Author event! Ruthie Ackerman & Eve Rodsky
[0:00]put down a ball. And there were so many things in this book that I resonated with, so many
[0:05]things that were just so interesting to learn about. And I was wondering if you could just
[0:11]start by summarizing the book for anyone here who hasn't read it yet, kind of what it's
[0:14]about because I'm just going to start listing things like motherhood and fertility and grief
[0:19]and marriage and divorce and so much generational trauma. I'm just going to go on and on.
[0:26]So do I. So this book is about my quest to figure out whether or not I should have a baby.
[0:34]And I spent many, many years in my life thinking I was in the Hell no camp. I would never have a
[0:41]baby because I come from a long line of women who abandoned their children, which is the first
[0:47]line of my book. And so I thought that if I had a child, I would abandon my child too. Which is
[0:55]actually where the title of the motherhood comes from. I thought that there was a defect in my
[1:01]genetic code that would make me abandon any kids that I would have. And so I thought to myself,
[1:09]finally, I married a guy who didn't want children. And I thought to myself, I should like
[1:15]make a hundred percent sure that I don't want a kid before I like finally finally make this
[1:22]decision. So I went on the quest, which I described in this book to talk to as many people as I
[1:29]could about whether I should have a baby. Everyone from my, you know, the obvious like fertility
[1:36]doctors to my friends to at one point a masseuse. So it's like there's this like
[1:46]my therapist, my, you know, my like yeah, my husband at the time, spoiler alert, we're not
[1:53]married anymore, who was like adamantly like from day one, I never wanted a child. So no.
[2:01]And yeah, the truth was I had no idea what I wanted deep inside. And so part of this book is
[2:08]untangling my the fact that so many of us, not just me, but you know, I know myself the best.
[2:17]So I'll talk about myself. But that I had such a hard time understanding my deepest desires.
[2:23]And I think that that's something that is very challenging, especially for women.
[2:28]Yeah. Yeah. There's so much I related to. I'm, I'm married and divorced and married again.
[2:34]I now have a total of six kids, three. I gave birth to three step kids.
[2:40]But my first husband who I ended up having two kids with, I told him on our first date that I
[2:45]didn't want to have children. I was like, I want to sleep under the stars in Africa. I want to write
[2:49]books. I want to travel. I do not want to have kids. You need to know this about me. And like
[2:53]literally 11 months later, I was pregnant by choice. So there was a lot. I like found myself
[3:00]really pondering my own journey. I'm now 16 years into motherhood. And I lost my mother when
[3:07]I was 18. So motherhood has a very loaded layer for me. And that was a big part of the reason I
[3:13]didn't want to have kids was because I thought, I have kids. If I don't have a mom, how can I
[3:18]even go on this journey without my own mother here? And so I just found myself really pondering
[3:23]so much and reflecting a lot on my journey, which was, I was really appreciative of that and
[3:28]that opportunity to think about a lot of things. Some that I had very deliberately chosen
[3:33]and thought a lot about and some that I just kind of barreled into or that happened to me.
[3:39]There's a lot about motherhood that we don't have choices over. And the word choice itself,
[3:45]I find I like tried to pick it apart because we think we have choices. And then there's other things
[3:51]where you just wake up one day and you're sort of like backed into something that you
[3:55]aren't so sure that you chose ultimately. There was a lot of existential ponder. I really
[4:01]appreciate as well. I mean, I work in grief realm. And so I sit with people every day who are dying
[4:06]or died. And I'm always thinking about just the kind of existential reality of getting out of bed
[4:12]in the day and what consequences we face with that. And you asked that question a lot in here too.
[4:17]What's worthy of our time? We have a finite amount of time on this planet. So if parenting is
[4:24]maybe not the thing that you want to do, then what else would you do with your time? Which
[4:31]would I ask myself? I thought like, I'm not going to be a mom. I have to figure out what master
[4:36]piece I'm going to make. And so the pressure of that is a lot of pressure. Yeah, it's a lot of
[4:43]pressure. Would you mean to us? Yeah. So I was thinking about what section to read. And I think
[4:51]I want to read from the very beginning that. Yeah. So stop me if I go on too long.
[5:00]I, I'll set this up for you guys. Okay. I come from a long line of women who abandoned
[5:06]their children, or at least that's what I'd been told. For as long as I can remember,
[5:11]I've heard about how my great-grandmother Kitty and my grandmother Ruth ditched their kids
[5:16]because of men or money or mental problems or all of the above. As the story goes,
[5:23]Kitty left her son and daughter with her in-laws, so she could gallivant around Europe,
[5:28]man hunting, as my mom calls it, on a good day. On a bad day, my mom will let it all hang out.
