MomLinks: The Lure of Discourse

A Tennessee mother's fight, a Moms for Liberty faceplant, That Emily Gould Essay, and more midweek stories.

Sometimes I wish for broader conversations about parenting, beyond the day-to-day discussions and updates that populate my preschool circles. Then sometimes the monkey’s paw curls and an essay like this week’s “The Lure Of Divorce” by Emily Gould hits the internet and all my group chats are plunged into a days-long debate over the intimate practice of building and maintaining a family.

I liked the essay: a gossipy but moving account of the mental health crisis, the professional jealousy, and the gendered expectations of parenting that contributed to a high-profile non-divorce of a Brooklyn literati couple. I won’t spend much more time unpacking it in this newsletter because—as I’ve argued into a couple text groups now—I think its contents are so wildly personal, its text careening between radical vulnerability and frustrating opacity (hang on, can we revisit that aside about the yoga retreat?) that it’s very hard to extract some universal message about family. And I think that’s fine! It’s an essay about personal flaws and mutual amends, and I enjoyed reading it, even if certain scenes set my blood pressure spiking.

Here’s what else I’m reading from around the parentsphere:

-A powerful new ProPublica project follows a working-class Tennessee woman denied an abortion after her state effectively banned the practice in 2022. Mayron Hollis was recovering from addiction and struggling financially to raise her infant daughter when she became pregnant again, this time experiencing serious complications that placed her life at serious risk. When Hollis began bleeding heavily 26 weeks into her pregnancy, an emergency surgery saved her life, and that of her prematurely born baby. But the forced pregnancy led Hollis and her family into an almost uniquely American series of cascading crises, from lack of parental leave, to lack of adequate neonatal hospital facilities, to lack of affordable childcare and early intervention programs. Hollis and her husband faced debt, eviction, and cutoff from food assistance programs, compounded by struggles with addiction, elder care, and a punitive criminal justice system.

“They forced me, basically, to have a child,” Hollis said of Tennessee. But then, “they didn’t help me take care of that child.”

-Despite senators adding new amendments, civil rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation warn that the “Kids Online Safety Act” is still a “censorship bill” dressed up in fears about children’s wellbeing. The legislation purports to hold internet platforms accountable for preventing things like anxiety, eating disorders, and bullying in children. But civil rights groups and LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have opposed the bill, calling it a backdoor method of banning information that some of the bill’s own advocates have deemed unsafe for children, namely information about race, gender, and sexuality. The challenge of verifying internet users’ ages would also incentivize websites to ban that content for all users, rather than risk penalties, advocates have warned.

-Two Moms for Liberty chapters in the group’s usual strongholds are floundering, with one folding altogether, The New Republic reports. One chapter, in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, has seen a steep decline in active membership since its school board candidate lost a November race. The other chapter, in Florida’s Brevard County, saw an embarrassing defeat last week when only one member showed up to a school board meeting about banning two acclaimed books. Every other speaker argued in favor of keeping The Kite Runner and Slaughterhouse-Five on the shelves.

-In the New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner interviews a Palestinian aid worker who fled with his family, including his two children and his pregnant sister, to Rafah, a city on Gaza’s southernmost edge. Despite Israeli authorities declaring Rafah a “safe zone” from its war on Gaza, Israel launched air strikes on the city this week.

Yousef Hammash tells Chotiner that amid bombings in 2021, when his daughter was three, he was able to convince her that explosions were fireworks. “Now that she is five, it’s harder,” Hammash says. “Now my children understand the meaning of war and the meaning of drones and air strikes. I have run out of justifications.”

-Far-right author Bethany Mandel, a “self-described ‘homeschooling mother of six’” is running for a Maryland school board seat as a Democrat, the Angry White Men blog reports. Mandel is a loud advocate against books that address race, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues, and has celebrated the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their historic homes. “Not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis,” the school board candidate tweeted in 2014.

-State-level school board leaders in Utah have taken the rare step of requesting one of their colleagues resign, after she wrote a Facebook post suggesting a high school basketball player was transgender, and that the girl should therefore be barred from competition. The accusation set off a wave of online harassment and threats against the student (who was cisgender), and prompted the girl’s school to provide security for her.

-Teachers’ unions in Indiana are denouncing a website launched by the state’s Republican attorney general. The “Eyes on Education” portal calls on people to upload “real examples of indoctrination” from schools. Educators say the portal website has published out-of-date documents, identifiable information about teachers without context, and pictures of Pride flags as evidence of “socialist indoctrination.”

-Meanwhile, Florida’s “parents’ rights” legislation has led to students at a Miami-Dade school being sent home with permission slips ahead of a school event in which “students will participate and listen to a book written by an African American.” The school clarified that the permission slip was issued because students would be hearing from a guest speaker, and the district’s superintendent later stated that “there is absolutely no need for any parent permission slip.” But critics of Florida’s 2022 “Stop WOKE Act,” which bars discussion of some race-related topics in schools, have long warned that the legislation would lead teachers to self-censor, for fear of accidentally discussing race in ways that could run afoul of the law.