Our Bodies, Our Fallible Selves - Issue No. 19
WELCOME BACK
It has been a year since my last newsletter, and as women often do, I find it necessary to defend myself, in this case by explaining where I’ve been. Even though, as a mother, I find that linearly tracing all that we’ve done and all that we’ve held may be an impossible task. So, here is a summary of the last year: I embodied the tooth fairy whom my daughter has carefully selected to be her pen pal. I worked through the trauma of experiencing a shooting at our neighborhood library with my son. I went on a writing retreat in France for a week and ended up running the chateau that I was staying in when the owner was hospitalized (essay forthcoming). I made roughly 100 pots of oatmeal and built innumerable “bad guy” towers with Legos. I weathered many tantrums and incessant sibling bickering, laughed deeply with friends, and blinded myself with my own sweat in hot yoga classes, a workout that I still can’t decide if I hate or love. I kept everyone fed and relatively clean. I fell in love with a Dyson vacuum, didn’t kill my houseplants, talked more about birds than I ever thought I would, and found an affinity for listening to audiobooks while doing puzzles. My husband and I worked through the hardest chapter of our marriage, and I’ve watched him with pride as he’s been promoted to partner, taken on additional responsibilities and travel, and received accolades for his performance. I’ve watched this while taking care of everything in the background, without a bonus, raise or evaluation. I have begun navigating the next steps of my career never having felt less charitable with my time and energy. Now, I am trying to finish the last year of my thirties with some semblance of grace and wisdom, while also feeling deeply resistant to the idea that I could be categorized as middle-aged. My twenties were the decade of discovery and ambition, my thirties felt like the decade of giving, and so my hope for my forties is that it will be the decade of rediscovering my fire. So, welcome back to Charmingly Chaotic, a newsletter about the chaotic reality of life while parenting two tiny (but quickly growing) humans. Thank you for being here. Thank you for understanding my long hiatus, that felt like anything but respite. It’s good to be back.
SURVIVING A TRIP TO THE LIBRARY
Our local library was the first indoor place my family went post-pandemic. After months of living an insular life with two kids under three, we masked up and unlocked the world from which my kids had been isolated. The library gave us a feeling of safety and community after months of quarantine. As time progressed, our weekly library trip has become a cornerstone of our family’s week and a much appreciated parenting crutch for me. If my daughter is losing sleep over her worries, we find a book about an elephant with anxiety. If I want to avoid violent television but my son has an insatiable appetite for superheroes, we turn to Dogman. Mondays are now for “books and bubbles,” an occasion in which we check out exactly 20 library books, stuff them into our “magical tote” which somehow always holds the load no matter the size, and then proceed down the street to read our newly acquired treasures over taro bubble teas.
It wasn’t until I had kids that I truly appreciated the sacred ground that is a library. Ours is subway accessible and offers wireless hotspots for checkout, which allows those who can’t afford internet to have it at their fingertips, and it is often a haven for the unhoused community in the area. Libraries are one of the last climate controlled public places that offer an equal opportunity to connect anyone who walks through the doors to the power of safe spaces, resources, and stories without a cost. At their best, libraries can serve as the hub for community.
This past February, there was a shooting at the library while my five year old son and I were checking out books. Every time I closed my eyes for weeks after, the refrain of Drop the bag, grab him, run - Drop the bag, grab him, run haunted me. The attendant was scanning our books, when someone screamed for security at the top of the staircase, then the gunshots began. I dropped our tote bag embroidered with my daughter’s name, picked up my son and ran as fast as I could, the popping sounds at my back. Please God, let my body be enough to keep him safe, I thought then, or maybe later, and for the rest of my life I hope or pray (or whatever verb you input for the highest level desperation) I am enough to keep my children safe.
I remember the front doors opening, no faces, just legs. I ran the entire length of the street, the same street that my dad’s office was on while I was growing up. I would go there sometimes after school and spend hours pretending to run a travel agency with his surplus of sticky notes and tape. This is the neighborhood in which we’ve sung carols, watched movies on the Green, eaten countless scoops of ice cream and done some of our best people watching.