[5:34]Kitty was a gold digger. She told me recently when I called to let her know that I'd been
[5:39]researching the women in our family. We were on video, so I could see my mom's face,
[5:45]the way her lips curled and discussed when I mentioned Kitty's name. What you don't understand
[5:52]is that all Kitty cared about was money, she said. She'd married one rich man only to leave him
[5:59]when she met another man who was even richer. As I listened to my mom, what I heard was the
[6:07]conviction in her voice. She was certain that her take on Kitty was true. There couldn't be any other
[6:15]explanation for my great-grandmother's behavior. Kitty was cruel to her children and her grandchildren,
[6:21]and money was the culprit end of story. She was married 25 times as next to her ear. The universal
[6:31]symbol for coop, but she was. I shook my head. 25 times sounded ludicrous, impossible. Yet,
[6:40]despite all the hyperbole and stereo about Kitty, the stories about the men she loved and left
[6:46]as quickly a mouse could snatch a piece of cheese from a trap. I later learned there was some
[6:51]truth to the family legends. Over the years, I interviewed an aunt and uncle in a cut. I even
[6:58]spent a weekend in Baltimore with Kitty's son before he died. Kitty didn't want to be a mother,
[7:04]he told me unequivocally, which is something I'd never heard anyone admit out loud about a woman.
[7:10]Especially one who became a wife for the first time in 1917 when women were meant to worship
[7:16]their husbands and children. Much later, I searched for census records, old newspapers,
[7:22]marriage and divorce decrees, and immigration files. I learned Kitty went by at least
[7:28]five first names. Kitty, Kuhn, Katie, Kate, and Catherine. Eventually, I could decipher facts
[7:35]from fables. I dug up documentation for 14 of Kitty's marriages. Her shortest was only 10 days.
[7:43]She married my great-grandfather Irving twice, the first time at just 17. My grandmother Ruth
[7:50]followed in her mother's footsteps, abandoning her first-child bath to marry my grandfather.
[7:56]This truth is this. I'd always secretly rooted for Kitty and Ruth, though I never told anyone
[8:02]in my family. I assumed that everyone denigrated them because they roamed around for their own
[8:08]pleasure, as if there was anything wrong with that. But I understood that of course there was,
[8:15]a woman living her life for herself has never been allowed. Women at that time didn't choose
[8:21]whether or not to be mothers. What would choice have even meant for my great-grandmother and
[8:26]grandmother? When the system, their families, their community, their religion, the culture they were
[8:32]steeped in only showed them images of women as mothers. Mothering was natural. It was normal.
[8:38]There was no question of desire or a path for opting out. They could only choose to mother as much
[8:44]as a fish chooses to live in water. It's what they had to do. It's what women did. We now have
[8:51]a language, a lexicon from eternal ambivalence. But back then, back in the early to mid 1900s,
[8:58]women were mothers and that was that. Yet Kitty and Ruth always scoffed at the rules,
[9:04]which is what I admired about them. The problem with public records is that the emotional
[9:10]tenor of the past is erased. I have no idea if Kitty loved any of her husbands or if Ruth loved
[9:16]hers. I have no idea why Kitty left them or if perhaps they left her. I have no idea if she was
[9:23]looking for money from them or some other type of security. I have my guesses though. Citizenship
[9:30]was a priority for a Jewish girl who spoke only Yiddish and never went to school after arriving
[9:35]at Ellis Island in 1906 at the age of just six. It may be true as my family tells me that Kitty
[9:43]married a Chicago gangster then divorced him because Chicago was too cold or that she married
[9:49]the owner of a jewelry store empire in South Florida and left him when his business went to put
[9:56]and then finally in her 90s, living out the last of her days and
[10:00]nursing home. She married the man several decades her junior whom she called
[10:04]what's his name. I should have asked you this before we sat down but how much
[10:17]do you want to disclose about how this journey unfolds? You know you go on
[10:20]you decide that you want to become a mother. I did I did I do and how much do you
[10:25]want to disclose about how that goes once you've decided. We couldn't
[10:29]like spoiler alert stuff. We can we can talk spoilers. Because you
[10:35]don't as everyone buys the book. So what does it you decide how do you
[10:39]decide how do you finally know? So I went to my therapist and I said this baby
[10:46]question is driving a crazy and she said on a scale of zero to a hundred how
[10:51]badly do you want a baby and I said 55% and she's like there you go and I was
[10:57]like shouldn't I really know like 99% if I'm going to annihilate every dream
[11:05]I've ever had my entire identity because that's what we've been told right?
