I dreamed of daughters

how Rebecca Woolf helped me see otherwise

Is there anything more god-like than a woman over 40? I’ve been hard-pressed to find one. 

Since I was in high school, I’ve gathered middle-aged women to me as talismans. They have always seemed the answer. Mrs. Smith, my tenth-grade English teacher; Lisa Sternlieb, my thesis advisor; Melissa Raeder, my running inspiration; Amy Hunt, teaching guru; Robyn Chapel, parenting guide; Kim Zeineddine, writing mentor. They were promise, reassurance, impressive as fuck. 

Plus, there was to be a lifetime of younger women ahead of me, once I had daughters.

Rebecca Woolf came to me via DM last year on my birthday. Usually, my college friend Cristina and I exchange things like dogs in snowman suits and marshmallow Peeps diorama contestant photos. This one was different: 

“Now it’s your turn to drive” chronicles Woolf teaching her son to drive a car, relinquishing the little control she has left: “there is no greater metaphor for letting go than climbing over the cupholders onto the passenger side.”

She writes about her teenage son in a way that makes me believe what I want for my boys, what I want for our relationships, is possible. 

I didn’t want boys. 

I am immodestly close to my mother. And I always expected my daughter would be immodestly close to me, too.

When I gave birth to my fourth and last child it was the first time I didn’t know the sex of my baby going in. On the day of his birth, I woke at 4am with labor pains, and laid in a bath, Blondie blaring on my phone, a last shout at the universe to make this one a girl.

A close friend had a baby two months before I delivered my son. Her baby is beautiful and my friend calls her feisty, even in the things that all babies do. I look at baby girls hungrily, like the wolves of fairy tales. 

Post-birth emotions are funny. Like a trick of light, you can’t guarantee when or how they’re  going to hit you. For me, it was an overwhelming completeness, something extraordinary done  and something extraordinary to happen, all satisfyingly squalling in the fullest my arms would ever feel.

But the truth is the ecstasy and wholeness of that first moment is no tone-setter for the period of post-partum. Ecstasy becomes agony, becomes bliss, becomes ambiguity, fear becomes joy, becomes terror, becomes flatness. There’s no telling those first months of being what to be.

Night feedings took on menacing shape as I mourned the imagined daughter I’d never have. My understandings of a future self were shifting to accommodate the role of mother without girls. Day and night, the fantasy of my mother dying hunted me. I obsessed over the idea that when she went, I’d have no sisters, no daughters. The future was an abandoned barn.

Children’s author Maurice Sendak had no children but he also had an imaginary daughter: “A daughter would be drawn to me. A daughter would want to help me. Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys and women more than men [...] I have lived my whole life with a dream daughter."

Part of the problem was I always felt pity for the moms of only boys: their hands hovering sadly over my own 8-year old head as if waiting to be asked to braid my hair, they seemed always on the edges of things: the soccer field, wedding planning, births of grandchildren, holidays.

There’s an attentiveness in Woolf’s writing to her son. He is not an easy shape pasted on a horizon. She gives the sense of infinity to him. And she is not on the sideline, but thick in it with him.  Even when she’s saying goodbye. “My boy in the rear-view, silhouetted by golden hour as I climbed over the center divide and waited. Asked him how his day was as we buckled our seatbelts against the sound of his playlist’s hiccup, ignition’s twist.”

Woolf’s site is called the braid. She braids together experiences of mother, lover, self, rejecting the notion that our mother-selves are not our lover-selves. She embraces the messy, revels in the contradictory, looks baldly at the taboo and says, oh, hi. Like me, she has four children. Unlike me, her three youngest are girls.

I get stopped a lot, with four young boys. Sympathy reads as pity to me. “You’ve got your hands full!” Sometimes I want to hug the stranger for seeing it and other times I want to yell FUCK YOU MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MY BOYS DEFIES YOUR EASY ASSUMPTIONS.

Woolf’s site is the opposite of the curated minimalist mom. Many of the photos are wobbly, shadowy, like old family polaroids. Nothing is bleached white. There is no slickness to the blog’s aesthetic. Her writing speaks for itself. 

Anything that was white in my life has long been stained. 

My postpartum grief was like the winter sun outside the bedroom window: edgeless and yawning, insistent but cowardly. It cowered in the loudness of my three older boys galumphing in, beamish with the day’s exploits.

Here is when I excuse my feelings by naming my love for my sons. I have four healthy children. I am lucky. But still, there is that river of muddy guilty grief.

Woolf recently posted a video of her son in his final high school musical, playing Billy Bigelow in “Carousel”. Even the way her camera follows him across the stage has love in it. 

I took my second son to see “Newsies” this month for his ninth birthday. He loves dancing and we swap scarves and he wore a cream silk one that night. To see a male dancing troupe— like strung pearls breaking across a stage-–is something. Masculinity writ large, and beautiful. 

“They grow up is the thing,” Woolf tells me in her essay. 

Radical black lesbian poet Audre Lorde said having a son changed her more than anything else. In her essay “Man Child”, Lorde wrote “Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly ‘inferior’ capacity to feel deeply.” She goes on, “But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.” 

The greatest gift a mother can give her son, Lorde says, is “how to feel love, how to neither discount fear nor be overwhelmed by it, how to enjoy feeling deeply.”

Reading “Man Child”, I was struck by what I’m in love with about Woolf’s portrayal of her son: she redefines his manhood as personhood, making the feminine universal in the way that the masculine has been until now.

“And now my old car is his new one and the roads that were mine are now ours and there is nothing I can do but watch him drive off without me, make his own way in a world of road blocks and freeways and sirens, and feel proud.” Her conjunctions force us to slow down and to speed up–like parenting does-–to feel the enormity of that goodbye, when the person who introduced your heart to itself drives into the world, his coltish limbs fully-formed.

When Woolf writes of her son it reminds me of looking at my sons, that jab-to-the-ribs reminder of the extraordinary enterprise of being human.

Tonight, one of my sons is pirouetting, another runs his elbow glissando on the piano. A third is on the counter chatting with my husband while they cook dinner. And the fourth, our youngest, asks to braid my hair. He twists it round and round like a curly oak branch, and when he lets go, the twist relaxes, wild and loose, across my shoulders.

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Special thanks to my dear Cristina Keefe who shared her love for Rebecca with me. And in sincerest gratitude to Rebecca Woolf, who graciously and enthusiastically responded to my message—there is nothing better than finding out a wise hero is a kind hero. “My boys on Abbey Road” is by the indomitable Emily Richardson (also master mom of a boy).