I put my son behind the brick sign of the Presbyterian church where I thought he’d be safe and squatted in front of him to explain what had happened, as best I could. While we were running, he kept asking “what was that noise?”, “why are you running?”, “what are we doing?” So, I did my best to answer. I explained, “Mommy heard gunshots, and when you hear something and you feel scared in your body, you move yourself as quick as you can to somewhere safe. Mama’s job is to keep you safe, and that’s what I’m doing.” I wish I hadn’t called the noises gunshots and instead left it up to his interpretation. But now more than ever, a part of me wants my son to understand what gunshots are so he runs as fast as I did if there comes a time that he hears them and I cannot carry him. Every time I pick him up, I feel the weight of him more, how much he’s growing, the increasing distance from when he was small enough to fit within me.
When the police cars started to speed past us from what felt like every direction, I realized we still might not be safe. We were on a straight shot from the library, and if someone were to flee, the chances of them running in our direction were too high. “I’m going to pick you up again,” I said to my son, lifting him back onto my hip and continuing down the sidewalk where there was a man in baggy clothes walking towards us. What if he is the shooter? What if the gun is tucked into his clothes and I can’t see it? What if he pulls out the gun again and it is just us on the street facing him? The shock and fear must have consumed my face. “Were you in the library, Mama?” He asked and I nodded. “You’re safe now. You’re both safe now,” he said with steadfast calm. A gentle voice and demeanor that he has likely had to evoke an unfair number of times as a black man. I’ve thought about this man so many times in the last few weeks – how he cracked me open with his assurance. My eyes filled with tears as I thanked him and we crossed the street.
My son whispered in my ear that he had to pee. I realized I needed my dad to pick my daughter up from afterschool since my car was inaccessible in the library parking lot. The duality of life as a mother continued. An hour later, we all reconvened over cheese dip in a nearby restaurant. In the car after, still dazed and shaking, I fielded my daughter’s interrogation on whether or not I was the tooth fairy. Life goes on.
Statistically, it isn’t surprising that we had this experience, since our country is still prioritizing regulating women and terrorizing our immigrant communities over reforming gun control or expanding mental health resources. My son now sees the library as somewhere you should only go if “you can run very fast”, and I feel robbed of one of the most integral public places in our family’s life. Emerging from the daze of trauma, I still am uncertain of my conclusion. We didn’t choose this story, and in surviving it we are changed. I am left reassured by my own strength and shaken up by the fragility of this life.
ONE FIRED MAMA
In the Fall of 2024, I was fired for the first time from a job. This blow followed my reentry to the work force after quitting my job during COVID and subsequently spending three years as a stay at home mom. My first job back was to launch a high school outreach program at a large, prestigious theatre in Atlanta that I frequently visited while growing up. I had stressed in my interview with the CEO that I needed a “family-friendly” workplace, and he had emphasized that he and many other employees had kids, so that it absolutely would be. I never asked what his spouse did for a living and to what extent she was responsible for the heavy lift of childrearing, but given his response, I started my new job cautiously optimistic.
My reentry into the workforce was tumultuous from the start, but I hoped the challenges were just part of the readjustment process. My boss, a woman in her 50s with no kids, had seemed frustrated from the onset when I asked if I could leave at 4:30 instead of 5:00 everyday to pick up my kids on time from after school. She agreed under the condition that I sign onto my computer every night for an additional 30 minutes and email her at the beginning and end of my additional time. Despite having no extra work to complete each night, I adhered to her conditions. During my two months at this organization I hit every deadline, completed high quality projects, and never came late or called out sick. I was regularly told that everyone was happy with my performance and excited to have me onboard. However, a few weeks in, I requested some clarity about policies around using PTO if my kids, who would both regularly get very sick due to their asthma, were to get sick prior to me accruing enough time. Since my boss had made it very clear that our workplace was a butts in the seats, no excuses, kind of working environment, I wanted some clarity on how to meet these expectations. I wanted to know whether it would be possible for me to work remotely or leave the office for a few hours to take the kids to a doctor’s appointment. My boss’s response was that she would like me to consider losing my benefits and going part-time because my obligations at home seemed too demanding for me to be successful in the role. She explained that this had nothing to do with my performance. Simply, the demands of motherhood were “not accommodations I had earned.” She cited an example when she had had to put her dog down and then returned to work the same day because “no matter what is happening to you personally, the work still needs to get done.” Five weeks later, she fired me over the phone during a hurricane while I was at home without power with my children whose school had been canceled for the day. Thanks to Georgia being an “at-will” employment state, there did not have to be a cause for letting me go. My former boss was nominated for the prestigious "Women Making a Mark" award the following year. This award “honors the remarkable women who are shaping Atlanta’s business and nonprofit landscape and the lasting impact women can have on our city.”
