Writer Mother Monster: Lyz Lenz, “Labias to the wall, ladies!”

“Labias to the wall, ladies!”
Lyz Lenz is the author of Belabored and God Land and her essay “All the Angry Women” was included in the anthology Not that Bad edited by Roxane Gay. She lives in Iowa with 2 kids and 2 cats and describes writing-motherhood in 3 words as “creative and chaotic.” In this episode, Lyz shares the story of how President Biden once (sarcastically) called her “a real sweetheart,” why she no longer matches her socks, and why men get mad at her. Find out why Lyz was kicked out of an online mommies group–and discover the origin of WMM’s new motto: “Labias to the wall, ladies!”

Writer Mother Monster is an interactive interview series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice.

Transcript

Writer Mother Monster: Lyz Lenz

January 14, 2021

Lyz Lenz’s writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, Pacific Standard, and others. Her book God Land was published in 2019, through Indiana University Press. Her second book, Belabored, was published in 2020 by Bold Type Books. Lyz’s essay “All the Angry Women” was also included in the anthology Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay. Lyz received her MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Iowa with her two kids and two cats, and she describes writing-motherhood in three words as “creative and chaotic.”

Lara Ehrlich  

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is writer Lyz Lenz. Before I introduce Lyz, I want to thank you all for tuning in and let you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms or read the interview transcripts at your leisure all on writermothermonster.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please also consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Please also chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into our conversation. Now I’m excited to introduce Lyz. 

Lyz’s writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, Pacific Standard, and others. Her book God Land was published in 2019, through Indiana University Press. Her second book, Belabored, was published in 2020 by Bold Type Books. Lyz’s essay “All the Angry Women” was also included in the anthology Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay. Lyz received her MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Iowa with her two kids and two cats. She describes writing-motherhood in three words as “creative and chaotic.” Welcome, Lyz.

Lyz Lenz  

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Lara Ehrlich  

Hi. It’s great to have you. I loved your book, Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women. Before we start, could you tell us the story you reference in your bio elsewhere that our soon-to-be President Biden called you, was it a “sweetheart”?

Lyz Lenz  

“A real sweetheart.” Something that happens often in my life is men get mad at me. I was so lucky to be able to co-moderate a forum on LGBTQ issues during the caucuses of the presidential candidates at the time. And by luck of the draw—I think they literally did a drawing—they had me ask questions. There were three moderators, and they had me asked questions of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren. It was quite the draw. There were a lot of organizations involved—GLAD was one of them—and together as a team, with the newspaper I was working for at the time and some advocacy organizations, we came up with all of these questions to ask the candidates about their past supporting bills or laws or programs that had impacted the LGBTQ community in some way. I think people who know about the story probably don’t know that I didn’t even write half of those questions that I asked, but they were carefully written and researched, and everybody got a say. 

When I got up to interview Biden, I asked him about his support of crime bill. As we all know, crackdowns on crime always affect the most marginalized. I asked about how it had affected the trans community, and he was taken really off guard by the question, which was surprising to me. He kind of pushed back and was like, “No, it hasn’t. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.” And when he was done, I pushed him a little bit—like, the data shows that that’s not entirely the case. We continued from there, but as we were walking off the stage, he looked at me and he goes, “Well, you’re a real sweetheart,” and walked away. 

I’m all about accountability for leaders, and while I am so happy he is our president-elect, I did tweet that that’s what he had said. I just tweeted it, put my phone down—because I had to get ready to interview the next person—and by the time the event was over, it had gone viral, and I was getting a lot of feedback about it. So, it’s a thing that happened. My kids think it’s the greatest thing ever. I didn’t even tell them. A lot of other people informed them that this happened. My 9-year-old daughter just thinks it’s great. She’s like, “Remember when the guy who’s gonna be our president was kind of sarcastic to you?” And I’m like, “Yes, I remember.”

Lara Ehrlich

Hard to forget that story.

Lyz Lenz  

Yeah.

Lara Ehrlich  

You know, this ties into some of the themes in your book. I want to get to that, too, about men who have strong opinions about women and what we should act like and what we should do with our bodies. But before we get to that, tell us about your children.

