coming soon

“Why Can't a Mother Think That? (Anne, Pt. 1)”

Tasha: Anne wasn’t someone who imagined having kids. It wasn’t part of her script.

Anne: I actually was quite sure that wasn’t what was going to happen.

Tasha: Until one day, a feeling struck–she remembers the exact day, exact moment–

Anne: I was heading up stairs and I stopped midway up the stairs and I was like, HUH. I would like to have a child. It was like that word broodiness, like a chicken? I don't know. That was like, I gotta go sit right now.

Tasha: She told her husband. and less than a year later, she gave birth. To a daughter.

Anne: I do remember being absolutely just blown away with the level of love.

Tasha: Motherhood still didn’t feel obvious or easy for Anne day to day, but soon, that broody feeling came over her again. She had two more kids:

Anne: It was, it was almost as if I knew that these, these three human beings needed to come into my life.

Tasha: As a mom, Anne clung to routine. Bring the kids to school, make their dinners, clean up, repeat. The routine went on. Fourteen years into being a mother, Anne was miserable–she felt trapped in her marriage and she started asking herself these questions…

Anne: When had I been a happy person? When had I been, when had I been me?

[Theme music beginning]

Tasha: She had no idea where to look for those answers–she couldn’t go back in time, didn’t really want to, but she couldn’t see a way forward either.

Then, she had this idea. An idea too scary to say out loud.

Anne: The thought itself was just so…terrifying to think it; what would come next wasn't even on my radar.

Can you imagine leaving your child? No, of course not. Because none of us do. Nor did I until four days before I did it.

[Theme music chorus hits]

Tasha: This is Mother is a Question. I'm Tasha

Julia: And I'm Julia. Tasha and I have been best friends—telling each other things we'd never tell another soul, since we were 14.

Tasha: Now we're both raising little humans, mothering, and asking:

Julia: What is a mother? And all things answer.

[Music swells, dances, fades down during snaps and under our hellos]

Tasha: Hi Julesie

Julia: Hi!

{Music totally out]

Tasha: Jules, there’s this book that my two-year old keeps asking me to read him lately. Especially–this is true–especially since we started work on Season 2 of Mother is a Question.

Julia: laughs

Tasha: The book is called

EO: Mama always comes home?

Tasha: Mama Always Comes Home.

Tasha: say it one more time?

EO: Mama Always Comes Home.

Tasha: Do you know this one?

Julia: You know I don’t know that one, but I remember needing to reassure my oldest daughter of that all the time when she was little. Any book that had a missing parent or lost child searching for a parent was beyond stressful for her. we’d have to stop reading.

Tasha: Well yeah, so the idea of the book is that moms - moms of all kinds like birds and rabbits and people – may have to go away to take care of some things, but there is a universal truth that while mamas may have to leave from time to time–to find worms in the ground or go to the office, she’ll always come back.

Julia: It makes sense to want to comfort kids with that, but I’ve always been tentative to say it out loud– the “always” part. because… what if the parents don’t.

Tasha: Well, that leads me to an email we got from a listener at the end of our last season, just after Julia gave birth to her third child!

Julia: Yeah, such a remarkable email to get right then.

Tasha: From a listener named Chloe Johnson:

Chloe: (reading her email into her phone) The reason I'm writing is because you said at the end of the first episode "crack open definitions and listen for the unspeakable."

Julia: Chloe felt like there was a story we weren’t telling.

Tasha: And she went on to tell us a bit about her own mother.

Chloe: It's normal for fathers to leave, but unspeakable for mothers.

Tasha: Chloe gave us her mom’s number and I called her up. Anne Lloyd. Anne told me she’d thought long and hard about whether she felt comfortable being public about her story– that she knew it was going to feel like–and these are her words–walking down the street butt naked.

Julia: She said what made her know she wanted to–was the idea that one mom listening might feel less alone after hearing it.

Tasha: I ended up interviewing Anne for hours. I couldn’t stop asking questions. The story just got bigger and bigger.

Julia: So, to open our second season of Mother Is A Question, we’re devoting the first two episodes to Anne’s story. Tash will be our guide.

Tasha: Anne lives in Virginia now. But–

[[Music–I tried two stems from PIZZ, lead violin and cello]]

Tasha: We'll start her story before she became a mother. She was in Munich Germany, early 1980s,

Anne: My hair was very long, very straight, very blonde.

Tasha: She had a boyfriend, he was fun and charismatic, and they’d pretty much spent the past three years in bars and at parties.

Anne: It was just a crazy three years. I mean, mostly we were drunk. And, you know, I'm in my early twenties, you know, what do I care?

Tasha: Anne describes herself as being in a kind of haze back then.

Anne: Just not really knowing what was going on. I didn’t know who I was without alcohol.

Tasha: And so when her parents proposed they open a pub together back in England, there may have been a part of her even then that knew it wasn’t the wisest idea. But a louder part of her just figured, why not?

[Music fades out?]

Anne: I really felt that in those, those years, that's when it became apparent that I just kind of just followed along.

Tasha: So she and her boyfriend moved to this small rural town, in England, and got married.

Anne says that haze she and her husband had been in--Anne was ready to come out of it when she got pregnant. She stopped drinking–but her husband didn’t. Which meant she started seeing him a little more clearly.

Anne: But I didn't know how to name it. I didn't know how to say…I didn't know what was wrong. I think, with hindsight like most alcoholics when they are sober they are delightful and the person you want to be around and then they drink and you don’t want to be around them.

Anne: The relationship was…hard? and I was confused by it.

Tasha: But she wasn’t confused about wanting to become a mother.

Anne: I loved being pregnant. I think I just latched onto that and focused completely on this child. I really don't think I thought about what happens afterwards.

Tasha: What were those first days of being a mother like?

Anne: Awful. It was awful.

Tasha: Anne gave birth in one of those old fashioned hospitals that you might see in, well, some old British movie–rows of beds, lines of curtains, staff rushing around. She had a really long, hard labor, and after three days, her daughter Verity, came into the world. Anne got this one drowsy moment to meet her–

Anne: and then she was whisked away…to the, baby unit to be monitored because she’d had a tough old time comin out too and they needed to check her. ‘Course they had to like, you know, put me back together and stitch me up.

Tasha: And through all of it, Anne was pretty much alone. Her mom came by the hospital once or twice, and her husband kept disappearing.

Anne: he was actually leaving the hospital. finding a bar and having a few drinks and then coming back.

Tasha: After a few hours of rest, in this big open room surrounded by all these other new moms in their beds, Anne sits up – the nurses are wheeling her baby back over to her.

Anne: And this baby is parked next to me. And I sat there and I was like, Well, I don't know what to do. And I didn't, and there was nobody there. And I was watching all these other women and, and everybody was so like scooping up their babies and, and I was like, how did they know how to do that?

Tasha: And this is the weird thing about motherhood, right? We’ve never done it before we do it, but it can feel like everybody else got the memo, took the class, is in on the thing, everybody but us.

Anne: and then the staff nurse came breezing down and poor little Verity is kind of sucking at the blanket, she’s lying face down, and she’s like your baby’s hungry. ‘oh, okay.’ and she’s like, do you know how to feed her? no.

Tasha: The nurse taught her how to breastfeed, how to change diapers. That’s part of the job for a nurse in the postpartum ward –to teach all the new moms this kind of stuff. But to Anne it felt like she was the only one who needed teaching.

Anne: When they released me from the hospital, bless their hearts, where they're like, okay, she's like, got it. The baby's getting fed. She knows how to change it. She's got a routine. It's all routine.

And nobody said that there should be a period of time between feed the baby, feed the baby, change the baby, make sure it's clean, put it down for sleep. That I should. Hold the baby. Love the baby. Like, I didn't know that was a thing. Which seems so bizarre.

Tasha: Anne says when she got home, she knew her life had changed forever–she was a mother now–but her husband hadn’t changed …he was still drinking–

Anne: Like now, now you don't do that anymore. Like stop drinking now. Like we're a family, I, we have this child. But I don't think I knew what was wrong still, and I definitely didn't know how to fix it, but I think I finally was aware that something was wrong.

[[Music starts CO LD]]

Tasha: So, Verity was born in 1985–

Anne: Verity from the beginning is very much little tomboy, wants to be outside. Ride her bicycles, run around, be outside, um, loves helping her dad when he's around. She wants to have, like, her own little hammer and screwdrivers

Tasha: Two years later, Elliot was born:

Anne: Very affectionate child. He was the child that when he arrived, wants me, and clings to me, and I’m okay with that.

Tasha: Two years after Elliot, came Chloe.

Anne: She's my emotional child, she's my, she was my moody child.

[Music fades out fully]

Tasha: Their dad, Anne’s husband, was away a lot for work over in Germany. And when he was home, he’d have stretches where he’d drink just a few beers a day, but then all of the sudden he’d disappear on a bender for a couple of days.

Anne says it was confusing–when her husband was there, they all ate dinner together, did the bedtime routines together. He could be goofy, charming, fun. The kids ran around and had a blast. They owned some land, had some horses and chickens…on the surface, she says, it looked normal. If you walked into their house you might not know anything was wrong in the family, or the marriage.

You might not even notice Anne, still feeling like she did when her first child was born–like all the other mothers knew something she didn’t–it hadn’t gone away. Anne would watch other moms and think they’re just better mothers. I’m doing it wrong.

Anne: I never, I never. I just felt like…I could never give myself permission that I was doing okay with it.

Tasha: Anne says that voice, started to spiral–the less confident she felt, the worse of a mother she was, the less confident she felt. Even her husband noticed: when he was functional, he’d suggest she just go into another room while he took care of the kids, which Anne says only made her feel worse.

On top of all this –living with someone who one day acts normal, but the next day disappears, or shows up drunk, it can make you feel crazy, or like you’re imagining things.

[Music starts: last half of DOPPELGANGERS]

Tasha: And then came her husband’s DUI, and what felt to Anne like a chance to finally give him an ultimatum: “You can stay. But you have to stop drinking!” He lasted two weeks.

Anne: I was like, you're done, get out. [[Music]] And he just looked at me and I was like, no, really, go pack your bags. You're done. Go away. I don't know what I'm going to do. Just go.

[couple of beats of music]]

Anne: as he drove away, I was like, yay, done it. I felt good. All right, let's move on.

[[music up. hangs. fades under, continues]]

Tasha: Her husband moved to his brother’s house. By now the kids were nine, seven, and five. Anne felt stronger, more sure of herself–taking college classes, getting more involved in town politics, working a job at a call center for people in crisis.

Anne: I remember just feeling so optimistic.

[[Music up and ends, naturally]]

Tasha: Then Anne got a phone call from her husband. He told her he’d had a nervous breakdown going cold turkey. And this part might sound familiar: Anne let him come home, but things didn’t get any better.

They got worse.

And the feelings Anne hadn’t been able to name, started to corrode.

Anne: Every bone in my body was exhausted. I couldn't, I couldn't–I'm trying to do all the things that you know that mothers do, provide food and provide home and all the places you go and go to the movies and it's a birthday and we do a party and, you know, I was baked the cakes and made novelty cakes and everything that you're supposed to do as a mother. And I was, I just felt with each day that it was like walking in thick mud.

Tasha:And through all this, Anne says she and Verity always had the hardest relationship. They argued a lot, sometimes–a lot of times–Anne would slap Verity across the face.

Anne: She had learned very early on to be wary of me. She was the child that from the beginning she took the brunt of my, of my angers and frustrations and pain.

Tasha: Stuck with her husband again, Anne’s confidence plummeted. A real nose-dive. And, the voices in her head grew louder.

Anne: I didn't want to admit that I was depressed. If it was depression and I admitted to it, then I failed in some way. I was just a big fat failure and I wasn't very good at motherhood and look what it did to me and everybody else was doing fine. And I didn't feel like I knew who to talk to.

Tasha: Eventually, Anne did talk to a doctor, who prescribed an antidepressant. It felt like she was waking up

And I started to see that I had become a person that I, I didn't want to be. I wasn't the mother that I wanted to be to these children. My children deserved a better mother. It can't be this.

Tasha: What could it be? She had no idea. No answers yet. Except one:

Anne: for the love of god Anne you need to divorce this man.

Tasha: So Anne gathered up her courage and told him.

Her husband didn’t put up a fight. Anne says the kids were a little sad but not surprised. But then the weird thing was:

Anne: we were still carrying on like this, like normal happy family.

Tasha: –still going to horseback riding lessons, eating meals together, visiting relatives. You know, the routine. Which was suddenly broken up by an invitation from a friend. “want to come on vacation? To America?” Anne was more than ready. She put the divorce on hold.

Anne: I think at that stage, you know, my mind, I'm like, okay, I'm going to go and have this nice little vacation. And when I come back, you're toast.

Tasha: And for the first time ever, without her husband or her kids, Anne took a vacation. Flew To Phoenix, Arizona, where she and her friend spent ten days lazing by the pool, eating big long dinners, driving around the desert…

Anne: It was just–Oh, I felt like I could breathe and, and laugh and I felt free. I wasn’t answerable to anyone. And I just remember feeling like I had a glimpse of who I was. I, I felt like I saw me. A, a, a, a, a person that I don't think I knew. She was happy and fun. and, and t he recognition that…when had I been a happy person?

[MUSIC starts to fade up – 2 Stems of LAMENT, Synth + Violin]

When had I been, when had I been me?

[violin stems begin, music continues alone and then through:]

Tasha: Anne remembers coming home from the airport. Three hours, highways turned into country roads, into winding lanes. She says it was a beautiful summer day, but everything felt small and grey. Her insides were constricting.

Anne: I didn't want to go that house. I didn't want to go to that, that life. I just felt like I was being pulled back into a darkness.

Tasha: As soon as she got back, Anne and her husband picked up with the divorce. But what becomes clear is: Divorce is only part of the solution to this darkness Anne is working through. It’s gonna help. But it won’t be enough.

Anne: I'm just going to be living in a house and then he's going to be in town, and this is a really small town, and I'm just still going to see this man every day …we might be divorced, but there’s gonna be no detachment. How do I get away?

Tasha: But what’s she supposed to do? The kids are 14, 12, and 10. They’re in school. They have friends, lives of their own. She doesn’t want to disrupt them and of course the kids are going to be with her after the divorce, that’s not a question–

[Music ends]

Anne: Well as a mother, this is what I'm supposed to do. It hasn't occurred to me that there is an option that doesn't involve the kids, like I love my children and I want to do right by them. I want to do the right thing. I'm desperate to do the right thing by them. So there's no way to process. All the, the scary thoughts that are, that are bubbling down below because you're not allowed to think those thoughts.

Tasha: She wasn’t allowed to think those thoughts.

[MUSIC-SYNTH STEM of LAMENT]

Tasha: But she did.

Anne: This overwhelming feeling of I can’t be there. I cannot be there.

[music ENDS]

Tasha: We’ll be right back.

+++MID ROLL?+++

Tasha: Anne banished her thoughts of leaving and fell back into routine. And deeper into the darkness. It got so bad, she couldn’t hide it from the kids anymore.

Anne: I don't want the kids to touch me now. It makes my skin prickle. Don't come near me.

Tasha: Meanwhile, Anne had kept the phone number of a guy she’d met back on her vacation in America. Steve. This sweet guy who was studying motorcycle mechanics in Phoenix and who she’d gone on a few dates with, shared a kiss with. Anne says he was kind, a good listener; she didn’t think much more of it.

[Music begins here]

Tasha: But one day she walked down the street to a payphone–she didn’t want her husband to know about Steve–dialed him up, and he answered. And this little phone booth becomes this place she can say things out loud she’s never let herself even think. They talked a few more times and one day, Steve, who’s now living in Wyoming, says, you can always come stay with me.

Anne: And I was like, well, that's lovely. But I mean, that's not exactly practical, is it? You know, and I just kind of laughed it off and. And it was just a very sweet thing that he said. But it sowed a seed because all of a sudden, the only way I can describe it to you was later, when I rethought about the conversation, it felt like this teeny tiny sliver of light was suddenly shining and I wondered if I should aim for it. But if I aimed for it, that did not involve my children.

[[Music naturally ends here]]

Anne: I had a very good friend who had been friends or many many years way back, she was actually a psychiatric nurse. And we always stayed in touch and I called her. I said I Need to talk to you. She's like, yeah, what's going on?

I said, I’ve had the most terrible thought–and you're the only person I can tell that I've had this most, I can't, I can't even believe I've thought this.

And she said, what are you thinking, Anne?

And I said, I'm thinking that I might have to leave my children. And, and I immediately went into like, I like, why would I think that? And she just very quietly said, Why can't you think that? And that's all she said. She wasn't like, Oh, you should, or what was it, or what's ha–She just said, Anne why can't you think that?

The kids had gone to school, I'd got them to school, and I had got a little part time job at a little bakery just down the road, like two minute walk from my house, if that, and I walked out the front door, and I started to walk down the street, and that's when the voice started to just scream at me: You gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go, just go, just go, you can do it, just go, go, go, go. And that's all it said to me, was go, just go.

Anne: Everything was just running on emotion. there was no, and then this, well, what if I do that? nothing other than in this very second, how am I going to get to the next second? to the next minute, and then from that minute, that's, that's all I could, that's all I could do. I remember those days almost like I was watching myself.

Anne: I scared the crap out of Steve because I called him and I was like, I'm coming. And he was like, what?

[Music exclamation point idea, continues]

Tasha: Once she blurted it out to Steve, she plowed through everything she needed to do. First she told her brother and her parents–she wanted to be sure they’d help with the kids while she was gone. She says it was kind of weird:

Anne: Nobody fought with me.

Tasha: She told her soon-to-be ex husband.

Anne: And he also didn't argue!

Tasha: Her relationship with him had been awful, but she’d never seen that cross over to the kids. She says he was a loving, even adoring father, and a lot more fun than her. She also knew a lot of rules were about to go out the window.

Anne went up to her room to pack -- and to a room she knew she'd never set foot in again -- and she stuffed a duffle bag with a few pieces of clothes, her passport, and a box of tea.

Then it was time to tell the kids.

Anne: I was trying to say it in a very honest but simplistic way that they could absorb.

Tasha: Verity was 14. Elliot was 12. Chloe was 10.

Anne: I sat them down and I said, you know that, you know, mom and daddy are going to get a divorce, you know that's happening. They're like, yes. And I said, I need to go away for a little bit.

I need to go and see. How did I say it? I remember trying to explain that. It was like I had seen a chance of something and I needed to go and check it out. That I would be coming back and that I would tell them everything that I was doing and when I was doing it and when I would be coming back and that they would be hearing from me.

Tasha: Anne says Elliot stayed quiet, then asked if he could go watch TV. She says she maybe remembers the girls crying a little. She remembers hugging all three of them.

Anne: But our relationship in those last couple of months had been so prickly. They probably didn't expect any more from me.

Tasha: Anne couldn’t tell her kids exactly for sure when she’d be back–she didn’t know yet. Her plane ticket had her returning in 90 days, the longest she could stay in the US without a visa.

But Anne says she knew there was a chance she’d get on the plane and miss her kids so desperately, be so worried, or realize she was crazy, and she’d fly back a lot sooner. But either way – in a week or in three months, no matter how long it was – Anne knew she would see her kids again.

[MUSIC–Full mix of LAMENT starts]

Tasha: She said goodbye to them. Then watched them hop into their dad’s car.

Anne: And I remember as they drove away that dual emotion, the relief that he was leaving, but the, the, the ache in my heart that they were leaving.

Tasha: That night, Anne’s brother insisted: She needed to see her parents one more time. She thought maybe he was hoping they would talk her out of leaving. But they didn’t. Instead, her mom didn’t say anything, got up from the table, and walked away.

Anne: And my father did manage to kind of, in his awkward way, give me a hug and he said, Do you know what you're doing? And I said, not really, but I'm going.

Tasha: In the middle of the night, her brother dropped her at the airport and Anne got on a plane. It was November, 1999. She was about to turn 40. This time she wasn’t going on a vacation–she didn’t know what it was yet.

Anne: I just knew it was what I was supposed to be doing. Even if I had to come back a week later with my tail between my legs and it was nothing but I was not gonna miss this opportunity.

Tasha: The plane took off, Anne’s life below receded into a bunch of little dots.

[MUSIC NATURALLY ENDS]

Tasha: Hours later, The plane touched down in the US as the sun rose. But her trip wasn’t over yet—Anne had to transfer planes. Steve lived in a tiny, remote town in Wyoming. Anne had to take an 8-seater to get there.

Anne: That's when panic set in, as in, where the hell am I going? Who is this man? I might've talked to, I mean, He could be an axe murderer. What on earth do I think I'm going to do when they get, okay, make sure you know where the airport is. I just remember the panic starting to well? And then I was so exhausted that I actually passed out and fell asleep.

[THEME STARTS]

Tasha: While Anne was off the follow that sliver of light in Wyoming, ten year old Chloe was home. Writing in her diary.

Chloe’s DIARY: I miss mom so much, and it's so hard when I see people all happy with their moms. Especially if I see families all happy together, because I know I'll never be like that.

Tasha: That’s next time on Mother is a Question.

Tasha: This episode of Mother is a Question was produced by me, I’m Natasha Haverty

Julia: and I’m Julia Metzger Traber. Rob Rosenthal is our editor

Tasha: The rest of our team is Genevieve Sponsler, Sandra Lopez Monsalve, Emmanuel Desarme, and Courtney Fleurantin

Julia: Our music is by Raky Sastri and Julia Read

Tasha: Mother is a Question is part of the Big Questions Project at PRX, and supported by the John Templeton Foundation

[Music swells dances, fades down]

Coming soon

 “Mothering Between Life and Death” (Katherine)

[Sound of trying to light a match]

[Sound of trying and then lighting the match]

Katherine: Make sure that it doesn't topple over and burn the house down. 

Julia: That's a good idea. That's a good idea. Is there something you like to say that  you would want to share? 

Katherine: No, I feel like it's mostly so much is unspoken, 

Julia: I'm with my dear friend, Katherine, in a back room on the top floor of her house. In the corner of the room is an altar.  It’s unassuming, simple.  A few objects on a little table. I always gravitate toward it when I go to her house.  It’s an altar to Ethan… Katherine’s first born child. 

Julia: Can you describe this altar?

Katherine: We have a photo of Ethan.  Um, some candles from a friend. And a little note to him. And every year I've been growing marigolds and sort of refreshing the altar around Dia de los Muertos. As like a time of remembering. 

Julia: The marigold chains are the only real color on the altar, a welcome burst of yellow and orange.  Though they’re faded now, dried.   

Katherine: He and I are both born in Brood X years. 

Julia: Oh, can you say what that is? 

Katherine: So there's this big emergence of, um. Cicadas that are born every 17 years.  And he was, he and I were both born in a cicada year. Brood X cicada year. Um, so I have little cicadas. 

Julia: From the time when he was born? 

Katherine: Mm hmm, yeah.

Katherine: The loss of Ethan kind of broke down this facade that I had built up around productivity and control, and if you like, plan, then everything works out and  it's just not the way. 

[Theme Music Enters, Up and Under]

Katherine:  And so then when the plan went fully off the rails, it was  just like such a huge death of that identity. In early days of grief it was cynical. I was kind of like “all you people walking around out there thinking you have control and you don't”... And so then it was a process to like, get to a point of like, surrendering to the lack of… control 

[MUSIC - theme continues]

Julia: This is Mother is a Question.  I'm Julia

Tasha: And I'm Tasha

Julia: We've been holding each other through love and loss 

Tasha: since we were 14. 

Julia: Now we're raising tiny humans, mothering, 

Tasha: and asking What is a mother?

Julia: and all things answer.

[MUSIC up and fades out and ends completely]

Julia: Tash, when I was 7 months pregnant with Shaia, my first, I went on a week long meditation retreat.  

Tasha: Yes, I remember that.  I remember that giving me hope for ever doing a meditation retreat.

Julia:One of the dharma teachers that week happened to be a mother.  And I’ll always remember, she said that mothering is the greatest spiritual teacher.

Tasha: Mmmm

Julia: I’ve really kept that with me in the hardest times. 

Tasha: What did she mean?

Julia: Well, I think she felt it was true for a lot of reasons, but one that really stuck with me is about how mothering makes us face this truth that all humans have to face… how little is in our control.  

Tasha: Right–from the moment we are pregnant, or decide to try to become pregnant, or fill out adoption papers, or however our path of mothering starts, we’re just reminded over and over of how little about our kids, is in our control.  

Julia: Or what happens to them. There’s only so much we can do or change. And having to confront that fact over and over can break us… or break us open.  

Katherine: “In our own ways We all break.”

Julia: This is my friend Katherine Collins. Reading a poem she told me she’s turned to over and over again since her son, Ethan, died. It’s by Nayirrah Waheed.

