, my California husband’s favorite baseball team.

Practical. Invisible. Conservative. Put together without standing out.

This is my “you look like a mom” stream of consciousness. These are the characters, clothes and concepts that flash in my mind when I think of the expression “you look like a mom.” These are the messages I’ve internalized over the years, long before I knew the impact they would have on me and how they would show up in the sounds of my frustrated sighs as I stood before my own closet.

“You look like a mom” is not something I’ve heard others say to me so much as it is an internal refrain. It is the crunchy sound of static always playing as part of my internal dialogue, making it hard to fully hear anything else. It’s the expression that comes to mind when I look at myself in the mirror or—worse—in a photo and notice the bulge of my belly, the softness of my arms, the bags underneath my eyes, the downward slump of my shoulders, the cylindrical shape of my body.

When I hear “you look like a mom” what I hear is that I’ve been forgotten or, worse, I forgot myself. I hear a quote I recently read in Emma Straub’s book American Fantasy:

“…Who was here but moms, and who were moms but people who had long ago surrendered their cool, the people who planned the Halloween costumes and the Christmas decorations?”

You look like a mom sounds like you look like you’ve been relegated to the margins. Like you are no longer relevant, bouncy or enigmatic enough to merit the world being your oyster.

When I became a mom, my closet underwent a gradual transformation. Over time, I learned my wardrobe needed a few key ingredients: function, comfort, spill-resistance, stain-removal and repetition. I needed clothes I could be in from sunup to sundown. I needed work attire I could wear while helping my toddlers eat breakfast in the morning and also while giving them a bath at night. I needed clothes that I could sit, stand, stoop, scramble and sweat in (all hail mom sweat). This translated to a lot of loose-fitting shift dresses, a lot of high-waisted slacks and absolutely zero—and I mean ZERO—pairs of jeans. The subtext here is that my wardrobe subtly began to de-prioritize other ingredients: delight, experimentation, risk, play, sensuality.

It’s easy to see this deprioritization as a failure of my own womanhood, a far cry from the suede cotton candy pink stilettos I once trotted into the office wearing. It’s much harder, however, to reclaim this narrative, to seize it from what the world told me womanhood should be and bring it back within my reach. But, reclamation is what I am here to do. Here, and in every essay, I am writing my way closer to myself. Not to who I once was, but to who I now am, to a version of myself I can recognize and choose with ease time and time again.

When I became a mom and my wardrobe changed, it wasn’t a failure. It wasn’t a demotion. It wasn’t a downgrade. It was adaptive intelligence. It was my body and life organizing around care, my ultimate center of gravity. It was my brain reminding me that clothes have to fit into our lives, and not the other way around. My wardrobe wasn’t betraying me. It was, instead, reflecting the truth about my life.

And, of course, the underpinning of this all is my body. My body, my body, my body. Oh, I’ve written and thought ad nauseam about my body, must I say anything else about my beautiful, wrinkly, saggy, imperfect postpartum body?! All I can tell you is that every mother’s body is a museum, and blood, sweat and tears go into curating each collection. So, every day I must decide that my scars, stretch marks and soft spots are exhibits worth looking at, not turning away from.

Clothes are different now because my body is different now. Feels different. Moves differently through the world. I try telling my ego that every day. Sometimes she hears me, sometimes she doesn’t. I must get dressed anyway.

I wish I could tell you that I hired a stylist and we revamped my wardrobe. (I wish I could tell you I had enough money for something as lovely as that!) I wish I could tell you that I snapped my fingers and decided to elevate my wardrobe, and as a result, I suddenly felt more confident. I wish I could tell you those things, but they would all be lies. So, I’ll instead tell you this: I used a $100 gift card to buy a couple of new dresses from Old Navy. I ordered a few cardigans from Amazon and some statement necklaces too. I’m thinking about maybe starting to wear ascots? I’ve told myself I will find and start using a good dry cleaners, but—let’s be honest—that’s highly unlikely. I’m wondering if I could pull off that thing everyone does now where they wear a sweater casually draped over their shoulders without the thing just falling off of me. I am hanging up my high heels for now. I am in search of a great pair of jeans. I will live and die by my size 14 Express high-waisted slacks (click the link and thank me later).

But, perhaps more than anything, I am reclaiming what it means to “look like a mom.” I am, in fact, a mom. Surprise, surprise! It is perfectly acceptable that care is the sun around which everything else in me circles. So as I write my way toward taking back this phrase, I do so with the hope that I learn how to stand in front my closet with a little more resolve and a little less dismay. I hope that I refuse invisibility and performance in favor of courage and embodiment. I hope that I allow my body to exist as a memoir of the places I’ve been and a map to the places I will go.

“You look like a mom.”

You look like someone who is still and always becoming, someone who brought human life to bear, someone whose appearance includes daily evidence of care, fatigue, joy, unpredictability. You look like a soldier with a story and a woman with a song. You look like you know edges and you know cliffs, like you have traveled to the ends of the Earth and lived to tell the rest of us about it. You look like magic, like rabbits pulled out of hats and silk handkerchiefs turned into doves. You look like blue skies opening, like red seas parting, like purple rain falling.

You look like your clothes are the least interesting thing about you.

You look like a mom.

Yes, please, say it again.

Xoxo,
Tyece

You May Also Like…

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Reclaim."

Welcome to Sunday Kind of Love, a soft place to land every other week. These shorter and more intimate essays aim to hold the ordinary fragments of motherhood up to the light. Thank you for being here.

Dear Jonas,

When I picked you up from daycare on a sunny afternoon, your teacher jokingly remarked, “He needs a haircut!” She wasn’t wrong. For eighteen months, we let your hair grow wild, knotty and free. Unlike your sister’s hair that we started styling in ponytails and pigtails when she turned one, yours was a beautiful jungle of its own, a curly mane that we refused to tame.

When your teacher said this, I laughed. “I know, I know. You’re breaking my heart!” I replied. And in a small way, she was. Not because you didn’t need a haircut, but because I had somehow, weirdly grown attached to the safari of coils atop your head. I had observed as they grew and became your security blanket. At night when you couldn’t sleep (which was often), I’d watch grainy baby monitor footage around midnight or 2AM as you touched your hair and twirled the sides, finding solace in the soft strands. Your hair became an endearing source of comfort that nothing else could provide.

I started asking around to friends with little boys. “When did you get his first haircut?” And they all mostly agreed that it was around this time, around the 18-month mark when it suddenly feels like more doors are opening and new blossoms of personhood are in bloom. It feels like I woke up one day and suddenly peek-a-boo had become hide-and-seek and pointing at a water bottle had become “Wawa.” It seems only natural that a haircut might follow suit.

So I did what moms do. After I asked around to friends, I researched places in the area where we could go. We landed on a place called Sharkey’s that specializes in kids’ haircuts and styling. I decided we would go the Saturday before Easter, which seemed appropriate so that you could have a fresh cut right before you donned your Sunday best the following day.

On a warm Saturday afternoon, off we went. Dad and your sister stayed home and the two of us took a 20-minute drive together. I didn’t have enough time to process what was happening, to metabolize this milestone for all it was. (As always, we were running late.) Before this, the last time your dad and sister stayed home and you and I took a 20-minute drive together, you were less than a month old and we were going to a solo doctor’s appointment of yours. It was the first time I had taken one of you out by myself, and I spent a full hour the night before practicing how to fold and unfold the stroller. At the checkup, the nurse looked at you and she looked at me, and she said, “He looks like you, mom.” And it was in that moment I learned that a heart could burst like fireworks in the night sky on the Fourth of July.

When we got to Sharkey’s, it was chaotic. It was loud and colorful and demanding on the nervous system in a way that is often the default for “kid-friendly” places. As we checked in, I felt you shaking a bit and you began to cry. I did my best to soothe you, but really, I didn’t blame you…this place was kind of nuts. I was instructed to take you over to one of those toy car chairs, but you weren’t having it. A few seconds of sitting in this make-believe car and you started to wail. Luckily, the stylist said that you could just sit on my lap, and that seemed to do the trick. She draped us each in our own styling cape and began to cut your hair.