[11:09]They're gonna have a kid you have to be all in. Why would I do it for something
[11:14]I want 55% and she's like well what makes you think 55% isn't enough. You're
[11:21]that 55% number is telling you something that you want it a little more than
[11:26]you don't. And so I went home that night to the man I had married but I had
[11:32]promised that I was not going to have children with and I now knew that I
[11:39]probably wanted a kid a little bit more than I didn't and what did I do? Nothing.
[11:45]I did nothing and that was a real turning point for me in writing this book
[11:50]that I finally like knew that I probably wanted a baby but then I went home
[11:56]and I didn't actually do the thing that would like I continued to
[12:02]import myself. I continued to pretzel to make this marriage work for two more years
[12:07]and that really surprised me and that that was like something I didn't
[12:12]like it's obvious but I didn't realize until I was writing it. Yeah that's why
[12:16]didn't I go home and say you know what we can't be together anymore. It's like
[12:21]cruising, hoping life would somehow like answer it for me. The book opens
[12:28]also beyond the passage you read with you in a bookstore running into this man
[12:34]who is now your ex-husband and your pregnant. Walk us a little bit there. I hadn't
[12:43]seen him in many years after like gone on a whole new journey on a whole
[12:48]other journey which you'll read about or maybe we'll discuss. Yeah and then I
[12:53]run into him and I'm so surprised by running into him. First of all he was in a
[12:59]bookstore. I was like you didn't read literature or when we were together and then I
[13:08]also knew he had been dating someone from the time we had gotten separated and
[13:13]and I had all these like questions in my mind about like whether they were
[13:18]gonna now have a child together and I was somehow going to be humiliated by
[13:23]this you know other relationship that turned into you know baby and there I was
[13:31]pregnant and happy and with someone new but I couldn't get it out of my head
[13:39]yeah this was like you know what like what was I gonna say to him until
[13:44]basically I like neither of us said anything we just ignored each other which is
[13:50]indicative of your marriage. I was taking of a man-fire thing but you go on this
[13:54]pretty deliciously satisfying dating journey to find the man that you want to
[13:59]have a kid with. I got divorced and remarried and had a my own mid 30s dating
[14:05]journey with two kids already in hands and I remembered this man that I had
[14:12]dated for a little while who I got pretty close to we had like a nine-month
[14:16]thing until it took a turn when we were laying in bed when morning
[14:19]discussing the relationship and why it wasn't working and he finally said to me
[14:23]he looked and he was like you are so perfect I love everything about you I
[14:26]love that you write books I love that you do this work I love this and this
[14:29]he's like I just think you would be perfect if you didn't have kids and he
[14:36]had kids he already had kids there's just gonna be too many kids with all of our
[14:40]kids right and so you go on a journey of lots of kind of ups and downs and
[14:45]exploring you know finding a man who wants to have a kid yeah and yeah also
[14:52]considering the idea of not finding a partner and having a good and there's so
[14:57]much amazing research in this book to you
[15:00]about all the different ways we can become mothers
[15:02]and women do become mothers, especially in today's day and age
[15:05]that was really fascinating to read about.
[15:09]Yeah, I mean, one of the, my favorite parts of the book
[15:11]was going, I went, the name of the chapter
[15:15]is Outlaw Motherhood.
[15:16]And I went on this sort of literary quest to find out
[15:20]if I was going to have a child with a partner or not,
[15:23]was there any way to have a child that could be radical?
[15:27]Could having a child, could being a mom not be seen
[15:32]as like weak and like denigrating?
[15:35]Because I felt like that's all I'd seen in the media
[15:38]and my own life at the role models that I had.
[15:42]And so going into the literature and being able to read about
[15:45]women like Barbara Aronrike and Tony Morrison,
[15:49]who wrote very vividly about their revolutionary mothering.
[15:55]And there's this amazing anthology that-
[15:57]Tony Morrison quotes were really great.
[16:00]It's like, she said she'd never written anything
[16:02]without, you know, basically the kind of primal scream
[16:06]of her child like radiating through it.
[16:09]And I love that.
[16:11]But what I found was that even though I,
[16:14]but my nerd and women studies and had read so much
[16:18]kind of what I would consider feminist literature,
[16:21]I really didn't have a grasp on the black
[16:26]and brown communities and the kinship networks
[16:29]and the ways that there are so many communities of women
[16:33]and families that have created alternative shapes
[16:36]to motherhood.