Lyz Lenz  

I have a 9-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son. I’m so lucky to be able to have them in the pandemic. They go between me and their dad’s house, and they’re kind of the only people I see these days, with the exception of one friend who I’m podding with. It’s great to have them. I feel bad for them, in a way, because before, when I could have adult conversations regularly, I treated them more like children, but now I kind of I talk to them like adults. I’m all like, “Oh my gosh, like look at this thing I saw on Twitter. I love it.” And they’re like, “We have no idea why a joke about Mike Pence’s fly would be funny.” And I’m like, “Oh, let me explain.” And they’re like, “Please stop. We don’t care.” The other day, I was explaining performance wool to them because I’d gotten this workout shirt for running outside. I was like, “Oh my god—it’s performance wool. It’s so cool because it wicks away sweat but also has the light underlayer.” And literally, my daughter was like, “Stop. We don’t care. We are children.”

Lara Ehrlich  

It’s funny how the pandemic changes our relationships with our kids in some sneaky ways and some really kind of obvious ways, too.

Lyz Lenz  

Yeah. I think it’s good. I think our relationship has gotten better. My daughter and I have instituted, when she’s at my house, a nightly teatime. We sit and sip tea and talk about things. For our 9- year-old, she’s very interested in when she’s gonna get her period and what’s gonna happen to her body—all those things. And it’s okay to say that because we have a little podcast together, which we started in the pandemic, which I distribute through my newsletter. Those are some of the things she’s very curious about, so we talk a lot about them.

Lara Ehrlich  

Talk a bit more about that podcast and how it works. What’s it called, and where can people find it? They can subscribe to your newsletter.

Lyz Lenz  

I have a Substack, like every shitty media man and me. No, there’s a lot of great people on the Substack platform. I have a Substack newsletter. I really love it. Back in the beginning of the pandemic, when I was listening to kid-friendly podcasts with my kids about Covid, just to explain things and talk about things to them, my daughter got really excited and wanted to start a podcast. At the time, I didn’t have the time, because I didn’t know anything about audio recording, and it was going to require getting a new computer and a mic and all this kind of stuff. Finally, I did my due diligence and talked to people and learned about it, and we started her Rad Ladies Podcast, where she has planned on interviewing mostly rad ladies, some men, about the things she wants to talk about. It’s anything from dinosaurs to menstruation, from Atlantis to witches to … it’s a little random. 

I do really want to protect my kids’ internet privacy, so this isn’t like a podcast you’re going to be able to download on Stitcher. I distribute it through my newsletter, and most of the episodes are going to be subscriber only. I love my kids, I want to encourage them, but I also want to really walk that line of giving them their privacy, so we don’t use her name. I try really hard not to use my kids’ names or faces online. That’s been an interesting conversation with her, talking to her about why I want to do that—because she’s like, “It’s fine. I’m fine with it.” And I’m like, “Ohh, but you’re not. You might feel differently about this when you’re 18, when you’re 34 and running for public office.” Right? 

I want to be able to encourage them but also protect them. It’s just such a hard space to walk as a parent, and I don’t know if I do it perfectly all the time. But I hope that if I ever screw up, and they get mad at me about it, that I’ll be able to say I’m sorry and be like, “Yeah, that’s a screw up. And I’m sorry.” It’s something that I think a lot about as a public writer and a mother.

Lara Ehrlich  

I think about that a lot, too. I don’t have my daughter’s face or name on social media or anywhere on the internet either. I figure when she’s old enough to make that choice and have agency, that’s when she can choose for herself, although I respect others’ decisions to put their kids online.

Lyz Lenz  

I really try hard not to be prescriptive about my choices. One of the ways that I became a writer was I was very frustrated, and nobody wanted to publish my writing, so I started a blog, like everybody. Then I started having children, so suddenly, my blog became a “mom blog”—just purely by using my uterus, I became a niche category. 

In the process of motherhood for many people—I know motherhood is accomplished in different ways and parenthood is accomplished in different ways—but if you give birth to a child, that kid is still part of you, in a way, and your story is still their story. A lot of our political dialogue tries to cleave the two apart, but really, for the longest time, we were the same organism. When writing about my kids in the early days, their story was my story. I clearly remember the moment when I was like, aha! Our stories are now different. And that’s the day I nuked my blog. I literally just hit delete. I didn’t even back anything up, which, in hindsight, maybe I should have. 