Katherine: 

“It is ok

To hold your heart outside of your body

For

Days.

Months.

Years.

At a time

— heal” 

Julia:  When I asked Katherine if she was willing to be interviewed, she said part of her hoped I would ask.  The other part feared it.  But she decided to take a leap of faith.  

[MUSIC]

Julia: I met Katherine 9 years ago at a farm in Virginia where she worked.  She was in from the fields for their weekly potluck. I was just visiting for the day.  Her face was bright, her hands were dirty. Her sharp wit attracted me to her immediately. And she just seemed to really have it together.  Feet firmly on the ground.  Armed with a plan. 

[MUSIC up and out]

Julia: Before I met Katherine, and before she became a farmer, back in the 2000s, she was studying geography at UC Berkeley.  Even though she was studying the outdoors, she was stuck indoors… reading and writing. And she felt restless.  Until she started helping out in a community garden.  

Katherine: It was just so refreshing, the, the, the like, contrast to all of the theoretical things that I was learning in the classroom and then just felt so tangible and grounding and, um, and visually clear what had been done that day.

Julia: She could see, taste, measure her  work.  It was the kind of work that spoke to her strengths– foresight, planning and attention to detail.  After graduating, she worked for school garden programs, then trained to be a professional farmer … she was hooked. 

She met her partner, Neil, in the midst of this love affair with farming.  Neil is an environmental lawyer in DC.  They got married in July of 2019.  And over that next year, their conversation turned to having children.  

Katherine felt ambivalent about becoming a mother.  Deep down she knew she wanted to, but all the models she saw were self-sacrificing.  She said It was scary. A big unknown. 

Katherine: It was just like, uh, well, are you going to jump off the cliff or not? And like, I just decided to jump off the cliff. 

Julia: Do you remember the moment you found out you were first pregnant?

Katherine: Yeah. Neil and I were living in DC at the time and, um, I just, thought like, Oh, I, I feel like  this might be it. And took a pregnancy test and we were pregnant. It all felt like everything went really smoothly. Like, we were just like, okay, yep, and now this is happening, and this is happening. 

Julia:  It was all happening at the exact right moment in their lives. Neil was lawyering. Katherine was managing a big non-profit farm. Everything was going according to plan. They had it under control.

Katherine’s pregnancy also prompted them to do something they'd been wanting to do for a long time. Move out of the city. Live more simply, off of less income, closer to land, closer to community. 

So, they made the decision to leave DC, for the baby, and to be the parents they wanted to be. Neil would continue his job in DC and Katherine would leave her full-time farm management job, and only farm part-time.

Katherine: That was kind of a big shift for me where I had sort of defined a lot of my self worth by how productive I was in my job.

They found out she was pregnant in September, and started looking for houses in October.  October, is when you plant garlic.  So, just as their lives were being cracked open and planted in new soil, so were hundreds of bulbs of garlic on the farm.

Katherine: Garlic is my favorite crop, I think, because it, it stays in the ground so long.

It's like October through July. 

Julia:October through July.  That’s 9 months.  A full gestation.  

Katherine: It really marks the passing of time, like from season to season. 

[MUSIC]

Julia: That winter, when the garlic was cozy in the dark earth, they settled on a house in Brunswick, Maryland, an old industrial boom town along the Potomac River.  And after they bought the house, they started preparing the space: setting up the nursery, organizing the clothes, and they started preparing themselves ...

Katherine: I was trying to get very mentally centered for labor, but also doing some amount of internal work to just be more prepared for attending to the needs of somebody else. 

[Music OUT]

Julia:  In spring, when Katherine was 7 months pregnant, I remember running into her and Neil at a cafe. They were outside on the patio, pouring over parenting books about playful parents and gentle parents, and how to bring joy to parenting... they were on a kind of stay-cation retreat to prepare for the birth.  After we talked, they headed down to the river, to reflect. 

A couple weeks later, as the due date was approaching, 

Julia: We did a new parent blessing together in the woods. Do you remember that? 

Katherine: It was so unseasonably cold. It was the end of May and we all thought it was going to be a warm day and we were freezing. You especially, I think. Yeah. And I just remember, yeah, people came together and, um, we had a really nice, moment of reflection and eating together.

[[MUSIC, starts low]]

Katherine: Some of those memories are nice, but they're also so painful because they just remind me of the frame of reference. The sort of like, uh, ignorance to what was about to happen, um, was like Like, that person was about to die, too.

Julia: That Katherine was about to die.  That version of Katherine who could plan for anything. Even something as unknowable as the outcome of a pregnancy. 

Katherine the person that I was, did think that she had control. That person doesn't exist anymore. And like, I'm someone else completely. 

[[MUSIC fades out over 5-7 seconds]]

[3 seconds of space before Mid Roll sound starts]

[Mid Roll]

[3 seconds of silence]

Julia: I can picture Katherine in early June of 2021, walking around the fields with her big belly hidden under a flannel shirt, the rest of her still lean, lifting crates and picking greens as if nothing were different.  

Julia: I remember seeing you on the farm either was it the day you went into labor or the day before but I remember up until you were giving birth basically, you were on the farm. I remember the field you were in. 

Katherine: Yeah, me too. Yeah, I always walk by there 

Julia: Do you remember what you were doing? 

Katherine: I was, um, planting basil, I think. Yeah, it was definitely basil. I remember saying to you, like, it feels like he's peering out at, like, he's, like, sort of searching to come out or something like that. I always, I just felt like his little fingers were like trying to like peek out and see, I don't know.

Julia: If he had peeked out and seen, he would have seen the earth and smelled the basil. Do you remember when you realized I'm going into labor,

Katherine: We had watched a movie. Um, that night and I had felt like, Oh, I'm having cramps. Um, but I think I wasn't sure. And I think Neil thought, Oh, this might be it. And we all, we just kind of went to bed right away thinking like maybe something's happening soon. But I was able to sleep for a good number of hours. When I woke up from having gone to bed after that, I was like, this is probably it.

Julia: The labor progressed steadily. Katherine was a little woozy and nauseous, but she breathed, she moved, like she had practiced, she stayed with it.  It got more intense, and eventually her water broke.  Almost immediately she felt the urge to push, which was a relief 

Julia: And so then Ethan is born. 

Katherine: His color wasn't good and he looked like, you know, he wasn't crying and like I had never witnessed a birth before, so I wasn't sure like what amount of that was not okay. 

Yeah, there's just like a lot of shock in that moment. We're just sort of like waiting for direction from other people because it didn't seem, it didn't seem like things were right, but it wasn't clear to me that things were very wrong.

Katherine: The, like whole team of, medical professionals were working on him and we were just waiting to find out what happened. We were just kind of floundering in this world of no control. 

The whole thing, I mean, it just was horrible. It just felt so, like, skin crawlingly, gut wretchingly horrible. It was the same pit of the stomach feeling that I feel like when I've done something wrong...I've done something to hurt someone. I've been bad in some way, um  the pediatric doctor came in to actually tell us that he had been pronounced dead. And then the team came in to call her away and, and his heart had actually restarted.

Katherine: So there was this weirdness around like, like when the loss really occurred, You know, because he sort of, in a lot of ways, like, had died, but then, hadn't really died. And, We were like living in this gray area in a lot of ways, and like the gray area is hard for me, for my brain to sort of make sense of the whole situation, like that he lived, but didn't. 

[MUSIC starts]

Julia: Catherine and Neil were in the hospital,  suspended in this strange gray space for two days

Katherine: We eventually transferred to a NICU where they had the level of medical care that Ethan needed including this incredible hospital chaplain who just like really saw us and where we were.

It was kind of, unreal how incredible most of those people were at their jobs. there were a lot of things that we would have missed out on otherwise. Um, like special time with him giving him baths, um, the opportunity to change his diaper, like, they sort of understood that parents in these traumatic loss times would maybe need this, need or want that.

Julia: Katherine and Neil did need and want all of this.  Katherine told me that she and Neil bathed Ethan several times.  Just wiping his little body with wet towels, and then drying him off, as he lay on the table, connected to life support. 

Katherine: And I think that I struggled with like, is he here? His body's here? How much importance to place on his body versus his soul?Is his soul here?  Like who is, this person? Is he here?

Julia: They tended to him, in whatever ways were available, while time stood still.  

Katherine: One of the NICU nurses just like made him a little Ethan bracelet that she put on his wrist and like helped us made make footprints and, um, they made an impression of his thumb for us.

These people, I mean, these people, like, have such an impact and I don't, like, it makes me wonder how much, how, how they're able to do, to do this and see so much loss and, like, witness it, like when I think about what God is that felt like, like, God, the grace that we can show people in moments like this, I mean, the biggest gift that they gave us was, this time with Ethan and this slowing down, um, but also the ability to, like set us on a path of grieving that was, grounded in the, the piece that mattered and that was, like, the time with him and the, like, those special memories and not the trauma of his birth and death.

Julia: How did you say goodbye to him? 

Katherine: Singing him songs and telling him the story of his pregnancy and all the people that, like, wanted to meet him and would, like, really miss him. And, um, yeah, just, just getting to be there and be really, like, sort of ceremonial in that way with him.

There was also just like a lot of the mundane that existed too like, Just like tiredness and like I don't know, boredom, too, even, which makes you feel bad, but then also it's it all, it's all here, even when, the most consequential thing of your life is happening, there's also this, like form you have to sign, and I don't know, it was just like, everything happening….And um, just being with him was joyful too. 

[[MUSIC up and under]] 

Katherine: And then also, looking back, there's so much I regret. 

There's all these times where I'm like, oh, I wish I had held Ethan this way too, you know? Like, there's so many ways to hold a baby, what would it have been to hold him this way, or this way… Because, like, how are you going to get saying goodbye to your kid right the first time? 

[MUSIC continues]

Julia: When did you name Ethan?

Katherine: Neil and I kind of had a private moment together while we were waiting to find out what was happening, like, during the resuscitation efforts. to kind of decide.

It had been on a shortlist, and then we remembered that the name meant strong.  The weight of naming has always felt really overwhelming to me and so sometimes like that's one of the things where I'm sort of like, was that his name? I'm not sure I got it right, but we did name him kind of, in a moment of hope for strength. 

[MUSIC rises and then ends]

Julia: Ethan was born, and died, in June when the garlic Katherine loves was about ready to harvest, after 9 months underground.  Katherine had imagined bringing Ethan into the field with her as she worked. Letting him smell the soil and feel the warm air of early summer on his skin. 

Julia: Do you remember what it was like to come home that day?

Katherine:  Yeah, I mean, I think it was just deeply  gut wrenching to leave the hospital …leaving with this empty car seat in the back seat and like, just having everything feel so surreal. I didn't want to come home to, uh, a quiet house. So we just had family meet us and just had like everyone kind of sitting there together. 

Julia: But the house wasn’t just full of family.  It was full of stuff.  Baby stuff.  Bouncers, a crib, toys, a nursery.

Katherine: I kind of wanted it there. Like I didn’t want, I wasn't ready to, like, pack it all up and put it away.

At least in the early days it was a comfort to have made me…in touch, more in touch with the loss, as opposed to like thinking that I was crazy, like that, how, you know…I think that it was easy to feel like none of it had happened because, we never brought him home. 

Julia: Do you remember what you did in those first few days? 

Katherine:  I was recovering from having given birth, so I think I just did a lot of sleeping and lying around, wrestling with like not being hungry and not wanting to eat or, like withholding of things from myself because I was like taking things out on myself . Like, I just wanted to disappear for most of the early days.

Julia: Katherine wasn’t alone.  Neil had taken paternity leave, so he was home to take care of her and bring her food.  He existed in limbo alongside Katherine doing his own grieving. going on walks and runs, while she stayed inside.  

[MUSIC- Doppelgangers- Pizz Violin]

Katherine: I think it was a weird time to be. Inside so much, because I had spent so, like, so much of, like, the previous eight or so years, like, definitely being outside in June, like, definitely peak, you know, almost arriving into summer solstice, like, peak of activity. And I just, I felt a lot, like, I just hid in my house for most of the summer. 

Julia: While Katherine hid, she spent a lot of time "seeking." Grasping. Trying to find answers. Sometimes that involved writing. Other times, she took to the internet. Looking for articles and research papers on possible causes of infant death. Or searching for resources on grief and loss for new parents. 

Katherine: My brain thought that it could solve, solve the loss and like, then it would be okay. 

Julia: When she tried to find answers as to why Ethan had died, she’d come up short.  Nothing made sense. Her mind would spin and spin. 

Katherine: I must, I must have been doing all of this wrong. I must have been doing the pregnancy wrong. I must have been doing labor wrong.

I didn't labor quickly enough or like, the way my body is shaped is wrong for birth; maybe I didn't do enough of this stretch or, I wasn't in touch with Ethan enough during the labor process. Everyone I know, this works out some way. And so why didn't it work out for me?  The answer was me. 

Julia: But some of those same late night, spiraling internet binges, while they didn’t bring answers, did eventually bring her closer to something she actually needed-- connection.  

Katherine: Well I just remember the experience of other people who had lost a baby, just feeling like oxygen. 

Julia: So she breathed. She breathed in all she could get, because along with recovering, searching, and grieving, Katherine was also still mothering… 

Katherine: I worried about him all the time. Like, I worried that I did the wrong thing and I wonder what's going on with him. And like, yeah, that's parenting. Like, it's not all that parenting is, right? Cause you know, it's not all negative, like worrying, we're proud of him too, thinking that he was beautiful… yeah, all those things, um, definitely existed. 

Julia: Even though Katherine and Neil were parenting, there was no living child. She says that meant other people didn’t know they were parenting in this unusual way. They didn’t acknowledge it.  They couldn’t see it.  She felt invisible. 

Katherine: It's not the same type of parenting, but it's like the only version that I had.  

Julia: As time went on, Katherine would walk down to the Potomac River. It’s a short stroll, maybe 8 minutes. She didn’t really want to be seen, or talk to most people. But there she’d listen. To the birds. Blue Jay’s in particular. She thought of them as Ethan’s bird. 

Sometimes, she’d yell something out to the river. Whatever the mood called for. Other times, she’d even picture herself in the river. 

Katherine: I just felt like the rock at the bottom of the river, like, just like fully heavy, sunk down and like wanting to be a leaf floating on the surface and playing and, um, and being with him and like Ethan being the water. 

Julia: Back at the house, uphill from the Potomac, Katherine still hadn’t packed up Ethan’s room. So, on occasion she’d sit in there. And, surrounded by all his things, she’d write him notes. 

Katherine: I really miss you today. This is what happened. I wish you had been there. And sometimes it’ll be more poetic but oftentimes it’s just sort of sharing  about what's going on here. 

Julia: The listening and the yelling and the writing… they helped. But, often exactly when she started to feel better, she’d be interrupted by doubts. 

[MUSIC up and under]

Katherine: I had one, like,  relatively momentous day. 

Julia:  She went and worked on the farm, by herself. 

Katherine: It was down in the lower field trying to like rescue all the carrots from the intense weeds that had grown up that year. 

Julia: And there, surrounded by weeds, she felt like she had purpose. She almost, maybe felt happy, but that triggered a nagging question, one that she kept wrestling with.

Katherine: Like, wow, how can I, how can I, how can this be? Like, how can I be happy and gutted? And like, how can it all be, exist at the same time? 

Julia: The pain and the beauty. She kept wrestling.  It was exhausting. So at some point, her grip loosened. Katherine says that year, the year after Ethan died was actually a beautiful time for her and Neil in some ways, everything else stripped away, just the two of them, together… they had to let go of what they thought they knew.  

[Music out]

And over those months, she shifted– Like a cicada, Katherine lost her shell. 

Katherine: How,  self destroying that is,  how, , image destroying that is, like, to, like,  think of myself as someone who's in control and in control of situations and can plan for, like, multiple worst case scenarios, and then to be like, oh, I'm, like, fully out of control, the world is out of control, and, like, any type of control that I experience is like a figment of my imagination. 

It's not like I'm a completely different person now, but there's more, more softness now.  I'm more comfortable with the gray area. There's  more  ability to… to dream about doing something big and hard but not, not getting bogged down in what might go wrong. 

Julia: Do you ever think of those as like, like lessons Ethan has offered you?  

Katherine: Yeah, definitely I think that sometimes it's sort of like these realizations are meandering and then it'll come to a clarifying point, like, oh yeah, this is, this is like, a learning that Ethan has given me.

(sound of walking) 

Julia: This spring, when everything was just starting to bloom again, after Katherine and I spoke, she and I took the stroll she likes to take, down to the Potomac River. She says sometimes, in the summer, the water is so low, she can walk out into the river and immerse herself. 

Katherine: Going to the river really helps as a practice for,  for having a space to reflect and  sort of like yell something out to the river if I feel like it. 

(sound of the two of you talking or maybe it’s just walking sound w/ birds.) 

Julia: In June of 2022, right around the one-year anniversary of Ethan’s birth and death, Katherine felt ready to have a second child. She didn’t let herself get too excited.  She took it one day at a time.  And in winter 2023, Silas was born. 

(tape from the walk to the river with Silas’ voice– “Hi Halo, Hi!”)

Julia: He’s a little more than a year old now. 

Katherine:  He loves balls and loves things that move like birds and the carpenter bees that are buzzing all around right now. There's a lot of fascination with that. Um, and so it's really like gratifying when he's interested in the things that I'm interested in too, like just different things in nature.

Sometimes we'll go to like that certain place and say, this is Ethan's beach. Um,  or like going to the river and just saying like, hello river, you know, like really kind of personifying the water in some ways that feel like fun and engaging for Silas.

Julia: Katherine and Neil have a special spot on the river. A certain place they think of as Ethan’s Beach where the trees give way to a big sky and there’s a steep sandy shore. 

Katherine: Something feels like very majestic about that spot for some reason.

Julia: From time to time, while she’s by the river, that image will come back. The one where Katherine sees herself as a stone at the bottom of the Potomac.  But something has changed.  

Katherine: I think like being the stone feels like less depressing now or something like it doesn't feel like that's such a negative imagery anymore, being the stone is like, being there with the water as it flows by.

Ambi - River sounds fade out over 4 seconds. 

[MUSIC- Theme Music starts]

Julia: Thank you, Katherine, for sharing your story with us. 

[THEME Music starts to fade up]

Julia: This Episode of Mother is a Question was produced by me, I’m Julia Metzger-Traber.

Tasha: and I’m Tasha Haverty.

Julia: Our editor is Rob Rosenthal.

Tasha: The rest of our team is Genevieve Sponsler, Sandra Lopez Monsalve, Emmanuel Desarme, and Courtney Fleurantin

Julia: Thank you to Neil and to Silas and to Ethan for sharing your mother and your partner and your story. Mother is a Question’s beloved original music is by Raky Sastri and Julia Read.

Tasha: Mother is a Question is part of the Big Questions Project at PRX, and supported by the John Templeton Foundation

[THEME MUSIC up for several seconds and then out]

“A Motherful World” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

Julia: One night this winter, I was up late, nursing my new born, Zephyr.  I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I stupidly opened my phone and went down a rabbit hole of article after article about the wars, and displacement, and about mothers mourning their children in Gaza, and I lost it.   I looked down at Zephyr.  His earnest round face as he nursed. And I thought the thing that I don’t usually let myself think, “what world am I bringing my child into?” 

But that night, I reached for a book I keep by my bed, it’s a book of poetry, called Undrowned, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.  

[Alexis Reading from Undrowned (youtube- Black in Marine Science)]

“Are you still breathing?  This is an offering towards our evolution,  towards the possibility that instead of continuing the trajectory of slavery, entrapment, separation, and domination, While making our atmosphere unbreathable, we might instead practice another way to breathe. ” 

[MUSIC- Theme enters]

Another way to breathe… another way for humans to co-exist on earth Alexis has a word for this–a word she uses again and again: motherful. 

Eventually Zephyr and I went back to sleep, life continued, but I couldn’t stop wondering: what would a motherful world look like? is it really possible?  These questions lingered so…I called my philosopher hero, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. 

Alexis: I'm so glad that you've decided to pour your energy into this question because it is exactly, exactly the question that we must live into.

[MUSIC- Theme up and under]

Julia: This is Mother is a Question.  I’m Julia

Tasha: And I’m Tasha.  Julia and I have been caring for each other, with creativity and loyalty, since we were 14.

Julia: Now, we’re raising tiny humans. Mothering on the precipice of an unbreathable world.

Tasha: And asking… What is a mother?

Julia: And all things answer

[MUSIC- Theme up and fades out]

Tasha: Julsie, That story you told about that low moment nursing Zephyr. You know I have a lot of moments like that, too. In those moments of despair. I think about who I could call (other than you!). Who could help me reframe things differently. Help me out of the darkness. 

Julia: Yea, I really need that right now

Tasha: So why do you think of all the people, Alexis is who you called as your lifeline? 

Julia: Um because I think she’s brilliant, and I think I needed to to hear that being a mother is not some small individualistic act.  That there’s someone out there who sees a lot of meaning in mothering as actually a creative and political act.  

I needed to be invited beyond my little house, to a place we can imagine, and breathe life into: A motherful world. 

And Doctor Alexis Pauline Gumbs will be our guide there. She is a poet. A philosopher.  She calls herself a black feminist love evangelist. A black queer troublemaker.  An aspirational cousin to all sentient beings.  

[Music up]

Alexis doesn't have any children. She's not a mother in the traditional sense, but she sees herself as a practitioner of mothering. She sees mothering as this: the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming and supporting life.  And how those practices could shape who we are as a society, how we treat each other, how we evolve as humans on this planet?--

 it’s something Alexis has been exploring in so many different ways. 

Alexis says her starting place was a motherful home.  

[Music up and under]

Alexis: I was a little baby who was born into a context of a whole bunch of adults who were so excited that I was born who were pouring so much love into me.

I have all these pictures now that I can see of this these just like my mom. All my aunties. my nana my grandmother. Like they're just holding me and looking at me like “aaaaahhh”, You know, like they're just like projecting all this love into my face and, each one of them just holding me, holding me, holding me, holding me, just like holding this tiny being. 

Alexis:  I mean, my mom talks about how she used to just talk to her belly before I was even born about the beautiful, loving impact, whoever this person was, was going to have on the world.

[Music fades out]

Julia: And when her mom,  gave birth, she experienced a total transformation– of her body, of her life. Like most every mother experiences. 

But, here’s the thing, one of Alexis’s big points…  Moms aren’t the only ones who can be transformed by love. Alexis says her dad was "motherful," too. She has tons of pictures of her dad beaming at her little face, and holding her tiny body too.  Anything she was interested in, her dad was right there for it: whether it was cartoons when she was a kid or books she was reading in grad school, he'd read, he'd learn, he'd dive in with full curiosity.  She says he allowed his whole world to be changed by her.

Alexis: That form of meeting me where I am and seeing me as someone who he's trying to care for as a parent, but also somebody who has something to teach him, right?

I think that's actually what makes it a motherful relationship as opposed to, um, a patriarchal property relationship with my dad, which I'm, I'm really grateful for.

Alexis: But then when I got to be of the age to be able to be witnessing these stories, the stories in the news, the, um, narratives in the movies and in the TV shows, the rhetoric of the politicians. There was this huge dissonance and I was like, well, how come they don't see the love that I see?

[MUSIC]

JULIA: Alexis was born in 1982.  

After a time of progress–of the civil rights movement, black power, the women’s movement–Alexis says she was born into an era of political backlashes against these movements.  Not just in the US, also around the whole world  – against anti-colonial revolutions. 

Alexis: All of those things are examples that say the world could be different. there could be a different way. 

Julia: Conservative forces of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, didn’t want it a different way.  And caught in the crossfires of these backlashes, were mothers, specifically black mothers, who were being demonized.  She says it was a global phenomenon, part of “population control”– a story that says poor women and women of color should not give birth. 

In the US, President Reagan campaigned and won, using the mythical image of the “Welfare Queen” to promote slashing social safety nets. 

​​Alexis: As if there really were so many people getting rich off of welfare (laughs) which never was true. Right, but was very important for Ronald Reagan's platform of creating an anti-social economy.

What you see in the political rhetoric boils down to the criminalization of black mothers, the taking away of black children from their mothers, the idea that there's such a thing as a quote unquote culture of poverty. 

Julia: And this rhetoric shaped policy:  government solutions to the public health crises like poverty and addiction, were–instead of investing in communities– to wage proverbial war on them.

Alexis: We gotta have a war on drugs. We gotta have a war on poverty. It's really admitting all we know how to do is war.  

Julia: And this is not an aberration in our society, Alexis says. 

Alexis: War itself is normative. It's happening all the time.

 Julia: And so in the midst of all of this… 

Alexis:  Enter a little baby named Alexis Pauline Gumbs and a lot of other babies. Yeah. 

