Day 43----

I wrote a lot again. That's coming easier and I just read a bit from another Ostriker book that's reinforced my resolve on writing everything down. Even at the point of isolation where I spend a lot of time analyzing the cat hairs, bits of clay, and other unknown objects in the matted piles of my very cheap rug on which I am laying because bambi and the cat have taken over the whole couch while they watch Kiki's Delivery Service and sleep, respectively. I just lay there and write it all down.

"The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject of incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers." 

-Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Writing Like a Woman p. 131

This is becoming less and less true now, nevertheless, I will still keep on. I was thinking about the years of otherness I felt when I was a nanny--spending every waking moment and often the sleeping ones too with children but never accepted as a mother. And then the time after the miscarriage, as an invisible mother. And when the nannying and that overlapped. A side effect of the othering of the voice of mothers-- telling women to keep it to themselves-- is the exclusive click of motherhood. The looking down on women who are not mothers. This is especially true in a church setting where motherhood is the only acceptable role/ the assumed goal of all women (but please shut up about it--you sound desperate). Therefore, a women who isn't must just be pining for motherhood or an enemy of it--either option are pitiable and exclusion worthy in the eyes of the in crowd.