The Swirling Charybdis of Motherhood

Or: why I decided to start a newsletter now

Photo by Simon Hurry on Unsplash, allegedly of a duck pond in Palo Alto, where I live 😬

I started thinking of myself as a writer when I had a pitch accepted at Jezebel in mid-2015. When Jezebel was shut down by its parent company a few weeks ago, I was devastated. Its loss felt especially senseless and painful in a time when the need – and demand! – for feminist media is bigger than ever before. It came back yesterday, which is great. But even its temporary shutdown was a difficult reminder of how many people think that writing for an audience of women is bad business.

For so many of us, Jezebel was a gateway to becoming consumers and producers of feminist writing. I’d been a regular reader of the site all through graduate school, but publishing “How to Teach an Ancient Rape Joke” changed the entire trajectory of my writing career.

Eidolon was still a tiny baby publication, only weeks old. You know how newborns in movies and TV shows are always played by 3-month-old babies who can basically hold up their own heads? Eidolon was so young that it couldn’t yet play a newborn in a movie. We had a promising launch, but I was still nervous it would flop. Maybe there just wasn’t interest in the kind of longform academic-yet-personal content we were interested in publishing. 

I was fresh from graduate school, where I spent months at a time working on dissertation chapters that were then read by 2.5 people, one of whom was my mom. Even my three dissertation advisers, (a very small part of) whose literal job was to read my work, sometimes made me feel like getting an email from me with a new draft was the biggest drag imaginable.¹

So when over a hundred thousand Jezebel readers viewed my article about the ancient history of false rape allegations, my mind was blown. It turned out that, actually, there were a lot of readers who were excited about exploring with me the unexpected intersections of feminism, classics, and life! I gave up on trying to ignore the disapproval of my advisers and instead tried to ignore the disapproval of the comments section, and to my surprise, it was an improvement. Without Jezebel, there would never have been an Eidolon.

With Eidolon I felt, for the first time, like a fully integrated self: I could be a mother AND a writer AND a scholar, and none of those identities had to exist at the expense of the others. Before, it had always felt like I had to occupy a very specific persona to be taken seriously as a young female academic, and part of that meant never mentioning that I had a kid and making sure my writing wasn’t too informal or personal.

So in my dissertation about how the comedian Aristophanes’ mockery of the tragedian Euripides shaped Euripides’ “brand,” my advisers had me cut a section on the lasting impact Tina Fey’s SNL impression had on shaping Sarah Palin’s persona. Too distractingly contemporary (at the time, this was a super-topical reference, I swear!). And it never even occurred to me to mention that I was drawn to my topic because I was related to a much-discussed (and mocked) public figure, and I was wondering what impact The Social Network would have on public perception of him in years to come. I stayed far, far away from that particular topic after one of my advisers cornered me at an event, tried to get me to admit that the film was “objectively” good, and when I told him repeatedly I couldn’t possibly be objective on the subject, said, “Well you know what? Fuck you!” And this was the man responsible for writing recommendations for me for the extremely cutthroat academic job market.

Grad school sucks. The comments section was a huge improvement. (And imagine how my mind was blown, years later, when I realized that I didn’t have to put up with that shit, either.)

At Eidolon, it felt like the more I wrote as myself, the more successful I was. Better yet, I got to provide a platform for others to do the same. It was the most professionally fulfilling period of my career. I was doing something that felt meaningful to me and to others, alongside three incredibly brilliant and bad-ass women, and I didn’t feel like I needed to hide huge parts of my lived experience to be treated as someone with something interesting to say. It was glorious.

But three and a half years in, I experienced what, if my life were the plot of a tragedy, Aristotle would have called a “reversal” (peripeteia). The short version is that, over the space of one (1) month, I experienced three comings-out: my first book from my publisher, my second child from my body, and my spouse as a trans woman. Any one of those on its own would make for a pretty big month, to be honest. All three at the same time was A Lot, by which I mean, I felt a lot like that guy in The Crucible who gets slowly crushed to death.

Promoting a book is a lot of work even when you don’t have a two-week-old baby at home. It meant giving lectures and being interviewed and appearing on podcasts and having my picture taken by professional photographers who told me to stop smiling and look concerned about rising fascism. 