[MUSIC]

Julia: So, in her home and in her community, Alexis is living in a fiercely loving, motherful world. But elsewhere–she’s hearing this rhetoric and seeing wars – wars on Black families, on people like her.  Something doesn't add up.

Alexis: I'm pretty well positioned to recognize a lie that's being told about me and everyone I love repeatedly. And that honestly is my birth as a writer because I started writing all these praise poems

Julia: gushing about those people who loved her with all of that motherful love: her mother, her nana, her aunties, her dad.  She said writing was a way tell a different story than the one the media was telling. 

A story about how amazing these black women are, and how  love is the most important thing. 

Alexis: And that because it's the most important thing, this is where we put our energy and how can we grow that? And how can we support that? And could it be possible that love fills the whole space? 

Julia: Could it be possible? Her writing opened her up to a whole world of stories and ideas.

Alexis: I started reading all these things, texts that my parents put into my hands, um, it was like, oh, mothering, oh, okay, the mother daughter things, like these, these are primary themes that Black feminist writers keep coming back to.

Julia: Black feminist writers like Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, June Jordan, Hortens Spillers, … 

Alexis: And all through school, whatever I thought I was studying, at some point it came back to like, oh, it's mothering, you know, like this, this is, This is about me wanting to understand my own mother and her mother and their relationship across space as a diasporic family, you know, migrating from the Caribbean.

But it's not what I first thought it was. I thought like, oh no, I, I just, I just aesthetically loved this. I just, I just happened to always be reading books about this. Um, I consider myself a relatively self reflexive person, but I still think that we often don't know what we're doing and why we're drawn to what we're drawn to.

Julia: Alexis was drawn to something underneath those narratives: Love. The question of love. The possibility of love.  the black feminist tradition finally gave her the name for the kind of transformative love she had experienced and was inadvertently studying, seeking out…  

Alexis: This name, the name mother, the actions that could be understood as mothering and motherful, the life giving actions that happen and must happen in a society are at the center of the Black Feminist Project. It offered a language of mothering and politicized mothering.  

Mothering is an instinct, yes, but it's also a practice. It can be taught. And this is, this is part of the idea that, oh, everybody can participate in mothering. Not just people who have given birth, not just people who are raising a specific set of people in their household, but it's actually something that if it shaped our whole society would place explicit priorities on what is the most life giving choice? What is the most nourishing choice for the collective? What is it that sustains us for the long term? 

Julia: When society shapes itself around that nourishing choice for the collective, Alexis says that’s mother-ful. 

And this word, motherful–it’s a black feminist word Alexis first heard through an organization called the Sisterhood of Black single mothers, based in Brooklyn. They coined the term in 1986, when Khadijah Matin said 

Alexis: Don't call our households fatherless households. Name what is here. We are motherful households, right? That was a political intervention that they used.

Julia: Making the word mother active–Motherful—mothering– it’s political. As opposed to something passive, or even taken as a given like motherhood.  It’s a reclamation.  Because, as Alexis learned from her research, that word, Motherhood has a painful political history.  

Alexis: You could relate to motherhood as a status, right? It's a status that certain people have. How do you, how do you get motherhood? Well, you become a mother because you're, because of who you're raising, because you gave birth,

It's a status that certain people are given, but it actually seems to show up more as a status that people are denied.

Julia: That status of motherhood was denied to people like her ancestors who were enslaved–and reserved for white women. Even as black enslaved people were doing the mothering. 

Alexis: The labor of actually keeping the children alive was outsourced in non consensual enslaved labor forms.  And the  status of mother was not something that gave safety or gave access to stay in connection to enslaved people who mothered. The status of mother was what proved that the next generation could also be enslaved.

So this idea of motherhood as a status becomes so complicated and part of what complicates it is the fact that the actual work of mothering, the labor of keeping the people alive is dispersed

Julia: Enslaved people  had to find ways  to mother each other, regardless of biology, in order to survive.  

[Music]

Julia: Mothering in these conditions, affirming life when survival seems impossible? Alexis says THIS WAS revolutionary. And continues to be. 

[Music]

3 seconds silence after music

[Mid-Roll]

1 second silence before music

[MUSIC]

Julia: One day about 15 years ago Alexis was talking over skype to her friend, poet and journalist Maia Williams. Maia was in Cairo working as a community organizer with ex-child soldiers, and she was sharing stories about mothers she’d been working with there and in Israel and Palestine, the way the strength of their commitment to peace and justice just lit up the society. It was so powerful. 

And Alexis and Maia landed on this term: Revolutionary Mothering. 

[MUSIC cuts.]

So they turned to other mothers– writers and thinkers and collected essays into a book.

Julia: They make a claim that they say should be obvious.  In order to live well on this planet, to sustain and support our evolving species, to live in a society where people help create each other instead of destroy each other– we need to look at the practice of mothering–  we need to look to the expertise of people who have dedicated their lives to raising children, to feeding communities. 

[M/Other tape– Alexis reading from Revolutionary Mothering]

Alexis: The radical potential of the word mother comes after the M.  It is the space that other takes up in our mouths when we say it.  We are something else. We know it from how fearfully institutions wield social norms and try to shut us down.  We know it from how we are transforming the planet with our every messy step toward making life possible. 

Mamas who unlearn domination by refusing to dominate their children. Extended family and friends. community caregivers, radical child care collectives, all of us, breaking cycles of abuse by deciding what we want to replicate from the past and what we urgently need to transform. We are M. Othering. 

Julia: So, you're making me think about this word revolutionary.  A lot of people, when they hear that, might be like, Okay, wait, a revolution? That's like something where you overthrow a government. How is this revolutionary? 

Alexis: Yeah. It's a completely transformed relation. It does mean that everything could be different.There's a roundness, right? There's a roundness in revolve and revolution. There's, it makes you think about orbit.

It makes you think about the roundness of being a planet, which is different than the linearity of, Um,  and the narrowness of a small definition of what it means to be alive that's about dominate or be dominated, right? 

Julia: Alexis says its also, very concretely, about mothers taking leadership to do what is needed for the collective.

Alexis: Mothers who were indeed in the streets and did in fact take over government buildings and were fighting for the environment for the, um, Afro Indigenous sovereignty for people to be able to,  to be in community, to love each other, to sustain each other, but also for the rainforest and the mountains not to be extracted from by the corporations. 

Alexis: They said: We say no war. We say, you cannot bring your bulldozers here.  This is where we draw the line.

[MUSIC up and under]

Julia: And so in this transformed world, where the values of mothering would guide us, what would that world look like?  Alexis says imagine mothering filling every space. Inspiring every interaction.

Alexis:  The verbs that I would associate with mothering include listening and holding and offering and receiving. They would include feeding or nourishing and watering and,... They would include changing, transforming.

[MUSIC fades]

I think the biggest mothering verb of course is loving.We can do that in relationship to each other, and mothering could be how we think about our relationship  with the entire planet.

[MUSIC up and down under]

Alexis: Everybody's eating nourishing food. Our relationship to water is a relationship where the water quality increases because of our presence there. We are Renourishing the soil, the soil that we're in relationship to with the food that we're growing is just getting like richer and more nutritious.

The worms in there are super happy. All of that And, um, What we're learning, we're learning in an intergenerational way. Like we're really learning together to make this a more nourishing situation for all of us,

Alexis: The tiniest people who are not using spoken language yet, the elders who have seen a lot in their lives all have something to offer. Like that's, that's what we have the most to learn from. So I see a really rich possibility when I think about, what would a motherful future be?

Julia: And it exists in the present, there are motherful realities all around us.  We just need to live into them.

Alexis: There's nobody who you can find who has no idea what mothering could possibly mean, right? There's an access point because even if what they feel like they've experienced is an absence of mothering, they know what that was that they needed, that they didn't get.

Then now we in our queer reclamation can notice that, Okay, but If mothering is something that anyone can do, what if we did it? What if everyone did that? 

Alexis: The energy of mothering has to do with pouring into something, someone, a situation, a context without knowing what's going to emerge. It's a loving offering. And we don't, we don't know what's going to be, um,  created. 

Julia: As we were getting ready to say good-bye, I was so energized with hope, but I also knew there'd be a moment, soon, when I’d be alone again, and this whole conversation would seem like a mirage. I knew I'd see another news story about Sudan, or glaciers melting, and I’d crumble. So I asked Alexis for one last foothold. Alexis, do you really believe that it is possible that we can reshape this world towards a more motherful future?

Alexis: Yes, yes. One, we have to, right? there's an urgency there, but also, yes, I know that it’s possible, you know, sometimes some people are like, you have more faith in people, you know, then they're really out here earning.

But, um, I think that's, that's another part of the motherful approach.

[MUSIC]

Alexis:  I don't, I don't think that my love for this planet is something to be earned. And my love for us as a collective and as a possible collective is not something that, even falls completely in the range of what's predictable. It's a miraculous reality. I mean, maybe that's another way of just, of describing a motherful approach, really opening ourselves to be present to the miracle and the possibility that actually life exceeds our expectations.

Alexis: Actually, love exceeds whatever we could imagine the experience of love would be. It does. And so that's where my faith comes from.

[Music up]

[Audio Clip of her reading poetry from Undrowned, continued from Beginning:

[Music lingers, then ends]

Tasha: Jules, I’m thinking, could I treat the world like I treat my child?  I’d like to think I could.  I just wonder how that would make its way to the people shaping policy decisions, or controlling our military weapons supply. 

Julia: Yeah, I mean that’s legit.  But, I think it’s about this being a cultural shift– a fundamentally different way for us to understand ourselves as co-inhabitants on this earth. So it requires a lot of us to believe it’s possible and then to shift.  I guess that’s why she calls herself a love evangelist.  

Tasha: Right, and it’s an act of faith. I think one of the things that I’m most going to take away from your conversation, is the way she articulates mothering as pouring your energy into something–or someone–or some place–without knowing what the outcome is gonna be. 

[MUSIC- Theme] 

Julia: Yeah, it’s this huge risk.  Much more vulnerable than seeking control, or domination.  But really powerful in its own way. And what if she’s right and there’s more love than we could ever imagine.  

Julia: This Episode of Mother is a Question was produced by me, I’m Julia Metzger-Traber.

Tasha: and I’m Tasha Haverty. Our editor is Rob Rosenthal.

Julia: Listeners, we’d love to hear from you. It would be amazing if you were inspired to write a review on Apple podcast or wherever you listen! What’s moved you? What do you like about the show? Help other listeners find us.

Tasha: The rest of our team is Genevieve Sponsler, Sandra Lopez Monsalve, Emmanuel Desarme, and Courtney Fleurantin

Julia: Mother is a Question’s original music is by Raky Sastri and Julia Read.  Other music from APM. 

Tasha: Mother is a Question is part of the Big Questions Project at PRX, and supported by the John Templeton Foundation

 “Should I Mother as the Earth Melts?”  (Elizabeth)

Elizabeth: It's incredibly ingrained in us to think about the impact all our actions have on the planet.  I stand at the grocery store and I look at all the different  food options and I'm like, well,  Do I get, like, blueberries from Peru in a cardboard container? Do I get blueberries from Vermont in a plastic container? or do I not get blueberries? Should I only have the local apples? And then you're like, OK, but the apples are mealy. Like there are so many rabbit holes. 

[THEME Music starts to fade up from begining]

We have been taught that to be environmentally conscious is to make quote unquote the right consumer decisions and…what's crazy to me—is that that kind of logic has also extended to–the choice to have children or not. 

[Music opens for a couple beats]

Tasha:This is Mother is a Question. I’m Tasha 

Julia: And I’m Julia. 

Tasha: We’ve been best friends–carrying our questions to the end of the world–since we were 14. 

Julia: Now we’re both raising tiny humans, mothering. And asking: what is a mother? 

Tasha: And all things answer.

[Music swells, fades down]

Tasha: So Jules–this whole question of how someone makes the choice to become a mother–for those of us who have the privilege of getting to decide–it’s so huge, and so personal. For me I can just say there sort of came a time when it felt like the decision came to me, more than I came to it…If that makes any sense. 

Julia: Mmhmm, yeah, it totally does.

Tasha: But it’s not just a personal choice. 

Julia: Right– we are in a generation where this choice, and all the reasons not to have a child, have also entered a really public conversation. And something I’ve been noticing in my own circles, Tash, I’d say the biggest reason?--people are actively choosing not to become mothers?–is the climate crisis. 

Tasha: The idea being that bringing another human into the world - especially a human living in the US – would use more resources, create more carbon emissions, cause more damage to the environment, but also, what world would that baby be living in? If we keep on this track?

Julia: yeah, it’s a huge question– and while people have had babies in the face of horrible situations throughout human history!--this is a new question and very much of our generation. 

Julia: Tash, there was this whole study, in The Lancet, a medical journal, they surveyed 10,000 young adults around the world and nearly 40% -- 40% -- said they were thinking twice about having a kid because of climate change. 

[[Music starts–STEM_Lead Violins from PIZZ]] 

Tasha: And then–there’s Elizabeth Rush–someone who’s spent her career writing about climate change. Before she made her decision of whether to become a mother, she felt like she needed to go to the end of the world–Antarctica–and stand face to face with a melting glacier. 

Tasha: In 2019, Liz jumped on a research vessel bound for Thwaites Glacier, with a deep longing to become a mother. She  knew that this experience  might change that feeling–that maybe, even, the glacier would have a message for her. Tell her the best thing she could do for the world was actually sacrifice that longing to have a child.

Tasha: What was it like to carry that possibility onto the ship? Like, What did it feel like inside of you?

Elizabeth:, I mean, it felt terrifying, I think I knew kind of two things. I knew that it could change how I felt about becoming a mother, and yet I really had no idea how the story was going to end. But I have to be open to if I'm really being open to the process, the creative process, the process of like becoming a human, I have to be open to the fact that whatever I think is going to happen also might not happen. 

[[MUSIC UP, HOLDS, goes under]] 

Tasha: Thwaites glacier wasn’t just going to have a message for Liz. The idea is: Thwaites glacier has a message for all of us. 

[music ends]

Tasha: Thwaites is huge - about the size of Florida. You may have heard its nickname, the Doomsday Glacier–because it contains so much frozen water that if it were to melt completely, sea levels could rise an average of two feet or more. On top of that, Thwaites acts like a dam, holding back a whole lot of ice sitting behind it on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. And, if that should melt, estimates are that sea levels could rise some 10 feet. 

Which means–this particular glacier is going to determine how fast sea levels rise, going to decide whether coastal cities like the one Liz lives in, Providence RI, will exist in the next hundred years.

Tasha: But until this expedition, researchers had never been able to actually get close enough to observe Thwaites, to really understand it, because there was too much ice around it. That ice had retreated, and Liz got to document this first ever voyage to Thwaites.

[Music starts–DOPPELGANGERS]

Tasha: She wrote about this quest in her book, published last year–It’s called “The Quickening.”  The title has a double meaning: on one hand–the moment in pregnancy when the mother first feels the baby’s movements, and also–the idea that our climate is changing so fast–that the term “glacial pace”--doesn’t mean what it used to. 

Elizabeth (Reading): What I do know is that all icebergs are glacial born, the offspring of a parent's dream. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, to calve means to give birth to a baby cow or to split and shed a smaller mass of ice. These definitions of animals and glaciers both describe the moment one thing becomes two, from cleaving, a flourishing, some new start.

This linguistic echo has long delighted me because it helped me think of Antarctica not as an inhospitable island at the bottom of the earth, but as a mother. A being powerful enough to bring new life into the world. However, as I stare at the lopsided straggler, the slab of ice so diminished it's nearly gone, my enchantment with the idea that Antarctica's great glaciers are responding to us, to our actions thousands of miles away, by birthing bergs whose very bodies bear grave warnings, seems all wrong. Because I wonder, how bad must things get for a parent to make such a sacrifice?

[[music up for a few sec, ends NATURALLY and DEFINITIVELY]]

Tasha: In order to be allowed on board the mission, one of the many requirements Liz had to agree to was: she couldn’t be pregnant. No woman on the ship could be–there wouldn’t be a way to get adequate medical care on board, out there at the far end of the ocean. Which meant Liz and her husband would have to wait–put  any moves toward starting a family on hold. They’d talked for years about this longing they shared–and the doubts.

Elizabeth: You know, before I went on this mission, like any quote unquote good environmentalist, I definitely thought about carbon footprints a lot and I also certainly felt extremely guilty about wanting to have a child. 

And yet I would say I was also at some level kind of like, I feel guilty, but should I feel guilty about this thing that is also like a spiritual question or also a question about some of the most like deeply personal decisions a person could make. Like, why am I thinking about that in carbon footprint calculus?

Like, so I think there was always a little bit of skepticism towards, towards that guilt that I carried around. But it—I mean, that I would say in terms of like my feeling towards, the potential of becoming a mother, it definitely had a strong patina of guilt, and concern at the start of, of this expedition.

Tasha: Liz and fifty-six other people boarded the ship at the southern tip of Chile.–it was called the Nathaniel B Palmer. The people on board were oceanographers, cooks, electrical engineers, sailors, journalists. In all, 12 were women. 

Liz writes about how it wasn’t until the Seventies that women were allowed to come on missions to Antarctica. Before that they were pretty much forbidden–men didn’t think they were fit to withstand the harsh conditions. 

Elizabeth: And as I delved into the Antarctic canon, I was like uh, Pardon my French, but this is just like a bunch of dick swinging. Like, it's like, I'm going to name this glacier after myself and then I'm going to go do this really hard thing and maybe I'll die and then everyone will celebrate me.

It was like, ah, this same story again and again and again. And it really struck me when I figured out that the first person to ever see Antarctica saw it in 1820. So that's like basically 200 years ago. And then. it's like we've basically only told one story about that place. And it's a story that is really about conquest.. It's like Antarctica is like broad, white, bosom, draws them towards it and her impenetrable interior is the ultimate prize. It's like really full of sexual violence, a lot of the language around this continent.

And so going into it that’s sort of why I was like I’m going to write about motherhood and Antarctica.

Tasha: The Palmer set sail–they would be at sea for two months. Early on, the ship has to make an unexpected stop, after a female scientist on board starts having sudden, excruciating pain. In the middle of trying to self-diagnose, she takes a test and learns she’s pregnant. But it’s not until they’re able to reroute and evacuate this female scientist–that she learns the pain is coming from benign ovarian cysts–her pregnancy was fine. Liz points out how despite having all the most advanced technologies to probe the depths of the ocean, there’s not even a simple ultrasound on board. 

[MUSIC–Stem Lead Violin DOPPELGANGERS]

Tasha: They start out in January, summer in the Southern Hemisphere–

Elizabeth: We had almost 24 hours of sunlight, for a lot, a lot of the time that we were there. But then toward the end of the trip,right, we were getting nighttime and I would often go up to the bridge and I would try to be there kind of at this dusky dawn time And as it got darker and darker, the ocean started to freeze over all around us and for me, that was like the most magical thing.

[music ends naturally underneath]

Elizabeth: Because one day you're looking out and it's open water and the next day it's opaque and the wave tips that you used to like see dancing on the surface of the water and the wind have been like stilled because these ice crystals are forming in the water. And then the next day you might go and look and because of a little bit of like storm movement, the ice is congealed into these gigantic lily pads that kind of bump up against each other.

And so it was like this really radical transformation unlike anything I've ever seen, unfolding, day to day, minute to minute, hour to hour it was really stunning.

Tasha: Before she got on the boat, Liz spent much of her days talking to people about climate change, and reproductive choices, and how those wrap around each other.  She writes about one discussion in particular, with a college freshman named Diana who was presenting a research project to her about the ecological impact of having children. 

Elizabeth: So this is Diana. 

Elizabeth (reading): “Having one less child is more effective than giving up your car, flying less, recycling, and upgrading all your incandescents to LEDs,” Diana says, pointing to the different colored bars rising like skyscrapers from the base of her graph. “Want to lessen your carbon footprint? Go kid free.” 

I pop a cheese cube from the buffet in my mouth and chew, nodding. None of this is news to me and yet I find myself destabilized, hearing it confidently presented by this young woman. Still, I tell Diana that I've long been skeptical of the cold logic of carbon calculus, sure that there is a categorical error at its heart.

“Child rearing is not just another consumer choice. Having a kid is not the same as flying to France on vacation or eating sirloin for dinner. It's not the same as purchasing a Prius or Chevy Bolt.” Diana looks at me as though I am not who she thought I was. 

“My mom tells me not to take any irreversible actions today,” she says. “That I may want kids in the future and just not know it.” 

I shrug, trying to ignore the sting of suddenly being aligned with an older, more conservative demographic. “Giving up on reproduction isn't the solution,” I finally muster. The words, as they exit my mouth, strip me bare. It's the simplest way I have of saying what I've struggled to own for so long.

“Not the solution,” Diana corrects me, “but it could help.”

I desperately want to hug her then, because I know what it feels like to fear that there might not be any meaningful strategies left. Instead, I tell her how much I enjoyed our talk. Then turned to the next poster. But the ease with which she tied choosing not to have children directly to environmental care haunts me all afternoon.

[Music–SEEDS]

Tasha: Back on the Southern Ocean, The Palmer sails through the Drake Passage, past volcanic ridges exposed by the melting Antarctic Ice sheet; past icebergs and glaciers. Liz spends a lot of time looking out the windows of the lower deck and reading about extinction–about how the damage humans are causing to the earth  is shaping animal’s instincts to reproduce–and she wrestles with the idea that if she does bring a human into the world, their sheer existence would make the world less livable for everyone. Yet her longing to be a mother–persists.

[Music up, then under, and fades out]

Tasha: After a month of sailing to the southernmost end of the planet, Liz and her shipmates arrive at their destination. It’s around 4 in the morning. Dusky and gray. The water is smooth; Thwaites Glacier rises up in front of them. 

Elizabeth: It's very hard for me to describe what I saw because there's like no analog in my life for what I saw.

The only point of comparison that I can think of is it sort of looked like the wall in Game of Thrones. Um, so it was like this really massive ice face. Uh, and I think what I couldn't see is maybe as important as what I could see, which is, I could see probably like 120 feet of ice, sheer ice at times, So we're talking about ice that's like at least twice as tall as the boat is. And we got really close to it, which was kind of crazy. Like we were within like a hundred meters of it.

But crazier, because, just like an iceberg, like 90 percent, is underwater. So I’m seeing like, beyond, beyond the, the scale at which I've like ever encountered ice in any way, shape or form.

[MUSIC–Seeds comes back]

Elizabeth (reading):I've wanted to see a glacier calve for just about the same amount of time I've wanted to form my own family. I've held these desires alongside one another for so long, curious how one might make the other contort, to take on certain unlikely positions.

In my mind, the ice would creak and groan. The ship's deck would tremble. Clouds of dust would rise up into the bright blue vault of the sky. Walls of water surge towards us. Bearing witness to such collapse. How could something not shift?

[~7 SECONDS OF MUSIC BEFORE BREAK]

+++MIDROLL+++

[3 SECONDS OF SILENCE AFTER LAST PROMO]

Tasha: While Liz looked for a sign from the glacier and tried to make sense of all that she was seeing, the scientists on board worked nonstop gathering data, –deploying submarines to the sea floor; collecting water samples; capturing close up aerial footage–to seize on this once in a lifetime meeting with Thwaites and all it holds for the future.

Elizabeth: The captain was a brave person and he like really held the boat close to the ice face because we wanted to use our sonar equipment to see into the ocean and see how deep the ice extended and also to see if there were any like fractures and cracks in the ice front underwater?

So we were really close to the ice and we did this survey along the entire front of the glacier–it took us about a day and at times, you know, it wasn't a gigantic wall at all. At times it was like sort of soft as dunes and there were like gigantic cracks and parapets and like chunks of ice that were just like falling off of the front of the ice shelf. 

Elizabeth: And, this is a moment where, you know, I turn to my shipmates and I ask them what they're seeing. Because to me, this is the only time I've ever seen anything like this. And it's just stunning and awesome. Uh, but when I listened to the scientists talk about what they were seeing, they started to describe it as like sick looking, or mangled and gnarly. And had I not had their eyes, I would have just taken it all as normal, you know? I needed them to show me what was out of the ordinary there.

Tasha: And arriving there and, and, like, getting your face up to it is also the moment you've been waiting for where you might get this clarity about becoming a mother, about what you want to do.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I mean, I did, I had this thing, I had this idea that I was gonna know in what, in my body, what my mind struggled to grasp, which was like, Antarctica can rewrite all our maps, right? 

And as soon as I'm there…I have to reckon with the fact that I have no idea what I'm looking at. And so whatever sort of bodily knowledge I thought would register, doesn't. And that was really disorienting. Like, I'm such an experiential learner, I think of my body as a really good barometer. And I get to this place where I'm supposed to receive the message from this glacier. I'm supposed to feel it in my body. But because I have no previous experience there, it doesn't really register.