[16:37]And I started to question why this very kind of white,
[16:42]bread and veg of motherhood is the one that we all know so well.
[16:48]And so that to me was a real turning point that,
[16:51]yeah, I could have a child, but also could I have a child
[16:54]and do motherhood differently.
[16:58]Yeah, say it more about the idea of motherhood
[17:00]as a radical act.
[17:02]Yeah, so could, is there a way to teach your children
[17:10]to, that your own dreams as a woman and as a mother
[17:16]are, and your own self-actualization is just as important
[17:21]as the mothering.
[17:22]So that like, you are becoming a mother
[17:25]and becoming more of yourself as your mothering.
[17:29]And I think that sounds like so obvious.
[17:32]I mean, it's 20, 25 people like it should be so obvious.
[17:36]And yeah, the fact that we can mother
[17:39]and do other things really is radical.
[17:43]Yeah, there was a quote in there from Jeanette Winterson
[17:46]that really gave me chills and pause.
[17:50]She said something along the lines of how she couldn't find
[17:53]a female literary model who did the work she wanted to do
[17:56]and also led an ordinary heterosexual life with kids.
[18:00]And she said, think about how many Nobel Prize winners
[18:03]we've lost because they were mothers instead
[18:06]or how many other creative types we've lost
[18:10]because they chose motherhood.
[18:13]Do you think that's entirely true?
[18:15]Like, I really started thinking like,
[18:17]can I think of this, where's it, where's that woman?
[18:21]Yeah, yes.
[18:22]I think that we're told that we have to choose.
[18:25]Do I think it needs to be true?
[18:27]No, I don't think it needs to be an either or,
[18:29]but we're told we need to choose between mothering
[18:32]and anything else.
[18:34]And so I think there's so much proof.
[18:36]I mean, we're sitting up here,
[18:38]like you can mother and write books, for example.
[18:41]But I also think like there's a lot you have to overcome
[18:46]in terms of like the voices in your own head
[18:48]and the voices in society in order
[18:50]to be able to do those things, because we're told we can't
[18:53]or that we shouldn't.
[18:55]I thought about this a lot for myself.
[18:56]I wrote three books and had three kids in a 10-year span.
[18:59]And one or the other was always taking a hit.
[19:03]Either the parenting and the mothering
[19:05]or the books and the publishing and that whole career.
[19:09]And it's an insane balancing act.
[19:13]And judgment on both sides from the outside world.
[19:15]I think there's a lot of outside world judgment
[19:17]that comes with all of that.
[19:19]Yeah.
[19:20]And I quote Claire Dieter, who's an amazing writer in the book.
[19:24]And she talked about abandonment as the kind of biggest crime
[19:29]a woman can commit, maternal abandonment.
[19:31]And that in some way as a writer,
[19:33]you have to shut the door on your children.
[19:36]And it's not only as a writer to do anything.
[19:39]You have to at some point shut the door on your children.
[19:42]And that can feel like a form of abandonment.
[19:46]Yeah.
[19:47]So tell us about your fertility journey.
[19:51]It's a big question.
[19:52]Yeah.
[19:53]So it's a question, but it's also
[19:54]such a huge question for so many that I
[19:57]think that's one of the reasons this book is so amazing.
[20:00]and it's going to speak to so many women and I think it's just going to be such a place for
[20:05]a lot of women to turn. Yeah, I hope so. So finally, so there's a there's a chapter in the book
[20:13]called 60 Days and Six Months. I went on a lot of dates. You were really strategic. I was very,
[20:18]I was trying to be strategic after not being strategic for a very, very, very long time.
[20:23]So I went on a lot of dates and I finally met this man, now my husband, Rob,
[20:31]if he's very wonderful. And but by the time we met and got to know each other and did all the
[20:37]things you need to do to have kids together, I was 41 years old and it wasn't easy to have kids at
[20:42]that point. And I should say that I had, when I was in my first marriage, I had frozen my eggs
[20:48]when I was 35, thinking that this was my life. I learned a lot about that I didn't know.
[20:56]I thought it was a guarantee. I thought that meant, you know, I had these frozen eggs. If my
[21:01]insurance policy, I keep in my back pocket for the day when I need it. And I needed it. And I
[21:08]was 41 and we thought those eggs and the 14 of them, by the way. So and I was told by my doctor,
[21:16]you'll be able to have two kids. And I was like, oh great, because I only want one. So this is
[21:20]perfect. None of those eggs worked. None of them were viable, ultimately. And so after that crushing
[21:27]defeat, we tried IVF twice. And that was either of those times worked. And by then I was already 42.