I didn’t really know how to guide her around what I wanted your hair to look like, so I think I said something about Patrick Mahomes. I was sweating. Your dad called, and I missed it. I did my best to settle in. I let the hairstylist do what she does, this thing she has probably done a million times, this ordinary act that she has probably stopped realizing is quite extraordinary in a moment such as this. I watched carefully as your safari of coils became an adorable little thicket.

When she was done, I did something I don’t often do in public. I asked her to take a photo of us. Little did I know that for a first haircut, this place also takes and prints (prints!) a photo and a certificate. We did all that, wrapped up, paid and off we went. They offered us a balloon, but in the whirlwind of it all, I forgot to take it.

And it was only as we walked back to the car that it all hit me. And it hit me because as we were approaching the car, I looked at the passenger side door of my 2014 Toyota Corolla, the side that has been scratched and not repaired since fall of last year. We’re at a season in life when paying for cosmetic repair on a car isn’t financially viable relative to the unrelenting cost of daycare. And so something about seeing that scratch as we walked out of your first haircut just made it all so real for me. Because I may not be able to repair my car, but every day, your dad and I are raising you and your sister. We are doing this parenting thing: this thing that we only once dreamt of, this thing a childless me once said I was, “60/40 on, with the favors in odd of having kids”, this thing that seemed impossible when you were first born. We are living through the mayhem; we are celebrating the milestones. We are not just getting through and getting by, but we are rising to every occasion. We are traversing the years of our lives—your lives—with grace, love, laughter, joy and pride.

And so I felt the tears well up in my eyes, and I was so glad they did. They were proof of presence, that I had been in it with you and felt it all in the marrow of my bones.

On the drive home, as my nervous system returned to equilibrium, I realized they had put my name on the certificate instead of yours. So it looks like I got my first haircut on 4.4.26, not you.

Maybe we’ll just have to do it all over again?

Another milestone celebrated. Another memory made. Another day well-lived.

Xoxo,
Mommy

Sunday Kind of Love: A Few Things to Hold

An essay that lingered with me: “How Hot Are We Supposed to Be” by . This thing has been living rent-free in my head for days. Julie’s voice is equal parts funny and poignant. This line in particular hit me so hard: Before parenthood, I could just disappear for a while to go get a haircut. Now, I need to have an out-loud conversation where the subtext is, “it is important enough that I get this haircut that you give up your scant leisure time and this percentage of our family resources for me to do it.” And that’s kind of uncomfortable!

Read on, friends. Read on.

The Point

How Hot Are We Supposed to Be?

One part of leaving New York for the suburbs that has been surprisingly good for my mental health is that I’m no longer running into Hot Rich Moms who send me into an existential spiral…

Read more

4 months ago · 305 likes · 64 comments · Julie Schechter

Something the kids are delighting in: Hide and seek. So fun. Also, send help.

An invitation for the week ahead: Gather the fallen pieces. The soft curls. The fleeting versions. The moments you didn’t notice were lasts. Treat them not as losses, but as evidence of how love somehow always finds a way to remake itself.

You May Also Like…

If you’d like to experience this piece differently, if you’re curious what my voice sounds like, or if your hands are full (mine usually are), you can listen instead. This is a longer one, and I’m making an effort going forward to record audio for my longer essays so they can reach you in more ways than one.

At dinner with colleagues several years ago, I found myself across the table from a mother of three young children. When the conversation migrated toward her kids (as any conversation with a parent tends to) she said something that inked itself into my mind: “It’s all joy and no fun.”

It’s all joy and no fun.

At the time, I was in my late twenties and in a new relationship with the boyfriend who would later become my husband. The idea of having kids of my own still felt very far away, coupled with ambivalence around whether I even wanted them to begin with. Her comment didn’t do much to help that uncertainty. Hearing a state of being described as “no fun” felt like a warning sign, framing motherhood as the exact opposite of the life of lightness and spontaneity that I had built my twenties upon.

What strikes me even more in looking back on that moment is just how much her words stuck with me. There are many times in life when we think we’re saying something in passing, only for it to fasten itself into another person’s consciousness for the long haul. We casually move on while the other person not-so-casually spirals.

I find this is often the case when it comes to the things we say to mothers.

The language of motherhood is both vast and shallow, an ocean that runs a mile wide and an inch deep. During the past two years of being pregnant and then having my children, I learned that there is a kind of shorthand for how we describe the experiences of motherhood:

You’re doing great!

The days are long, but the years are short.

Welcome to the club.

These expressions, and others of this kind, serve to soften the edges of an experience that is otherwise too vast, too destabilizing and too contradictory to articulate neatly. Yes, at first glance, these are offerings of comfort and solidarity. But, they are also their own kind of dilution, a way of collapsing the wild specificity of each mother’s journey into something that is more palatable in conversation and more shareable online. These familiar phrases fill the silence when the truth is too heavy or jagged to hold.

In looking back at some of my recent writing, I noticed a disillusionment emerging with some of these expressions (e.g. just you wait and give yourself grace), so I felt compelled to follow that thread to see where else it might lead.

Motherhood is, after all, such a rich text. There is so much to say about it, and so many ways in which to say it. We do ourselves a disservice when we rely on a short list of platitudes instead of saying what is true, what is difficult, and what cuts closest to the bone.

I am trying to get to the heart of the matter.

What is the language of motherhood?

What are saying and what are we actually trying to say?

That led me to realizing the language of motherhood has five key dialects: initiation, overwhelm, time, reassurance and support. Here’s my best attempt at saying something true, difficult and close to the bone about each.

The Dialect of Initiation

“Welcome to the club!”

“Your life will never be the same.”

“Nothing prepares you.”

This is the threshold moment when a woman crosses from who she was into motherhood, often without fanfare but with total permanence. At least in Western culture, we have a script for celebrating pregnancy, with diaper raffles and games like “don’t say baby” running amok at baby showers across globe. But once a woman gives birth, the script dissolves and what is left is disorienting, sacred, and invisible all at once. No one has captured this better than Lucy Jones in Matrescence (I don’t know how I would have survived pregnancy and even now without that book). The language of initiation is less about the baby arriving and more about the self being rearranged.

When did I become a mother? Was it a Monday morning in March when I stood in the bathroom and gasped at a positive pregnancy test? Was it late one Thursday night in October when I pushed the first of two babies out of my body? Or was it the countless nights in December when I slept in 90-minute increments next to two little bassinets as The Christmas Cookie Challenge played quietly on my iPad?

I’d like to think I became a mother in each of those moments. I’d like to think that motherhood is a becoming that happens day over day, month over month, year over year. It is a million becomings and unbecomings all in one lifetime.

There is nothing a woman experiences that is quite like motherhood. No job, breakup, cross-country move, trip, or loss has the exact same metamorphic qualities as motherhood. There are certain transformative moments in life, and then, well, there is motherhood. It defies description, despite my best attempts to give shape to it here in these paragraphs.

So, there is no figuring it out, no moment of self-actualization, no victory at the top of the mountain. And perhaps there is beauty in not having the right words to describe this seismic shift. Because in not having the words, we allow mothers to discover their own words, in their own time and in their own way.

The Dialect of Overwhelm

“Give yourself grace.”

“You can’t pour from an empty cup.”

“Put your oxygen mask on first.”

This is the constant hum (and sometimes acute spike) of too-muchness. Too much touch. Too many needs. Too many things left undone. This is the language of a nervous system stretched to its breaking point, the invisible labor of trying to keep the train on the tracks and the stench of resentment that builds up when we do so.

When I was in my early twenties, I stood next to a woman at a copy machine at work, and I commented that I was tired. She responded by saying, “You don’t know tired until you’ve had kids.” I thought it was rude and presumptuous, and in many ways, I still think that. She wasn’t necessarily wrong, but I believe what she meant is that tired is a relative term; it is a state of being that stretches in direct proportion to what your life is asking of you. Tired in my twenties meant I stayed out too late on a weeknight and I needed to fight to hold my head up at work the next day. Tired now means I’ve lived five lifetimes by the time 9AM arrives. In both cases, I was definitely tired. But in my twenties, I needed sleep. And now as a mother, sometimes I need sleep. But most times, I need rest. That looks a little different depending on the day.

