I’m writing this from the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, sitting at a tiny table outside a Dunkin’ Donuts, waiting for my flight home to Chicago. Around me: rolling suitcases, half-drunk iced coffees, families trying to reorganize themselves before boarding. There’s something oddly vulnerable about airports — everyone in transition at once. Between places. Between versions of themselves.

I almost didn’t come on this trip.

It’s the middle of May, otherwise known to parents everywhere as Maycember: the completely unhinged sprint to the end of the school year. Next week alone I’m chaperoning a field trip, and my daughter has a ballet recital, a cheerleading performance, and kindergarten graduation. There are permission slips and snack requests and spirit days and laundry and work deadlines and all the invisible labor that keeps a family moving.

The list felt so long before I left, that saying yes to a work trip almost seemed irresponsible.

And yet, I came.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot in relation to this month’s conversation around values, vision, and the operating systems we inherit versus the ones we choose.

Because I think one of the operating systems many women — especially mothers — absorb is the idea that our own expansion should always come second. That if something is not strictly necessary for the functioning of the household, it becomes optional. Extraneous. Self-indulgent, even. But sitting here now, tired in a satisfying way, I know this trip mattered to me for reasons beyond work.

Yes, I was here to write and report and gather material.

But I was also here because curiosity is one of my values.

Growth is one of my values.

Aliveness is one of my values.

And increasingly, I think honoring those values makes me a better mother, not a worse one.

This trip reminded me that I am not only a person who keeps things running, I am also a person who wants to see new places. Who wants to learn. Who feels energized by conversations with strangers and the texture of unfamiliar cities and long dinners and gathering stories.

I got to travel with a friend, which felt meaningful in its own quiet way. Adult friendship can become so logistical in this phase of life — voice notes, reschedules, quick check-ins while unloading groceries or sitting in pickup lines.

And suddenly here we were, walking through Cincinnati together, talking without interruption, laughing over cocktails, deciding where to go next with no one asking us for a snack or help finding a shoe.

I got to sleep in a pitch-black hotel room where nobody touched me or woke me up all night.

I sat down with the cheesemakers at Urban Stead Cheese and tasted through their cheeses while we talked about the inexorable link between cheese and community — how the best food is never really only about food. How it becomes a gathering point, a language, a way people care for each other. We talked about place and fermentation and neighborhoods and risk and building something slowly with your hands.

I lingered over earrings in a tiny shop because I could. I drank a very esoteric pét-nat with a delightfully foul-mouthed winemaker who clearly loved to hear himself talk, and somehow that, too, felt life-giving — this reminder that the world is still full of deeply specific, eccentric, passionate people.

And that’s part of what travel gives me. Not just rest. Not just inspiration. But texture.

It breaks the spell of hyper-functionality.

At home, especially during seasons like this, it is so easy to become a machine for managing life. Scheduling life. Optimizing life. Moving everyone through life.

Travel interrupts that. It reminds me to notice things again.

The curve of the Roebling Bridge against the gray sky. The way a restaurant sounds when everyone is slightly tipsy and happy. The sharp creaminess of a cheese tasted at exactly the right temperature. The pleasure of wandering without urgency. The strange intimacy of airports.

Every time I leave home — even briefly — I come back slightly rearranged. More awake. More present. More myself.

And I think that’s the value underneath all of it.

Remembering that I am still a person with a mind and a palate and ambition and curiosity and a hunger for beauty and conversation and discovery.

Someone still becoming.

This year, I asked one of our WWC members if she would write about her experience inside of The Wise Women’s Council, my ongoing group coaching program. Previously, she wrote about changing her relationship to rest, slowing down to be present to her own life, and the dangerous trap of comparative joy. This month, we’re digging into our core values and how they help us make decisions about the way we show up to our lives. If you’re looking for a group coaching program for women, check out The Wise Women’s Council and apply to join.

— Sarah K Peck

Hannah Howard is the author of the memoirs Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen and Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family. She writes for Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, and Bon Appetit. Hannah lives in Chicago with her family and loves stinky cheese. Subscribe to her Substack, Letters from Hannah. She is also a member of The Wise Women’s Council.

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“Motherhood is often portrayed by the media as so one-dimensional," Shama Hyder, the CEO of Zen Media and new mom, told in their 2020 interview.

She knows media—she’s deep in it—and yet still, motherhood surprised her.

"I didn't hear anyone tell me, 'You know what? It's totally fine to have help. Totally fine to keep doing your business.'" You don’t have to give up who you are completely in the journey into parenting.

