Photo: Corey Towers, courtesy of the artist
“We… acknowledge the need for frivolity, humor and the absurd,”1 1 - Melissa Goldstein and Natalia Rachlin, “Editorial Note,” Mother Tongue 3(Fall/Winter 2022 – 23): 10. also proclaims the Editorial Note in the current issue of Mother Tongue, a new print periodical focused on contemporary motherhood. This need for a spectrum of feeling is never more salient than in the early days of mothering, of which the poet Adrienne Rich evinces that we “remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom” punctuated by moments of “passionate love.”2 2 - Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience And Institution (London: Norton & Company, 1995), 60. Of course, what Rich remembers is not little but a totalizing gamut of contradictory emotions spun by mothering.