So that’s what I think we’re really trying to say when we talk about overwhelm, when we say give yourself grace and put your oxygen mask on first. We’re saying is “you need rest and you deserve to have it in whatever form is most rejuvenating to you.” And what we’re saying is that rest is not really negotiable. It’s not a “nice to have.” It is foundational to the way a woman mothers, to the rhythm and spirit of her children and her home. Without it, the edges begin to fray and the seams begin to come undone.

Without a mother’s rest, most other things will start to unravel.

The Dialect of Time

“The days are long, but the years are short.”

“It all goes so fast.”

Time in motherhood twists and turns. There is warp speed. There is whiplash. Time distorts, shapeshifts and comes out on the other side as a child who is all grown up. The present is relentless, the past is romanticized, and the future feels just out of reach.

While some days are unforgiving, other seasons disappear seemingly overnight.

Despite what some might have you believe, milestones often arrive unceremoniously. If you asked me when my children started walking, I could not tell you the exact moment. I can only sketch a rough timeline between Thanksgiving and Christmas when they went from pushing a little wooden cart that helped them walk to somehow moving about freely on their own. I thought my life would be like one of those pristine Instagram videos where parents look over and a baby stands up and walks right over to them for the first time. Instead, we found ourselves recording videos after the fact, almost as proof that yes, this incredible thing did happen and yes, we did witness it.

When we talk about time in motherhood, I believe what we’re really saying is be as present as you can for as much as you can, not only for the milestones, but also for the tedium, the monotony, the 12th time in a row your child has demanded you blow bubbles or make that silly face. Because really, it’s all time no matter what increment we measure it in, and the hard, harsh truth is that every millisecond only brings you that much closer to your child leaving the nest. But, what we are also saying is that in motherhood, there is sometimes a chasm between the desire to savor and the reality of exhaustion, and it’s a chasm we can’t always close no matter how hard we try.

The Dialect of Support

“It takes a village.”

“How can I help?”

This is the language that acknowledges even the best moms can’t and shouldn’t go at it alone. This is where we are all doing our best to recognize just how difficult, exhausting and complicated it is to be a mother. But, in many ways, I find the language of support to be the most fragile of any of these motherhood dialects because it is rooted in scripts that do not apply to every woman’s life. It’s language that often overlooks the endless permutations of support mothers may need at any given moment. It also can stir up feelings of sadness and inferiority in mothers who do not have access to a sturdy enough support system, or traditional forms of support (read: partner).

When I was pregnant, one of the questions I disliked receiving most was, “Is anyone coming to help you?” By anyone, people meant my parents and, more specifically, my mother. They wanted to know if my mother was going to stay with us and help care for our family during the early weeks of our twins’ lives. And I would always politely answer no and share how my family lived close enough that they were planning to visit every so often. When asked this question, I did not, however, take the opportunity to unpack the many complex family dynamics and health challenges that contributed to not having my mom come help. I did not tell people that my mother has COPD and spends most of her day tethered to an oxygen machine; I did not tell them that she is a loving and doting grandmother who is in no shape to care for babies and toddlers on her own.

It absolutely does take a village to raise a child, and yet, every village comes with its own fragilities and fault lines, its own capacity and constraint. And sometimes the people who love you and your children the most deeply are the same people who are incapable of carrying the loads you need to unburden. That does not make you or those people any less than. It simply makes you all human, and it means that sometimes help is built-in, sometimes it’s bartered, and sometimes it’s bought. And, truth be told, sometimes the help simply isn’t there and a mother still somehow finds a way to build her own bridge across troubled water.

The Dialect of Reassurance

“You’re doing great!”

“You were made for this.”

“Trust your gut.”

This is the steady drip of validation that—rightly or wrongly—mothers often need and are usually expected to internalize. Sometimes this language soothes and softens. Sometimes it hits us right where we need it. On rare occasion, this language backfires and diminishes the complexity of a mother’s struggles, serving as a band-aid over a bullet hole. But, more often than not this language is the most well-intentioned and buoying of them all.

When I was pregnant, I saw a bevy of doctors, nurses and midwives. One summer afternoon, a midwife came into the exam room and after a quick look at my chart she exclaimed, “Oh, wow, twins! I have twins too.” Meeting another twin mom in the wild always feels like kismet, and in the case of a midwife examining me, doubly so. I picked her brain about a lot of things. As the exam went on, she said something that I’ve never forgotten: “You just have the constitution for twins. It’s like the universe knows.”

Here’s the catch: there’s no such thing as “you just have the constitution for twins.” I do think it’s an experience some personalities are better suited for than others, but the same thing could be said for getting an enema. So, maybe there is a higher power at play or maybe it just so happens that I had two eggs fertilize within two days of each other and boom, fraternal twins! Nevertheless, her words stayed with me because she had already walked through the very portal that I soon would. And those words were a life jacket at a time when my head and heart were spiraling. What she said had nothing to do with my constitution and more to do with her seeing me and caring enough to encourage me in a very specific way at a very specific moment. She made me feel like I was special, and that’s exactly what my fragile, millennial, hormonal ego needed.

So, what if that’s what reassurance for mothers looked like? What if it went beyond “great job!” And it took into account a mother’s uniqueness not just as a mother, but also as a woman? What if our words of reassurance considered not just sentiment, but also time and place?

There is a Zulu greeting called “Sawubona” which translates to “I see you” not just in the visual sense, but also as a human being. And when we see people as human beings, we recognize their deeper existence, their humanity, power and light.

The next time you see a mother, sure, tell her she’s doing a great job. Because she is. But, maybe also tell her your own version of “Sawubona.” Tell her something that is specific and true in a moment when she might be feeling vulnerable and in need. This is how we switch on a mother’s inner light. This is how we allow her to beam more brightly.

Share

Motherhood has a language all its own, one built on phrases passed from woman to woman like heirlooms, meant to steady us, to welcome us, to make meaning out of something that often feels impossible to name. And yet, so much of it falls short. Not because it isn’t true or well-intentioned, but because it isn’t complete. The village is real, but so are its limits. The exhaustion is real, but so is the version of it we carried before we had children. The reassurance is real, but so is the doubt that lives alongside it. And so I find myself reaching for something more precise and more honest. I find myself looking for language and stories that make room for the contradictions and do not rush to tidy them away. Because if motherhood has taught me anything, it’s that two things can be true at once, and we deserve language expansive enough to hold every version of this beautiful, precious and wild journey.

I’m endlessly curious about this topic, and I want to talk and learn more. What are your thoughts on the language of motherhood? What have you heard that has stuck? What have you heard that hasn’t hit the mark? What other dialects are there? Let’s chat in the comments.

Xoxo,
Tyece

You May Also Like…

Welcome to Sunday Kind of Love, a soft place to land every other week. These shorter and more intimate essays aim to hold the ordinary fragments of motherhood up to the light. Thank you for being here.

This weekend we threw away your winter hats. And I could’ve sworn I reached the point where I stopped staring longingly at your garments any time you’d outgrown them, but it turns out I haven’t. I used to hold on to everything—Halloween costumes, Christmas pajamas, the outfits you wore to your first doctor’s appointment—and put them in a keepsake box. But then, the milestones started coming faster than the space would allow, and I stopped saving so many things. Or maybe it’s just that the realism of being a parent in a small space overcame the romanticism of being a mother in an eternal daydream. Either way, it became easier to get rid of things, to say goodbye, to move on to the next season and size up.

But something about your winter hats made me pause today because this past winter, wasn’t it brutal? They say winter starts December 21, but I’m convinced ours started November 4 when I got norovirus and then passed it on to your dad and you guys too (I thought it was supposed to be the other way around; I thought you little walking petri dishes were supposed to get it first). From there on out, every few weeks, a new illness arrived, testing our wherewithal and reminding us of our humanity. It felt like I spent the lion’s share of the season with a sore throat always threatening to give way to something worse. We ended winter with our grand finale: a family-wide outbreak of hand, foot and mouth disease.