For Shama Hyder, she planned to take maternity leave and time off, and then she waited for that mythical love of motherhood to arrive and sweep her off her feet. Like she’d been told. But that wasn’t the reality for her.

Her truth? "We slogged through it," she said about those first few months. "And breastfeeding was HARD."

"I felt so much guilt for it," she shared about becoming a first-time mom. "I was like, ‘Why can't I be stronger, better, able to do more? Why do I need so much help?’"

These are the myths and lies about motherhood—that it should be easy, come naturally, be seamless, and be effortless. For many women and parents, however, it’s not this way. While some parts of motherhood may be absolutely beyond wonderful, other parts can be deep, hard, and unbelievably challenging labor.

If you’re challenged by the motherhood myths, take a listen to Episode #219, where Sarah and Shama take a deep-dive into the myths about motherhood.

The thing about the way motherhood and “momlife” is portrayed is that you're supposed to want it completely and fully, and it's supposed to be fulfilling all by itself.

But what if it isn't?

That's okay too.

It's totally normal to want and crave more than motherhood.

In the interview, Shama talks about how hard breastfeeding was for her, how she ended up sourcing milk for her kid from anywhere she could find it, and how she ended up going back to work right away.

When it came to work and her business, "I had so much creative energy," she said. "And motherhood doesn't fulfill it [for me]. I needed so much more than motherhood.”

"I just never heard my version of motherhood validated by anyone else," Shama shared on Episode 219 of The Startup Parent Podcast.

"I just want every mom out there—anyone who finds herself in the gray zone, to know that it's okay to want more."

TOUCHED.
OUT.⁠

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I couldn't tell you what someone like Esther was doing at this awful conference, but I'm thrilled she was because now I get to tell you this story.

At the end of her roundtable chat, I remember one guy in a white shirt raised his hand to ask how he could be a better partner to his pregnant wife given that her "brain was changing and she had all these hormones controlling her. And she gets... you know."

Oh boy.

Suppressing my inclination to scream at the top of my lungs, I let Esther handle this one. (Also, I wasn't allowed to "handle it" as I was not the speaker.)

The eloquence with which Esther ripped this guy a new @$$hole made us all sit up a little straighter in our seats. With dignity and grace, she said, "Listen, bi+ch, your wife's brain is fine. She's not broken. And presumably you've known her a long time. Use your empathy and perspective taking skills. Also, bro, ask her what she needs and she'll tell you. Remember she's pregnant, not an invalid. Her brain is working fine. In fact, it's working over time building a skeleton, muscles, organs, and a full. on. nervous. system. This is a dumb question."

*mic drop*

Okay, fine, she did not call him a bi+ch or bro or say it was a dumb question. I added that. But it sure felt like she said it.

The pièce de résistance was at the end when, in her signature nondescript accent, waving her hands, she asked, "What is this with you Americans and this 'change your brain?' you ask about?" It was as if she was posing an existential question for us to clarify for her as representatives of America. (She used American similarly to how my immigrant family uses it; to mean: ‘you naive egocentric child.’) Then Esther continued. I'm paraphrasing, but this is what I remember:

"Everything changes your brain all the time. You look at a flower and your brain changes. You listen to me and your brain changes. What kind of changes specifically are you asking about that you are so worried about. What do you think 'change your brain' means'?"

Excellent question, Esther.

Her point was that we falsely equate "change" with bad.

Our brains are neuroplastic. They change all the time. This is not a problem. It simply is.

See: Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain

What Esther wasn't saying, but I will, is that this kind of rhetoric that masquerades as support ("I care about my wife and I want to help,") is actually the thing suppressing his wife. Because what is he asking if not “Help me change her back to the way she was,” or “Tell me there’s nothing I can do, so you can let me off the hook for not helping her?”

In psychologist Darcy Lockman's book, All the Rage, she interviews neuroscientist Lise Eliot about the least controversial topic in the world: gender and brain development. They talk about the whole "natural mothers" fallacy.

Or is it a fallacy? That is the question.

I have personally been told by everyone in the world that motherhood comes naturally to women. My own mother informed me that in graduate school she learned that a woman's love is unconditional, but a man's is conditional and that that's just science. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Ooof.

I remember when my ex-father-in-law "warned" me that "the baby will come and you won't notice anything else—you'll see." I did see. I saw that he and everyone else was wrong and very bad at what they called "science." As well as seeming to know me.

Like most cishet women, before I could even speak, I was deluged with all the ways in which I could not know anything about the world unless I was a mother. Self-actualization is only possible if you are a mother! Because until you are a mother, you don't know who you are, what you want, what matters to you, what matters in life, and what it really is(!) to love someone.