[21:37]And like, as you can imagine every month, it's like this race against time. And then finally,
[21:44]our doctor said, do you want to try donor eggs? And I had never heard of it, thought of it.
[21:54]This idea, and this relates back to the title of the book, The Mother Code. I had spent so long
[22:02]running away from the generational trauma in my family, running away from the flaws, the defects
[22:10]that I thought lived in my DNA. This idea of using someone else's DNA to have a child should have
[22:18]been like a huge relief for me. But then suddenly being faced with this decision on whether or not
[22:26]to move forward with donor eggs, there was a lot of grief around, wait, it's like, yes, I have a line
[22:34]always makes me laugh. Like my family's full of like assholes and addicts or something like that.
[22:40]But they're my assholes and my addicts. Like they're the devil I know. Like who knows what
[22:47]someone else's DNA? You did so much cool research about donor eggs and the genetics, the epigenetics.
[22:54]And I thought it was so fascinating. Can you share maybe some of the highlights that you've learned?
[23:00]Yeah. So because you were so curious about how much of your DNA, your essence would even be in
[23:07]this child. That was your big question about should I do this, you know? Yeah, if I do,
[23:12]yeah, like what? Like I was wondering, would I have any imprint on my child if I use a donor egg?
[23:22]I would care. So basically, I mean, I don't know how much you guys know about donor eggs,
[23:27]but basically a donor egg would be mixed with my now has been sperm, create an embryo,
[23:33]and then transferred into my body. So I would carry this child, but I would have no DNA genetic
[23:40]relationship with this child. So I was like, I might as well be a surrogate. Like if you put,
[23:47]I started like calling up every research or geneticist I know to be like, well, I have,
[23:53]well, my body like had any influence on this baby at all. And basically, no one could answer
[24:01]because there's no research that you can do like that. So, so I spent a lot of time on that,
[24:08]but then I finally spoke to this one researcher, Deanna Bianchi. And she told me about something
[24:14]called microchionarism, which means that there's little pieces of DNA from the fetus that float
[24:24]around in the mother's body when they're carrying the child. So ultimately, I learned that there
[24:32]would be that I would have little pieces of the child's DNA in me and vice versa. And that was
[24:41]like this wake up call moment that there was no way I could be pregnant for nine months with
[24:47]a child and have no, my bloods running through their body and no impact at all. Of course,
[24:54]I would have an impact not to mention all the impact of, you know, raising this child.
[25:00]So it's just this real week of call moment.
[25:02]Yeah, it was really fascinating to read about.
[25:06]Like I said, my mom died when I was 18
[25:08]and then my first daughter was born when I was 31
[25:12]and was really hard to become a mom without my mom here.
[25:15]And I remember learning that we have all of our eggs
[25:20]when we are fetuses in our mother's bodies.
[25:22]So it brought me a lot of comfort to think about how
[25:26]my daughter and all of my kids were in me
[25:29]when I was in her.
[25:31]But then this took it a whole new step further
[25:33]to think that I don't know if there still
[25:35]would be at this point, but pieces of her in me now.
[25:39]And I was laying next to my son
[25:40]when I was reading that section my six year old.
[25:42]And I was thinking about how there's
[25:43]like little pieces of him floating around in me
[25:45]and how incredible that is.
[25:47]Yeah, and that there's like science around.
[25:51]If you have some sort of like hurt troubles,
[25:55]then like sometimes the DNA from the fetus
[25:58]can go and fix a maternal heart.
[26:00]And it was just fascinating research for anyone
[26:05]that's into that sort of thing, which just like blew me away
[26:09]and kind of changed the course of my imagination
[26:15]around what was possible in terms of motherhood for me.
[26:20]Did you know you were writing a book
[26:22]when you were doing this research or thinking about all
[26:24]of these things or living through this?
[26:26]And I was living through this, no.
[26:29]But when I was by the time I was doing the research,
[26:31]I understood that I was writing a book.
[26:33]But I also, there were many different versions of this book.
[26:36]I thought I was going to write a book about my relationship
[26:38]with my mom, which is very complicated because of my health.
[26:42]My brother, I thought, has been
[26:43]a write a book about him.
[26:45]I have a half brother from my mom and my stepfather,
[26:49]who has what I call a triple whammy of rare genetic disorders.
[26:52]That was another piece of the whole DNA question for me.
[26:57]And so, yeah, there were a lot of versions of this book.
[27:00]But I actually wrote this book in the throws
[27:04]of the fourth trimester after my daughter,
[27:06]sorry, spoiler alert.