So when I see those winter hats, I think about each freezing cold morning that we got out the door and made it to daycare or—on the weekends—to the museum or the library or to grandma and grandpa’s house. I think about a million little acts of ordinary resilience, of what it takes to make the engine of a family with small children rev up day after day. It is a sound that no one else hears, but the family within those four walls knows that engine has a mighty and powerful boom.

The hats are old and frayed now; the Velcro chin strap no longer sticks. They are beyond “gently used” and therefore not suitable to give away. And maybe that’s for the best because I’d feel a little heartsick if anyone else made memories in those hats.

It is spring now. We’re wearing windbreakers. Soon enough we won’t need jackets at all. It is a lot easier to get out the door nowadays without the need for a minimum of three layers. And when I pick you up from daycare, I find you and a bevy of other toddlers and teachers outside with the sun on your skin as everyone screeches and smiles for days.

We will make new memories now, warm weather ones that will feel a little lighter and a little less hard-won. Later this year, winter will return. You’ll wear new hats. We’ll succumb to the same and maybe different illnesses. New memories will layer upon old ones. Each season will change us and make us anew.

If motherhood has taught me anything, it is that some days we tilt toward the sun and some days we tilt away from it, but no matter what, the Earth keeps moving and our lives keep blooming with small forever things.

Xoxo,
Tyece

Sunday Kind of Love: A Few Things to Hold

An essay that lingered with me: “I Thought I’d Be Magnificent” by . This line in particular: “But now I am a mother, and when I look at my child, all I see is magnificence. I am in my mother’s shoes, staring at the most magnificent being I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

Promoted to Mother

I Thought I’d Be Magnificent

Growing up, I thought I’d be magnificent…

Read more

4 months ago · 32 likes · 22 comments · Kiya Taylor

Something the kids are delighting in: Their belly buttons! A new discovery that has made t-shirts a lot more fun.

An invitation for the week ahead: Consider what this past winter asked of you and what you are ready to release. Honor the ways you survived, even when it didn’t look pretty, graceful or Instagrammable.

Back in 2020, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman wrote a book called “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close.” It made its rounds everywhere, and I uncharacteristically avoided it like the plague. Typically when a book like that permeates the zeitgeist, I add it to my Amazon cart quickly. But, just seeing the title and reading the synopsis unearthed some of my own insecurities about not always being a great friend. So the idea of reading about great friendship and the role friendship plays in women’s lives felt a bit too punishing.

I don’t say “I’m not a great friend” in an effort to garner empathy, nor in an attempt to villainize myself. It’s mostly just a fact. I’m not great. I’m not bad. I’m mostly…adequate. I do enough to keep up with my friends, show up for the big moments, and support them through life’s many swings. But I am probably not the friend most people would call at 3am; they know I would be sleeping like a rock with my phone on silent. I often decline invitations to things (a practice that started well before I had kids) and it’s not uncommon for me to respond to a text thread hours later. As the years have passed, the ways in which I show up as a friend have been filtered through seasons of career ambition, family crises, marital progression and, now, new motherhood. Each season has proven more demanding than the next, and now what remains is a version of friendship that is sincere, but often delayed at best and absent at worst.

Becoming a mother in many ways only served to widen the dam in some of my friendships, forcing a blunt honesty about who could meet me in this new version of my life and who I was willing to meet. Motherhood exposed the distinction between friendships based on shared history and those based on present-day connection, the difference between shallow waters and deep rivers.

Subscribe now

When I started writing this essay, I originally titled it, “I Was a Better Friend Before I Became a Mother.” But with the benefit of space and time, I realized that title is misleading; it only tells part of the story.

Yes, in many ways I was a better friend before I became a mother when I measure friendship by some of its key elements: responsiveness, availability, physical presence. There was, naturally, a dearth of these things once I became a mother; capacity is not infinite and for every flow of energy in one direction, there is a narrowing of it in another. But, what I lost in time and energy, I gained in intention and tenderness. Motherhood has a way of sharpening precious and often underrated qualities like compassion, warmth and softheartedness. I was not able to show up as often, but I was able to show up more meaningfully and better attuned to my friends, myself and whatever the moment reflected.

I felt this shift most vividly during a dinner with one of my good girlfriends back in December. She was in town visiting from Seattle and it had been over two years since I had last seen her. We made the plans several weeks in advance, settling on one of our old haunts from when she still lived in the DC area.

The day before our scheduled dinner, my father had a minor heart attack. It was enough to rattle our entire family and send us all spiraling, this unexpected health crisis befalling our seemingly unshakable patriarch. But by the following morning, he had been discharged from the hospital and encouraged us all to resume our lives as normal (um, not possible). I spent most of the morning contemplating if I should still go to dinner that night. Was it callous to enjoy a dinner when my father had just been in the hospital? Would I just be a sad sack the entire time I was there?

I thought about it deeply and eventually, my husband encouraged me to go. His reasoning was simple and supportive: seeing my friend would be good for me, it would help me feel better.

And he was right. That night, we laughed and we cried. We drank wine and spoke nakedly about the unromantic realities of motherhood and marriage. We talked until the waiters began clearing candles from the tables. We didn’t want those precious few hours to end. I showed up with my whole heart and then some. She did the same. Because even at a moment in life when I could have said no—when it may have even made sense to—I felt the boundless power in saying yes to my friend of nearly 20 years.

So many amazing and harrowing things happen in a life, and most of those things change who we are and how we show up. Marriage. Divorce. Birth. Death. Loss. Grief. Crisis. Relocation. Health issues. The list goes on. Through these circumstances, sometimes we give more than we take, and sometimes we take more than we give. That is merely the calculus of a true and imperfect life. So being a good friend is not always a matter of competency so much as one of capacity. It is a range that expands and contracts over the course of our lives.

The absolute beauty of female friendship is how enduring and fluid it is. For my entire life, I have been engulfed by the good company of great women. And the friendships that have prevailed are the ones that have ebbed and flowed with me, and I with them. So yes, I was undoubtedly a better friend before I became a mother if the mark of a good friend is measured against responsiveness, availability and physical presence. But somehow, my closest friends haven’t ever held that against me or made me feel less than as a result. Instead, they have also given me the space to be the friend I know I can be now that I am a mother: deliberate, soft, engaged. Available less frequently but vibrating at a higher frequency.

Friendship nowadays is imperfect, piecemeal and braided through ordinary moments. It no longer looks like the late nights and enmeshment of friendship during my twenties, but that doesn’t make it any less sturdy or true.

Xoxo,
Tyece

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "In Good Company."

Notes on Multiplicity is a monthly essay series that aims to unpack the unique nuances, internal struggles and rich delights of twin motherhood. Thank you for being here.

I wish I could remember the first time I felt it, those sour tinges of envy as a twin mom. But, there wasn’t any distinct moment, no particular, definitive instance. I think I felt it the most when I would see dads (always dads) bopping around my neighborhood with a baby strapped to their chest as though they didn’t have a care in the world. I would think to myself “Wow, I could never just do that, I could never just strap a baby to my chest and be on my merry way.”

It was a terrible and unmistakable gnawing, compounded by my own internal dialogue in those early days that pure, unalloyed happiness was the only appropriate response to motherhood.

My experiences of pregnancy and postpartum are best described as an inverted bell curve. I was incredibly fortunate to have a good pregnancy, all things considered. That’s not something handed out to many mothers, especially in twin pregnancies that are notoriously hard and high-risk. Throughout my entire pregnancy, I beamed any time I told people I was having twins; I took pride in their surprise and delight.

Of course, once my children were born, the reality of having twins was quite different. While there was still a lot of public spectacle and fanfare anytime we were out (which wasn’t often), my days were exhausting and flattening, a seemingly endless loop of trying (unsuccessfully) to sync up their sleep schedules and writing down who pooped when. I experienced the usual baby blues, blurriness and dense clouds of new motherhood. But as a twin mom, those times were often exacerbated by the question: “How much easier would this be if I had one baby instead of two?”

I knew on a cerebral level this was a futile and unfair question. I knew I loved my children deeply and, in some cosmic way, I had come across a rare stroke of luck by having two children come from one pregnancy, the kind of outcome some parents dream of. Even so, I couldn’t stop my irrational, postpartum brain from fantasizing about how life might feel with just one baby, how nice it would be to scoop up a baby and go.

