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So much of our anxiety stems from love, and the desire to be the scaffolding for the lives of those we love. But I want to remind us that we, as mothers, are also finite. We cannot hold up the world indefinitely without it breaking our backs.

From the coauthor of the groundbreaking book, The Courage to Heal, this beautiful and heartbreaking memoir recounts, with unflinching honesty, the author’s fiery and complicated relationship with her mother.

Tick Tock: Essays on Becoming a Parent After 40 explores the “foreign country” of geriatric parenthood and how it traverses the intersections of gender, age, race, and sexual orientation.

In her story collection, Shapeshifting, Michelle Ross isn’t afraid to explore the dark and vulnerable ways in which motherhood can shift a woman’s identity.

That she managed to parent four kids while crafting a successful writing career seems as otherworldly as the spirits that haunt her fiction.

“I write about things that I want to understand, that I want to figure out, and I try to impose some form onto things that feel chaotic or confusing.” Kim Brooks

He says go up in skies, a spell for us.

How mistaken we were / about what mothering means.

nothing was ever / enough, not the way I loved her, or later, the way I changed the way I / loved her.

Was your face veiled, your belly tethered, / your cry unslapped? You are only questions.

That was last year / You said, crumpling the paper into shapes