mothers are people, too

and we need to stop acting so surprised when women act like it.

The following post first appeared here September, 2023 but I’m reposting it this week based on the conversations that came out of the Writing Sex panel last week at AWP. I also wanted to say hello to new subscribers and thank you for your support. The following post is free for all but your paid subscriptions keep the lights on both here and in my literal house and for the month of April, I am offering 20% new subs. <3

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A couple weeks ago, someone upped their subscription to paid for approximately ten minutes in order to read a post about me fucking my ex-boyfriend and having feelings about it. And that’s fine. I totally get it. I would want to read about it, too. Please point me in the direction of all middle-aged women who are writing about their destructive human impulses and I will automatically pay-subscribe. But the lede of this story is not that someone unsubscribed, it’s that they messaged to tell me that they liked me because I was more than just a mom before they did.

I’m sure this was meant as a compliment assuming I would take it as one and I did because yes, it’s true, I am more than just a mom but the thing that makes me feel like my head is going to pop off my body is that EVERY. MOTHER. IS.

Meanwhile, people do not say to men, EVER — “I like that you are more than just a dad.”

I have spent years having this conversation and yet, somehow, it still feels brand new. The amount of mothers I know who, because they are parenting children and/or are married to men, feel like they cannot speak honestly about their VERY COMMON experiences is… many.

rebeccawooolf

A post shared by @rebeccawooolf

Mothers, since the dawn of time have gone mute in exchange for being good. They have fucked their ex-boyfriends in secret. They still do.

Because what would their children think? Their fathers? Their husbands?

Which is why, “more than just a mom” triggers A LOT of feelings in me. It assumes that anomalies exist where they do not. Should not. And that makes me want to double down on my more-than-just-a-mom-ness so others will, perhaps, get a little louder with their stories as well.

ED: A tree that falls in a forrest without a witness is still a fallen tree. Even if it screams into its pillow at night instead of onto a screen on the Internet.

I am no better, no worse than those who refuse to acknowledge that they, too, are human. That they, too, mothers, wives, are also SO MANY OTHER THINGS. Complicated. Heartbroken. Social. Sexual. Ambitious. Impulsive. The worst. The best. All of the above, etc.

And look, I realize my tone here sounds a little angry (another thing mothers cannot be) but I’m not mad. Culturally, we have all been conditioned to believe that once you become a mother, that is what you are. I believed this, too. Signed off on my work with an acronym instead of my name. I wasn’t Rebecca Woolf for MANY YEARS. I was GGC, the girl in me GONE. (My original catchphrase for Girl’s Gone Child in 2005 was, “welcome to the new & improved titty-flashing all-nighter” insinuating that my body went from MALE GAZE to MALE GRAZE.)

It took me well into adulthood to become confident in who I am, to prioritize my own wants and needs separate from my children and traditional partnership. But I am a free agent now. And that freedom has empowered me to wear all of my skins — not just my domestic ones and not just my strong woman who takes no shit ones, either because I take a lot of shit, actually. I trust the wrong people. Have no self-control. Grieve breakups like a teenager. Make questionable decisions every day. And if I can’t write about all of those things in my own space, shouldn’t I be questioning what is holding me back?

Even with this post, I deliberated on whether or not the language was too strong. But guess what. This is how I talk. How I write. How I feel.

It’s why I started this substack. Called it the braid. Because I wanted to create a space that validates women, specifically mothers for being human after YEARS of walking on eggshells — both in my home and in my work. I wanted to challenge myself to write about all of the things I wouldn’t dare write about ten years ago.

No pearl-clutching allowed in my house and that goes for this space, too.

There is a chapter in Lyz Lenz’ forthcoming book (that you should pre-order immediately) that explores the impossibility of being a woman and a complex human being all at once.

The lack of passes we get for being regular old flawed sacks of flesh while men and boys get fucking STACKS of them is not lost on anyone and yet, we DO NOT ALLOW OURSELVES the luxury of a lowered (aka human) bar. Instead we take the high road, enabling men their mediocrity while striving for our own impossible standards of superhuman excellence.

Lyz writes:

“I don’t want to be the arbiter of someone’s morality. I think of my father saying about my mother how she was so good, the best one out of the two of them. Better than he deserved. And I think of her brittle goodness in the face of their volatile marriage. I do not want this. I do not want a life so rigid and righteous that it has no room for my own failings and humanity. What I wanted was to be as fully human as these men are. Not to push the stone of moral goodness up a hill day after day.”