A quick Google search of “twin mom envy” yielded a lot of results that I didn’t necessarily expect to see, but that I was somewhat heartened to find. It’s apparently not that uncommon for twin moms—especially in the early days—to experience envy for singleton moms, and to spiral into a cyclone of guilt, shame and loneliness as a result.

I’ll pause here to say that it’s easy to jump to a number of counterarguments, such as:

Sometimes one baby alone, depending on said baby’s temperament, can prove more difficult than two.

But you get double the blessings!

At least you don’t have to worry about a second pregnancy if you’re content with two children (more on this in an upcoming Notes on Multiplicity essay)

Subscribe now

Each of these counterarguments is valid in its own right. The fact of the matter is this: 1) in our family, we didn’t deal with the dreaded witching hour, colic or any other exasperating plights that often befall new parents; 2) I absolutely did get double the blessings and; 3) no, I am not overly concerned with conceiving again. True, true, true.

And yet I believe there is space for multiple truths to live and breathe concurrently. I believe all of those counterpoints can be very true AND that twin mothers can still sometimes feel tinges of envy for singleton moms.

But, if ever there were an emotion that we all unilaterally agree should be swept under the rug, it’s envy. It makes us seem small, petty and thankless. It’s the kind of bitter pill we swallow dry before anyone else can even see us pop it onto our tongue. It slips in through the back door while we all laugh and smile in the living room, pretending it’s not there. Because we worry that if we say it out loud, if we give envy even the slightest bit of oxygen, it’s an indictment on our own character, morality, and sense of what it means to be a good person.

But, in peeling back the layers of my own envy as a twin mom, I was reminded that envy is usually a thread tied to something much deeper. In my case, it was a longing for ease. A longing for the frictionless version of my pre-kids life that no longer existed and a fantasy of motherhood with one child that looked well-contained. It was a yearning for just a single moment when it didn’t feel like my head was on a swivel or my heart was torn in two. I didn’t want someone else’s life so much as I wanted relief from the invisible weight of my own.

Envy—when scrutinized, understood and tucked in its rightful place—is not a moral failing. It is, instead, information. It’s a signal that points us toward the most tender and bare parts of ourselves, the soft spots that could use a little extra care. Envy left unchecked becomes resentment, bitterness and anger. But envy that is checked becomes clarity, honesty and gratitude sharpened by awareness. I worry sometimes we do all mothers a disservice when we jump to counterarguments about their pain too quickly, or when we try to smother difficult, unpleasant emotions with the insistence that we all should just be grateful.

Of course we are grateful. And yet, gratitude is allowed to exist on the same plane as longing, exhaustion, frustration and a host of other emotions that mothers experience. When we demand mothers simply be grateful, we rip out the pages of the entire story in favor of ones that only record appreciation. Motherhood is a complex tapestry, and gratitude is simply one of its many threads.

And if motherhood is a tapestry, then the early months are when the threads feel most tangled. You can’t yet see the pattern; you only feel the pull.

Leave a comment

Sixteen months later, I sometimes wish I could go back to my former self, the self I was in those first bleary-eyed and overcast postpartum days. If I could, I would tell that version of myself that what she was doing was hard, nearly backbreaking work. I would tell her it’s OK to feel a little envious when she sees the dads in the neighborhood bouncing around with their babies on their chests; she may not ever reach that point, but she’ll get mighty good at unfolding a stroller. Perhaps most importantly, I would tell her that it gets better, it always does, and it’s OK that it sucks right now because it’s kind of supposed to. Morning always comes, both figuratively and literally. When the sky seems the most pitch-black, that is when the light will soon break through.

I also wish I could give that early postpartum version of myself even just a 30-second flash of what life is like now, 16 months later with her babies bright, blooming and (usually) sleeping like actual humans. Oh, if only she had known what was just around the river bend. In that fast forward frame, she would see that she’s now experiencing the unique and inexplicable gifts of twin motherhood. The way their bond emerged independent of any adult interaction or intervention. The language they speak to one another each morning while standing up in their cribs, a twin dialect that only the two of them understand. The yanking back of a toy or pacifier when the other steals it, demonstrating their innate ability to assert a sense of self, hold their own, and fight in the beloved (albeit obnoxious) way that only a twin brother and sister can. It is the kind of sibling love that says, “Why are you always here?” and “Don’t ever leave me” all in the same beautiful breath.

Twins compel their mothers to love in an expansive way, to make peace with a continuous state of chaos, to hold space for fragmentation and to rise to a rare and beautiful occasion. The gifts of twin motherhood somehow have a way of blunting the sharp edges of envy that twin moms sometimes feel. Like most things in life, typically the good has an uncanny way of outshining the bad, and yet acknowledging both realities is important. On any given day, for every heavy sigh I exhale (and, trust me, there are many), there are also five deep belly laughs I howl.

So, what if we were audacious enough to allow our envy and gratitude to coexist? What if we were courageous enough to sing a ballad of motherhood that was a layered harmony and not a mere one-note tune? How much sweeter, then, would life sound? How much more honest would our song be?

Xoxo,
Tyece

Welcome to Sunday Kind of Love, a soft place to land every other week. These shorter and more intimate essays aim to hold the ordinary fragments of motherhood up to the light. Thank you for being here.

It’s an unseasonably balmy night in March and I’m in the the back of an Uber with its windows rolled down while the sleeves of my sweater are rolled up. It is the kind of night that arrives as a welcome relief and necessary reminder that after a long and cold winter, spring is en route. I’m on my way back from a quick business trip in Cleveland, hoping with everything I have to get home before bedtime.

I prayed silent prayers that my flight wouldn’t be delayed, thought if I held my breath long enough we would have an on-time departure from CLE to DCA. And it worked up until we were on the tarmac and the captain announced that the air traffic controllers said yadda yadda yadda, and we wouldn’t leave until 5:05pm and sure, of course, that wasn’t the biggest deal in the world, it was only an hour later than our original departure. But, I started doing the mental math of whether that time would get me home in time to say goodnight, press my cheek up against my daughter’s much squishier cheek, and kiss my son’s beautifully bulbous forehead. Another bedtime missed simply would not do. Because sometimes as a mother, one minute can feel like an hour, and every moment away feels a little like eternity. It certainly feels this way anytime I’m just trying to get back home to this little family of mine.

I’ve never really been one for traveling. The sensory overload of airports and airplanes wreaks havoc on my central nervous system. So, traveling for work has always felt like a necessary evil, a condition of most corporate gigs that I try to accept and take in stride. Except now it feels a little heavier and a little harder because doesn’t everything as a mother? It feels a little more consequential than it did during my childfree twenties when I stayed too late at the hotel bar with coworkers drinking red wine till it stained my lips purple.

And I know I’m supposed to relish being away as a parent, that I should savor this time and appreciate it for what it is: a built-in break that I wouldn’t easily get otherwise. I know I’m supposed to enjoy the uninterrupted sleep (I did), the piping hot shower (I also did) and the pristine room without toys everywhere and crumbs in the corner (yeah, sure?). But, rest feels different when your body and brain have grown so used to being needed. Time alone somehow feels both necessary and hard when your heart keeps calling you home.

As it turns out, my silent prayers and held breaths all worked at least a little bit, and I made it home a few minutes before bedtime. My babies squealed and greeted me with smiles and their current version of a hug, which is really just them lying their head softly on me so I can hug them (and that’s a treasure too). This reunion felt quite different from the last post-business-trip reunion back in October, this time their sensibilities and personhood so much more pronounced. Last time, the emotions of leaving swept me away; this time, the emotions of returning did just the same. Both babies pawed at me and lingered. They kept running over to hop into my lap and protest going to sleep. They probably were excited by my return back in October too (I hope?), but their brains and bodies hadn’t yet learned how to demonstrate it the way they can now.

Each time I leave, I’m reminded that it’s all going so fast, that time is slipping through my fingertips like water, that my babies are growing and my heart can’t keep pace.

Subscribe now

And so when they lingered and protested going to sleep, I said, “How about we read something?” My daughter—always resolute, even at 16 months old—marched over to the book basket and, in a moment that can best be described as cosmic, grabbed a book called “Me and My Mama.”