[27:07]I have a daughter now.
[27:10]And in this time in the morning when she woke up
[27:15]and I was trying to get her back to bed,
[27:17]I was awake and I was writing.
[27:19]Yeah.
[27:21]Well, the book, how has it been to have her?
[27:26]Like, that's not, you know, we go in this whole journey
[27:29]and all these questions.
[27:30]But I think you're in to motherhood now, you're far into it.
[27:35]Yeah, so she's five now.
[27:37]And I feel like one of the questions,
[27:39]so I talk about the 55%, I was only 55% sure
[27:44]that I wanted to have a child.
[27:46]And now I say I'm a hundred and 55% sure
[27:50]that I want to be a mother.
[27:53]But what, like people say like, was there that like one moment
[27:57]for you that sort of flipped the switch?
[27:59]And I think it took, it didn't happen before she was born.
[28:04]Like I kept waiting for it to happen.
[28:06]But what happened instead was that through just like taking
[28:10]one step in front of the other and through mothering,
[28:15]I became a mother of that makes sense.
[28:17]I like mothered until like through the caretaking
[28:21]and the like trials and tribulations.
[28:24]There's someone, you had a conversation with someone
[28:26]about that concept too, and the quote was that.
[28:28]Yeah, I'm not remembering.
[28:30]I do know that it's true.
[28:32]Yeah, it's about becoming a mother by mothering
[28:34]and the real mothering.
[28:35]Oh, yes, the, yes.
[28:39]And I'm forgetting her name off the top of my head,
[28:41]the researcher around, yes.
[28:44]But how, by doing the thing, that's how you become a mom.
[28:49]But we have all these other conceptions
[28:51]that like, especially for women,
[28:53]that we're just boring with this maternal instinct
[28:55]do we know how and we want to, mother.
[28:58]But actually it's something that we cultivate over time.
[29:02]Which I don't think we talk enough about.
[29:03]Yeah, no, we don't at all.
[29:07]I think we're going to open it up for questions.
[29:10]Sure.
[29:11]Yeah.
[29:12]Ready?
[29:13]Yeah.
[29:15]I think it's just, it's popped into my head
[29:17]in that last bit.
[29:18]So, um, yeah, that you're earning her mothering
[29:23]as a young person as a little girl or a child.
[29:27]Did you find that do we do?
[29:29]Did you play with baby dolls?
[29:31]Did you hear children?
[29:32]Did you have an idea with them all around motherhood
[29:35]as a little?
[29:37]How were you when you break down?
[29:39]Yeah, I think I just assumed I'd become a mom
[29:42]because that's what women did.
[29:45]It didn't, I didn't know there was another option.
[29:47]But I also felt like it just looked like women
[29:51]that I knew weren't having a very good time of it.
[29:54]Yeah.
[29:55]Like everyone that I knew my mom, my stuff all like I'm like.
[30:00]friends moms, everyone looked pretty miserable and were like very vocal about all this
[30:04]when they were and so I was sort of like, why does anybody do this thing? And then there's
[30:10]a scene from when I'm in college and my best friend and I, we like, you know, kind of thinking
[30:16]about who we were going to be in the world and like we were comparing two of our professors,
[30:21]one who was a mom and looked like, you know, to shovel that like just like, you know, what
[30:28]you'd expect a mom to look like. And the other like very glamorous, stylish, you know,
[30:34]woman who wasn't mother, who was probably like 30 years old at the time, but I thought was like
[30:41]just like so old, I don't know. But as like an 18 year old, I was like, oh my god, I'm never going
[30:47]to have a kid. I want to be like her. So, yeah. You said you wrote in the morning before your
[31:01]child broke up. Like how long was that? Like how many in years? Like every morning? Like every day?
[31:09]Not every day. This is the other thing. Like so many people asked me about is, you know, do you have to
[31:14]write every day? I don't know what your answer to this is, but I do not write every day. All right,
[31:19]like three or four days a week. And no, I was not writing every day. It was like it took a really
[31:26]long time. But I should have said what I meant was like that I woke up, there was this one scene.
[31:34]I remember waking up in just in the middle of the night and being like in this frantic moment
[31:40]and being like, oh, I know what the opening of my book is going to mean. And it was the scene,
[31:46]which is further in the book now, but in my mind, it was going to be the opening scene of the book.
[31:50]Which is a scene when I introduced my daughter, who is just a few days old at the time,
[31:56]to my brother. And my brother that I mentioned to you has all these these genetic disorders.