[Music–STEM LAMENT–SYNTH ]

Tasha: The scientists don’t have much time. The Antarctic winter is right on their heels–the nights are getting longer, the water is changing fast. And it turns out–they have even less time at Thwaites than they planned. Five days in–the lead scientist notices something on the aerial footage: Thwaites is falling apart, releasing icebergs, way faster than expected. It’s not safe to stay. 

The ship makes its way away from the glacier’s western face, back through what a scientist on board calls an iceberg graveyard. The water is strangely, deceptively still.

Then–the thing Liz has been both waiting for and dreading happens. The glacier calves–releasing an explosion of ice into the water.

[Music ends]

Tash: What happens in that moment to that question of whether or not you should sacrifice the chance to be a mother?

Elizabeth: I mean, I think the best way to describe it is, like, the desire just doesn't go away. I carried it with me to this glacier and, I carry it alongside the glacier, and the glacier falls apart in front of me, and I go back home and the desire is still very much intact.

[Music: SYNTH Stem of LAMENT starts]

Elizabeth: I was like, oh, this is also not the answer I expected. Like, the desire just persists. Okay, I've got to figure out how to live that. Like how do you… how then do I choose to have a child, if that desire is not going away? 

Tasha: Here you are in this moment watching the quickening. Like it's this harbinger of doom that you have pressed your nose up to. And this would be the moment that you would say, Oh yeah, no, I'm not doing that. But you, you do.

Elizabeth: Yeah. (Laughs) I mean, it seems maybe totally crazy, but I like that you described it as like pressing my nose up against it. Um, yeah, I do decide to try to have a child.

[Music carries for a long moment, then starts to fade down under:]

Tahsa: With nearly a month at sea still to go, as the Palmer made its way back North– The scientists and crew members had these long swaths of idle time, down in the galley. 

And it’s there, talking to people who understand our melting world as well as anyone, where Liz got to hear stories that absolve–even affirm–her intention to have a child. 

Elizabeth: I didn't hear from any single person on board say like, Oh, I don't have children cause I know how bad it can get. Um, and I thought that I would hear that. You know, I'm laughing, like many of them didn't just have one child, they had like two children. Some had three children, and I was like, wow, that is also totally not what I expected. 

Tasha: Liz also asked all her shipmates for their birth stories–which gave Liz a reason to feel hopeful–the possibility that a new generation can live more gently than the last–even drive big changes in the way we all live.

Tasha: Can I tell you something my partner said to me when I was grappling with some of these calculations before, um, we decided to become parents, that helped me, he said, um, “yeah, but what if our child actually comes up with a solution?” 

Elizabeth: Yeah. And I didn't know this at the time, but something that I think is really fascinating is that at least three of the birth stories, involve parents who are working in the oil and gas industry when their children are born.

You know, our lives are so dependent upon extractive, fossil fuel consumption to the point where, like, it's really impossible to even imagine these people coming into the world without it.

And yet you're also hearing from the next generation of voices who are doing this really fundamentally important scientific work to try to clarify the rate around which Antarctica is melting so that we can, make active policy decisions that will slow that melting in the future, right? So I feel like you can also, just in listening to those birth stories, already see a intergenerational shift.

Tasha: The ship arrives back where it started in Punta Arenas, Chile. As soon as Liz gets home with her husband they make an appointment to talk about trying to conceive and get her IUD removed. And she writes how now back on land, a fear that had stayed abstract at sea surfaces: What if she’s not able to get pregnant? What if choosing to wait for what’s amounted to a year for some clarity–has actually messed with her chances?

One day teaching a writing class back in Providence, she’s convinced she’s pregnant, takes a test–just one line. This happens a few times. But half a year after returning from Thwaites, she has that feeling again, and this time, she is pregnant.

In May of 2020, Liz gives birth to her son Nico. And, she says, it breaks her open in ways she couldn’t have imagined.

Elizabeth: Anybody who's given birth to a child will tell you like (laughs) that shit is gnarly. Like it's um, it's like a really fracturing, obliterating, intense, physical, gross, awesome experience. And it's like the most powerful I think I've ever felt in my life.

Tasha: As Liz grew Nico in her body, gave birth, brought him into the world, the scientists from the mission to Thwaites glacier were making sense of what they observed. 

Tasha: Here’s what those scientists discovered, on the first ever voyage to Thwaites. The ice is melting faster than they’d thought. Much faster. Bands of warmed sea water are pushing underneath Thwaites. The massive ice shelf hanging off the glacier could break apart, opening a path for more melted ice to flow out–in as soon as five years. Even knowing all this, Liz chose to have a second child. 

Tasha: As we speak, you are in these tender days with your second child and you were so open in your book about what it took to decide or like surrender to this yearning to become a mother. And I'm just curious what it was like the second time. In what ways, if at all, was it different this time around?

Elizabeth: It was really different with the second child. I think, um, in many ways I had like already worked through and maybe worked beyond like a lot of the guilt that I felt around having my first child. 

Tasha: Liz’s son Nico is now three and a half and her daughter is a few months old. Liz is learning to sleep again as her daughter learns too. 

Tasha: What will you tell your children about this moment that they are living in the world? 

Elizabeth: Well, I guess the first thing I should just say is like, We talk about climate change in our house all the time because that's, like, my work is so tied to climate change, that it's sort of like when you ask, like, what am I going to tell them? I'm like, it's just part of the world that they're in. I don't, I don't mean to sound like, ‘Oh, I don't think I'm going to have to have a talk with them.’ I'm sure I'm going to have to have many talks with them about it, but it's also kind of in their worldview from the very start. So they don't have to adjust to it. Like it just is. 

That being said, you know, my son and I watch nature documentaries together, and we also watch Egypt documentaries so like to get this story, you need the Egypt documentary piece. Like so we were watching an Egypt documentary that was about Tutankhamen and because like half of them are and, this one was like, maybe Tut's mask was made for a different person. Um, and so when we look at it, it's like not actually his face that we're seeing. And so they were doing this like historical reconstruction of the shape of the mask and the bones and the sarcophagus and all this stuff. And my son looked at me and he was like, “that's not true. Like that's Tut's face.”

And I was like, “yeah, that's not true. That's Tut's face.” And then the next night we're watching a nature documentary and there's this like climate change moment, which, you know, totally hate the way they frame it. It's like, fires are burning everywhere and the world is ending!!! And it's, and my son looks at me and he's like, “that's not true.”

Elizabeth: And I was like, well…(laughs) I was like, in this case, human beings are changing the planet. But they're trying to make you really scared in this movie. And, like, you don't have to think of it in that way. But yes, we are changing the planet and yes, it is causing trees to burn and it's causing big strong storms. So, you know, climate change is real, but I think the conditioning that we're doing around it is a grave misstep.

I'm not gonna lie like since I've had Nico I think that the future that he's gonna live in is gonna be more unstable than the one I imagined four years ago And that sense of like, oh, I, you know, I want to protect him and I can't, you know, that's grown stronger. But I can give him tools to be flexible, acquiesce control, and try to think and live in a more holistic way with the things that sustain him. But will that save him or keep him safe? There's like absolutely no promise of that.

[MUSIC-LAMENT full mix starts]

Elizabeth (reading):Also this: I gave birth. 

For the first year of Nico's life, we rarely ventured farther than 20 miles from home.

When he got big enough, we biked together, him in his toddler seat, barely supporting the weight of his own head, me panting and pedaling and describing the world. Instead of saying, look at the bay, look at the trees, I tried and continue to try changing who acts in my sentences: “The Tupelo trees are greeting you, the Narragansett Bay swims by.” Maybe if the language I use understands the landscape where our lives unfold as animate, he will too. I'll admit that at first this felt like a thought experiment and not one that came easily to me. But just a couple days ago I was walking on the beach and I realized I didn't have to try anymore to think about this ocean as a person. It just was, and it is.

[MUSIC LAMENT CONTINUES FOR A LONG STRETCH]

[CROSSFADES with last section of THEME MUSIC]

Tasha: This episode of Mother is a Question was produced by me, I’m Natasha Haverty

Julia: and I’m Julia Metzger Traber. Our editor is Rob Rosenthal

Tasha: The rest of our team is Sandra Lopez Monsalve, Emmanuel Desarme, Courtney Flaurentin and Genevieve Sponsler.

Julia: Our music is by Raky Sastri and Julia Read; other music by APM.

Tasha: Mother is a Question is part of the Big Questions Project at PRX, and supported by the John Templeton Foundation

[THEME MUSIC UP, ENDS NATURALLY]

“A Mother’s Tripped-Out Trip to Guilt, Self-Doubt, Ego Death… and Back” (Negin Farsad)

Negin: So, first of all, my body, because it's like a special, interesting, unique flower of a body, does not do well with epidurals. You know what I mean? Not to brag, but I'm a more bespoke creature than that. I can't just do your run of the mill epidural.

So I ended up having to do ketamine and going into a k hole. I was in labor for 25 hours before we ended up doing the C section. And then, of course, the c section, instead of lasting like 20 minutes, lasted two hours. I woke up in the middle of the procedure, you know what I mean? Um, and uh, and that's a harrowing experience when you wake up in the middle of an operation. I don't know if anyone out there has done it.

[THEME MUSIC UP]

Um, hit me up if you have. I feel like it's a very exclusive club, um, waking up in the middle of your own operation.

Julia: This is Mother is a Question. I'm Julia.

Tasha: And I'm Tasha. We've been going on wild trips together since we were 14.

Julia: Now we're raising tiny humans, mothering on the edge of sanity.

Tasha: And asking, what is a mother?

Julia: In this episode, Negin Farsad answers.

[THEME MUSIC Up and Fade out]

Tasha: So Jules wanna hear a crazy dream a friend just told me she had? In real life she carries around this little backpack, and in the dream, she opened up the backpack and inside was all this raw meat and ants crawling out.

Julia: Ugh

Tasha: For what it’s worth. This friend is a mother. And I guess her dream got me thinking about all that mothers carry around all the time, but don’t want to or know how to really look at.

Julia: Yeah, I mean, that sounds so gross, so no wonder we don’t want to look at it. And you know, motherhood never stops. So when do we have the time to unpack this unconscious backpacks… like just stuff builds up.

Tasha: I feel like am just waiting for a chance to catch my breath or take stock of all the changes all the time. Whether it’s with the reckoning with my own body I experienced since becoming a mom, or the responsibility to keep this creature alive, or all the insecurities of whether we’re doing it right–that we can never put down now that we’re holding it.

Julia: Absolutely. Not to mention the stuff we’ve inherited, stories and ideas of who we’re supposed to be as mothers, what we’re trying to live up to– it’s all there, like pulling the strings on our mothering every day, but it usually stays unconscious. Like we don’t even realize how we could be free from that. It just becomes this weight that we carry.

[Music Up]

Tasha: So imagine opening up your metaphorical backpack, imagine turning your consciousness inside out. And just staring it in the face. Well Negin Farsad did just that.

Julia: She hadn’t thought she was avoiding a whole lot. In fact as a comedian, she considered it her job to reveal the hardest things about her life on stage every night–to turn them into jokes. Even after she became a mother.

Tasha: But then she took an unexpected trip– a trippy trip into the depths of her unconscious mind... where it turned out, all the monsters of motherhood were there waiting for her.

Julia: She told us all about it. And this conversation was really special, because Tash and I got to talk to Negin together!

Tasha: It was too fun to do alone– we needed to share it.

[Music Up]

Julia: Hi Negin!

Negin: Hi!

Tasha: It's very nice to meet you.

Julia: Negin Farsad is a social justice comedian, a writer, a director. We love listening to her on Wait, Wait Don’t Tell me…. But she’s done a ton of other things too.

She’s been a comedian for years, talking about tough topics- like racism and religion- elbowing her way into the rarified boy’s club of comedy.

She says the work is demanding. Comedians are on the road a lot. Sometimes playing sketchy places. You’re always hustling, she says. The hours are brutal. You feel like you're on all the time.

Negin: if you're a doctor and you're on call, you're like, that's okay, you're saving lives. I'm on call for like, like show business? It's so dumb.

Julia: That demanding, unforgiving career- comedy - she says it’s no place to be a parent. But, four years ago, Negin had a baby.

Tasha: So, how did becoming a mother change your comedy?

Negin: It slowed me down, considerably, because it's just this whole other full time job, um, like, waiting for you at all hours

Julia: but there was a plus side to being a mom - new stand-up material.

Negin: It was like a whole universe of jokes, you know, um, that I could tap into. And, um, and even when I was pregnant, you know, I remember I was doing all this material about how serious I was about what I could eat. You know, you couldn’t eat soft cheeses and all that stuff.

Negin: and I remember then reading a study where they found that the, that women that were doing, um, heroin, uh, straight up horse, their babies ended up just fine, and I was like, I'm out here avoiding soft cheeses and I could have been doing H this whole time.

Julia: Negin says there’s no maternity leave for comedians. Surprise, surprise. So, a few weeks after having her daughter– after what she describes as a “harrowing” birth– Negin went back on the road – to Boston, Philly, San Antonio, Sheboygan…. Just like before… only now… with a baby.

Negin: I would take her on a plane, on a train, and I would just go to this gig and I would hand her off to a random producer and I would just be like “watch this… child, I'm gonna be on stage for about an hour, I'll see you later.” You know what I mean? It was like, that's like how I did it. And it was crazy because I was like, you know, pumping and breastfeeding and all that stuff on every form of transit possible in every type of green room, they would set me up literally in janitor's closets sometimes.

Julia: Bleary eyed, Negin somehow managed. No one on the outside would have known how hard it was. She just sucked it up. She even created a stand up bit about her incredibly difficult delivery.

She didn’t want to seem needy or make a scene. She says, she’d let it get to the point of breasts exploding with milk on a film set, so as not to bother anyone. Negin says keeping a brave face no matter how hard things actually are, that’s something she learned from her mother.

Negin: My mom is quite glamorous. You know she wakes up and puts on a full face of makeup to go to the supermarket, you know what I mean? Like she never doesn’t look glamorous. Um, and she's really talented. She was a, you know, a beautiful singer, beautiful dancer. Um, you know, and I think one of the things about my parents, which is I think just culturally true about a lot of Iranian parents, is the, the model of parenting that I got from them was like the sacrifice oriented one. Their entire lives felt like a sacrifice so that I could grow up in America, live all my dreams and take improv classes, you know what I mean? It's like they did the most difficult things so that I could go and do silly ridiculous things.

And I think part of what's tough about having parents like that is that I, I'm like, should, should we all be doing that level of sacrifice? Is parenting just sacrifice where you are no longer a physical entity. You're just subsumed into this role for this other person. Is that what parenting actually is?

Julia: Negin tried not to sacrifice anything. She devoted herself to both her daughter and her comedy– juggling those 2 full time jobs. But after a few years doing it all… Negin found herself exhausted, anxious, overworked and in a creative rut.

Then, one day, she got a call.

Julia: Afar magazine, a place she’d written articles for in the past, had a strange assignment for her. It was unlike any other gig she’d had. They wanted her- a comedian- to write a piece on the booming trend of therapeutic psilocybin retreats -places where people take mushrooms as therapy. But she wasn’t going to just watch people trip. The magazine asked her to write an article about her own experience. They would send her to a luxury resort in Jamaica (through one of these therapeutic companies) and SHE would take magic mushrooms…

Negin: I've never done mushrooms before. I'm very nervous about drugs and stuff like that. I've done marijuana And then I've tried to do a couple of other drugs, but I chickened out. So that's where I am, you know what I mean? I was like, impressed that Obama had done cocaine. I was like, oh my gosh, that's very… I couldn't do I couldn't do it

Julia: Luckily for Negin, this wasn’t going be a wild party situation. She says the place the magazine wanted her to write about was legit.

Negin: They have a lot of therapists and nurses and handlers. If you're doing mushrooms for the first time and you're a type A person like me, who's also a nervous nelly about drugs in general… then the then the science and the many people that are backstops to the experience are really reassuring

Julia: So, medical safety? Check. Existential safety? Check. But that whole "inner journey" thing??…

I'm not a wellness person. I don't use the word journey. It makes me cringe. I don't believe I have chakras or that I emit some kind of energy. I don't, like, really believe in healing in that way. It all sounds corny to me.

Julia: But… a break would be nice, she thought.

Negin: It was landing on my plate right when I needed it most, like, right when I felt like “oh my god, I'm in such a rut I just can't get out of this feeling …and wouldn't it be great to do something for myself for a full week?”

Julia: So she said yes.

Negin: … and I really didn't know what to expect

Julia: Negin packed her bags. Said good-bye to her husband and four year old daughter. Got on a plane. And flew to a gorgeous, scenic resort in Jamaica.

[MUSIC]

Tasha: It sounds like a reality TV show. Cause so you've got these like doctors and people who are really going to be holding you. And then you describe like a candlelit dinner when you arrive, and there's these eight perfect strangers, like a divorced dad, an agoraphobic graphic designer, a recovering politico, a gay executive healing from his Catholic upbringing, an entrepreneur, a stuck yoga instructor, and then it's you.

Negin: There was also like, um, a fully practicing Hasidic Jewish man, you know, and then the Muslim comedian. It just felt so ridiculous.

Negin: And everyone who was there was there because they really felt like they needed it, you know? And I felt a little bit like an imposter because I was like, oh, I'm just like in an artistic rut, you know? Like, I'm here, I'm getting paid. Like, I'm going to write something really fun.

Tasha: And can you, can you, um, tell us the scene of what one of the lead therapists tells you what mushrooms were for…

Negin: Yeah, I was kind of fishing around for like, what do you really see this drug does for people. And, uh, one of the therapists she says it sort of just like clears up the horse shit so you can get on with it and I thought that was such a clear and beautiful concept that, we all walk around with a ton of horseshit in our minds, and to just, like, clear that off and be able to get on with it is like, I think everybody's dream, you know?

Tasha: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Negin: and, yeah, and so it was just like this elegant description of, like, what happens.

Tasha: And so the whole retreat is going to run for a week. And the plan is that you're going to take three doses, take three trips over that time. … and little do you know at that point that you're really about to be on a journey too.

Negin: Right, cause I kept thinking this is something that's happening to everybody else and not me, you know? You know, I really, I really felt that way until they, you know, until we took our first dose.

[MUSIC]

Negin: If you want to do a party dose of Magic Mushrooms, you're doing like 0. 5 or 1 gram at the most. That's like, oh, the trees are talking to me, or whatever. Like, I'm, ooh, this is fun. And like, you know, I want to dance or whatever. That's about that much.

And so to start, to start me off, they gave me 3 grams, which is over three times more than what you would do in a party situation. It's a therapeutic dose of psilocybin they call this like a hero dose, right?

Tasha: A hero dose cause you're gonna go like on a hero's quest?

Negin: Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, exactly.

Julia: In preparation for the “hero's quest,” the facilitators set the participants up around the resort in strategically placed lounge chairs, overlooking majestic ocean vistas.

Negin: But they gave us these really heavy eye masks because they didn't want us to look at anything.They want you to go inside. And so, and again, I had no idea what to expect.

Julia: Where do you go inside yourself? What happens?

Negin: I just sort of go into this world of mother daughter guilt, this mother daughter guilt vortex.

The first kind of area was like I was with my daughter and you know she kept telling me not to go on safari and I was like no no no I have to go on safari but I'll be right back and she's holding my hand and I'm like no and she's like please don't go please don't go and I'm like no I have to go and I realized like this safari was like a stand in for comedy because in both cases, you know, you can be eaten by wild animals, but if you're not it's exhilarating.

But that's, I think the feeling I have all the time is that my career feels like it's at odds with being a good mother.

[Music gets space]

Negin: At times my daughter became my mother and then I had these horrible feelings of guilt that my mere existence ruined my mother's dreams because she had dreams of being a singer, but she was also an immigrant and also a mother, and, yeah, so there was just a lot of, guilt … it was actually just incredibly painful.

Julia: and during her trip, from within the mother daughter guilt vortex, Negin says she had a realization. She called over one of the therapists standing by for support and said

Negin: Hey, I just realized something. And they'd be like, what'd you, what'd you realize? I’d be like. Everyone deserves a nap.

And like I realized that just like, I had really exhausted myself with all of this guilt. I also needed to give myself some rest from feeling bad that I was ever born. I mean, that's a crazy Like, that's a crazy guilt to carry around, like, on the regular.

[Music up]

Negin: Coming out of it, a nurse walked me to my room because you can't really like, Use your body normally, um, so they have people escorting you

[Music fades out]

and I take a look in the mirror, at my face and I was just like oh my god And I just look like I was the heavy for some sort of mafia operation, you know, and I said to the nurse, like, Oh my God, my eyes are so puffy.

And she said, yes, you cried a considerable amount. Um, and so even for a professional who had seen this many times before, like I cried a lot, and I think the guilt of motherhood just hit me so hard and has never let go, ever since my child was born.

Tasha: Did you know that you were carrying around so much guilt before that trip?

Negin: You know, I knew that I felt guilty just generally. Oh, I should read her more books, or oh, I should have made her food better. Oh, I should have signed her up for this or that thing, you know. But you don't realize, like, how much it's messing you up, you know.

Negin: I don't know if it's possible for mothers to ever like fully get rid of it, you know. But, um, but

Tasha: but it did feel like a release in some way

Negin: yes, a release and also of realizing like, this is not useful, you know, this feeling is not useful.

[MUSIC]

Julia: After you gone through that huge realization and cry for five and a half hours, you have time off. Like they give you this day off.

Negin: an in between day, yeah. It's just like, yeah,

Julia: and then. You're just supposed to do it again, right?

Tasha: Did you want to do it again?

Negin: I was like, guys, that was hard and maybe I just sit this one out. You know what I mean? I like had a ton of thoughts. Um, I mean, and I didn't say that was hard. I was like, that was horrible. Like, I don't want to feel that. Like, I was so sad. I was so sad, you know what I mean?

Negin: And they were like, “It wasn't horrible. It was challenging.” Like, basically, they were like, that's good for you. and that's when I realized, oh, this isn't one of those situations where the learning is delivered to you on some sort of fun platter, you know what I mean?

this isn't about you having fun, you know what I mean?

[Music up and under]

Negin: This is about you painstakingly finding the realizations, in ways that are uncomfortable. And so for the second dose, I was really nervous. Um, because now I knew what to expect. Also, I knew when the mushrooms take over, you know, you're like in another worldly space.

And I was just really nervous about it. And, um, I think my body was like a little resistant. It took longer for the mushrooms to take over. Um, and this time they gave me six grams.

Julia: (laughter)

Julia: So they doubled your dose, you're like feeling resistant, you have your eyes closed, and then you go back in and you don't know what you're about to face. But you said that there are two things that happened on this trip.

Negin: So first I have an ego death, which is, my trip was like…

Julia: Oh, so just a little thing first.

Negin: yeah, just the first thing you have to do, which is like, an ego death is when you become one with nature, and apparently it's very common, right, in mushroom trips. And I, my trip was like, you have to, you see that sunset, you got to go be one with that sunset.

And I was like, I don't know how to be one with that sunset. Please don't make me do it. But I mean, not to brag, but like, I totally nailed it. Like I became one with the sunset, whatever. You know what I mean (laughing)?

Negin: And um, so I'm, I'm, I'm the one with the sunset and then I come out of my like ego death and I have this, like, hot demon in my body. And the thing is, is like they're very used to people having like hot demons in their bodies and so they even say like, “oh you like might feel like there's like And if you have that sensation, just go ahead and get on all fours, and then theatrically vomit out that demon, it's not a big deal,” you know? I literally remember, calling over one of the handlers and being like, “I think there's like a hot demon up in there,” you know? And he's like, “yeah, go with it, go with it.” So like, and I was like, oh my god, this is so annoying. And I get on my hands and knees, commedia dell'arte style, like very theatrically mime out this hot demon. And, um, and I realized, guys, this is it's like these really embarrassing, obvious things. The thing that the hot demon was that I was vomiting out was self doubt.

[MUSIC up and under]

Negin: The reason I realized it was self doubt is because I then find myself on a clay court in the French Open as Serena Williams and I Like, don't know anything about tennis, so for me to find myself in a very heavily tennis situation with the eyes of the world watching me, um, was very stressful.

And it was, by the way, very exhausting. Like, what Serena Williams does is, like, quite tiring, just so you know.

My quads hurt, like, from being Serena Williams, even though I was just lying there and it felt so glorious to win that tournament.

Negin: Uh, you're welcome Serena. But you know, I felt so happy and I lifted my mask and I wrote down on my notebook, everyone can be Serena Williams.

But just, the idea that there's something that has been holding me back, whether it's motherhood or it's like just years of just self doubt and being a woman, and, um, and being in a field that requires this kind of preternatural confidence. I was like, no, I can be Serena Williams. I have that. I have that in me. We, every, everybody has that in them.