I am sometimes gobsmacked that this is my life, that my entire world can all live and breathe together in just one room. Sometimes I look at my husband with our children and I think “This is it. This is all I need.” What a precious gift in a world of want. So, I bubble over with gratitude knowing I have someone who earnestly waits for me to text “just landed” and that I have many reasons to power walk through the airport toward ground transportation so I can make it home quickly. To miss and be missed is a profound and unguarded expression of love.

These days, my life is best summed up in a cheesy Vanessa Carlton lyric from 25 years ago. Because I would absolutely walk a thousand miles if I could just see you. I would walk and I would sprint, I would gallop and I would trot. I would do anything if that meant I could just see you. And you. And you. All three of you.

Xoxo,
Tyece

Sunday Kind of Love: A Few Things to Hold

Sunday Share: An Essay That Lingered With Me

In the MOTHERhood

Raising Light in a Burning World

Every morning, my son wakes up ready to chase adventures…

Read more

5 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Carolina Espinal

Something the kids are delighting in: Please, Baby, Please by Spike Lee & Tonya Lewis Lee

An invitation: Allow coming home to be imperfect. Laundry piles. Children clinging. Food waiting to be cooked. Find one place where you can choose gentleness over urgency and allow your nervous system to learn a more tender language of return.

This past week, it was Read Across America Week, which should really be known as Spirit Week, which should REALLY be known as Moms-hustle-and-buy-every-item-imaginable-on-Amazon-that-your-child-will-only-wear-once week. In the midst of all of this, there was another commemoration of sorts during this first week of March that was specifically bestowed upon our household. I’d like to call it Injury Week. Throughout the week, we experienced the following:

Wednesday: Our daughter tumbled out of the bathtub in the two seconds it took me to put her brother’s bathrobe on.

Thursday: We received our first injury report from daycare informing us that our son ran headfirst into a cubby.

Friday: While throwing a tantrum, our son yanked down a small plastic bin that fell on him.

Saturday: During a play date, our daughter continued to try to stand up on a low coffee table despite my best attempts to stop her. She eventually fell, bit her lip and began bleeding (who knew that much blood could come from such a tiny, tiny mouth!?).

A note: it feels really vulnerable to even type these things out. It feels like surely, there is someone reading this who will immediately assume, “Wow, what a negligent parent!” And yet, for every person who would say that, something tells me there are ten parents of toddlers who would say, “Yep, been there, done that. Welcome to the club.”

Share Ampersand Motherhood

At sixteen months old, my children are shifting into true toddlerhood. It’s no longer merely a matter of semantics the way it was when they were a year old or even fourteen months old. It’s now much more a matter of behavior, cognition, emotional growth, increased mobility and independence. These changes present a seismic shift not only in them, but also in me as I evolve from simply being their mother to also being their parent.

The hard truth is that for the past sixteen months, I have had a bit of a motherhood chip on my shoulder, perhaps in part due to the very Substack newsletter I author. I’ve built a certain consciousness and interior life around motherhood—its softness, its physicality, its transformative properties. (And there are no plans to change that.) But in building my mothering sensibilities, I’ve dismissed my parenting ones; the word “mother” has always felt high-caliber to me while the word “parent” has always felt a bit too pedestrian to really capture the experience I’ve been having. (This, of course, doesn’t make any sense because a mother is, well, a parent.) The word “parenting” has always evoked images of how-to guides, bullet points and best practices, all systems to be applied rather than a transformation to be lived. Conversely, the word “motherhood” has always felt less procedural and much more instinctual and sacred, a role defined less by strategy and more by devotion.

So every time I’ve come across anything in the zeitgeist about parenting, I have either scoffed, skimmed or ignored it entirely. I’ve been both willfully and woefully ignorant up until this point, believing that I didn’t really need to consider parenting, it would come “naturally.” I would figure it out. I have made the mistake of seeing “mother” and “parent” as two separate identities that are often at odds with one another instead of what they truly are: two necessary expressions of care, one soft and sheltering, another steady and secure enough to draw lines where needed. Both instincts must learn to live in the same body.

In what feels like the flip of a switch, I now find myself at an inflection point, as I imagine most toddler parents do. I now have to actually parent my children. I have to truly begin the life-changing and demanding work of raising them to be people in the world, not just babies in my world. I have to not only meet their needs, but also nurture their personhood. I have to both hold them close, but also learn how to let them go. I have to help them not simply exist, but also thrive and flourish.

Now I see why everyone says this is so hard.

(Somewhere in a universe far, far away, there’s another essay waiting to be written about how doubly difficult this is when I consider what it means to parent along with my husband. I’m not yet ready to write that essay, so consider this my tacit acknowledgement of our immensely different parenting styles.)

I would never pretend that it’s been easy up until this point. That would be an insult to me and new mothers everywhere. It’s merely been a different kind of hard. And so I am now trading in one form of hard (sleepless nights, the near impossibility of even leaving the house, tectonic plates of my identity shifting) for a very different kind of hard (busted lips, tested limits, saying no and having to stick to it).

The mother in me wants to soften every fall, wants to give my son a pacifier each and every time he whines for it, weaning be damned. The mother in me wants to always say yes, give them the world, wipe every tear, and yank each and every monster from underneath the bed. But the parent in me is developing a voice, one that is learning you can be tender and also firm, you can be soft and still set limits. The parent in me knows that falls, fizzles, frustration and even failure are sometimes just a part of growing up. They are the cost of admission if you want to be a person in the world.

It’s not lost on me that at the same time I’m traversing this bend in the road as a parent, I’m also reading a book called Radical Candor for work. Without going too far down that rabbit hole, one thing I’m learning about myself is just how reluctant I am to say no and enforce boundaries, resulting in living in the quadrant of what author Kim Scott refers to as “manipulative insincerity” (which is a really charged way of saying I’m a people pleaser who wants to be liked). I believe on some subterranean level, I’ve always known this about myself. But it’s only now as a parent that I feel deeply compelled and motivated to change this, not so much for the sake of my career as for the sake of my children.

When it comes to my children, I do not want to be a people pleaser aiming to be liked. I believe one of the greatest gifts my mother gave me and my sisters growing up was the clarity that she was our parent, and not our friend. In some ways, that closed the door for friendship down the line once we were adults and could be on more even ground, but it also bred an environment rooted in respect and recognition of who was leading us. Even today, my mother is very much my mother. I don’t curse in front of her; I keep the sordid details of my life to a minimum. I text her every morning and call her every night to get my own cup filled and to always be reminded to give the babies a kiss on her behalf. Once as an adult when I heard my sister slip up and refer to her as “Martha”, my mom had no qualms laying down the law and reminding her that she should never be called by her first name. When it comes to my mother, there is not a friendship between us so much as a deep love, respect and understanding that has evolved alongside us.

This is difficult work to do, to embrace that discipline and boundaries do not have to be at odds with nurturing, and that mothering and parenting are ultimately two sides of the same coin. It’s much easier to decide early on that you are going to pick a lane and be one or the other—a tough love kind of mother or a tender love kind of mother. It’s much, much harder to make space for both. And yet, I wholeheartedly believe that is the work we are called to do. The true and everlasting endeavor of motherhood is to is embrace that a mother’s journey is much more both/and than either/or. It is our job to create both soft places to land and lines in the sand. It is our job to be the gentle arms that gather them and the firm voice that guides them, preparing our children to navigate a perilous and precarious world as clearly, kindly, and self-assuredly as they know how.

Parenting is not the vanilla counterpart to motherhood that I once imagined; it is instead one of the most important and loving expressions of motherhood there is.

Xoxo,
Tyece

Wednesdays are always the hardest.

Between my husband and I, I am the parent responsible for daycare drop off and pick up on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Wednesdays just happen to be the one day that overlaps with when I also have to work in the office.

Let’s unbox this a bit.

Mondays are, well, Mondays. They come with the universal arduousness of shifting from the fluidity of the weekend to the structure of the week. But, once I’ve wrangled two toddlers into daycare, I get to start my work day from the comfort of my home. Easy enough.

