Writing about motherhood as childhood melts away

I didn't want to write another parenting book. Now I realize why I need to.

“I didn’t want to write this book.” That was the first line of the proposal for my book The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read (coming summer 2025 from Sourcebooks.)

For months my agent and I had gone around and around, trying to turn the book I thought I wanted - and felt ready — to write, which was broadly about entering midlife and the opportunities of the empty nest.

It was a book about transitions, I told her; about reinvention. I’ve been writing about motherhood for more than two decades. It’s time for me to move on from “mom stuff”.

It took several rewrites and a dozen or so rejections from editors for me to finally admit it to myself and my agent, though: I wasn’t getting off that easy. I couldn’t write a book about saying good-bye to my identity as a mother without actually writing about the process of mothering my way through it.

The re-re-rewritten and re-re-re-reshaped proposal finally did find a home, happily, with a publisher I’ve heard only good things about from my author friends. Now I just have to write the thing.

……

Dammitall, I just have to write the thing.

I love to write. And I’ve written multiple books, in much shorter timeframes. I know how this works: how to set deadlines, organize my thoughts, pace myself.

So why does this book feel so hard, and why are the words coming so slowly?

I’ve done a lot of wandering around over the past month or so, as well as a lot of staring at the wall (both favorite “writing” techniques). I keep waiting for conclusions about the “long goodbye” to motherhood to drop, fully-formed, into my head.

This keeps not happening. The ideas come, yes, but they’re dim and blurry, like the low-light birthday-cake photos of my kids we take year after year after year.

More than 100 birthdays so far, friends. That’s a lot of candles.

Then it hit me: the very reason I need to write this book is the same reason it’s so hard to write. The transition is still happening, and I’m in a murky stage.

When my kids were small, the material they gave me was endless. And reassuringly finite. I found endless material in everyday struggles, from Target tantrums to moldering sippy cups, and wrote prolifically about them; 600-800 word essays with a neat beginning, middle, and end complete with a pithy reframe. My life, it seemed at the time, was made up of a series of small, finite, action-filled moments, each containing a lesson if I only knew where to look for it.

Writing about motherhood - experiencing motherhood - doesn’t so much look like that anymore. There are still lots of small moments in my family’s life, sure, but they seem a lot less self-contained. A single day no longer feels like an endless smorgasbord of miniature three-act plays starring my children and myself as protagonist and antagonist (which person in which role depending on who’s telling the story).

It’s no longer as dramatic as that, nor as narratively tidy.

The decisions my kids and I discuss these days, around topics like college and careers, money and love, are simultaneously higher-stakes and slower-moving. It could be years before I know whether today’s dinner-table conversations have any impact at all. I may never know. And when I do, it may not be the impact I was hoping for.

But the most disorienting part about all of this - and the hardest to navigate as a writer, looking for stories and conversations and concrete imagery and examples to build on - is that my identity as a mother is slowly dissolving, right before my eyes.

When my children were small and my family was large, motherhood was at all times a clear and tangible state of being - easy to write about, if not always easy to live inside.

Now, it’s more like trying to write about a candle as it melts. How do you capture the essence of something as it’s re-forming into something else?

To be clear, I don’t see this melting as tragic. Our kids leaving us has always been the point — and while it’s bittersweet, their growth (and the breaking away that comes with it, painful as it can feel in the moment) opens doors for new opportunities, for both them and for me. Even as the identity I knew loses its structure, it’s reforming into a new shape full of possibility—and that’s exciting.

But right now, that shape still looks pretty formless. Hard to wrap my arms around. Hard to wrap my words around.

So I struggle. And I keep thinking back to a writing assignment in one of my first college writing classes — yesterday, it seems, except that I was eighteen, just a bit older than my fourth child, and just a bit younger than my third. (What. On. Earth?)

“When you can’t think of what to write, just write “I want to write about…” and see what comes out,” our instructor said.

And it worked. That exercise always got the words flowing for me, I think because it took the pressure off of focusing on a finished project with a contained beginning, middle, and end, or of extracting meaning and lessons from every experience, or of coming up with pithy reframes or neat endings. I didn’t actually have to write anything of value—I only had to state what I wanted to write about.

Writing about motherhood these days is like trying to write about a candle as it melts. How do you capture the essence of something as it dissolves into something else?

So maybe that’s where I need to start with this project, too - to sit a little longer in the messy, undefined stage of parenting and think about the things I’d like to write about.

Here goes.

I want to write about…conversations that seem to be about nothing — sweaters and skincare and test scores — and to know that while they are actually loaded with meaning, you aren’t sure what the meaning actually is…and probably shouldn’t let on that you believe there is a meaning, anyway.

I want to write about…what it feels like to stand up on your tippy-toes to hug the person who once fit into the crook of your arm, and before that, inside of your body.

I want to write about…what motherhood becomes when it no longer centers around things you do for your children, but simply an identifier for your relationship to another human. Am I still a mother when my kids no longer want or need mothering?What is motherhood without an object?

I want to write about…the day you realize you need two boxes of birthday candles to accommodate your baby’s age and it takes so long to light them all, the top layer of the cake winds up covered with a coating of melted wax.

I’m realizing that this book will require me to sit uncomfortably in the middle of my own figurative pool of melted wax. To share experiences as I’m living them, while the lessons contained in them are still unfolding. To allow for occasional disappointment in myself and - something I never really experienced when they were little - my children, too. To suppress the need to seek a neat and tidy reframe in complicated situations. To realize that most of the time, there’s nothing tidy any of it, anyway.

I want to write about it all, honestly and fearlessly and yet helpfully - and that makes it possibly the hardest project I’ve ever taken on…

…Besides, of course, motherhood itself.

I’d love to hear from you, friends. If you were to write about this stage of parenting, what would you want to explore? And what would you like to read about, in my book?