[Beat]

Julia: But this is a mushroom trip Negin is on. And so the onion layers of her mind keep peeling back. She’s not just Serena Williams playing tennis. There’s something underneath it. Another scene, another reality, snagging her awareness, tearing through the skin of this reality.

It was a scene in Morocco during the first weeks of her daughters' life. The first weeks postpartum. A nice scene at first, so she couldn’t figure out why her trip was taking her there.

Negin: And then like a ton of bricks a memory descended upon me , that I had completely blocked out of my mind, which is that when we were in Morocco, I was holding my baby, I turned on a kettle to make some tea, and I was standing too close to the kettle, and I burned my baby's, finger on this kettle.

And I was, oh my god, even talking about it right now makes me upset. I was catatonic. Like, I was so upset that I, that I did this. And it sounds like, You know, it sounds like pretty small right now, right? But when you're a new mother and you're entrusted with the, the care of this incredibly vulnerable, like, tiny creature, you're just like, why would you, you know, you dumb bitch, why would you do that?

After that happened I came back to New York and I just had all kinds of anxiety I thought I was gonna accidentally let go of the stroller in the middle of traffic, I always thought I was gonna drop her.

Negin: I was so upset, but my brain had completely blocked this memory and I had to re-experience my baby getting burned, like, the trip made me remember this. And, I pulled the nurse over and I just kept saying to her, “I just made a mistake. She was a baby and I just made a mistake and parents make mistakes.” And it's funny because the therapist, they have no fucking idea what you're talking about, right? But they're like, they're like, “That's right. Yes, you made a mistake and you need to forgive yourself, dude.”

And so the, the, the trip really wanted me to do that, to, to forgive myself. And I lifted my eye mask and I wrote down a note. And the note was, Parents make mistakes. Which, again, so obvious. It is written on a coffee mug somewhere. Um, but it was something I needed to understand. You know, in my bones.

[MUSIC UP and under]

Negin: We would have these like two or three hour integration meetings the morning after and everyone would sort of like describe parts of their trip and what they learned and you know, the therapist would guide us into kind of like, how are you gonna take this into your life, you know, and It was just, It was so, sort of beautiful to hear this really eclectic group of strangers go through, um, every type of love that there is- you know, about their sisters, their parents, their dog, their kids- and how that has affected them.

And it's like everyone is just a product of love and experiences love and then that love is actually very painful.

Julia: Mmhhmmm.

Negin: It's like, it's this incredible thing and it is laced with the possibility of loss, you know? And fear. It's just loss and fear and love are just in this, like, delightfully horrible stew, and like, and we consume it every day.

[MUSIC ends ]

Julia: And so, I feel like you're probably in a really different place going into the third round. Because yes, they required you to do it a third time like, how can I discover anything else? Like, I've gone to the depths of guilt with my daughter, with my mother, I've vomited the demon of self doubt, I've become Serena Williams. I've gone into repressed memories and discovered that it's okay to make mistakes

Negin: I know, I was like, I got all the messages, you know?

Julia: Thanks. Um, but then one of the therapists was asking you about birth, cause that's a common thing that people need to work on and asked you if you had a hard birth or traumatic birth and you're like, I did, but I'm totally over it because, I have 15 minutes of stand up on it.

Negin:I kept saying to her, like, I think I'm good, nothing to worry about here. And she's like, well, you know, it takes about four to six years to recover from a traumatic birth.

And I was like, “what?” but of course, like I take the seven grams. And immediately the first place I go to is, uh, is back in the delivery room.

[MUSIC up]

Negin: And the thing about my birth was that my cervix wouldn't open, and so, um, you know, I jokingly say, Oh, they tried a ton of things to open my cervix. Like, they, they threw a car jack in there to crank it open. they tried whispering sweet nothings. they tried a good cop, bad cop routine. Like Look, I don't care if you open, but my partner here is a real asshole. I can tell you like it, it felt like they took a fully scrambled Rubik's Cube, threw it in my vagina, and then tried to solve that Rubik's Cube, right?

So I have all these like joke things about what they did to open my cervix, but the reality of that period, which in stand up, I kind of address quite breezily, was that like, for about 17, 18 hours I was really tortured, right? Like I, I, I wasn't taking anything for the pain. It was actually far more painful than the contraction. So if you've experienced a contraction, imagine whatever's worse than that pain wise.

After, like, 18 hours or something of going through that. The doctor comes in and she's just like, Wow, you have a really high pain threshold. And I was like, um, I mean, yeah, I'm a comedian, so that tracks.

[Music Up]

Negin: I’m one of those people, you know, I've suffered chronic migraines for a long time

[Music fades and ends naturally]

and I've just learned to like act like everything's fine because I don't want to seem like I'm needy. I don't want to seem like I'm unreliable. I don't want to seem like I'm someone who gets a migraine and then can't work.

So I push through and that has been my mentality. It's also coming from immigrant parents. It's like what we do. And I've learned to push through a lot of pain and that's what I was doing in this pregnancy.

Negin: I think if I had been taking care of myself or admitting what I needed, I would have been like, I need some, I need some pain meds. I need an epidural. I need whatever, you know, you got to stop doing this. I'm, it's like killing me. but I didn't do that. I just acted like everything's fine, you know, while it was really horrible.

Tasha: And then, and this trip, you really are reliving what you just told us.

Negin: So, the therapist who had asked about my traumatizing birth, um, she was in the vicinity. And I remember I'm in the delivery room and I'm in a ton of pain, and I, pull up my mask and I say to the therapist, “just can you tell them to give me the epidural? Can you just please tell them to give me the epidural?”

And she said, “the nurse is standing right here. Well, like, why don't you ask her yourself?” Because one of the principles in therapy is to kind of rewrite a traumatic event in a way that would have been better for you. And, um, and so I say to the nurse, can you please give me an epidural?

And then, and then so she does. So you know, like in this trip space…I'm seeing the doctors, the nurses, all these people standing around me and I, and I say to the therapist, I said, “Oh, they didn't know I was in pain because I never told them.” (cries… silence) Sorry. (crying)

Negin: But yeah, I never told them. And so I, I just kept saying to her, like, um, “you know what? I forgive them. They didn't know. And I, I didn't say anything and I, I forgive them.” Like, I just kept saying that, you know? And, it was like awesome because that happened.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

Negin: I ended up feeling, like, super victorious, and elated, and so light and airy, and I just, like, I literally pictured myself as Napoleon for some reason in that one portrait where he's got his, like, knee slightly cocked, and I, I just, like, looking upon this war, this battle that I had won, and, um, and I'm in Versailles, I don't even know if Napoleon lived in Versailles, but anyway, um, I'm in Versailles, and I'm just, like, living it up and it was just, I was just in a light and airy place and um, and it, I, I remember feeling like liberated, liberated, um, for that entire experience that I had been carrying around for over four years.

[Music up and begins to fade]

Negin: I remember looking at my phone because I was like, I better note what time it is where I was liberated, like my phone has a picture of my daughter on it. And, I was like, oh my god, my daughter is telling me that it's 2:40 p. m. And it's, and I'm liberated. I remember writing down, “2:40 p.m. liberation point” and then I crossed that out. I was like, no, I'm not going to understand what that means. And then I wrote down “2:40 P.M. O'clock liberation point.” And I was like that, then now I'll understand, now I'll understand.

Um, through stand up, I was suppressing how actually painful it was, because I wanted to get jokes out of it. Which I still think, and I, which I still do, and I think those jokes are good, and I believe in them. But there is something about stand up that flattens your experience, by necessity, right?

Tasha: Right

Negin:So, it was good to finally be able to like admit that it was incredibly painful and then to let it go.

[BEAT]

Tasha: So when you got home, what do you remember? Um, maybe about first seeing your daughter again.

Negin: Um, um, it's funny because she was supposed to do this like dance recital, but she got sick that day and then it couldn't do her dance recital. And normally that's the kind of thing that would like make me really disappointed or I don't know, whatever, and I just remember being like, oh, okay, well, whatever, you know?

And, uh, I was really excited to see her. I was really excited to see my husband. I, you know, the, the entire experience made me really, really, really miss them. Um, and,I remember, the next day or something, I got a call about a work thing that didn't go my way. And, you know, I got off the phone and I told my husband, “Oh, that didn't go my way, but you know, whatever, then there'll be the next time” or something and he was like surprised because normally I would like be really upset and I would like make a you know and be like you know I'd feel really defeated or something and angry and I just like just like, brushed it off my shoulder like it was nothing, and he was like afraid of the destroying the equilibrium

Negin: And he was just like, “yeah, I'm gonna go get a snack” and like he just like left the room because he was like afraid of like he said one more thing that I would get, you know, and then like a few hours later, I was like, “Hey didn't I handle that one thing really well?” And he's like, “you did, I didn't want to say anything, I was so scared, but you handled it so well.”

[MUSIC]

I think that, you know, that was really incredible to see me be able to do that.

Julia: As we were about to end our conversation, I couldn’t stop thinking about something. Negin said she had been taught being a mother means sacrifice. She learned it from watching her mom: Don’t take naps. Don’t make mistakes. ... she even said she felt guilt about her very existence because of what it had cost her mother.

And then she has an experience like no other she’s ever had and in the process she gains a new understanding, a new perspective

Julia: Did you ever talk to your mom about that? Like, just even reflect that back or ask her anything after you came back from, you know This experience and kind of looked at that guilt more?

Negin: Well, the, I grew up like never to really telling my parents stuff. Like, you know, I had a lot of rules and I lived a little bit of a double life. But the crazy thing is, after doing this trip, I told them the entire thing.

Originally, I told them I was just going to write a regular travel piece for a magazine. I didn't explain anything. And then afterwards, I was like, you know what I was doing there? And I told them, like, mushrooms, this, that, you know, realizations, guilt. I mean, I just told them everything in a way that I've never really discussed with them before.

And, uh, and it was wild and I, I realized, too, that I never really gave them credit for being their own people, that could have that kind of like understanding, thinking, feeling, relationship with me, you know? That they are things other than bags of sacrifice flesh, you know?

Julia: And do you feel like that's stuck now? Cause you kind of surprisingly told them everything pretty soon after. But do you feel like that's shifted your relationship with them or with her since?

Negin: Yeah, I think I think I just so much more like forgiving of them… You know, I used to turn into a teenager the second I walked back into the house, right. And I'd just be like, “Ugh, what's this? Ugh, whatcha doing with that mom? Why?” Like, and I'm a dick, like just a full dick, and I don't know why I do that. Right. And I feel like I've, I've really, like, stopped doing that, um, since the mushrooms and since having, like, a real conversation with them about it

My mom has said stuff like, I wasn't a good mother because I was so young. I didn't know what I was doing, whatever. And I'm always like, “Dude, you were a great mother. Stop!” Like, I see her really beating herself up. I mean, and she's like 70 something. And, I'm like, oh my God, is this what happens just for the rest of our lives?

[Theme Music starts]

Negin: We beat ourselves up? And so, um, I try to like, you know, pull her out of it and be like, no, you did great. You were great. You were fantastic.

So, um, yeah, I feel like it's been really, it's been really good for us.

[THEME MUSIC UP and then under]

Julia: It's been so lovely to get to talk to you.

Tasha: Thank you so, so, so much.

Negin: Yeah, thank you guys. This was super fun.

[Theme Music Up and under]

Julia: This has been Mother is a Question. I'm Julia Metzger Traber.

Tasha: And I'm Tasha Haverty. Our editor is Rob Rosenthal.

Julia: The rest of our team is Genevieve Sponsler, Sandra Lopez Monsalve, Emmanuel Desarme, and Courtney Fluerantin.

Tasha: Our music is by Raky Sastri and Julia Reed. Other music by APM.

Julia: Mother is a Question, is part of the Big Questions project at PRX and supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

[Music up until end]

“Mother is a Song” (Sarah Bryan)

Tasha: So Jules–wanna jump in a time machine with me?

Julia: Uh yes, where are we going?

Louvin Brothers: This song here is a very favorite song of ours and seems to be a favorite of everybody's. And we’d like to do it today and dedicate to all the mothers here and everyone who wanted to hear it…(fades down under) 

Tasha: What if I told you that a hundred years ago in the U.S.–in the early days of recorded music–a lot of the songs people were listening to were about one particular person–mother.

Julia: I probably wouldn’t believe you. 

God bless her because she would go hungry that I might eat. And her wish today would be that I have more  than she…God bless her because countless are the steps that she has walked from my bed to mine, when in cold winter nights when from illness or for water I would cry. God bless her because when I was a little helpless child…. (FADE DOWN)

Tasha: There was a time when Mother was at the center of so much American music–this curious window, from the twenties to the fifties–which is when the Louvin Brothers, who we’re hearing now, recorded this song.

God bless her because she has deprived herself of many privileges, in her sincere efforts to help all dreams in my young and eager heart to come true. Godbless her because…

Julia:  So why were so many musicians singing about mama back then? What world was that?

Tasha: These songs really are a portal to a different world, but they also get straight to the heart of a connection–and a LONGING–so deep it transcends time and space. 

God bless her because she is. My mother. [MUSIC OUT]

Julia: So…let’s go!

[THEME SONG COMES UP, SUSTAINS ~14 SECONDS, AND UNDER:]

Tasha: This is Mother is a Question. I’m Tasha

Julia: And I’m Julia. We’ve been best friends–making up songs together–since we were 14

Tasha: Now we’re both raising tiny humans–mothering

Julia: And asking: what is a mother?

Tasha: And these songs answer.

[THEME SONG GOES FOR ~14 sec MORE, FADES OUT UNDER:]

Tasha: So Jules, as you know when I feel estranged from my own life or fellow humans music is my way back in. And I especially love listening to old, even weird, recordings…

Julia: I know you do

Tasha:because they remind me that the questions I have are the questions people have always been asking.

And it was actually right around when I became a mother that I stumbled on these “mother” songs. This production company, Dust to Digital, had unearthed a bunch of recordings and they totally blew my mind–it felt too bizarre and beautiful to be true, all these mother songs out there.  And the collection Dust to Digital released is actually just the tip of the iceberg–there are so many of these mother songs! But they’re on the verge of being forgotten.

Julia: Wow, I had no idea.  I’m just thinking about the music I hear on the radio and I can’t think of a single song about moms. 

Tasha: So for this episode, we’re traveling to a place and time when mother was the muse–when thinking about Mother was the way for musicians to make sense of what it meant to be alive. Back when musicians in the U.S. were constantly singing about “the one who’s always true” as one of these songs goes.

Tasha: We’re going to listen to a lot of music. And I’ll be DJ. So let’s start with the oldest record we’ll be listening to–a song from a century ago, 1924, which topped the charts that year.

[FIDDLIN JOHN STARTS, FADES UNDER:]

Tasha: You may need to lean in to hear the lyrics. The record is pretty beat up and scratchy. 

FIDDLIN JOHN CARSON SONG COMES BACK UP: Singing songs was mother's joy when our father's care would leave us all alone. I can hear her voice as sweet as she sang when shall we meet. You will never miss  your mother until she's gone. [FADE DOWN UNDER]

Tasha: And, yeah…listening to this song now…it’s kind of hard to imagine how popular it was. It’s called “You Will Never Miss Your Mother Until She’s Gone.” and it sold a million copies when it came out–meaning about one in a hundred people in the US had this playing on the phonograph at home, and even more were listening to it on the radio… 

[FADE BACK UP AT CHORUS OF THE SONG]

Tahsa: The singer says about his mom: she “was kind and true and loved us all. Was the hand that touched my brow, I can almost feel it now. You'll never miss your mother until she's gone.”

[MUSIC FADES UNDER, CONTINUES UNDER:]

Sarah: it's so archaic, just the voice and fiddle style, the sort of, slow and measured way that he was singing there. 

Tasha: And along for this ride on the time machine will be Sarah Bryan. 

Sarah:I think it's absolutely beautiful, but it's still so hard to imagine a million people buying a copy of that record, which is, which they did. 

Tasha: Sarah is an ethnomusicologist who consulted on that collection I mentioned. 

She knows a whole lot about these songs and I’m so excited to have her with us.

Tasha:. So. This–a record like this comes out and is the idea that record executives think ‘Well, I guess we can do more mother songs.’

Sarah: Yeah, more, more mother songs. This sells. And they sort of took a gamble that it would sell, especially considering how poor so many people who would be listening to that music were, that, that really says something.I mean, it's a gamble that paid off. 

Tasha: How were people getting these records and hearing about these records?

Sarah: Well, furniture stores often sold phonographs early on because, you know, the phonographs were pieces of, big pieces of wooden furniture. So, rather than going to a record store originally, you'd go to the furniture store. Sometimes the furniture salesman was also the undertaker because he'd make coffins too.

Tasha: Wow.

Sarah: Years ago, I talked to the, The blues singer, John Jackson, who grew up in central Virginia in, I guess that would, he was probably remembering like the ‘30s at the time. And he remembered, um, a man who'd come through his community selling records from his wagon along with probably dry goods and fabrics and, you know, household necessities.

[LV JONES STARTS, fades under:]

Tasha: This song really caught my ear. It’s called “Will My Mother Know Me There.” by LV Jones and his Virginia Singing Class. And this one’s from 1928.

[LV JONES Fades back up, goes strong for 20ish seconds, fades down under:]

Tasha: So let's get more into why Mother was so much at the focus–why was she at the center of these musicians' attention? What was happening at this time?

Sarah: I think a lot of that has to do with how in this, this early era of country music in the ‘20s and ‘30s, it was a time of great mobility. So people were picking up and leaving home.

Sarah: A lot of people were moving, say, from the mountains to the Piedmont to work in mills. And this coincided with the early days of the Great Migration when a lot of African Americans in the South were moving to, to northern and midwestern cities. And many people would've left their mothers at home so it should really represented a loss and distance, but also, in some cases, the sort of, you know, lost coziness of home and being taken care of.

Tasha: And the idea also that it's not like today, that if, if they left home for a new city or a new job in the mills, there was a chance they'd, they'd never see their mother again.

Sarah:. Exactly. And. You know, and the people who were living in those, in those days, but were older, in the most horrible cases, you think of the enslaved women who were separated from their children and literally never saw them again. I mean, that's countless, countless families would have had that experience and older people still living in the ‘20s and ‘30s would remember that just viscerally or would know that they had been taken from their mother very young and had never seen her again. 

Sarah: And, you know, people who were separated voluntarily. I mean, this was Civil War veterans and by then World War I veterans as well who'd been far from home in a scary new world. New world, new situation, and so nostalgia for mother would have, would have meant a lot to them as well.

Tasha: Let's listen to another song, and this one is by Jay Bird Coleman. It's called “River of Jordan.”

Jay Bird Coleman: I'm gonna meet my mother in glory. I'm gonna meet my mother in glory some of these days, hallelujah. I'm gonna meet my mother in glory, I'm gonna meet my mother in glory some of these days. I'll tell her how you treat, I'll tell her how you treat me some of these days, hallelujah. (music fades under and out)

Tasha: I really want to know who “you” is in that song. 

Sarah: Me too, is it, yeah, is it, Society at large. Is it a person in his life who treated him wrong? It was it, you know, who is it? I would love to know.

Tasha: A lot of these songs, Mother is, is in heaven and almost has more, maybe in that song, it feels like she maybe is going to have more power up there. Like,’ “I'm going to tell her how you treated me” and she's going to do something about it.’

Sarah: Exactly. Yeah.

Pilgrim Travelers: I've got a new home. Way up in the kingdom. Way back up in glory, keep telling you. (fades under:)

Sarah: Okay, so this is, this is a later record from 1953 by the Pilgrim Travelers, who were one of the really prominent Black gospel quartets. Called “I've Got a New Home”, and it sort of, it follows a traditional format of talking about getting on the telephone and talking to Jesus.

Pilgrim Travelers: Woah yes sir, Ooo Lord, when I get lost, and sad, and blue, and I don’t know just what to do. I go down on my bended knees and I talk to Jesus here when I please and I tell operator to give me long distance and tell long distance to give me heaven and… FADE UNDER:

Sarah: But what I love about this in particular is that after, most of the song has gone by but suddenly he basically asks Jesus to pass the phone to his mother and starts talking to his mom, or fantasizes about what he would say if he was talking to her. It feels like he's just, gets so emotional thinking about his mother, that's, that's even more compelling than thinking about getting on the phone and talking to Jesus. So, you know, the gospel element goes out the window. He just, you know, wants to think about his mom.

Pilgrim Travelers (RISE BACK UP): Goin on, sit down, my mother. We'll begin to talk things over. Ooh, what a time we'll have that day when my God wipes my tears away. Whoa, mother, I know you've been waitin Ooh, I know you've been watchin for me. You know my heels were hot. To climb, but I know you praying for your little child sometime moanin and sometime cryin, but I stayed only till I sat. I love my mother because she, she, she‘s mine. (SONG ENDS NATURALLY)

Sarah: Just, it gives goosebumps. They were just so wonderful. Pilgrim Travelers.

Tasha: So, nostalgia, that's a complicated word. I, I, I remember learning in high school Latin class that it literally means the pain of homecoming. 

Sarah: Mmm.

Tasha: But it also feels like it means, You can't go home again. 

Sarah: Mm hmm. 

Tasha: Yeah, I'm curious how that comes up in these songs? When mother is someone that is not next to you mother is someone that is somewhere you may never get to go back to.

Sarah: Yeah, she becomes a you know, just a symbol of everything lost and left behind and also In some cases, a symbol of what could have been, because she often, in these songs, often will be giving advice to her child, you know, don't drink and gamble, don't go far from home, and uh, the grown child will be thinking, if only I'd listened to mother.

Sarah: So it's a nostalgia not only for what was, but what could have been. You know, I wouldn't be sitting here in prison today if I'd listened to my mother, or I wouldn't have lived this life of sin that'll, condemn me forever, if I'd only listened to mother.

[BLUE SKY BOYS STARTS UNDER:]

Tasha: Is the Blue Sky Boys a good song to listen to for that?

Sarah: Yeah, that's, that's a great one. 

[BLUE SKY BOYS FADE UP:]

Blue Sky Boys:  One day a mother came to a prison, to see an erring but precious son. She told the warden how much she loved him. It did not matter what he had done. She did not bring him parole or pardon…[FADES UNDER]

Sarah: Yeah, this is a, this is a 1949 recording by the Blue Sky Boys, brothers, Bill and Earl Bullock from East Hickory, North Carolina.I think it's one of their most maudlin songs that did go in for the maudlin. This was one that my dad particularly loved, uh, because it was so, so over the top. 

[FADE UP] Blue Sky Boys: Though she had pleaded with him each night. Yet not a word did she ever utter that told her heartache, her smile was bright…[FADE UNDER]

Sarah:, and this is sort of a, um, another trope of this era, but, um, at the end of the song, the mother,, begs the jailer to let her son go, and he does, he releases the son, and the mother dies on the spot. She dies but smiling. So, I mean, she's, she's rescued, redeemed her son, but, uh, evidently, that's, that's all that mattered to her. So she died happy. She died smiling (laughs)

[FADE UP] Blue Sky Boys: She left this smile you can remember. She’s gone to heaven from heartache street. The bars around you could never change her. You were her baby and err will be. She did not bring…[FADES OUT]

Tasha: There's like this angelic quality to a lot of these mothers.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, it may be true everywhere, but it's such a southern thing, too. I mean, especially men referring to their mothers as angels or saints. My father referred to his mother always as a saint. Who knows what, uh, what complexity these women really had in their lives, but, uh, but that's, that's such a thing. So

Tasha: And I feel like it's more than Southern. I mean, it's, it's so classic, right? 

Sarah: Absolutely.

Tasha: Before I was a mother, I thought it was so weird. And now I'm a mother. I'm like, I hope my son thinks that way about me. 

Um, I'm wondering. When I listen to that song, you know, I'm wondering, who's listening to this more? Is it moms sort of loving that portrayal of themselves? Or is it other guys who had to leave home? I don't know how one would know this. I'm just trying to picture who's listening.

Sarah: That's such a great thought, and it's, yeah, it's, I've actually never, never thought about mothers listening to that, but there must, it must have been gratifying to, you know, turn on the radio or, or spin a record on your phonograph and hear this, uh, this laudatory portrayal of your, of your place in society.

Tasha: I also love imagining a world when there was more attention on the mom even

Sarah: yeah

Tasha: You know, when I first came across that collection by Dust to Digital I thought oh Well, that's just because things were pure or you know, you weren't allowed to sing about sex or love But it doesn't sound like it's that at all. It really sounds like a genuine, center of gravity difference.

Sarah: I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it stands for things that people really did deeply care about and, and still do just in different that we just put it into different words and express it in different kinds of art. 