Her impact on my reentry into the work force at an employer that had promised to be “family-friendly” has certainly stuck with me. My inability to check my formative identity as a caregiver at the door and to silently balance my responsibilities at home with those at work disqualified me from doing a job that I was excelling at. I have found great comfort in recognizing that I am not an anomaly. The inability to support the responsibilities of caregivers, including workplace flexibility and wages to cover the high cost of childcare “has made workforce participation untenable for many women across the United States.”
According to Forbes, from January to August of 2025 “more than 455,000 women exited the U.S. workforce…While 42% of the exits were due to layoffs, 58% of women leaving the workforce decided to give up their jobs.” Out of all women impacted, “women with young children have been the hardest hit. In just the first half of 2025, the labor force participation of women aged 25 to 44 with children under age five fell by 2.8%, marking the steepest mid-year decline in more than four decades.” While mothers have faced these issues for a very long time, many women got a taste of flexible hours and remote work during the pandemic and adjusted their family dynamics to work within this new reality. According to a 2024 survey conducted by Walr, “nearly two-thirds of C-suite executives said that return-to-work mandates caused a ‘disproportionate number’ of females to quit.”
Women are not leaving jobs because they lack ambition and drive, they are not leaving jobs because they can’t handle their responsibilities they are leaving jobs because workplaces are systematically disadvantageous for parents, and especially women, who often take on the brunt of caregiving responsibilities.
I had left my teaching job in August 2021 during the height of the Pandemic, when the school where I was working had asked that everyone return to teaching in person. My son was nine months old, and my daughter was two, and neither could be vaccinated yet for COVID. I was making $30k to work 60% time and be in my car for nearly two hours per day. I couldn’t make the numbers and the risk work. While I knew that my “break” from working would likely handicap me from being able to easily obtain a job at the salary I would want later, I also felt like given the circumstances, it was the right choice for my family. I made a choice, but it was a constrained one. According to Forbes, “Even before the pandemic, more than 2 million parents each year were left with little choice but to reduce their role in the labor force. This not only disproportionately impacts women but “these challenges [were also] exacerbated for Black and multiracial parents: they experience job disruptions related to child care problems at nearly double the rate of white parents.”
According to the US Chamber of Commerce, women who take time away from work to focus on childrearing upon returning to the workforce often “miss promotion or growth opportunities, further widening the wage gap.” But, even mothers who remain working out of the home after having kids are penalized when they become parents. The phenomenon of women being punished for becoming mothers is known as the “Motherhood Penalty.” Studies have found that “Mothers suffer a penalty relative to non-mothers and men in the form of lower perceived competence and commitment, higher professional expectations, lower likelihood of hiring and promotion, and lower recommended salaries.” Black and Latinx women are nearly twice as likely to experience the “motherhood penalty.” Men conversely often experience a “Fatherhood Bonus” upon having children in which they are perceived as more responsible and competent in the workplace after becoming fathers because of all their juggling. While women experience a per-child wage penalty of 5 to 20 percent, fathers experience an approximate 6 percent wage increase.
Being fired from the first job I got since becoming a mother was deeply discouraging both for my ego and my hope in finding a place to work in which I could be my full, dynamic self. Being a dedicated and present mother does not diminish my ambition, drive, or performance as a professional. Since the beginning, mothers can and do hard things everyday. But being a “family friendly workplace” is more than a tagline or a marketing scheme. What if our workplaces and our country made space for the women who made us? In creating workplaces that do not allow mothers to thrive, we are excluding the most resilient, capable, and strategic people from the jobs that need them most.
BIRTH CONTROL AND SANITY
On my way to my annual gynecology exam, I rehearsed what I would say to my OBGYN if she asked if I was done having babies. Similar to a container of yogurt, my IUD was coming up on its expiration date, and so the decision on whether to replace it or remove it felt pressing. I’m quickly approaching 40, which I’ve somewhat arbitrarily marked as my deadline for having another kid, and yet I am not ready for my husband to get a vasectomy because it feels too permanent. I planned on answering my gynecologist's question with, “While I would love another kid, it’s not the right thing for my family at this time.” But instead, in an exemplary display of word vomit, when asked, I answered, “I would love to, but my husband doesn’t want another one. And, it turns out, it takes two people to make that happen. So, not at this time. Or, at least not with him!” And then I immediately felt regret at unloading on a woman who, aside from performing my emergency c-section 7 years prior, was pretty much a complete stranger. She smiled at my unexpected response as she grabbed the forceps, and I wrongly assumed we had moved on. However, once she had pried me open and was performing a pelvic exam, she followed-up with: “do you feel safe and okay in your marriage?” I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, never having felt more exposed and answered, “it turns out, it’s just hard to raise two little kids.” “It is so fucking hard,” she responded, eyeballs inline with my vagina. “Sorry for dropping an f*bomb” she amended. “I think it deserves an f*bomb,” I explained. And together we laughed.