Fridays are, of course, Fridays. In the mornings after drop off, I return home to a relatively meeting-free calendar and a sense that the week’s boulders on my shoulders are finally being lifted. On Friday afternoons, I leave earlier than usual to pick up the kiddos, excitedly anticipating the stretch of unscheduled days ahead of us.

But Wednesdays? Oof. Wednesdays mean that after I’ve completed the Herculean task of daycare drop off, I have to shift into an entirely different mindset, one that is prepared to say “Good morning!” and launch into whatever other impromptu interpersonal interactions come with being in an office environment. Wednesdays take two already-hard modes, combine them, and make everything feel nearly impossible. Once I’ve conquered Wednesdays, I might as well have conquered the entire week.

On a recent Wednesday morning, I found myself having a breakdown as I was stuck in traffic on the exit ramp to work, realizing I’d be a few minutes late for a 9AM meeting. I went through the usual internal dialogue I experience during moments like this:

I can’t do what I used to do.

I’m doing the best I can.

I need to give myself more grace.

When I landed on that last line, I found myself even more frustrated. Because I know the phrase. I say it to myself and I say it to others. But I don’t always know how to live it. How to embody it. How to make it actually true and meaningful for me. An expression that should be a balm for my aching, recovering-perfectionist soul winds up feeling more like a map with no legend. It’s a place I know I need to get to, particularly during this new-mom metamorphosis of my life, but I don’t actually have a clue where to begin.

Give Yourself Grace: A Brief History

In trying to unpack this concept and my cognitive dissonance around it, I decided to to trace the roots of the expression. Hopefully you don’t mind indulging me in a quick journey. For most of its life, grace was a theological word meaning unearned favor, divine mercy and forgiveness. Somewhere along the line through the rise of the self-help gurus like Tara Brach, the notion of self-compassion grew and, later, a collective reverence for ideas like vulnerability took hold (thank you, Brene Brown). Grace migrated from the religious realm to a more secular and eventually even a corporate one. It was then thrust into the spotlight because of a global pandemic. “Give yourself grace” became shorthand for “Survive this” and “It’s OK to soften” and “You are still worthy.”

That is, arguably, a beautiful evolution. But I also wonder what happens when something sacred becomes commonplace, and when the systems in which we all live and work are not designed to support such an idea.

Living Soft Lives Inside of Hard Systems

I’ve written extensively here about my own former workaholic tendencies and career reckoning, all rooted in achievement culture. That way of being isn’t unique to me. We are all—someway, somehow—a byproduct of hustle culture and the girl boss era. Case in point: I once very unironically wore a shirt that said, “No regrets, just results.”

However, many of us who grew up in that era are now mothers trying to reconcile an entirely new existence and set of priorities that require flexibility, boundaries and rest, (aka the antithesis of hustle culture). And even though much of our collective rhetoric has shifted to having a “soft life”, we are still living and mothering inside systems that reward overextension. This is true whether you work full-time for pay and mother, freelance and mother, work part-time for pay and mother, or work full-time as a mother (a lot of wordy variants there because the language matters). In every case, we all live in a world that rewards output and overlooks or, worse, penalizes personal limits.

Subscribe now

I can still feel my old wiring underneath it all. I can still hear the low hum of a very memorable refrain: your worth must be earned, your rest must be justified, and you better not screw things up. That wiring does not unravel simply because the language changed. Too often, we beautify the language so that we don’t have to confront the ugly, scuffed paint and broken engine of the system. A quick fix over a slow rebuild. But, the last time I checked, performance reviews are still a thing. My Apple Watch still only hypes me up when I’ve exercised, not when I’ve taken a rest day. “What do you do?” is still the first question I ask a stranger, and the first one I expect to answer. Which means that many days I don’t feel as if I’m living a soft life so much as a soft lie, and I’m not quite sure how to square that away.

I believe the encouragement to “give yourself grace” is well-intentioned. I don’t fault anyone who has ever said that to me or any new mom for that matter because I know it’s rooted in love and compassion. But the problem with telling new moms to give themselves grace is that it puts the onus entirely on them to make things feel easier without challenging the societal norms that make things feel harder. Without proper support systems in place and a more nuanced inner dialogue about what giving ourselves grace really means, we run the risk of this concept becoming more of an expectation than an exploration, yet another way in which we are asked to perform motherhood instead of embody it.

What “Give Yourself Grace” Actually Means for Me

So as I consider what it means to offer myself grace, I must dig deeper and figure out what ideas I’m actually trying to internalize. What myths I’m trying to dispel. What insecurities I’m trying to uproot. I have to take those three words and tear them down to the studs so that they make sense for me, my family, and the unique set of stars that aligned to make my life what it is.

So. when I say to myself “give yourself grace” here’s what I think I mean:

Allow yourself to be fragmented. Allow all of the beautiful and important parts of you to still be there, but to not always feel completely in tact. Didn’t they tell you that when you became a mother, you became Humpty Dumpty, and no amount of king’s horses and men would ever put you fully back together again? The point of motherhood was never to be restored to your former shape, the point was to be made anew. The point was not for life to feel cohesive, but for it instead to feel meaningful. So know that these days, each part of you asks to be prioritized preciously and separately, and there won’t ever be a day when you’ve done it all, seen it all, or been all things to all of the people. Motherhood is the ultimate weighted GPA, and what you do for yourself and your family will always count more than what you do for recognition at work or applause from the algorithm. So do the hard work of being in tune with yourself and your home enough to know who and what need tending now and who and what can wait until later. (Cheat code: The “who” at home usually needs you now, and the “what” everywhere else can usually wait until later.)

Know that if in the military “early is on time” then in new motherhood “five minutes late is on time.” Respect other people’s time while recognizing your own constraints, and trust that these are not mutually exclusive concepts. Be a bit tardy, and resist the urge to apologize more than once about it. Leave a little early, and resist the urge to have a chip on your shoulder about it. Pack lunches calmly the night before or hurriedly the morning of, and realize that packing lunches is a morally neutral task; you are no better or worse as a person for doing it at a certain time. The same goes for folding laundry, cleaning, filling out doctor’s forms, buying socks for crazy sock day at school and a host of other things that (typically) moms do. Morally neutral tasks, all of them.

If you’re rushing somewhere, it doesn’t mean you messed up, it just means you are sweatily on your way. Sweatily on your way is always better than not on your way at all.

And, finally, do yourself a favor and stop romanticizing the old days. Your old body. Your old life. In doing so, you lend more credence to the echo of the woman you once were than the voice of the woman you have become. The woman you have become has both inherited and deep-rooted wisdom, born from experience, from loss, from love, from rebirth, from a thousand quiet reckonings no one else saw and that she alone felt in the middle of many nights.

As I read those words back, the notion of giving myself grace becomes more simple. For me, it’s clear how much punctuality, a sense of daily accomplishment and a certain level of polish have disintegrated for me now as a mother, and how much of my former identity was tied to those flimsy ideals. So those are clearly my most delicate spots, the areas most in need of my grace.

And it’s important for me not to confuse self-righteousness or defensiveness with giving myself grace. Perhaps, instead, grace is the audacity to just be in a world that tells us to just do. Perhaps grace is the courage to let one’s life speak for itself.

All this time I’ve been waiting for “give yourself grace” to feel like something—a lightness, a flutter, the stretch of spread wings. I’ve been waiting for it to feel good. But in writing this, I realize giving myself grace is not a feeling, but is instead a responsibility, a daily practice, and an ongoing resistance to compare the me of now to the me of yesteryear. To give myself grace is to understand that there will always be an inherent, internal tension between the grace I offer myself and the systems that do not reward it, and it’s up to me to make peace with that paradox each day.

Give yourself grace is not a panacea for all of the ways in which we can so often feel inadequate, insecure and unglued as new mothers. It, is, however, a staunch refusal to turn against ourselves in the moments when we feel the most unraveled. That is wildly difficult to do in a world that never ceases to remind us that we should have it all together. And even when we don’t have it together, we should share that not-together story in a put-together way, we should package up our unkempt humanity in white linen and warm filters until even our imperfections become perfect again.