[MIGHTY DESTROYER STARTS UNDER]

Tasha: Here’s a song from 1941. Mother’s Love by Mighty Destroyer, who sings that a mother’s love is the master key to this world. Sarah and I will be back with more mother songs.  

Mighty Destroyer: [FADES UP:]Sure and your mother must fancied her. Try and be moderating your behavior. You must be loving and generous. And your days will be prosperous. Don’t give her any backchat or insolence or you will be punished by the omnipotent. A mother love’s some creation. You never will find a great and stronger affection. 

FADES OUT INTO THE BREAK

+++MIDROLL+++

Tasha: I’m very eager to get back to the music. But here’s another cool thing about Sarah Bryan, who’s here listening with us. Not only does Sarah know a whole lot about these  “mother songs,” that were commercially recorded a hundred years ago, she also heads up an organization called the Association for Cultural Equity which was founded by Alan Lomax. So Sarah holds the keys to an incredible archive of field recordings from Alan and his father, John. In the 1930s and onwards, Alan traveled to the far corners of the U.S and around the world recording folk songs–including mother songs.

[BUKKA WHITE SLOWLY FADING UP]

Tahsa: He’d lug around these huge recording machines that you would not call portable. One of them weighed over three hundred pounds. Recording everyday people’s music on their front porches, at markets, inside prisons.

[BUKKA WHITE UP FOR A BIT, HIT VOCAL POST, FADE UNDER WITH GUITAR]

Sarah: He recorded some of the really sort of foundational for American music, recordings of African American men and women who were incarcerated in Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Florida. And one of them was, Booker T. Washington White. 

Bukka White: SINGING

Sarah: He recorded This song in 1939, called “Poor Boy.” And it's, it's about being sent to prison and the sorrow of being taken from his mother in that circumstance. But what I find so heartbreaking is the song ends with his mother coming to see him in prison.

Sarah: And trying to comfort him and talking to him like he's a child. His mother tells him, “try to be a good boy and you'll be home some old day.” Something about the, the way she talks to him as a, as a child when this is, you know, a grown man being, sent into a horrible situation just, you know, has always just made me want to cry.

BUKKA COMES UP: Oh she said goodbye, your mother’s gonna leave you alone, she tell you be a good boy, you'll be home by and by. (ENDS NATURALLY)

Tasha: What is different, you know, you sort of distinguish blues music, country music, what's different about the mother in these stories and blues songs? 

Sarah: Mmhmm?

Tasha: Versus these country songs?

Sarah: I would say that in country songs, it's more, more often a sort of, sort of one dimensional portrayal and more about a very simple distilled nostalgia. And I find that in Blues and African American Gospel of the era, mom's a more complex figure. There's a little bit more nuance, I would say, in blues and Black gospel portrayals of mothers.

Rev. JM Gates: I want to speak to you young peoples, and old peoples as well. Amen. Uh, from this subject. Yeah. You mother heart  breakers. Breakers. So true. And so many ways you can break your mother's heart. Amen. Congregation: That's the truth. Rev. JM Gates: When I say mother's heart, I mean the woman that…(FADE UNDER)

Tasha: So this one was recorded in 1929, its Reverend JM Gates.

Rev. JM Gates: You can find out. Yes, without a doubt. So why break your mother's heart? Amen mil Lord. Another reason why Uhhuh, you should not break your mother's heart. Your mother's the only one that can tell you just who is your father. And she's the only one that knows. Sooo (fades under and continues quietly)

Sarah: He was a Baptist preacher from Georgia. Just enormously popular, influential recording minister. Um, he, he recorded a lot of sermons and some songs and sold just massive numbers of records. You'll still find his, his records out there with, you know, with some frequency.

Rev. JM Gates: I found that their mother's husband was dead. But their father's still alive. Oh Lord. Why? (fades under and out:)

Tasha: Some of what he talks about mother as like more complex. Um, like he's saying, “she's the only one that can tell you who your father is.” And that's coming from a reverend!!

Sarah: Yeah. Well, again, again, I think that in, um. Music, and in this case, sermon by African American artists and, and ministers in this era.That there was more of an ability to talk directly about  mother and her complexity. In, you know, in, in white traditional music in  that era, if you're talking about an unwed mother, uh, you sort of talk around it rather than saying it directly.

Sarah: There are little euphemisms you listen out for in: Where, um, Where she talks about where she ties her apron, what part of her midsection she ties her apron, it signifies whether she's pregnant or if she can't lace up her shoes anymore, you know, that means that, that she's gotten, pregnant out of wedlock. But Reverend Gates is just saying it right there, which is amazing in some ways and, and also so, so much more modern.

Tasha: So let's listen to another song, and it's from 1930.

[ELVIE THOMAS STARTS SLOWLY UNDER]

Sarah: Yeah, this is from the guitarist Elvie Thomas. One of a small number of women blues guitarists and singers recording in this, um, in this traditional style in those days. Motherless child blues.

Elvie Thomas: Remember the day you drove me from your door; go away there woman and don’t come here no more. I walked away and I wrang my hands and cried (x3), can’t have no blues I (?) song ends naturally.

Sarah: I, I wish that she had made more records. She was just wonderful.

Tasha: Who's the mother in that song?

Sarah: Well, in some ways, this is you know, falls into a standard pattern of wishing I'd listened to my mother or else I wouldn't be in this fix, Mother's sort of this pious figure, you know, don't, don't do this, that, and the other because, because that's, because you don't do that way. Don't, don't gamble, don't drink, don't go far from home. 

Sarah: But in Elvie Thomas's telling, Mother tells why. Why you don't do this, because, um, you know, don't fall in love with every man you see, because that's what I did, and, you know, it brought her heartbreak, and it'll bring you heartbreak, and the, the narrator is wishing she'd listened, because now her heart's broken.

[CARTER FAMILY Song starts, goes under:]

Sarah: You know, the one that I think I love most is that Carter family song. “I Have an Aged Mother”?

Tasha: So why is that your favorite or one of your favorites?

Sarah:  Well, I love the Carter family. And they changed American music. They were just so influential. But the two real stars were Sarah and Mabel Carter. So there's a certain depth that I think that they give songs about mothers because they were mothers themselves. 

CARTER FAMILY FADES UP: I saw my dear old mother, down by a rippling stream. Don’t ask me why I’m weeping. Don’t ask me why I’m grave. For I’ve an aged mother, ten thousand miles away…FADES UNDER:

Sarah: I find so often songs that are told from the point of view of a woman, it's a much more complex view of the mother as a person. She’s a person and not just a stand in for, for ideas in, in the narrator's life.

CARTER FAMILY FADES BACK UP: …I’ve a dear old mother dying ten thousand miles away. Mournful nonverbal singing. Out in the cold world a long ways from home…(fades down)

Tasha: When I picture someone at home, like, listening to some of these records, I guess it just makes me think about what purpose stories serve for our imaginations like because if someone says you know what I want to listen to right now Is this incredibly sad song about a mother like what is that–It's so earnest so many of these songs like there's none of the kind of sarcasm or snarkiness that's so alive now.

Sarah: Yeah, what it reminds me of advice that a friend of mine gave me years ago, which was when you're, you know, you've experienced some loss in life or you're just really, really sad and sort of wound up about it but can't, you know, can't cry, the best thing to do is to go to a really maudlin movie, a sad movie, and cry about the movie, and you'll feel better about your own life once you've done that. Hearing about somebody else's sadness, whether real or fictional, you know, helps you feel better about your own life.

Tasha: So what happened? I mean, what, why did this change?

Sarah: Well, I think two things. I think the um teenage rebellion revolution of the fifties and sixties happened when, um, adolescent distancing from one's parents became almost celebrated in pop culture.

And then, you know, in, in the, especially in the sixties and seventies, the huge ideological divide that grew between generations; for younger people making and listening to music You know, parents were just not as, not as interesting a subject for songs anymore. And also just, you know, sincerity, sincerity became less desirable in music and popular culture in general.

Tasha: I guess, someone listening to these might say, Okay, there's, you know, that's fine, that was then and this is now; some of these depictions of mothers, maybe are best left behind…But is there anything in these songs that maybe does live on?

Sarah: Well, I think it's,, an eternal relationship. Every person is going to have. And that process of growing up, becoming an adult, realizing that you're, you're not the same person. You're not, you're not a unit together, but, but are, you know, different people, you know, ideally, remaining always close, but not necessarily.

That, that so parallels the, the geographical distances and other kinds of distance that this music so often refers to. 

[WASHINGTON PHILLIPS fades in slowly]

Sarah: I think those are, those are stories that are in just about every person's life, and always will be.

Tasha: So let's end with another song. This one is by Washington Phillips. It's called “Mother's Last Words to Her Son.” It's from 1927.

[FADE UP, hit the post with lyrics coming in]

Washington Phillips: I never can forget the day, when my dear mother did sweetly say, You are leaving, my darling boy. You always have been your mother's joy. [Fades down] Now as you leave, and if the words are wrong, You may not be able to get back home.

[Music fades under]

Tasha: Sarah thank you so much I’m so glad we did this. 

Sarah: Thank you so much thanks for letting me be part of this, it’s been great fun.

[WASHINGTON PHILLIPS CONTINUES, fades down]

Julia: Tash, it was so moving to hear all of these songs. And I’ve just been sitting here listening, thinking about what we have lost. Not the idea of mothers as angels or any of that, but the idea of coming from somewhere. I feel like so many of the songs now are self-centered, as if the world begins with us as individuals and they erase the sense of needing other people, or coming from somewhere. It feels like a loss of a connection to where we’ve come from. 

Tasha: mmhmmm

Julia: And Tashi, I’ve been thinking about what mother songs I know–and I think I thought of my favorite. Its “Julia,” by The Beatles?

Tasha: Of course you would love that song! Wanna sing a few lines? 

Julia: Okay. (sings: Julia, seashell eyes, ocean child, calls me… so I sing a song of love for… Julia”) You know, a lot of people hear that song and think it’s a romantic love song, which it kind of is. You’d never know it’s about a mother. You hear how this person the song is about, Julia, John Lennon’s mom, is just like this full beautiful, complex person, and I just like feel how deep and rich his love is.  That’s why it’s my fave.

Tasha: Yeah and we’re not used to hearing that about a mother, I think that’s why people think it’s a love song.

Julia: Absolutely. You know what else is coming up for me Tashi? It’s a memory that feels like it’s from a hundred years ago. Of you and me, from before you and I became mothers. The night of your 30th birthday, we were biking through Berlin Germany, where I was living, and singing–that old folk ballad “Silver Dagger”... remember? Haha your turn–

Tasha: “Don’t sing love songs, you’ll wake my mother, she’s lying – nope, she’s sleeping here, right by my side…” I love that song! It’s about a mother who’s so protective of her daughter that her daughter has to warn suitors to go away because her mom who’s sleeping there might kill them! If she wakes up and sees them there.  Which…by the way, I completely get as a mother!

Julia: (laughs) Um, Tashi, I wonder what songs our kids might write about us one day. I hope they tell stories about mothers that were full, and strange, and complex people–and that someone is listening to those songs a hundred years from now.

[THEME MUSIC COMES UP FOR A MOMENT, FADES UNDER]

Tasha: You can learn more about Sarah’s work you can go to sarah dash bryan dot com. Special thanks to the Association for Cultural Equity for sharing the Bukka White recording, and thanks to April and Vance at Dust to Digital for inspiring this episode.

This episode of mother is a question was produced by me, I’m Natasha Haverty.

Julia: And I’m Julia Metzger Traber. Our editor is Rob Rosenthal. 

Tahsa: The rest of our team is Emmanuel Desarme, Sandra Lopez Monsalve, Courtney Fleurantin, and Genevieve Sponsler. Our theme music is by Julia Read and Raky Sastri.

Samantha Gattsek did the final mix and master for this episode.

Julia: Mother is a Question is part of the Big Questions Project at PRX and supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

[THEME MUSIC RISES, FINISHES NATURALLY]

Grandmother is a Question (Asha & Isis)

Julia: Asha grew up in a peach-colored house with her mom and dad and 3 siblings. And in the basement, lived her grandma– her special person. 

As a kid Asha went down there as much as possible. And her most magical memory of all there: were the seafood parties.  

Asha: We'd have these seafood parties and so she would buy like crab and she would buy shrimp and she would like lay out a towel and we would sit on her floor and she would have a, um, a different colored light bulb.

Julia: It was a black light 

Asha: So we were bathed in like purple light, while we were eating seafood, 

Julia: On a lot of those nights, Asha says, before her siblings got older, it was just her and her grandmother. No parents allowed.  Asha says it was where she felt the safest  

Asha: It felt like being in a womb, like this person just loves me so much and is taking care of me, like she creates a space of, um…. of feeling held.

Music [Theme Up and under]

It was so important for me to feel like somebody saw me and saw what I was going through and like somebody else could hold the emotion that I couldn't. I would not have made it through my teenage years without my grandmother. Like, I, I just simply would not have.

Julia: This is Mother is a Question. I'm Julia.

Tasha: And I'm Tasha. We've been saving each other’s lives since we were 14.

Julia:  Now, we're raising tiny humans. Mothering

Tasha: And asking. What is a mother?

Julia: And all things answer.

Music [Theme Up and fade out]

Julia: Tash, the other day I rushed into my mother-in-laws house, so late, totally disheveled and exhausted, to drop my kids off with her, so I could get to work on this podcast, after having been up almost all night, and she handed me a coffee and said “god, it’s so lovely to be a grandma”.  

Tasha: mmm, what do you think she meant by that?

Julia: Well, she had had all of her kids in her early 20s, and she said she just had too much she still had to do, that she was still figuring out when she was raising her kids.  So, she couldn’t be like fully present with them. And now, when my kids come over, she can just be with her grandkids.  

Tasha: Yeah I’ve seen that kind of freedom in my own mom as she’s become a grandmother (even though we’re not allowed to call her grandma). Like, she’s just so light around my son. And I can see how grandmothering is maybe a sort of portal to the past, like in some ways she gets to be a mother to a young child again, but without any of the stress of being in her twenties, or the baggage. And now she’s arrived into this full person and she can dance in it–literally–with her grandchild. 

Julia: Yeah, It seems like that generation between–that space between grandparent and grandkid–can be liberating, maybe there’s less projection that happens.

Tasha: Yes! And more of a celebration actually of the child’s separateness so they can each enjoy seeing each other for who they are. 

Julia: Yeah. So to wrap up Season 2, we have a story – a love story– about a grandmother, and her granddaughter … how they came to know themselves through each other, and how they’ve saved each other’s lives– again and again. 

Tasha: It’s a story about home. How we find our place, our longing for Motherland.  

Julia: It’s about destiny– the kind we create and the kind that creates us. 

Tasha: And as we prepare to end our season, it’s also a story about taking flight, and saying goodbye.

Julia: And a heads up before we dive in, this story contains reference to violence, and self harm.  

[[MUSIC Starts]]

Julia: One October morning, three years ago.  Asha was on her way to the Atlanta airport, to fly across the world.  But first, she needed to pick up her travel companion.  When she arrived at the house, she pulled up, and there, in the light of an open door, stood a 74-year-old woman. Asha’s best friend. Her grandmother.

Asha: And Grandma had dyed her hair purple. She had dyed her locks purple. And her locks are like waist-length– they're very long– and they were purple.  And I was like, amazing. Let's do this.  (they laugh)

Julia: Asha and her grandma were about to get on a flight to Tanzania.  The place where grandma had decided to move for the rest of her life.  

It’s not unusual for a grandmother to accompany a grandchild through the big moments in life.  Sending them off to college, or bringing them to their first job or house. Think: Grandma guides granddaughter out of the nest, so she can take flight in the world. 

But in this case, it was Asha, the granddaughter, holding her grandmother's hand, and it was grandma geared up to spread her wings.. 

Asha had always known this day would come. 

Asha: And you know my grandmother and I have a lot of you, know I've had a lot of like, individual quiet conversations over the years and she would say to me I don't want to die here, like, I don't want to die on this land. Like she did not want to join her body with this history, this land. And, and she doesn’t say it this way, but essentially she’s like, this land is soaked in blood. Um, like, I was brought here against my will, and I'm gonna be trapped here into eternity, like the pieces of my body, like, she just, like, she was like, I'm not, I cannot die here. I will not end my life here. 

Asha: And so, she was saying, you know, I've chosen the place where I want to live out the rest of my life. You know, this, this closing season, this is where I would like to be. 

Julia: Grandma–we’re calling her grandma for now because as we’ll get to, she’s a woman of many names–so Grandma says she’d known she wanted to live out her days in Africa long before Asha was born. But she’d always known she had to wait for the right moment. 

Mama Isis: I always knew that I would be leaving the USA, but I could not leave, would not leave while the children were small.

Julia: She had to make sure Asha and her siblings were ok first.

Mama Isis: I knew that I was really too attached to them. And so it was an entire process that took a number of years for me um to let go. It was very traumatic to wean myself off of them. I mean, they were actually my life, and I can't even explain to you how very painful it was for me. I was just not prepared for how, um, the separation was going to be such a difficulty for me. I was grandmother -living as grandmother being my number one priority for 25 years. I dedicated my life. 

Julia: And now grandma was finally ready to invest in her own life again. Rediscover herself.  She’d chosen Tanzania. And Asha supported it.  But she wasn’t about to let grandma move by herself. 

Asha: I was like, um, my grandma's going to move to another continent, site unseen.  And nobody will know where she is. Are we going to lose my grandmother? I was like, there is - ain’t no way. So I was like, well, grandma, I'm going with you.  

Um, and she was like, “Uh! you want to come?”  And I was like, absolutely. 

Mama Isis:  She just told me, No. you're not going by yourself.  But I have traveled, I have traveled around the world by myself. So I mean, I was not afraid to come on my own. I’ve been to or lived on 5 different continents. Um, but when, of course, when she said she was going to come, I thought that was marvelous. 

Julia: So that October morning, in 2021, Asha and grandma boarded a flight to Kilamanjaro Airport– Tanzania. 

Grandma was headed to the African continent– the land she had been dreaming of living in, for her whole life.  

[Music up and fades out]

Julia: Grandma was born in 1946 as Gwendolyn, the oldest girl among 9 siblings.

Asha: She talks about having been sort of the black sheep, the one whose head was always in a book. Um, the one who wanted to go far, far away. Like she was a little girl who talked about wanting to go to Africa and

Julia: as a little girl?

Asha: As a little girl. Ha ha ha. Yeah. 

[Music- “Doppelgangers- Bass Stem” (Read & Sastri)]

Julia: In the third or fourth grade Gwendolyn remembers friends talking about wanting to go to Paris or London, and having absolutely no interest. She wanted to go to Africa.  

She says every week she would pour through the National Geographic magazine that came out, devouring information and pictures about Africa.  She discovered elephants, and the Masai, and little Gwendolyn dreamed of going there. Grandma says she's only one generation removed from slavery. Her parents were sharecroppers, and their parents were enslaved. 

Julia: In the late 1930s, Gwendolyn’s parents fled north from Arkansas as part of the Great Migration, along with approximately 6 million other black people from the south. They were escaping the violence of Jim Crow and looking for work in shipping and other industries, and her family found it in Washington state.  

Julia: This place never felt like home.  Not really.  She yearned for a home where she could be her full self.

Mama Isis: I was this really shy person growing up and life used to let things just happen and I didn't think I had a voice 

[Music Starts- “Peaceful Flow” (APM)]

Julia:  So, when she got pregnant with Asha’s mom, at 19 years old, and found herself trapped, in what she calls: a loveless marriage– she didn’t want to just “let it happen”.  She needed out.  Gwendolyn says she left her husband, took her two kids, and went looking for her voice, her people.  

Back in Portland, she found it- and a political home– with the Black Panthers, volunteering for their community projects- while also mothering two children, earning money, and studying. 

Julia: Gwendolyn says her work in the black power movement inspired her to go deeper to her roots:  She got involved with the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations.  Witnessing her community work, some members of the association started calling her Isis, after the Egyptian goddess of love, healing, magic and... motherhood.  

Mama Isis: because they said I'm just such the consummate mother. And it took some getting used to because you don't want to run around calling yourself a goddess. You know, I felt like that came with a lot of responsibility.

Julia:  The name still felt aspirational to Isis–mothering her own two children hadn’t ever felt easy. She says the love was unconditional, but trying to grow up into an adult while figuring out how to raise them- alone– was hard.  But she worked, and grew and learned.  She became a bigger, prouder, more empowered version of herself. 

[Music up for a few beats]

Julia: Then, a wild thing happened.  An unexpected turn.  During her daughter’s junior year of high school, Isis fell in love with a man, married him. And then, before her daughter’s senior year… she and her new husband moved to Liberia, 

[Music out]

West Africa–leaving her daughter and son behind.  Isis wouldn't have moved back… except she had to.  Which brings us to the story of the first time Asha saved grandma’s life.

Julia: It was the early 1980s when Grandma picked up and moved to Liberia, West Africa –  like she’d always dreamt of as a child.  There, she was working to build a compound for her family to come move to.  And while she worked toward that, she spent a lot of her time with local children.  A few years into it, she acquired the land she needed and was so close to making the compound a reality

Mama Isis: but then the war came and nobody asked me if it was going to interfere with my plans.

Julia: Within months of warlord Charles Taylor launching his scorched earth campaign and sending Liberia into a bloody civil war–Isis realized she had to leave. She says she watched horrors unfold in front of her.  She did not want to leave though.  She didn’t want to leave all of the children she’d become so close with, but her family begged her to get out of there, and at the 11th hour…she did.

Mama Isis:  I got evacuated from a war zone.  By benefit of birth, I was able to get on the last C 130 that the United States flew refugees out of Liberia. If I had stayed there, I would not be alive.  

Julia:  Grandma says she was allowed to bring just one bag of belongings out of Liberia. One thirty pound bag. 

She arrived back in the US–Atlanta, Georgia–to her daughter’s house, safe, and alive, but she couldn’t stop thinking about everything–and everyone–she’d left behind. Most of all, she couldn’t stop thinking of the children she had worked with and become so close to. 

Mama Isis: They had no options. They had nowhere to go.  I was so in shock and stressed.  I was suffering, I found out later from what is called Survivor's Guilt, and um, this is a kind of a hard part to relive, um, I used to pray every night that I did not wake up in the morning, 

Julia: But morning after morning, she woke up.  And while this wasn’t the life she’d imagined, by a strange turn of fate, she arrived in the US as her 23-year-old daughter was preparing to become a mother.  

And one June night in 1992, nearly two years after Isis had landed back in the US, her daughter gave birth to:  Asha, which means Life. 

Mama Isis:  Each morning I woke and there was this beautiful child full of life and Beauty and joy and it kept me living. I, I wanted to live after that because, well, there was Asha. Yeah.

Julia: Their bond was instant.

Mama Isis: Her mother would be sitting on the sofa holding her maybe after nursing. But Asha's eyes were always on me. 

Asha: I would just stare at her 

Mama Isis: Wherever I went in the room, 

Asha: my eyes would follow her. 

 Mama Isis: Her eyes would follow me. We’eve all I felt like we've always been in tune with one another to the point where, um, they won't admit it but I think her parents were jealous. 

Julia: Grandma says Asha was born special. awesome. Ahead of her time. She walked early, spoke early.

Mama Isis:  She was like, um, maybe to my knees and I'm a short person, and she was maybe a year, maybe even earlier walking beside me, holding entire conversations the way we're talking now. And people were like forever coming up to me saying, Oh my god. how old is she? And I would tell them and everyone said, wow.

[Music up and under]

 Mama Isis:  So her parents would ask me where we're going. And I said, we're going wowing.

[Music up for a couple of measures, and fades out]

Julia: But it wasn't just how gifted she was, or how much attention she got.

Mama Isis: I've always felt like there was some, something deeper, some sort of psychic connection that we've had. Everything about my involvement with Asha is just special to me.

[Music Starts- Seeds B (APM)]

Julia: Isis says being a grandmother unlocked a special kind of love that she never could have imagined.  She says watching your baby have a baby defies explanation.  So, when Asha was born, grandmothering became her calling. It was a second chance at mothering.  She poured herself into Asha and her siblings. 

Asha: She sort of operated as a, as another parent. I feel like I sort of grew up with three parents

Julia: Growing up they all lived together – Asha, her younger siblings, her mother and father, and Grandma– in a house they called the Peach House, in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Asha has a lot of memories in the house– mom and dad around the island in the kitchen, discussing politics with her; mom braiding her hair and her sisters’ hair for hours at a time.

Julia: And outside the house, on that little plot of earth, Asha says, Grandma worked her magic.  She nourished Asha and her siblings with everything she had… including, her garden

Asha: I have these vivid memories of growing watermelon, of growing tomatoes, and the first time that I ate a tomato that we'd grown out of the backyard and me just being, just blown away, um, by, by me liking it, because I didn't like tomatoes, and then I tasted one from the ground and I was like, oh, this is another world. 