After solidifying an unexpected bond with my gynecologist, I went home and started researching my birth control options. The first time I got an IUD, I was in my 20s and the gynecologist told me that inserting the little device felt similar to one contraction of childbirth. After the procedure, I struggled to get off the table, and after hobbling to my car I immediately called my mom in tears from the pain and declared that if this was a taste of childbirth, then I had to regretfully inform her that she would never be a grandmother. I spent the rest of the day on my couch with a heating pad on my pelvis, so grateful to have a job where I was able to take a day off. While the first IUD was developed in 1909, and over 10% of American women currently are using an IUD, it wasn’t until May 2025 that The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, released new guidelines addressing the pain of IUD insertion. This new guidance “urged doctors to not underestimate the pain experienced by patients, marking a significant change for the organization.” In this case, taking women’s pain seriously only took 116 years. I have had a total of three IUDs inserted prior to this guidance being released.
Compared to the alternatives and despite the pain, I have found that IUDs are my best option. I don’t have to regularly think about birth control, and they are over 99% effective. The negatives are basically that I just have this weird foreign object bodyguarding my uterus, and I don’t have a period, which despite being a monthly annoyance, also feels like an important part of my natural biological process. The IUD also doesn’t stop me from having PMS, which means that once a month I feel completely unhinged without justification. Other downsides are highlighted by recent research, which has found that women using hormonal IUDs have a 40 percent higher chance of developing breast cancer. However, studies have also found that “rates of deadly ovarian cancer declined by up to 32% for women who used IUDs.” So, basically women have to pick their poison – increasing one risk to prevent another, which seems par for the course with women’s health.
My research on what non-permanent, non-condom birth control options my husband and I have, led me to the hormone-free pill for men called YCT-529, which could be released relatively soon. So, for men who aren’t ready to start contributing to their unborn offsprings’ 529 plans, YCT-529 could be for them. This potential future male contraceptive just completed its first safety trial, so there is quite a bit more testing to be done. Since the first oral contraceptive for women was introduced in 1950, we’re only looking at a roughly 75 year delay in finding a comparable solution for men to take responsibility for their fertility. While other male birth control methods have been tested, like a two-hormone injection that was commissioned by the World Health Organization in 2016 to lower sperm count, the trial was stopped because men experienced side effects. The multitude of side effects women have faced apparently pales in comparison to men grappling with increased acne and mood swings. There is also some concern that men would not be as consistent with taking a birth control pill as women since the fear of getting pregnant holds a different kind of weight (literally) than a man getting a woman pregnant. All things considered, I decided to get my fourth IUD a couple of weeks ago on my daughter’s first day at a new school. I woke up early, made cinnamon rolls and smoothies, got lunches packed, and backpacks ready before anyone was up. After delivering my daughter to school and attending a parent coffee with twenty minutes to spare before my appointment, I remembered that I was supposed to insert a pill to help soften and dilate my cervix and ease the insertion process four hours prior to my appointment. And so it goes that I hadn’t thought about my own body or needs until it was far too late to do anything about it. Like my previous insertions, when this pill hadn’t been made available to me, the process of getting my IUD was painful and I was out of commission for the rest of the day.
After being on multiple forms of birth control, having two children, and feeling the looming threat of perimenopause, I continue to be deeply disappointed in the patriarchal nature of our health care system and the constrained choices women continue to have to make amid so many inadequacies in addressing our wellness and wellbeing. In the wise words of my gynecologist, “it’s so f***ing hard.”