And so when I think of it this way, truly extending ourselves grace is almost an act of defiance, a battle cry from the abyssal trenches of motherhood. It should serve as more than a new mother’s catchy campaign slogan because it’s actually the door-knocking in the rain. Which is to say it’s the unseen work. It’s the hard work. The messy and never-ending work. Giving yourself grace is the slow and unglamorous ground game of building a life that is actually sustainable, livable and, dare I say, enjoyable, even when that means pushing back against cultural scripts that exalt achievement and exhaustion. Giving yourself grace means nurturing a life that works for you, your family and the unique set of stars that aligned to make your life what it is.

And that is the real work of motherhood.

Xoxo,
Tyece

You Might Also Like…

Welcome to Sunday Kind of Love, a soft place to land every other week. These shorter and more intimate essays aim to hold the ordinary fragments of motherhood up to the light. Thank you for being here.

Remember when I used to be your favorite muse? It was the summer of 2019 and the world hadn’t yet turned on its axis. We were just a year into dating, still head over heels with only a few bruises from trivial lovers’ quarrels. We spent most weekends that summer gallivanting around DC and its surrounding areas, picking out photogenic spots where you could test out new equipment and take pictures of me. We went anywhere that the wind would take us: National Arboretum, Botanical Gardens, Old Town, Alexandria. We tried to go early before the sticky hot sun of July consumed the day, but no matter what time, we still sweated through every garment we owned.

Did we know we were making long-term memories back then? Did we know that what seemed like the most humdrum outings would ink themselves into our shared story forever?

When I became a mother, I stopped being your muse. That sentence is harder to write than it is to feel, harder to see on the page than to know in the heart. The kids are your muses now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. They are, after all, the cutest two people on planet Earth, and maybe Mars and Jupiter too.

But every now and again you call me over as you’re editing photos, and you say, “Look at you here.” And we both pause and smile for different reasons, our love emanating from both sides of the Lao Tzu quote: “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”

You recently went through all of the rigamarole of switching camera systems and I couldn’t follow a thing you were talking about for weeks. You went back and forth to your favorite camera place, trading and swapping and buying and agonizing. But on the other side of it, you fell back into the habit of taking family pictures like you did when the babies were first born. You once again started to capture shots during our most routine and unspectacular moments: eating breakfast, sitting on the couch, reading a bedtime story. These images reflect the ever-unfolding stories of our days and remind me of the remarkable gift of an ordinary life.

The other night somewhere in between finishing dinner and ironing clothes for work the next day, I stopped you and started my sentence with “Listen to this.” Or something like that. But you didn’t listen. Instead you kissed me. And I remembered that even eight years in, you can still surprise me in the most beautiful ways. See, in that moment, I was about to recount all of the divorce writing I’ve been reading, all these gut-wrenching stories of men upping and leaving their wives and families after two decades, and all of the women who can only be described as phoenixes rising from unimaginable ashes. I was about to recount to you the way I devoured Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers like it was the last literary thing in this world I’d ever eat. But after you kissed me I said, “You know what, forget about it” because in that very moment I no longer wanted to talk about other people’s love stories, I just wanted to keep writing ours.

I started this new series, Sunday Kind of Love, with the gentle promise that I would hold the ordinary fragments of motherhood up to the light. But then I realized that you and I, we are the light. Our love is the lantern that leads our family’s way. And so I had to begin there. I felt like I had no choice but to begin there. I found these words spilling out of me freely and ferociously when I chose to begin there.

Without us, I do not have a motherhood story to tell. Because before them, there was us.

Xoxo,
Tyece

Sunday Kind of Love: A Few Things to Hold

Sunday Share: An essay that lingered with me

The Nap Trap

Will it always be like this?

Written in bed, on a Monday night after New York’s Blizzard of 2026…

Read more

5 months ago · 31 likes · 26 comments · Marina Mofford

Something the kids are delighting in: animal crackers

An invitation: Reconnect with the love that started it all. Whatever that love is. Whatever “it all” is.

It’s taken me awhile to get my footing on Substack. Or, perhaps it’s taken me awhile to rediscover my voice. Or both. I came back to writing online after taking seven years off, and during that time, the Internet and I both changed entirely. There was no other option but to start from scratch. So for the past several months, I’ve been experimenting. Writing. Discovering new voices and reconnecting with beloved ones. I wrote a sprawling series about my first year of motherhood. I was buoyed by the unexpected positive reception of my essay about being an unmarketable mother. I found comfort in the monthly essay prompts from Exhale Creativity’s Blog Hop. And I began to feel the clarity, contentment and rootedness that comes from writing regularly, a feeling I haven’t known for awhile.

All of these things have helped to shape what’s next as I aim to bring more intentionality to my writing here and further build out the anatomy of Ampersand Motherhood. My list of essay ideas is so much longer than I could ever tackle, so having some internal sense of structure also helps me organize my thinking and writing process. With that in mind, I’m excited to share two new series, both beginning in March.

Subscribe now

Notes on Multiplicity
One Essay a Month Exploring the Complexities of Twin Motherhood

The truth is that I’ve sometimes shied away from writing explicitly about having twins because such stories can occasionally have a condescending tilt, a sort of “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a twin mom” quality. As a society, we tend to applaud mothers who have multiples, exclaiming “I don’t know how you do it!” I do the same thing when I come across mothers with more than two children; I’m sort of mystified by them and the calculus of their lives. But, really, I don’t know how any of us do it, whether we have 1, 2, 3, 4 or 10 children. All I know is that resilience and love have expansive properties, and we’re all just doing the best we can.

And yet, there are permutations of motherhood that come with a unique set of complexities, like mothering a child with special needs or being a single mother. Mothering multiples is one of those many permutations. While these experiences are all quite different, the common thread is that they tend to invite awe at the expense of humanity.

And perhaps it’s that sense of awe that I hope to deconstruct in this new series, Notes on Multiplicity. Because while admiration is deeply appreciated, it can sometimes prove one-dimensional and flatten the complexity of mothering multiples. And so I hope to tell more human, flawed stories around this version of motherhood, stories that replace novelty with nuance.

This series will be my best attempt at giving voice to my interior life as a mother whose love has been running parallel since that first shocking ultrasound back in April 2024. Since then, my world has been a unique blend of mental and emotional arithmetic, a never-fully-achieved balancing act and unexpected public spectacle. These are some of the experiences I hope to shed light on so that twin mothers feel more known and all mothers feel more connected.

Sunday Kind of Love
A Soft Place to Land, Every Other Week

Back in the days of my former blog, I had a bi-weekly newsletter called Sunday Kind of Love (IFYKYK). That title and the spirit of that newsletter have been tugging on my heart lately, and I’ve been considering how I might repurpose the idea for Ampersand Motherhood. And then I thought, “What if I just bring it back, only slightly remixed?” And so that’s what I’m doing. Sunday Kind of Love used to included—as GG says—my truthiest truths, the things I didn’t want the entire Internet to access so I just sent them to a small mailing list. But, my writing posture has shifted since then, and I see my vulnerability less as a “dirty little secret” for a select few and more as a matter of integrity, the alignment of what I feel and what I am willing to share.

So my aim for this reimagined Sunday Kind of Love is to share one short essay that you can read while sipping coffee on Sunday morning or while curled up under a blanket on Sunday night. My goal is for these essays to feel a bit more poetic and intimate as I gather up the ordinary fragments of motherhood and hold them to the light.

In addition to the main essay, I’ll tuck in a few extras at the end: a Substack post that lingered with me, whatever has the kids’ hearts right now, and a question to sit with slowly as the week prepares to unfold. Maybe some other things if the mood strikes.

And it’s bi-weekly because that’s what it used to be back in the day and the idea of committing to anything weekly as a mom of two toddlers gave me heart palpitations.

These new series feel a little bit like coming home to myself, like I am a mama flamingo who is finally getting her pink back. Notes on Multiplicity will hold the layered truths of raising twins and becoming alongside them. Sunday Kind of Love will be the softer landing, a bi-weekly ritual of noticing what is true and tender in the midst of it all.

And, of course, I’ll still write long-form essays whenever I feel moved to do so. These series are simply a supplement to the existing architecture of this space.

This is the next chapter of my writing, not a departure from what is but an intentional evolution toward what will be.

Xoxo,
Tyece