Julia: Asha also remembers the juicy meals Grandma and mom cooked with those tomatoes.  She says the whole thing became a sort of collective project– mom had a role, siblings had a role…

[Music fades out]

Asha: I think that my understanding of food as being nourishment and love, and also infrastructure and community and resistance and power, like, my sense of all of those pieces being connected really came through my grandmother.

Julia: Grandma always told Asha and her siblings the truth, including the hard truth. Truth about the ground they stood on– about chattel slavery, indigenous genocide, land theft. 

Asha: Such that I was aware when I went to school that I was being taught lies and half truths. And so then that connection to tending the land, in our choice, as opposed to having been enslaved or exploited for it, like that was made really early, because of how strong both her political sense and her practice on land were.

Julia: So Asha was aware of the lies and violence of the world very young.  

Asha:  I had a really hard time, um, getting through understanding the horrors of the world and being able to hold it. Um, I just, I felt overwhelmed by it.

Julia: Asha says, she felt overwhelmed by home too.  She says it was high pressure, high criticism.

She and grandma say Asha's parents expected the kids to be exceptional.  Especially Asha.  Her mother, who I also spoke to for this story, says, absolutely.  Asha was exceptional. – she read Robinson Crusoe at age 4, skipped first grade, – and, they discovered later, she struggled with ADD.   Her mom saw this, and as a teacher herself, tried to support her with different strategies– mom and grandma even homeschooled her at one point.  

Julia: Her mom says it was hard to know how to parent and educate such a gifted child.  And her father– Asha says her father saw it as his duty to keep her from “squandering” her potential.  Asha says, when it came to discipline, mom and dad were always a united front.  And they were extremely strict. 

Asha: (inhale) Huh, my parents believed in, or my dad certainly believed in, um, corporal punishment. Like you're going to get whooped if you did something wrong. Um, and…

Mama Isis: or not

Asha: or not. Um.

Mama Isis: Or not do something or not do something wrong. Sorry. 

Asha: Yeah, yeah. 

Mama Isis: I'm sorry. Go ahead. 

Asha: No, it's okay, Grandma. Thank you. Um, and I, for me, as the the heart that I am, the soul that I am, it was really so, so, so difficult. I felt scared, a lot of the time. I felt a lot of fear. And just, like, a lot of lack of control, you know, because my life was… otherwise controlled.  

Julia: Grandma adamantly disapproved of the way her daughter and son in law punished Asha.  This was not how she raised her daughter. When I talked to Asha’s mom, she confirmed and stood behind their use of corporal punishment. 

Grandma says she was outraged.  

Mama Isis: I do not believe in corporal punishment, but I had to try to straddle the line between interfering and staying in my role, you know, Asha didn't do anything wrong, and that's not just a grandmother's perspective.

Julia: While Isis struggled with her limitations, she found ways to channel some special Grandmother powers.  This is where the purple-light, seafood parties in the basement came in.  Grandma found ways–made it her mission–to create that womb-like space for Asha. 

Asha: My grandmother for me has always been my safe person.Um, she has always been the person when I didn't feel like I was safe, like I was okay, like I could see, like I couldn't see the future in front of me, you know, like she, she held that for me.

Mama Isis: I couldn't not be there for her. I had to show her, well, number one, I loved her dearly And I enjoyed every moment. of it, you know. And I could not leave her alone with them. For me, yeah, it just really wasn't an option, but it was kind of self serving as well because well, having her in my life was like everything for me. 

[Music Start- “Lament” (Read & Sastri)]

Mama Isis:So for all of her life, all of their life, I have felt like I have been, well, for lack of a better term, protector, intervener, yeah. 

Asha:  Yeah, definitely been my protector and intervener, for sure. 

Mama Isis: She saved me and I was there trying to save her.  That's about the best way I can put it.

[Music up and under]

Julia:  Despite grandma’s best efforts to protect Asha, things got really dark. By the time she was 13, a freshman in high school, it was all too much. Asha’s mental health plummeted. She kept it to herself.  But her mom found out, and one day, grandma says

Mama Isis: I had went to your mom's job to pick her up and she told me that your granddaughter has been cutting herself. And I remember it, it was so traumatic. I, I fell to the ground in the parking lot because I felt like I had been working, rather diligently, trying to watch over her, and this had gotten by me and it made me feel like something of a failure. 

 I didn't know if I could save her.

[Music Starts- “Sunshine Full Moon” (APM)]

Julia: Grandma realized the sanctuary of her basement wasn’t enough. So, she started taking Asha away from home as often as possible. To museums and protests.  On adventures: whitewater rafting. Zip lining. They even took a trip to Niagara Falls. … Asha says along the way, her Grandma  helped her to understand a few key truths: one: that the world was big and beautiful, two: she didn’t need to stuff her brilliant mind into small boxes.  And three: she had choices. And these truths–helped save Asha’s life.

As early as she could, Asha began to apply to colleges- ones that were far away from that little peach house in the suburbs, and she aimed high.  At 16, she was accepted to the prestigious women’s college

[Music fades out]

– Wellesley, in Massachusetts – on a full scholarship.  She was taking flight.  Almost.

Julia: The summer after her first year at college, Asha says her grandmother would swoop in to save her one more time. This time… in an orange Miata.  

Julia: When Asha was 18, the summer after her first year of college, she lived at home to intern for a state senator in Atlanta. Grandma was still around, now just living on the other side of town. 

Asha was also in the process of breaking up with a serious girlfriend. Asha says her parents have come a long way with her queerness, but she says at the time, it was much more of an issue– and she wasn’t allowed to date in general. Because of that, Asha lied about seeing the girlfriend. She told them she was going to hang out with her best friend, instead. And Lying was the biggest sin in their house.  Her dad found out–

Asha: And he basically let me know, you know, when you get home, you know, that's it. Like you already know what's happening essentially. And what's happening is that I'm going to get a whooping.

I'm going to get a whooping with a belt and I'm going to get all my devices taken away– like my phone, my laptop. 

Asha: So I'm, when I was on my way home, I was like, okay, well, I already know this is the punishment I'm getting. So when I was on my way home, I messaged a few friends who would miss me if I was MIA for several days and my grandma, who is among that number, right. And I was like, so, you know, this is what happened.  I'm alive, but I'm definitely being punished. 

[Music starts- “Doppelgangers” (Read & Sastri) ]

Asha:  At the same time, my grandmother was calling my cousin, who's an attorney, and is a very close cousin of mine, and had that cousin call my dad. And that cousin was like, hey, like, I understand you feel like you're disciplining your child, but she's 18. Um, and so at this point, it's just more serious, all the things that you're doing, you actually like can't. So I'm going to need you to like give her her things back and let her leave.

[Music up] 

Asha:  So my grandma, um, came with her friend Her friend had this, like, orange Miata and she and her friend drove up in this car, um, into my front yard and I had, like, grabbed my, my stuff that I needed to go back to Wellesley and I’d grabbed, you know, my laptop and my phone and… they busted me out of my house. 

Asha: I was so like, flooded with relief. Like, I'm, I'm out, I'm free.  And so, yeah, she took me to the mall, we walked around. (Laughter) That was the last time that I ever got a whooping from my father.

[Music up and fade out]

Julia: Asha says her grandmother saved her life that day, and many other days.  In part she did this by validating her truth.  

Asha: My grandmother's anger has always been protective for me. It always served as an outside affirmation that what I was hurt by, that what I was experiencing, that it was real and that I wasn't, um, too sensitive or too small or, or, or, or,  or creating things or imagining things. My grandmother has been my biggest validation of my experience.

Julia: Asha says she is who she is today– sensitive, open-hearted, and confident– in large part because of grandma. 

Mama Isis: I…..okay, I mean I’m going to accept some of that, but, actually, (laughs) Well, it makes me feel good to accept some of that. I did try, but most of what Asha is, is because of who Asha is. Asha came into the world full of gifts and she is just simply manifesting her destiny. Yeah. I love you. 

Asha: I love you.

Julia: Okay. Let’s get back to 2021, and into that plane flying over the Atlantic ocean.  Inside, a grown woman– 29-year old Asha–and her grandma, her soul mate, sit beside each other.  Grandma rests her head – those purple locks –on Asha’s shoulder.  And beneath them, like clouds, all of these memories float by– Asha’s little eyes, the seafood parties, Niagara falls, the orange Miata… 

And this will be their biggest, grandest adventure yet. 

Julia: Grandma has spent Asha’s whole life away from Africa.  After getting pulled out of Liberia against her will. It was for Asha she stayed.  Now, she is headed back to the continent where she wants to live out her days.  Asha had to be the one to take her there. 

[Music up]

Julia: Grandma’s plan was to live in Arusha, a city of nearly 700,000 people in the north east of Tanzania. But, the weird thing was – weird to Asha anyway – her grandmother hadn’t made any plans for housing. 

[Music fades out]

Asha:   My grandmother was like, Oh, you know, we could just, um, you know, we'll just see what, what there is when we get there. You know, you ask around when you get there, um, what people have available for housing for stays. And I was like, so you're saying you want us to land without lodging secured for that night. And she was like, Yeah, you just do it. Um, and I was like, well, no, that's not what we're going to do.

Asha: Because it's me and I'm used to traveling in the 21st century Um, and so it helped me also contextualize it. Like my grandmother has been traveling abroad since before the internet. Like she has been showing up in countries and making it happen since before  there were mobile phones.

Julia: So Asha took it upon herself to use modern technology to book them a place to stay when they landed.  But pretty soon after landing, Asha and Grandma started their search for a house for grandma to live in. And it turned out, for this process, they kind of had to do it grandma's old-fashioned way. 

Asha: You have to find a person who will take you to the houses, who knows about houses that are open. Like, you can't just go. You have to find person who will take you. 

Julia: They found that person, who showed them house after house. And it wasn’t long before they discovered THE perfect place to live. 

Asha: We walked into the backyard and it was like, this is absolutely it. Like I cried. I just, yeah, knew in my body that this was the place that she was gonna start off

Julia: Which was a relief, because Asha saw it as her job to make sure grandma was all set.  But, there was still a lot to do.  Like, they had to figure out how to rent the place… in cash

Asha: So we pulled out all this cash converting the cash because you have to pay but you're paying like six months in advance cash. And you know, we're also writing the contract for the apartment. 

Mama Isis: Long hand!

Asha: So I'm writing contract for the house, longhand and paying In cash. So, whoo. That was a time. 

Mama Isis: What I remember, uh, is, thinking that, oh, how wonderful my baby is now taking care of me. This little baby is, um, well, yeah, literally, quite literally taking care of me now. 

[Music Starts- “Sunsets in Dakar” (APM) and under]

Mama Isis: She did everything.

Julia: She even took grandma on Safari. Like she had always dreamed of. So Grandma  got to see all of those animals that she had read about in National Geographic, as a 4th grader, almost 70 years ago. She says it was magical. They saw everything-- water buffalos, hippopotamus, They saw a lion eating a zebra, a snake in a tree, and the elephants! Grandma says, while they were watching, one of the elephants was nursing her baby. And suddenly the nipple popped out of the baby's mouth, and they were so close, they could see the milk squirt out.  Life, right in front of them! She says, It was miraculous. 

[Music continues]

And then to end their trip, their last hurrah, Zanzibar. A lush island off the coast of Tanzania.  

Mama Isis: I would never have gone to Zanzibar. but um she took me there She she paid for everything- all inclusive resort- I would never have done that either.

Julia: Asha wanted grandma to be treated like a queen. Like a goddess.  To feel loved and pampered.  So they lounged on the beach, in front of the gorgeous turquoise waves… until it was time to leave.  

[Music up, lingers and under]

Julia: But, remember, this was not a vacation. Or one of their adventures.  Not another excursion on a zip line somewhere in the woods where the two of them would return home together. This trip to Tanzania was a parting. And now it was time to say good-bye. 

Asha: Part of why I went with her, I think too, is because I needed that.   I needed to be able to say goodbye.  I also knew that I was going to be back. Um, but I knew that I had to go to say goodbye. 

Julia: And so, after a rickety flight from Zanzibar to Kilimanjaro airport, and  a lot of hugging and crying, Asha got on a plane, alone, and flew back to the US.

[Music up and ends naturally.] 

Julia: 7, 771 miles away from Arusha, back in Durham, North Carolina, Asha lives in her little house, with a garden, and is busy traveling around the country facilitating and consulting with racial justice organizations, but she says now she thinks about grandma all the time

Asha: It’s a thing to have your person all the way across the world

Asha: Like, I can see things and guess what my grandmother might think about them or Tell her later, saw this and I thought that you might want to know or, you know, did you hear about this? 

Julia: Asha says grandma is pretty technologically savvy, so they stay in touch through calls…They send texts and funny messages back and forth. But it’s still not the real thing.

Asha: It's hard because I miss her and you know, it's just different to communicate via WhatsApp than it is to have your bodies there in the same room, you know? Um, and I see her being so happy, you know.

Julia: The other day, Grandma Isis sent Asha a picture of a luncheon she hosted for her new friends. 

In the photo, grandma stands in the center of the room, beaming. Dressed in a green blouse and a flowing white skirt, her face framed by an orange head wrap. She is surrounded by snacks and drinks, and people.   Lots of people. It’s a version of grandma that Asha realizes she never really got to meet. 

Asha: I've seen my grandmother pull together a couple of gatherings in my life, a few gatherings, but I knew that there were stories about how my grandmother had done lots of entertaining,when she was younger, like before I was born. And so for me, it feels like watching her return to herself. 

Mama Isis: I think it's um, maybe was surprising to you because you've never known me as a single person. I mean you've known me… I mean, I've always been single since you've been knowing me, but you have not seen me live my single life. You've always seen me live as grandma. 

Asha: Right. Right. Exactly.

Mama Isis: You see. I mean, I've had, I've had, I've had your siblings say things like, “I didn't know you dance grandma.”  I'm like, how can that be? How can that be? How can that be that I didn't show you that part of me. It was like, I…I guess I was remiss in some ways, because I was so busy I guess, involving myself with you all, that it never occurred to me that, um, maybe I needed to show you more of me.  There's just so much of me that you didn't see.

Asha:  I'm so happy to see pictures of, you know, you riding motorcycles and entertaining rooms of people and just living your best life. Like it really, it's what I want for you. And it's such an inspiration to me and to everybody who I tell the story. And so I'm, I'm endlessly grateful. And it's like, oh, it's absolutely bittersweet. Um, and I miss her so bad. … miss you.

[MUSIC- “New Life” (APM)]

Julia: Before she left for Tanzania, Grandma gave Asha asparagus plants from her garden.  At that point, They were just tiny, feathery little trees, –they hadn’t produced the edible shoots yet.  But it's been three years, three growing seasons, and this spring for the first time, Asha harvested the fresh green stalks from the plants her grandma seeded–then she cooked them, and ate them. She says she hadn’t known asparagus could be so delicious.  

Meanwhile, in Tanzania, Grandma gets up, at 6 o’clock in the morning, and the sun rises over Mt. Kilimanjaro.  That’s when she most wishes Asha were with her.  She knows that Asha, of all people, would appreciate the beauty of this place.  Of her home. 

Grandma says she made it home.  She’s finally at peace.  Now she’s ready for her body to become part of Mother Africa, whenever the time may come.  

Tasha: Jules, I'm thinking about that Portuguese word, that means this indescribable mix of joy and sadness, like this beautiful painful longing?  

Julia: Mmmm. Saudade

Tasha: Yes. That’s what’s here with me after hearing this story.  And it feels like that’s one of the most consistent feelings of motherhood, actually.  The love that’s so big it’s ripping your heart out from the beginning. And the whole time you’re loving fully and preparing yourself to say good-bye.  

Julia: Yeah. (Sighs). And I’m feeling that acutely as we speak, Tash, because we’re also at the end of the season.  This is our last episode.  And then we’re entering an unknown.  So there’s like a real joy and there’s a lot of longing and missing there.  

We started working on this season when my newborn, Zephyr was just 6 weeks old, and now he’s almost 8 months Tash.  It’s just been a wild ride.

[Theme MUSIC]

Tasha:  We have so many people to thank as we wrap up this season, people who nurtured, supported, and affirmed the life of this project.

First of all our editor Rob–who I learned radio from 16 years ago and half a lifetime later we were so lucky to have Rob as the best midwife these two radio mamas could dream of. 

Julia: yes, thank you Rob – this has been like a Radio Hogwarts for me, and you’re a wizard teacher.  

Tasha: thank you to Courtney Fleurantin who made podcast miracles happen. 

Julia: and Emmanuel Desarme who always made sure the trains were running on time.

Tasha: Thanks to Genevieve Sponslor, who was one of the first people to believe in our show.

Julia: Sandra, whose passion for sound is infectious, and made us sound good.  

Tasha: To Raky Sastri and Julia Read–you created music that expressed what words never could, and it made a whole world for these stories to unfold in. Other music in our show was from APM.

Julia: and all the people who cared for our children so we could make this project.  For me and my 3 kids that included: their amazing father, Stephen.  All of their grandparents  The little radicles team and SO many others!  And to my kids for putting up with all the work.  

Tasha: Thank you to my mother Sandra and my dad Charlie and to Lizzie and Ana, and most of all thank you to John, my husband for bringing so much magic and joy to our child’s life, And thank you to my child Emerson Ocean, who has the most beautiful ears. 

Julia: And Thank you Asha and Grandma Isis for inspiring us with your love, and sharing your life force!  And to everyone who trusted us with their stories and reflections these past fourteen episodes.

Tasha: Lastly, we want to thank you there–yeah you!–for listening. However you found us it’s an honor to have your attention and your ears. And as we enter this next phase, we’d love to hear from you. You can always write us at motherisaquestion@gmail.com and hey be sure to subscribe to our show to get any updates in the coming months. Mother is a Question is a part of the Big Questions Project at PRX and supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

MOTHER IS A QUESTION - EPISODE ONE: WHAT IS UNTEACHABLE ABOUT MOTHERING?

Teouria: So to me, it is a dance,

(MUSIC BEGINS)

of caring for other people, guiding other people who happen to be your children. And sometimes you can mother people who aren't your children. You can mother other women your same age. But, it's just a constant guidance, a constant struggle over who's right and who's wrong. A constant caring-for, teaching. In the hopes that you can send them out on their own and that they can make it in the world and become who they want to be.

(MUSIC UP)

Tasha: This is the first episode of Mother is a Question. I’m Tasha Haverty.

Julia: And I’m Julia Metzger-Traber. Tasha and I have been best friends, and learning from each other since before we got our periods.

Now, we’re both raising tiny humans- mothering–on the precipice of a tectonically shifting culture.

What is a mother, we ask?

And everything answers.

(MUSIC UP, SWELL)

Tasha: Jules, I remember when I was pregnant, I found myself wanting to do research. I wanted to be ready for it all.

Julia: I couldn’t even wrap my head around anything beyond the birth!

Tasha: Right, how can we. And now that I’m a mother, I feel like there are things you can teach, and prepare for, like ways to carry your baby or tools for how you might be able to help them to sleep–maybe. Then there are the things that might actually be universal, but there is really no preparation for. anyone who mothers will have to face and move through some kind of real pain-- whether it’s giving birth, or seeing your children suffer, or maybe being separated from them... how do you prepare for that? How do you teach that?

Julia: There’s no way, there’s now way to know it until you live it. but of course we still try.

Tasha: So I wanna tell you about someone I met ten years ago who was actually a teacher of motherhood. She worked with women who were pregnant, on the verge of becoming mothers, or women who had just had their babies.

Teouria: The way that I feel like I want to be known is as someone who is inspiring.

(MUSIC STARTS, CONTINUES)

Tasha: She introduced herself to me as T. Her name is Teourialier Johnson.

Teouria: That, you know, when you speak to me, it's how you feel like it's a heartfelt conversation. You feel like you are, um, being listened to, but also that you're given little nuggets of wisdom that you could take on and that can transform your life in some kind of way, even if it's a small thing.

Tasha: The day we met, ten years ago, I only got to talk to T for fifteen minutes. And honestly, her wisdom didn’t really feel of use to me at the time–I wasn’t a mother and had no real plans to be one. But for reasons that we’ll get into, our conversation–though very brief, has haunted me. I’ve thought about our conversation so many times throughout the years, and all the things I wish I’d been able to ask T. Especially now that I’m a mother.

So this past August, I found her again.

Turns out, T now lives about 6 hours from me, outside Buffalo New York. So I drove to meet her. She invited me into her apartment. And I started by asking her to describe herself.

Teouria: I’m this brown girl (laughs) with this curly hair, long nails, bright smile, and warm eyes. (Tash: That was really good! Tasha and Teouria laugh) I don't know, the first word that comes to mind is scared! Even tho I want to be inspiring, I’m a scary little person. (Tasha: You’re scared?) Most times yeah. (Tasha: Really? Like as you walk through the world?) Yeah. Like scared. I'm not gonna make it scared. I'm not gonna, um, make my mom proud or scared that I'm gonna let my kids down or, you know, scared that I'm not gonna be able to provide.

Tasha: Can you tell me about the classes in mothering that you taught?

Teouria: I think what was the most interesting about the classes was the, um, Emotional aspect of it. It wasn't just, oh, month one, you should feel this, or month two, this is what's happening with your baby.

It was, um, a check-in with what's going on with you. How do you feel about being a parent? Is this your first time being a parent? things like that. Basic Classes on how to groom the baby, how to bathe the baby, how to bond with the baby. So say for instance, we might have had a mother who was suffering from depression, I would, um, stay with her in the room with the baby and kind of like navigate the bond between them two, and try to help her, um, engage with the baby more.

Tasha: how much was it coming from within versus stuff you were reading or observing in other women? You know, where did that come from, that knowledge?

Teouria: Well a lot of it came from stuff that I did not know. I'm like, oh my God, I totally botched this. Nobody told me I was supposed to do it this way. Like when my daughter, when I fed her, I fed her stuff that I liked. Oh, I like sweet potatoes. I'm gonna give her sweet potatoes.Then when she didn’t eat the carrots, duh, I gave her the sweet stuff first.

So first I was intrigued about, oh my goodness, what else didn't I know and what can I learn now so that I help other people do it in a way that is better for the baby. And then some of it was just, stuff that I was missing that I wanted to be able to teach my children when they had their children.

[Mux: SON_AFRO_0243_01001_Above_The_Storm_APM-02]

(MUSIC UP, CONTINUES THROUGH THIS NARRATION SECTION)

Tasha: When T says it was stuff that she was missing–she means missing in the deepest way you can imagine. Because, when I met T, she was trying desperately to hold on to her motherhood. She was teaching these classes inside a maximum security prison, and it wasn’t just her students that were incarcerated there, she was living out a 17-year-sentence.

And that gets me to one of the big reasons our conversation has haunted me, and why it felt so unsatisfying. I was there as a journalist, reporting on the Bedford Hills Prison nursery–which was the first prison nursery in the country and serves as a model for a way to keep a select group of moms with their babies in prison, at least for a year–but it also had some questionable practices I was looking into – anyway, at the end of my visit, the media relations guy from the department of corrections brought me to this room, where T was sitting…

Tasha from old interview: Okay. Um can you introduce yourself?

Teouria from old interview: Okay my name is Teourialier Johnson and I’m 31 and I don’t know what else you would like from me!

Tasha: …And told us we had 15 minutes. T was so generous with the facts of her life, and her experience–like the fact that when she got locked up, she’d given birth to her son just a month before, and also had a four-year-old daughter.

Tasha from old interview:…So what do you use your time to do?

Teouria from old interview: Well I think it’s a very fulfilling role…

Tasha: But T wasn’t one of the moms who got to stay with her babies. Her children were at home and she was here.

Teouria from old conversation: .,..They write, we have a very close relationship regardless of the situation but I feel like…

Tasha: So to share that all with me, this stranger, and working in a job where she was holding other mother’s babies…as I got ushered out by this guy from the prison administration I just felt sick to my stomach. I wished I had found a way to tell him to give us more space, and more time.

Ten years later, T’s home. She got out of prison a couple years ago, and I'm sitting on her couch.

Tasha: So when we met, you told me that your son was a month old when you went in, so just to like talk about the hardest parts there of when you walked into the nursery, you're seeing these babies that are his age.

Teouria: Hmmhmm. Um, So I think the connection was with a lot of the mothers is that my baby is the same age and while I'm separated from my baby, you're here with your baby and how can we make it so that you can be there with your baby long term. You don't have to be at my predicament, you can learn from me and do something different.

So sometimes, They would be going home with their baby. And then sometimes some mothers will have a longer stay, so the conversation become even more in depth of how do you mother from a distance.

Tasha: How does it feel talking about, for example, when you went in and your son was a month old, Now that you're home? is it any easier to be asked about this stuff?