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
My son just started Kindergarten, and while I could unload about how emotional it is for my baby to cross this milestone, instead this piece is about the beehive we discovered in his wall after his first day at school. Because, this is how life works, pairing an exciting milestone with an actual nightmare. My son came home excited, energized, and exhausted, and so after debriefing over dinner, we entered his bedroom to promptly start his bedtime routine. We were surprised to find ten dead yellow jackets on his windowsill, and, upon moving the bed away from the wall, another twenty scattered across his floor. I ushered my son and daughter out of the bedroom, and my husband closed the door to investigate. He moved our son’s dresser away from an exterior facing wall and discovered a softball-size hole with a beehive behind it. The next thing I knew, my husband had suited up as if he was auditioning for the cast of Breaking Bad with a can of bug poison in one hand and our Shop-Vac in the other. His face was one of apprehension and perhaps a tinge of excitement. While he shop-vaced a swarm of bees, I tried to calm our crying and screaming daughter, who had just recently developed a phobia after having been stung by a yellow jacket in her room the week prior. At the time we thought this was an anomaly, but in retrospect, this was an indicator of a much bigger issue. My son seemed stunned by the whole thing as we deemed his room restricted. After sucking up the swarm, my husband filled the hole with poison and plastic bags and stuffed pillows to block the gap under our son’s door. We drove my daughter over to Nana and Baba’s house, deciding that her anxiety about sleeping in our home that night was the issue that was easiest to remedy. Here are things that I learned that day: bees can make hives in walls; bees in walls eat through your drywall; hives in walls require a hive removal company which takes a lot longer to schedule than a pest control company. Unrelated to the hive in his bedroom, on my son’s third day of school, he was stung by something on the playground, and his ankle and foot swelled up so that it was hard for him to walk. It is weeks like this that inspired the expression when it rains, it pours. After a weeklong slumber party in our room, the beehive was removed. Apparently, the hive was likely constructed this summer on an older hive that was built the summer before. So, we had a two-hive stack for the better part of a year in the room where my son sleeps. It could have been way worse and I’m grateful that no one was seriously harmed in the making of this bizarre situation. Bee bygones were definitely not on my Bingo card for the beginning of the school year.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
My son recently decided that he has a superpower – he can change the brightness of lights. It’s not flying or mind-reading, but he thinks it’s pretty extraordinary, all the same. He’ll ask tenderly, “Mama, are those lights bothering you” about the headlights of a car or the sun blazing down, and if I say “yes,” he’ll squint his little eyes towards the light and then ask “is that better?” I always reply with a sincere “yes” and thank him profusely. Because, it does help. It helps to be taken out of the anxiety I’m feeling about the state of the world and to just see my beautiful boy who believes with every fiber of his body that he is magical, which I know to be true too. Keeping the magic alive with little ones can be a challenge. I was prepared for Santa. However, I did not consider all of the other mystical characters that my children would expect to interact with and thus have me embody. Last St. Patrick’s Day Eve, my daughter went to bed full of giddiness at the idea of what a mischievous leprechaun might do while she was sleeping. I wracked my brain for what magic I could deliver on a holiday that I had associated as a child with just being pinched if you hadn’t worn green. Heavy with exhaustion, as my children slept, I applied temporary clover tattoos to the top of each of their feet. I taped a piece of paper to their floor that asked them to step on it and look down, so that when they did so, they would see their St. Patrick’s Day tattoos on their feet. This year, thanks to Amazon and China, I was prepared with green gear that they would wake up to on their stuffies. Surprisingly, the tooth fairy has been the most demanding of my magical identities, perhaps because my daughter’s mouth is looking more and more like the split I so often get while bowling. My daughter has not wanted just cash and coins from her last teeth, instead she’s seen each wiggly tooth as an opportunity to continue cultivating a relationship with her newfound penpal, the Tooth Fairy. Her tooth fairy’s name is “Sparkle Starlight,” which could easily also be the name of a stripper. Her favorite color is rainbow. She is 137 years old. And she even provided a self-portrait per my daughter’s request at the loss of her most recent tooth. At the risk of tooting my own horn, or tooting my own butthole as my daughter would say, I am good at creating magic. While there are many nights that I would prefer to be horizontal watching Off Campus or Outlander and briefly existing in a fantasy that is so different from my reality, I also deeply love conjuring magic for two tiny humans who live in a world that could use so much more of it.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
While it is hard to imagine, I’m hoping some cool weather might give us a reprieve from the heat soon. Then before we know it, there will be Halloween inflatables littering yards and pumpkin spice wafting through the air of your local Starbucks. While what my kids will eat remains a wild card, this pumpkin bread recipe is a breakfast or snack slam dunk. While I love chocolate, I thought this recipe was rich and dynamic enough without the chocolate chips. We served the loaf warm and added a pat of butter to each slice, which is unnecessary if you prefer your food with less joy and deliciousness. Hope you enjoy this tasty Fall treat!
