“Addiction issues, mental illness, attempts at recovery, progress, setbacks: a mother tries to make sense of her son’s troubled life journey in light of her own history. Without sentimentality and from an unvarnished self-oriented perspective, Judy Sandler allows herself to explore how her son’s type II bipolar disorder has affected not only his life, but hers as well.”
Tag: motherhood
Book Review: Fear and Motherhood in The Heart Folds Early by Jill Christman
When an 18-week ultrasound revealed that her son had only developed half of his heart, Jill Christman did not know what to do. In her 2026 memoir, The Heart Folds Early, Christman unspools her ultimate decision to terminate the pregnancy, shedding light on the various heart-wrenching reasons a mother might choose not to carry a…
“Beautiful” sacrifice/Unseen burden? Navigating emotional labor as a healthcare clinician, woman, and mother
Smile, nod, smile, nod. There is both sincerity and effort in these offerings. After all, behaviors affect thoughts affect emotions affect behaviors. How quickly, it seemed, that the childhood version of myself learned to blur the lines between what I felt and what others expected me to portray. How quickly that appropriate outward presentation became…
Little House in the Hood: Save the Bees, call me Mel
Cover Image: Self-Portrait by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo 2020. Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo // What’s in a Name? I was born in the 1980s, an era filled with excess. Perhaps this is the reason I have always struggled with moderation. My generation was defined by drugs, MTV, and Melissas. From grade school to high school, I was one of a few…
How can HIV-positive women be good mothers?
Sasheenie Moodley // We are told that a “good mother” is the trope of a mother who is loving and nurturing (Chess, 1982; Mercer, 1985). She prioritises and protects her infant. This mother has a good relationship with her “happy” infant (Benedek, 1959). It is a good mother’s job to understand her child’s behaviour and…
Parenting in Public, from Passivity to Peace
Mira Assaf Kafantaris and Alicia Andrzejewski Introduction Is the affective experience of public parenting a health concern, a concern for the medical humanities? Certainly, the constant surveillance of parents, mothers in particular, is born out of care and concern for the well-being of children. This surveillance and the interventions/invasions it inspires, however, result in a…
Mothers, Memoir, and Medicine
Livia Arndal Woods // It’s Mother’s Day, holiday of breakfast-in-bed and/or reflection on the ways our society fails families. This Mother’s Day, I want to add a thought about how memoirs of motherhood cultivate an insistent thread of anxiety about medicine.
Demonizing Mothers: Psychodramas, Horror Movies, and Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Lauren A. Mitchell// Fair warning: this post contains some spoilers for Ari Aster’s Hereditary, but you should read it anyway. Early in Ari Aster’s 2018 Hereditary, family matriarch and film anti-heroine Annie Leigh attends a grief support meeting after the death of her mother. We learn that Annie and her mother, Ellen, had at best a conflicted…
FTM: Arriving, No Arrivals
FTM is an internet acronym that people use to identify themselves as someone who has transitioned, or is transitioning, from female to male, as well as someone who has transitioned, or is transitioning, into a first-time mom. FTM is an identity but it is also a hashtag: a sorting tool that creates a digital community, a grouping mechanism. When the #FemaleToMale and #FirstTimeMom tags collide, an accidental abbreviation of experience is turned into a digital community, and the hashtag becomes an intersection. The personal narratives we articulate below are meant to explore this intersection.
An Elegy to Breastfeeding, from Titus Andronicus to Now
Alicia Andrzejewski // I nurse my daughter for the last time. She is fifteen months old. I hear her sharp cry at 6:10, and, as my partner checks his phone, I rush to grab a glass of water and walk through our five-foot hallway to her. She stands in her crib, expectant, and offers her…