Teouria: No, I'm like, it is not easier, um, because it still kicks up the same, um, emotions about all of the stuff that I missed. Um, my son was a month, but my daughter was just four starting school, um, it's never a easy conversation.

Tasha: Does it feel okay to talk about it?

Teouria: Yeah. It's, to me, I will always wanna talk about it because I want people to learn from the experience or people who are in the, uh, experience to be able to have somebody to identify with.

Tasha: When T got sent away, the first prison she went to was not Bedford Hills, the prison with the nursery–she got transferred there a little later. So at that point even trying to keep her son with her wasn’t an option. But by the time I met T, eight years into her sentence, she told me that getting to teach and be part of the prison nursery program had actually saved her life.

Tasha: What about you was it that was called to be a teacher in that way? Like what was it about you that felt like, yeah, this is what I wanna do?

Teouria: So who thinks of a nursery inside of a prison? But the college office was right next door, and so one day I was walking to go to the college office and I actually peeked in there and I seen the swing that I had from my own son. And so at first I come immediately started crying. I'm like, oh my God, this is terrible.

It brought back memories of a life that I could no longer be a part of. But then as I kept walking back and forth, I'm like, maybe I should try to see if I can get a job in there. And I actually did, and I loved it. But um, it wasn't just typically typical babysitting, like we were being taught how to interact with the baby.

There were activities that we had to do, we had to set up the corral in a way that encouraged child development. And so it got my mind working. Like I had already had two children, but I hadn't experienced it this intense in this way. And so being that I had experienced it in a new light, then I started being more engaged with childcare and then they thought I would be a good candidate to teach the prenatal classes.

So it was a tough situation because we were in a nursery setting. I kind of understood a little bit more because not only did you just have a baby, you're not around family. You're locked up and you're expected to be a great mother when you necessarily don't feel even great about yourself. So the whole interaction was a trying one because me and the mother were different ethnicities.

And not that that matters to me, you know, in the bigger scheme of things. How do I reach her where she's at when we come from totally different backgrounds? Um, I could be seen as a threat. Like, you're coming in and tell me how to mother, you're in prison yourself. And you know, no one understands my situation. They're all judging me. So in this moment, only thing that I could do is use my other hat. And my other hat is that I've always had a passion for doing hair.

And to me, when a woman feels good about herself, then she could feel good about other things. And so here I am trying to navigate, but without feeling like I'm, oh, let me hold the baby. you know, like interjecting in a way that could seem threatening. Instead, I said, let me do your hair. And so I do her hair and she starts feeling good about herself, but me and her bond. So now she allows me to, when the baby is crying, I could pick the baby up, but she doesn't feel offensive.

You know what I mean? By the time it was over, oh, that's your Black mother. That's what she was saying. (laughs) And, but it was such a good experience for her. Now I can say to her, okay, maybe try this or maybe try that. I can make suggestions to her if she's more open to it, because I took care of her first.

Tasha: Were they always white when you say like, there must have been some Black women that were there (T: yes) too.

Teouria: There were, and you would've thought that maybe they would've got her a caregiver. Who looked more like her, but to me, in the scheme of things, when we're locked up, we all looked the same when we put on the green uniform, you know? So they just sent in the person that they felt was good for the job, and thank goodness, you know, it worked out.

Tasha: But some of these students of hers, fellow mothers, were in this agonizing situation, of being with their baby, getting taught about motherhood, knowing in a few months, they’d be separated from their baby. They’d stay in prison and their baby would go home.

Tasha: So your job was to take care of the babies and also take care of the moms in the for how long would that go? Like how long would those relationships be with those new moms?

Teouria: it depends if they're staying for a short period of time, it'll be for a short period. if the baby goes home and they have to stay longer, then. We’re gonna, I might see them in population and still keep in touch.

Tasha: What was some of the common wisdom you tried to share? You know, things you would try to teach these new moms?

Teouria: It would be to engage the baby where the baby is at. So a lot of times, Because it was our job to engage the baby. The mothers would just throw them in the corral and go on about their day watching TV. And you know, a lot of times the kids would act out, but it was really because their job is to play. And as a mom sometimes you have to play with them to understand them.

And um, a lot of times the mothers would kind of miss that. And I don't know, again, if that's a teachable skill. Um, Like I had one baby, if you would put him down, he would do like this little hand closing motion. And his mom thought that, oh, he's just being spoiled. But if you really looked at him, what he was saying is that he had a problem with transitions.

So you can't just come in and bam, put him down. So like say for instance, when it's time to change him, I would sing the same song. Or when it was time for him to interact with other kids, I had to sit down with 'em, introduce him, then back away. You know? So a lot of times mothers didn't realize that the kid was speaking in their own language. If you had a moment to hear and a lot of mothers didn't yet. But that's what the nursery kind of taught us as caregivers. We were on the floor with the kids looking at the world from their view, listening to their cues.

(MUSIC)

Tasha: So: you're teaching these classes, you're supporting these moms, and then meanwhile you're figuring out how to mother from inside. So those first, I don't know, moments and days, how did you keep your feet on the ground, you know, as a mother when you first got in and you knew you were gonna be apart from your kids?

Teouria: I barely kept my feet on the ground. Um, I was breastfeeding my son at the time, so any mother knows when you get that milk is a constant reminder of, oh my God, I'm not able to feed my child.

I fell into a complete depression, wasn't come outta my cell, didn't wanna do anything. And, um, I think at one point it's like, okay, T you're still here. You're existing. So you have to figure out a way to carve out some type of existence. And it wasn’t again until I got upstate and I saw oh they have a nursery…I feel like that nursery kind of saved my life and got me to Realizing like, you still have a life. You could still mother, you could still help others.

Tasha: So it's like almost going right into the pain is what got you through the pain.

Teouria: That's exactly what it was. And I'm happy that I didn't run from it. 'cause when I seen the swing, I could have completely showed it myself from the pain at the moment. Then I, I felt like I was drawn to it. Like, no, you know, okay, you cry. Okay, and then now what? What can you do now? Or you cried and you didn't die. You're still alive, so go towards it and see what will come of it, because staying in a cell isn't gonna work, so why not come here and do something that's productive?

Tasha: And that kind of like moving through the pain instead of walking around it. I've been wondering about your birth of your son because you, you must have known by then you were going. Can I ask you about that?

Teouria: To me, in that moment, I feel like I just had to keep. Um, keep going. Um, I feel like everything that could've went wrong went wrong. Like I was staying with a cousin and because this case happened, like that relationship kind of dissolved and then I had to go get an apartment and I'm not gonna get an apartment knowing that I'm not gonna be here long. But, you have to keep–like, it was like a time in my life where I felt like I was shadow walking. As if, you know, you have to keep going even though you know what the outcome could be, you still have to keep going no matter what. No matter what.

Tasha: How was the actual birth for you? Where were you and what do you remember about it?

Teouria: I let it be a joyous occasion because to me…

(MUSIC BEGINS)

I feel like you can't let circumstance rob you of a life coming into the world. And so I just did the best with it that I could.

(MUSIC BREAK)

Tasha: So you go in and you have a four year old and a newborn. Can you talk to me about how you mothered while you were incarcerated and maybe how that evolved?

Teouria: So I was incarcerated for a long time. Um, so mothering changed throughout the time. At first both of my kids were with my cousin and then that situation changed and one child was in Florida, my son. And then my daughter was still local.

So I was more able to be more present with mothering her where it was harder 'cause he was further away. I think mothering was just, taking advantage of opportunities at the Children's Center. So if they had a summer program, my daughter was involved. If she can go to summer camp, she was involved. I'm not gonna lie to you. I was in their face all the time. Like, hi, what do you have? Okay, yes, sign my daughter up.

Tasha: The Children’s Center was where T was working, and in addition to having the prison nursery it had programs for kids visiting their moms, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes overnight.

Teouria: I was that parent that was always knocking a door down and um, and the director would say to me, sometimes I'm confused why you are that only parent sometimes.

Tasha: What do you mean? Like, why aren't more moms sort of fighting tooth and nail to get close to their kids if they can?

Teouria: Sometimes I feel like they don't know. Sometimes it could be, um, a rocky relationship with the guardian, or sometimes people don't want to walk into that pain. They'd rather go in a different situation, whether it's. Um, drugs, whether it's being in solitary, you know, anything else than to deal with that. Some mothers haven't fully engaged in being mothers. Like even with the nursery, I would ask this question, um, um, was this pregnancy planned? And a lot of times the answer would always be no. Um, do you have other children? Yes. Um, have you mothered those other children? A lot of times. No. A lot of times this would be the first time that they're sitting down and have to, or making a decision to be a hands-on mother. So inside, sometimes you have groups of women who their relationships are centered around motherhood. When the birthdays come, we're all making cakes and celebrating that child's birthday from inside. Or we're all sending birthday cards or signing cards, you know, and then some women, they don't wanna think about it.

TASHA: T’s kids would come for what are called trailer visits–overnights in a trailer on the prison grounds. It was the only time T got to be with both her children together–her daughter was living with her cousin then her daughter’s father in Buffalo, and her son was with his grandmother in Florida. Then after these trailer visits…they’d leave, and T would be without them again, for months. So it’s one thing to teach other moms these really deep, universal principles of mothering. But meanwhile, T was also trying to live them.

(MUSIC BREATH)

Tasha: Can you remember any moments with your kids where all of a sudden one of those lessons that you're teaching other moms comes home for you when you're on a trailer visit or something?

Teouria: So my daughter would come up 'cause she's local for trailer visits regularly, or she'll come up for the summer program or she'll come up for any events. Where my son was further in Florida, so his grandmother will only let him come up once a year. So when I get both kids on a trailer who are used to having their mother kind of separate. It was chaos like they were at each other's throats and I'm, they're little and I'm like, all, you know, how do I manage all of this?

But other mothers are going through it too, so I think the more. At that time it became more about activities outside, um, other mother's mothering. Um, them seeing us in a more communal aspect. 'cause on a visit they don't get that. You know, I remember my daughter, the first thing that she thought when she came up to the trailer, was, oh, why didn’t, you tell me you live by the park 'cause there's a playground out there.

She didn't even see the gates at, like, that was all disappeared for her. And so it was just a moment of. Seeing that her mother were other people able to converse and talk freely, not at a table, not something that, so officer is there, don't do this, don't do that. So to me it was a whole different environment and at that point you are just learning as you go.

Tasha: Which is like true of everyone. I guess I'm learning more and more you are just making it up as you go. You had instincts that you knew how to listen to.

Teouria: Um. To me, I just think I took advantage of the vulnerability of the situation. Um, I feel like during prenatal class, that was my main in.

Um, you're pregnant, you're in prison, you're vulnerable. And vulnerable as in ripe to maybe see something from a different perspective or to break down any barrier that you might have up because, When you're in such a hard place, it's only to me, typically two ways you're gonna be, either you're gonna be callous and hard or you're gonna let your guard down.

And I think I was in that moment where I wasn't guarded, I just was more vulnerable and wanted to learn how to do it right, be a better person.

Tasha: Why do you think that was the road you took?

Teouria: Because I seen other roads and they weren't pretty. (Laughs) I hate to be that way but. Before I got incarcerated, I wasn't a bad person.

I wasn't in the streets. I wasn't a troublemaker. I'd never been in trouble before. Um, and so when I got there and I'm in this new place, all I could do is just sit and watch like, what's going on here? Oh, don't go down there. Oh, don't talk to her. You know what I mean? I learned really quick. Um, what I didn't wanna do. Then when I heard about the college program and the nursery. I made a very, conscious decision, okay, this is what I wanna do because, to deteriorate, to, you know, become a bad person in a bad situation wasn't an option for me, not as a mother. Nope.

Tasha: Through all that, how did you understand your identity as a mom? Like how did you stay connected to it even when the system is trying to separate you from it?

Teouria: Because I felt like that was, at that moment, the crux of who I was. I hadn't become a college graduate yet. I hadn't become a homeowner yet. That was like the main focus point of my identity. I wasn't a wife; I was a mother. That's who I was before I got locked up. That's who I am now. I feel like that's who I will always be, and I wouldn't let the system take that away.

Tasha: What were you most afraid of at that time? Where were the darkest thoughts or the darkest fears around motherhood for you?

Teouria: That she would get home and that your children will hate you or that they are starting to hate you right now, or that they're calling someone else Mom. And that, you know, how you see yourself is not how they see you in their lives. So I think like, that was like my constant biggest fear. I'm gonna get home and they're gonna hate me, or they're gonna think that I don't love them or they're going to judge me.

Tasha: T got out at the end of 2018. She left prison with a college degree she earned inside–she graduated valedictorian.

Teouria: I can never explain what it's like to come home. I feel like they should have some type of medical term for it because it's literally overload.

I don't think I've ever had a feeling like that in my life where I felt like I was going to burst. Um, I didn't understand the value of money. So looking at apartments and rents, it was like, how am I supposed to pay for this? Um, I didn't have a job yet. It was just complete. I don't understand what's happening in my life, honestly.

And then within the 30 days, like the situation with my girlfriend fell through. Um, I told parole that I was staying somewhere else and it was like, you have 10 days to figure it out, or we're gonna put you in a shelter. Of course, I'm looking at apartments and they're doing background checks. Um, I ended up filling it out for the apartment and I did not check that I had been locked up before and the lady came back to me, she was a property manager and she was like, you know what, everybody deserves a second chance.

She gave me the apartment. My grandparents paid three months in advance because I didn't have a work history. Um, I ended up getting, um, a job and I can't even tell you how it all came together, but it came together and my kids moved in and we made it.

Tasha: Eventually T found not one but two jobs: A factory job overnight, and as a harm reduction counselor by day– a total of 16 hours a day working. And for the first time in all of their lives, she and her two kids were going to be living together.

Teouria: I feel like, and I could be wrong, I feel like for women and men who come home, it's totally different. Like for me, when I came home, it was the expectation of. You are going to get your children like within, uh, I wanna say a month to two months of me being home. I had two teenagers. So it was get with the program. You’re still a mom. You know, I’m expected to still be that.

Tasha: So then you, they get here and it kind of begins like your life living in a home with them begins. For the first time with your son.

Teouria: First of all, it was in an apartment that was kind of small with three bedrooms that were kind of small. He was from a suburb in Florida, so he is like, what is this? Because he loved me but didn't want to necessarily change his life, he had some resentment. He was breaking things, acting out. It kind of took a minute for us to figure out a dance and be able to bond. My daughter was completely jealous of my son, which was the typical on the trailers. She felt like he's getting more attention and I'm not. And at this time, she's in her last year of high school. And so to me, I feel like she was kind of more self-sufficient where he's being like taken from all he known and brought into a whole different environment.

So again, back to mothering and trying to figure out how to balance between two children and their own needs. It was a lot, it took a lot of work to get our relationship to where it is now.

Tasha: So then how did you understand your identity as a mom at that time?

Teouria: At that time, you just trying to understand your identity as a free person. As a returning citizen. So it was a balance of all of these things. Okay. I'm trying to have a job and be whatever that title says, and I'm trying to be a mom and I'm trying to pay the bills.

TASHA: At this point in our conversation, Tyler, T’s son came downstairs and into the kitchen to take out the garbage.

(T: Good morning! –laughing– I said he’s coming down! Tyler we’re in the middle of an interview Tasha: I’m Tasha nice to meet you!)

Tyler: nice to meet you – TAPE FADES UNDER:)

Tasha: I realized, meeting Tyler, that I’d still been picturing him as an infant. But he’s 18 now, and about to start college with a full scholarship. (conversation is under this narration)

(Conversation fades up for a moment before fading out)

Tasha: I was gonna ask you what you had to relearn as a mom, but it almost feels like it was a totally new–

Teouria: –mm-hmm.Totally new experience. Um, I think relearning how to listen, if anything, and like figure out how they feel because at that moment you're just trying to be the best mom that you could be, but, they have their own feelings, their own lives.

Tasha: Listening, like did you feel like you forgot that when you were inside? When you say you had to relearn that like…

Teouria: Well, listening with little kids is different versus listening with teenagers, when you're little you can kind of guide and instruct, but once they're 14 and up, they got their, they have their own way of seeing the world, their own vision, their own goals. Their own perspectives.

Like for instance, my daughter she had been living one way with her dad, and now my mom is here, and her expectations of me in her mind was so much that. She ran away. At first she kept running back to her dad, running back to her dad.

Tasha: When you say she would run away, like, what do you mean? Can you give me a day or a, an example of a time where you had to figure that out?

Teouria: I'm at work, I'm working overnights. So something told me to come home. Okay. I'm gone 16 hours a day and I come home late in the middle of the shift. My daughter is in the hallway with a boy, and so I'm like, oh, no, this is not happening. He has to go. She runs back to her dad because literally I know this is the behavior that he allows.

It's a conversation and listening to what she thinks is right in the world, who she thinks she is in the world, or how she thinks things should be in the world, or understanding her overall goals, so listening as in, um, why is she always running? What is she afraid of? What is her expectation of me? How does she want our relationship to be? It is starting from the ground up. Everything I thought went out the window.

It was starting from the ground up.

Tasha: And how did you know how to do that?

Teouria: Many mistakes, many failures and bumps and bruises and oh my goodness, we're back at this part again. We went around the bush again.

I think it had to be an adjustment in my mind about who I was in their life and listen to them about who they felt I was in their life.

Tasha: I notice with my own baby, I still have moments where I'm insecure that I'm not, and I'm in the easy part, you know, like I'm not reckoning with a teenager and I haven't navigated what you've navigated, but that I get insecure about if I'm the right mom for him. Like if I'm doing it–

Teouria: –I get insecure about everything. So say for instance, Tyler asked me to come with him to Damon to meet a new track coach. So I'm there viewing the school we're going through to the different facilities, and I'm sitting here, I'm like, Damon is private. It's 48,000 a year.

I'm trying to figure out like, okay, what is it that he wants me to do here?

Totally insecure. And I watch Tyler negotiate with this coach. You know, I'm just, I guess I'm just there as the, go ahead. Get in there. You know, just the nodding head of Go ahead, son. And negotiate with this coach about getting a scholarship. You know, uh, getting the things that he needs to be able to go forward and do what he needs to do.

And to me, I feel like in those insecure moments, if you laid the foundation, your child will show you that the seeds that you planted there, they're growing. That’s what he’s done. But I feel like I set the example when I graduated from college in prison as the valedictorian, the seed was already planted then.

Tasha: I think something I'm struggling with right now as a mom myself is I feel like it opened up all this joy and love and then it also opened up a lot of darkness for me, like a lot of fear because there's just now the worst thing. Is now like that you lose your kid or that they die or something.

And I, I sometimes struggle with how to live in that, like how to live in that light and dark.

Teouria: It's, it is difficult. So the other night, Tyler worked till midnight and then he decided he wanted to go out. I'm like, what time are you thinking about coming in? 4:00 AM no. Three. This is mom negotiating at all times.

And then, um, when three came and he wasn't in. You think the worst. He's like, oh my God, what's going on? He's not that. Then I text him, he's still out with his friends, and I'm like, no, you gotta be in. Oh, I'm just, I work so hard and I'm going to school and I'm doing all the right things. I can't have a little bit of fun?

And it's like, yeah, but anything can happen. But I get it. I'm your only son and you wanna protect me, but as a mom, we think you don't have to be doing anything wrong. And something bad can happen. And he’s a Black male. It's a constant worry that anything can happen to him at any moment. And I just think as a parent, you're gonna always navigate that. You better always worry. In a way that I know that they don't understand. They just look at it like, ‘I'm just living my life!’

Tasha: So back to the kind of final question I wanted to ask. What is maybe unteachable about mothering? You've done all this mothering in your own life. You've taught all these mothers. Is there anything that you just have to live and you can't teach?

Teouria: Um, to me, I feel like all of it is based on experience. like to me, I don't feel like motherhood in a whole is teachable. You have to experience it, bump your head, learn from the mistakes. And regroup. To me it's the learning from the mistakes part. Some lessons I have to learn over and over again, and I'm like, I thought I understood this, like, why am I back here again? And then there'd be a moment where something happens and it's like, bam, there it is. I got it.

[Mux: ES_Lawn Road - Anders Schill Paulsen-02]

(MUSIC STARTS, FADES UP UNDER:)

Always be open to learning. I feel like kids teach you so much every day. Um, so never be shut off from learning and being receptive to what they have to tell you. You know, you have your job, your career, your mate, or whomever.

But I feel like your kids is what shaped you and teach you things about yourself that you didn't even know. Patience (laugh), understanding, like they, you know, they show you things that you, how to strive to be better. 'Cause even here I wasn't always here. In a good place so that they can go to a good school so that they can thrive. So again, they push you and motivate you to be better, whether it's circumventing, whatever, so that you could figure out a way to get more, be more so they can have access to more.

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

Tasha: This fall T started an MBA program. She also does hair from her home. And she says she is still teaching mothering. Whether it’s to her cousins who are having babies now or the women whose hair she does. She talks to them about child development, object permanence, lamaze, and most of all, how to listen to yourself, which she says really only you can teach yourself as a mother.

(MUSIC CONTINUES AND THEN FADES DOWN)

Julia: Tash, I am so glad you found T after all these years. One thing that really moved me is that she focuses so much on how you have to keep learning and growing with so much humility.

Tasha: mmhmm

Tasha: Yeah. I think the thing that I most remember, that I was really haunted by when she first told me about it ten years ago and am so grateful we got to talk more about it, is that idea of moving through the pain that might come your way as a mother, instead of around it. And leaning into the moments we’re most vulnerable as also when we’re most open to learning and surprising, and even saving ourselves.

Julia: Absolutely. So much of the time we defend against our vulnerability and close up behind our armor to protect ourselves. It feels like moving towards the pain, and being with the vulnerability, it’s the unteachable heart of mothering–and in fact where you become a mother, and create the roots for your children to blossom. It reminds me of the saying, “they tried to bury me, not knowing I was a seed”.

(MUSIC UP, MUSIC CARRIES UNDER )

Tasha: So this has been our first episode of Mother is a Question. We’re continuing our journey from here through this territory called motherhood

Julia: This place that can be a portal into our humanity, full of shadows and mysteries

Tasha: This place that’s home to people who have birthed, who have not birthed, who cannot birth,

Julia: This place for creating, nurturing, supporting and affirming life.

Tasha: As we set out to find the intimate wisdom forged in the fires of mothering

Julia: To crack open definitions–

Tasha: –and listen for the unspeakable,

Julia: Will you join us? We can only make meaning together. So you, our listeners, our community: What’s something about mothering that can’t be taught? Leave us a message on our heartline. (802) 404-1663‬ or send us a voice memo at motherisaquestion@gmail.com

Tasha: We’re listening.

(MUSIC FADES DOWN, IDEALLY X FADE TO NEW SONG UNDER THE MONTAGE)

BEEP

Hannah: Something about mothering that feels impossible to teach is how to really listen to your child. And I mean that at every stage, how to listen to them before they have language, how to listen to them when they have some, how to listen to them when they have a lot, and how at every stage to begin to decode this complex web of needs and sorrows and joys that is particular to your child and that will never be fully realized in language.

Ellen: You know what you're doing. You love your child. Your child is not in control of its life you are. That's very hard to teach. The child's going to go on and become the adult they're gonna be, and what you have given them will come from your example. It won't come from what you've said. Occasionally it will. They'll look back on what you've said, but mostly they're going to look back on the way you were. What did you do, not what did you say?

Rita: Hi, Julia and Tasha. This is Rita. I don't think I received any advice on mothering. For some reason, that's how I grew up. And then... I feel that there is nothing can be taught about mothering to someone else. They have to go through their own experience. First of all, every child comes with their own, uh, tendencies. And, uh, one formula does not apply to other ones. So, I, I mean, you can teach about the general things like how to put the diaper on, how to breastfeed or something like that, but the deepest. How to actually raise a child cannot be taught.That's what I feel. Thank you. Bye.

(LAST SEGMENT OF THEME MUSIC FADES UP, CARRIES THROUGH TO THE END)

TASHA: Thanks for being with us in the questions. This episode of Mother is a Question was produced by me, I'm Natasha Haverty.

JULIA: and I'm Julia Metzger-Traber. Our team is Courtney Fleurantin, Genevieve Sponsler, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve, Emmanuel Desarme, and Whisper Speak Roar Media's Suzanne Schaffer. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

TASHA: Our theme music is by Julia Read and Raky Sastri. Other music is from APM. Special thanks to North Country Public Radio, my first radio family and home base when I went down to Bedford Hills Prison and originally met T. Especially thanks to Brian Mann. If you want to hear the story I did about T in 2013, it’s on my website natashahaverty.com

JULIA: Mother is a Question is part of the Big Questions Project at PRX Productions, and is supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

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