I miss having a bigger life (not that my life was ever very big). Things are very busy and dull - my days revolve around food, my kid, facilitating education, and work, without much room for anything else - and I feel dull within that. I miss having an interesting inner life.

I’ve mostly felt very Choose My Choice Feminism about having a kid, in that I did a lot of very intensive parenting stuff (stayed home for 2 years, breastfed for 3, lots of attachment parenting stuff) but even though I felt pressured into some of it, I always knew I could opt out

My grandmothers were baffled by a lot of my choices because they went against a lot of the empowering gains for mothers their generation had made. One of them could not wrap her mind around the fact that I was breastfeeding, because to her formula was a tool of women’s liberation

Her perspective came from growing up as one of ten with a mother who couldn’t opt out of the labour-intensive parts of parenting. And for a long time I was like, geeze, Nanny, get with the program, we have feminism now and this stuff is an empowered choice these days!!

And it was a choice! And when I felt done with staying at home, I went back to work, and we all thrived. Anyway. Right now I feel like I have a tiny taste of my grandmother’s experience of this intensive, solitary, stay-at-home parenting as Not A Choice and I chafe

I’ve definitely felt a real identity collapse (which I mean in the same sense we use “context collapse” on here; what was three dimensional before is not that anymore)