SO CONCERNED

For scholarly books from university presses, promotion – when it exists at all – is largely about seeming like you’re a poised person, a topic expert who has all the answers. (I mean, I’m sure it’s not always like that. Probably there are people who can promote an academic book and still be authentically messy and weird and admit to Socratic aporia! People who are less insecure than me! But not me.) So I was pretending to have All the Answers, except for “how do we solve the problem of online radicalization?”, which people always asked me at Q&As, and… come on, if I knew that, I would have led with it.

But, at the very least, All the Answers about this one specific thing, how classical reception in far-right online spaces worked and why it mattered. When I was out giving lectures, I embodied that persona, knowing that back home I had literally no answers and had never felt more confused, out of my depth, like I was fucking everything up in a way that might potentially put the physical and emotional health of the people I loved the most at risk.

We all made it through that time, although I’m not entirely sure how. It’s kind of a blur. And there was a cost. My spouse and I got divorced a year later, which meant that both of us had to figure out life as single moms, which left me with no bandwidth to run Eidolon. Not while taking care of a young baby and a neurodivergent child and supporting my ex through the hardest time of her life. My co-editors and I tried to figure out how the publication could continue without me, but ultimately we made the heartbreaking choice to shut it down. 

I still miss Eidolon all the time.² I miss it whenever another feminist media site shuts down and when everybody is suddenly talking about how often men think about the Roman Empire and when misogynist trolls decide that they hate Emily Wilson’s Iliad translation before it’s even been released. I don’t miss the trolls themselves, who added a toxic cost to running the site that we definitely could have done without. But I miss the community of writers and readers we built, and I’m sad that in the three years it’s been gone, nothing remotely similar has taken its place.

Since Eidolon shut down, I haven’t been a classicist. I’ve taught a handful of Greek mythology classes, but I’ve published almost nothing. I abandoned a second book project with HUP about feminist versions of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. I’m honestly afraid of finding out how rusty my Greek is.

But I miss it. Look: ten years ago, for my parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary, my siblings and I were all going to give toasts. My older sister, Randi, told me she was going to sing hers, because she’s delightfully extra like that. I told her I’d probably write something about ancient myth. “As long as it’s not one of those stories about death or people turning into trees,” she said. I promptly ignored this instruction and my toast compared my parents to Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon, which is a story about death AND people turning into trees. But in a romantic way!

I love ancient literature, and it’s never far from my mind when I have big feelings. So why is it that when my feelings and problems are the biggest, my solution has always been to amputate the “classicist” part of me entirely?

I know there are other people for whom the lens of classical myth and literature has been a hugely useful way of processing trauma and pain. Just look at the brilliant work done by Rhodessa Jones and the Medea Project. Or Jess Zimmerman’s wonderful book Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology. Not to mention so many articles we published on Eidolon. I wanted to follow their example. Instead, I did the opposite, and decided that the only way I could manage my life was to quit the field entirely.

It’s always been that way for me: I quit for the first time right after grad school, when my oldest child was one year old, and I became a stay-at-home mom. That lasted a year before I un-quit to launch Eidolon. And now I was doing the same thing when my second child was a toddler.

Every time I’ve felt myself sucked into the swirling Charybdis of motherhood, the easiest ballast to jettison was the part of me that studied and engaged with Classics. Like my career and my longing for intellectual engagement were luxuries I didn’t have time and energy for. Optional. A distraction from what really mattered, which is to say, all the people in my life who need my support.

Well, screw that. So here I am, starting something new, until a new catastrophe comes along that fractures my identity and pushes me to succumb to the false dichotomy of motherhood vs. writing yet again. Or maybe this time, I’ll learn from my mistakes.

1. THIS IS ALL A LOT MORE COMPLICATED AND NUANCED THAN I’M MAKING IT SEEM HERE and in the intervening 10 years I’ve learned a lot more about the realities of academic labor! Just to be super-clear: I’m not saying they were failing to do their jobs. But also, the professor/grad student relationship does have the potential to be a fucked-up dynamic in all kinds of ways.

2. Ok, not ALL the time. For example, whenever something by or about Agnes Callard is published, I feel very relieved at the angry response pitches I won’t have to field.