We love using "motherhood" as a way to disqualify other ways of being a woman or even being valid as a human.

Last week, I wrote about how psychology was founded on the denial of women's experience. This, my friends, is an extension of that. Neuroscientist Eliot said says it more eloquently in All The Rage:

"It's bullshit. Our brains get good at whatever we're faced with doing." As in, you're not natural at parenting. You get good at it. You learn it. It is a learned skill.​

​Read the book to find the overwhelming amount of data that supports this.

The part that I found most astonishing, namely because I did not know this part, was this bit of data from Bar-Ilan University in Israel (page 90-91, All The Rage):

"The researchers concluded that the differences between the three groups were not so much a function of biological sex or genetic relatedness to the infant, but rather, of how much time the subjects had spent in intimate contact with their babies. They write: 'Assuming the role of a committed parent and engaging in active care of the young may trigger [a] global parental caregiving network in both men and women, in biological parents, and in those genetically unrelated to the child. Such findings are consistent with the hypothesis that human parenting may have evolved from an evolutionarily ancient alloparenting substrate that exists in all members of the species and can flexibly activate through responsive caregiving and commitment to children's wellbeing.'"

Translation: There is no such thing as "natural" motherhood. If you spend more time with your kid, you get your alloparenting substrate activated. BOOM.

Bolding above is mine because [head explodes]. It makes so much sense. Women died giving birth constantly. Men had to take over. So of course we have the same brain structures. They just needed to be activated and the mitigating factor was (drumroll please) time spent with child.

A natural mother is an invented idea.

The person who spends the most physical time with the kid gets the "instincts" (aka has the necessary brain circuitry turned on). Men are not inept, quite the contrary. They're merely absent, thanks to the myth that sits next to the Natural Mother myth: Be a Good Provider.

The myth that “men are providers" is just as corrosive here, especially for the men who suffocate and/or hide under the weight of their responsibilities and later hold it against their wives and children, and so often maintain that "they are the real victims." In many ways they are also victims. No one wins in this system.

When we say it is "men's duty to provide," but narrowly define "provide" as money, house, and food—we rob men of the opportunity to connect with their kids and develop their "instincts" and we rob women and families of the actual support we all need.

I'm so sad for all the children who've grown up without a father providing actual co-parenting, co-partnering, and fathering. For the fathers who don’t have a model for how to be an active, engaged parent. For the workplaces that use shame to prevent men and women from caretaking.

Womxn and mothers don't need providing for. They need partners.

Mother's Day is this weekend and my feed is drowning in well-meaning attempts at "supporting" and "appreciating" mothers with things like candles with puns on them, sparkly jewelry, fluffy socks, and for some reason a very expensive sky-blue tea kettle.

Much like the confused boy at Dr. Esther Perel's round table, these gifts are not how you support mothers. You support mothers by objecting to the systems that diminish their freedom to be a person in the world. And you reject the idea that "motherhood" is a woman's thing.

Celebrate parenthood by actually supporting systems that support parenting.

Push back on schools ending at 3PM and push for flexible schedules at work. Campaign for paid family leave at your organization (or hire Sarah, she can help). Pass common sense gun laws (don't @ me bro). Don't say "She's not working," when someone is on family leave. They are very much working. They are simply not getting paid.

Be the guy who calls out the school when they call his wife first because they assume he's at work and she's available. Shame your friends who openly cheat on their wives. Especially if those wives are sitting at home with their kids. Stop normalizing neglect from men and calling it "work." And for the love of god if you're a dude reading this and your wife sent a Mother's Day gift to your mom — you can celebrate Mother's Day this year by growing up.

Get yourself a copy of All The Rage. It's a click-baity title for a very serious book. Binge listen to Where Should We Begin? and then read Mating in Captivity (this TED talk gives you the gist). Listen to the Startup Parent Podcast. Listen to Anne-Marie Slaughter. Hire Sarah K Peck to talk to your organization about paid family leave. Ask yourself sincerely why it's "bad" that your son is playing with a baby. For real. Why.

83% of today’s new dads want equal paid leave. They want to do fatherhood differently. They want to be a part of parenting and we should let them. We need them. And they need us. We have to work together as partners to create a system that benefits all of us — especially our kids.

That's what I would like for Mother's Day.

No more candles. Some accountability and systemic reform, please.

And fine, that tea kettle.

— Margo​ Aaron

Jessica is an opinion writer and journalist for The New York Times, a three-time author, and a wife and mother of t…

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