The Books That Help Me Raise Children in a Broken World
In the introduction to her book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Angela Garbes describes these times as “strange and difficult years of instability, loss, and grief—both general and intimate.” That’s it, I thought. Sometimes it feels as though decades of tragedy and erasure have been smashed into the past 30 months. During the upheaval of the summer of 2020, for example, my son also had his third unexplained seizure, and I faced the disorienting truth that I couldn’t promise to keep him safe, even within my own house.
It can be hard to find space to live and grow and breathe in the U.S., let alone mother. (Here I borrow from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who defines expansively as “the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.”)