[32:02]And I introduced them on zoom, because it's the middle of COVID, by the way. Like when I finally
[32:07]got around having a baby and all this stuff, it's like the middle of COVID. I'm like the universe
[32:12]is telling me something. So like I'm trapped in this apartment where on zoom and the scene of
[32:18]him meeting her for the first time was really meaningful to me. And then when I finally did
[32:26]sell my book and my editors, like I love that scene, but it's not the opening chapter of your book.
[32:32]Like, oh, that's okay. But I needed that like scene to come up for me so that I would start to
[32:39]write. I don't know if that's ever happened to you where it's like the thing you think is like
[32:44]the like cluncher for the book. Like, yeah, it usually isn't. But you need that entry point though,
[32:50]you need to find that moment that you've emotionally connected that sits you up in the
[32:53]middle of the night that enters you into the book, at least. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
[32:59]And I was going to say like, I know you had said like, do you feel okay like with the spoilers and
[33:04]stuff? And I think like, the answer is yes. And the reason why is because I think it's about
[33:11]the quest and the journey of it that feels like so much more important than like, did you have
[33:19]a baby or not? It's like, how does one go about getting in touch with their deepest desires and
[33:26]trying to figure out like the person they want to be in the world? I don't know how else to say it.
[33:32]And one thing I want to say is that the title of the book change in meaning for me as I went
[33:40]through that transformational arc. Like I said in the beginning, the title meant in the beginning
[33:46]for me that I thought there was a flaw in my DNA. By the end of the book, the title, the mother
[33:52]code meant that each of us has our own narrative around what kind of mothers we want to be,
[34:00]whether or not we want to be mothers, what the generational trauma is that we
[34:06]have inherited and are questioning like whether we would pass on. And so to me, the mother
[34:12]code became so much more like multifaceted through the writing of the book, like as I transformed
[34:20]the meaning of the title transform, too. It's a really good title. Yeah. So I haven't had your
[34:28]book yet. I'm excited to. But I read your essay on spread the jelly about your
[34:35]a don't hair experience. And I left you in comment today because I don't need a might ache.
[34:40]So I was just like really excited to hear your perspective on it. And I kind of wanted to ask
[34:47]um, yeah, how how you feel like did you feel like you wanted any kind of understanding of who this
[34:55]donor was? And why did you? This was a fascinating part of it. Yeah.
[35:00]Yes, for my perspective people are like what if your biological children try to find you
[35:05]someday and like I checked some boxes that said like I would allow that 14 years in the
[35:10]future so you know I don't know how different agencies work but I'm just curious from
[35:14]your side of it like if you would want to have any relationship at some point if you would
[35:21]and I get I don't know if this is too personal a question but this is a no more I guess
[35:24]if you plan on talking to your daughter about it or it helps like no I'm gonna have to
[35:30]tell my actual children about my experience at some point or I want to so yeah oh my god yeah
[35:36]I'm so glad you're here yeah this is so special yes okay so there's a lot of pieces to
[35:45]guess one is that we robbed my husband and I decided very before I even got pregnant
[35:55]that I would that we would talk to our daughter about where she came from that was a very
[36:00]important part of the process one there's been a lot of research through adoption like the
[36:06]history of adoption around talking to kids that have been adopted and not keeping that
[36:13]journey a secret is very important mental health wise and so with donor eggs and donor sperm
[36:21]that's been a very important part of the process so we had to actually do like a psychological
[36:26]evaluation which I write about in the book I'm only laughing because it was actually kind of funny
[36:33]which you'll find out but yeah the psychological evaluation which the whole point of it was
[36:38]are you are you're not gonna talk to your child about where they came from so yes we've already
[36:43]started talking to Clementine about that and actually there's a story coming out on WBUR where they
[36:52]recorded Clem talking about where she came from so she already understands not exactly but you know
[37:00]in age appropriate ways and then that our purpose our clinic that we use they do only closed
[37:09]don't egg donation but we actually wanted to have an open donation so we could have
[37:15]contact with the donor which they wouldn't allow but once I was pregnant I found out that
[37:21]different agencies and especially if you pay more money and there's this whole like higher
[37:26]hierarchy of how much money you pay for different kinds of access which is kind of like
[37:32]gross and like there's a whole part of that we could talk about too but once I was pregnant
