Overlapping Ribbons
How long will the ribbon of your life and those of your children overlap?
In honor of Mother’s Day in the US, Featured Author Leah Libresco Sargeant offers a beautiful reflection on love, mortality, and the all-too-brief years that parents share with their children.
Overlapping Ribbons
Leah Libresco Sargeant
If you have children, new skeins begin to unspool alongside your paired strands. The present prudence suggests you should be very, very careful to pin the start of the ribbon in just the right spot—after grad school, after some time to travel, after choosing where to live long-term. None of these factors are inappropriate to consider, but there’s something to set against them.
How long will the ribbon of your life and those of your children overlap? You will share more of your life with your children if their lives begin before yours are more than a third unfurled.
This Week in Sex-Realist Feminism: A Mother's Unique Love, Depop's Dirty Secret, and Society's Sex Change
This week: Erica Komisar on the unique nature of a mother's love; Poppy Sowerby on Depop, Vinted, and porn pushing boundaries; and Ashley Frawley on society's sex change. Plus: rage against the mom machine, "affirming" pedophilia, the manosphere can't give boys fathers, the dignity of dependence—and more!
From the Archives:
Featured Author Nadya Williams reminds mothers of how nights highlight the beautiful yet invisible nature of maternal productivity.
Motherhood: A Nightlife
Nadya Williams
“Motherhood inspires and organically creates a secret nightlife all its own—one that holds the power to transform us.”