Speaking similarly in her newsletter published yesterday, Tracy Clark-Flory writes about the shaming of a Love is Blind contestant re: her past infidelity and the violation of double standards:

A woman who cheats

From start to finish, it’s hard to watch this spectacle of a woman being questioned about her sex life. Yes, the questioning is rooted in concerns about honesty and trustworthiness within a relationship, but we’re also watching the shaming of a woman who has violated the traditional sexual double standard on multiple fronts. She is a woman with desires that a man couldn’t satisfy, and those desires also led her to cheat. As a Black woman subject to racist stereotypes of hypersexuality, she will be seen as violating the sexual double standard no matter what she does.

ED: As a woman who has written at length, without shame about her own infidelity and dated both monogamously and non-monogamously, I can tell you, straight up, that the most secure I have felt in my relationships was with people I knew ALSO had a history of infidelity because I knew they would not hold mine against me. The only men who have ever weaponized my past against me were the ones who claimed to be “faithful.” “Good men.”

People love to talk about how GOOD MEN don’t cheat. But I disagree. No one has made me feel worse about myself than the men who never have. Who have constructed entire identities based on their ability to keep it in their pants. And who carry that entitlement into their relationships, convinced that their morality supersedes the fact that they’re actually assholes.

When my book first came out, people would come up to me and tell me all sorts of stories about their husbands, dead and alive. They told me about their affairs. Their sex lives. I once heard from three different women about their extra-marital relationships in the span of one evening while at an event. All of these women were moms, too. And they all were getting fucked by people they weren’t married to. They were having the best sex of their lives, they told me but shhhh, don’t tell. I can’t afford to leave my husband. Their affairs were helping them survive and they knew I would understand.

I did understand. It’s why I hugged them and then proceeded to enjoy my night without thinking twice about their choices.

I have come to believe that every single woman leads a secret life. You can disagree with me and that’s fine but I have heard the biggest bombs from the least suspecting people — over and over and over again these last five years — with no sign of stopping. Nothing shocks me anymore and I’m sorry that any of it ever did.

(ED: I personally believe that more women are having affairs than men are we are just a thousand times better at keeping that shit on the DL. We are smarter at having side-piece sex. Because we know how to multi-task about ten thousand times better than 99% of men. But also, we hold generations upon generations of buried secrets. Our mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s and so on.)

But just because we know how to hold onto our secrets for life doesn’t mean we should.

And while I believe women WANT to support each other’s misbehavior, “well-behaved women rarely make history” style, we are not very good at it.

Meanwhile, we barely roll our eyes at men for being selfish or impulsive or bad. And, yes, sometimes they are ACTUALLY VERY BAD.

But, also, and I say this with ALL THE LOVE IN MY HEART, so are women!

Sometimes I am “bad”. Just like you are “bad” and what is “bad” and according to whom, because THAT ALSO matters.

Beyond that, doing bad in secret doesn’t make any one of us better women or mothers or wives. I’d argue the opposite. Secrecy is what has made our truths feel so unfamiliar, abnormal. A thing that should be hidden from public consumption. TMI.

It is why that one Jonas brother dude got away with shaming Sophie Turner. Because she dared to be more than just a mom.

So did Pamela Anderson.

And Keke Palmer.

And probably you, too, because every mother on goddess’ green earth has had her motherhood weaponized against her. Repeatedly.

“I can’t believe she would do that, she’s a mom!”

“I can’t believe she would write that, she’s a mom,”

“… but she’s a mom.”

“…she’s a mom.”

“…a mom.”

I have spent the last three days reading through emails almost entirely from women who are in transition. The most common story — the one I read over and over — is this: I AM MORE THAN A MOM AND A WIFE. How do I show up in the world as someone who knows what to do with her womanhood as it exists without her children? Without her husband? WITHOUT THE PEOPLE SHE HAS BEEN TOLD TO DEFINE HERSELF BY?

And do you want to know how?

By refusing to negotiate with a culture that continues to shame women for being ALL OF THE OTHER THINGS OUTSIDE OF THOSE TWO THINGS.

By opting out of our default programming that suggests women need advice in order to exist and judgement in order to improve. By loosening the grip around our throats and learning to breathe without our purity choke-holds. Using our hands not to clutch the pearls of patriarchal values but to remove them strand by strand from our necks. So that instead of handing them down like heirlooms to our daughters we can cut them at the clasp and watch them roll.