[37:38]I had this like crisis in my mind of like did I do the wrong thing because I could have like
[37:44]for whatever who knows $10,000 more gone to a clinic to and been able to like Skype or zoom
[37:52]with the donor and it's like I mean all these add-ons you know like this crazy thing
[38:00]and then in terms of like I would love if there was a way to actually meet the donor and also
[38:07]any half siblings that Clementine might have because she's an only child and she's gonna be an
[38:12]only child and so wouldn't it be great if there were others and I know there are yeah
[38:19]who we don't know where they are so we could go on like 23 in me or ancestry I may be
[38:24]fined the donor but we had signed contract saying that we would not do that because it's a
[38:30]closed donation and so I'm leaving that up to Clementine whether she wants to do that in the future
[38:37]that was a really fascinating whole section of the book you choosing which donor and looking at
[38:41]these photos and Rob's opinion versus yours and the doctor wing and I mean I was like
[38:47]oh my god that was like the spread the jelly's this kind of new-ish motherhood site that
[38:55]publishes essays and so that's sort of what the essay was about like finding her baby's mama
[39:02]as we tookingly called her but yeah it's so hard it's like swiping on these pictures of young
[39:11]women and like you don't know who the people are you don't get to talk to them you don't really
[39:17]know much about them and yet they are genetically related to your child so yeah and do you have
[39:26]children now I forgot a few cents yeah so they're two and four but when I get a little bit older
[39:32]I do want to talk to them about I don't know any of the couples that I donated to but I know
[39:41]one of these child is born so I'm like they have have siblings biologically and yeah I want to
[39:46]tell them about it at some point but yeah that's definitely yeah yeah I mean from all sides it's so
[39:51]interesting I guess didn't think about there being resources for parents to talk to
[39:56]either young kids about these things so I might look better.
[40:00]Yeah, they're books, lots of books.
[40:02]And so there is this book called Something Like the P in Me.
[40:08]And so I explained to Clementine that, you know,
[40:11]she's the P, and all these people wanted her to love her so much.
[40:16]She didn't brought her to life.
[40:17]And then there's another book where,
[40:18]like, there's the egg and the sperm.
[40:20]And so I was reading to her about the egg and the sperm.
[40:23]And she's like, I thought I was a P.
[40:25]She was like, mom.
[40:27]So she gets it, you know, to an extent.
[40:31]But it's funny.
[40:32]She's like, correcting me.
[40:33]She's like, I'm a P, not an egg.
[40:40]You have the same last name.
[40:41]And I came here wondering if I am your loss to the man that's done.
[40:45]Oh, maybe.
[40:49]But I do have a serious question.
[40:50]OK.
[40:51]Which is, I talked about being 55 and 45.
[40:54]And I was wondering what would be the other 45
[40:56]manifested itself at a new point.
[40:58]That's really interesting, not, not since she's been born.
[41:04]I think when I was pregnant, sometimes I'm like,
[41:07]wait, why am I doing this?
[41:09]It's like, you know, just like all the feelings that come up.
[41:13]Being pregnant and then in the book store,
[41:18]there is this scene that we talked about running
[41:21]into my ex has been the bookstore.
[41:23]And there's, I had been pleading a little bit.
[41:28]And it turned out I had this, like,
[41:29]I have something called a subcory on the chemotoma.
[41:32]None of this matters except to say that there
[41:35]was always this anxiety during my pregnancy of like,
[41:39]will I, will this become, you know, something bad?
[41:42]Will this be a miscarriage of some sort?
[41:44]And so during that time, I was just like, very in my head.
[41:48]Like, is this, like, why did I do this to myself?
[41:52]But no, since our child has been born,
[41:55]I've been 155% of it.
[41:58]But like, I didn't wonder if that was, you know,
[42:02]I didn't know if that was gonna be the case.
[42:05]And also, yeah, like, there's, it's a total rap shoot
[42:09]being a parent, like, like, you could love your kid
[42:13]or they could be a total jerk or sometimes both things at one.
[42:16]I closed this book, I'm amazed that any of us are born
[42:19]just learning so much about how an embryo comes to exist
[42:24]and then how it makes it through pregnancy.
[42:25]I was just, I closed the book and I looked at my three kids
[42:28]and I was like, oh my God, I can't even believe you guys
[42:30]are here, but yeah.
[42:32]And there's the, that research by the same research
[42:34]I can't think of her name, Catherine, something.
[42:37]It says, the chances of any of us being born one
[42:40]in 70 trillion.
[42:42]Like, exactly as you are, that's one in 70 trillion.
[42:45]It's like, that's just like, all off.
[42:49]Yeah.
[42:50]Yeah.
[42:51]It's an amazing book.
[42:52]Thank you.
[42:53]Thank you.
[42:54]Thank you so much.
[42:55]Thank you so much.
[42:56]Thank you.
[42:57]Thank you.