When I became a mom, and found myself sinking in exhaustion and despair, I clung to certain books like life preservers.
One of these was The Hip Mama Survival Guide by Ariel Gore. In this memoir, she wrote things I hadn’t read anywhere else. Reading this book, I suddenly felt someone understood: I didn’t like being a mom sometimes; I longed for the old days when I brushed my teeth every day and wore clothes that didn’t have someone else’s barf on them and slept more than two hours in a row.
Yesterday, Ariel Gore published my essay “I Hate Babies” on Hipmamazine.com, and this was a watershed moment for me. In fact, I risked being taken for a creeper when I wrote her this email last week, after she expressed interest in the piece:
And may I just say…it feels a little surreal to be emailing the actual Ariel Gore….This is completely irrelevant to the essay we’re speaking of, but this is one of those MOMENTS for me, and I wanted to acknowledge the bizarre wonder of it.
I know I will look back fondly on this, and suck my dentures in to tell the grandkids, “Oh, have I ever told you about the day I emailed Ariel Gore? She was famous, you know; she wrote lots of books and stuff, and probably saved your mother’s life by convincing me that everything was going to be okay.”
This is one of the building blocks of my journey as a writer. Do you have a watershed moment like this? I’d love to hear.
photo credit: By Bjørn Christian Tørrissen – Own work by uploader, http://bjornfree.com/galleries.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16876932
dawn claflin 