I remember I was trying to take a picture of them for the blog—and again, I have not done this always perfectly, and if you want to judge me, don’t worry, I judged myself, too—but I was trying to take a picture, and my daughter said, “I don’t want to be in a picture.” She was 4 at the time. And I was like, “We’re done here.” That’s it. I felt like I was pushing a boundary, and she had drawn a clear one. I was like, it’s over, we’re done, and we’re gonna find new ways of telling our stories, while still being honest but also trying to respect them as autonomous human beings.

Lara Ehrlich  

How did that play into the writing of your two books?

Lyz 

It’s funny. I’ve been writing books for most of their conscious lives. Kids don’t really remember stuff before the age of 3. They’re like, “Oh, you have two books and two kids, so one’s about each of us.” Actually, I write about other things. And that really kind of offends them. They’re like, “Why are we not good enough?” I’m like, “No, actually, religion’s far more interesting.” I love to troll children—just love to troll the shit out of them. My other favorite thing is to talk shit about kids, too, but we don’t have to do that in this public forum. Not my kids but other people’s kids. Don’t worry about it. Delete it. Delete all of this!

Lara Ehrlich  

Too late!

Lyz Lenz  

But yes, it’s a real hard balance. I also write about my divorce, and I still have to co-parent with my kids’ father and now his wife. I want to write honestly, but I also want to respect boundaries. It’s a weird balance. I know some people who probably think I say too much. I know other people who say more. It’s a constant tightrope. 

When I was writing Belabored, that was something I did think about a lot. Like, how am I going to write this? What am I going to say? Because there’s some tough stuff about my relationship with their dad. I really tried to think about when they’re 18 and come to this book, am I gonna be able to say that I was thoughtful and considerate but also honest? 

Once again, I’m not gonna claim I’ve done things perfectly, but when I was going through the fact checking phase of the book, I remember going through some of my notes and seeing a little note I had written to myself that just said, “Dear Name and Name—of my kids—your story is my story in so many ways, and I’m so sorry.” I remember reading that and being like, oh, yeah, that’s a tension. I think that’s a tension we have with all of our parents, right? It’s just not always so public.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, and I want to get into the themes of the book and pregnancy and our bodies, but first I wondered, for any listeners who are writing memoir or nonfiction that draws upon their own lives. I’m sure that they and myself, who does that sometimes, are experiencing that tension. Can you talk a little bit about the logistics of writing personal experience? How do you find that balance technically on the page? How do you pull back?

Lyz Lenz  

My approach is to go as far as possible and pull back through the editing. Often too much is really just a writing problem—it’s a style problem, it’s a craft problem. If something’s not ringing, if something feels like too icky or gross on the page, that’s a sign, maybe not that you went too far but that the craft isn’t there, the approach isn’t there. 

I’m number two of eight kids, so any time I’m going to write something, it’s gonna have ripple effects onto other people’s lives. I remember back when I didn’t know any writers, in my early 20s, and I was googling “how to become a writer.” I lived in Iowa, just down the road from Iowa City, where, you go there, just spit and you hit a writer. A friend of mine was like, “Here, let me introduce you to this writer, Barbara Robinette Moss, who wrote this wonderful book, Change Me Into Zeus’s Daughter, and she’s one of us. She passed away from cancer a few years ago. But she was one of many kids and writes about abuse, which is a topic I talked about, too. I remember asking her “how much is too much?” Because in families, even if they have betrayed you, you still love them. How much do you sell them out on the page? She said to me, “It’s your story. If it happened to you, it’s your story.” I’ve really taken that to heart. I have had times when I’ve had clashes with my family about the things that I’ve written. Mostly, they’re just upset that I said things that they didn’t want to be said. We all still talk, other than a good year and a half when my mom didn’t talk to me, but that actually was a nice break. It was just really a refreshing time. Sorry, mom. Just kidding.

I think my approach now is to write as much as you can to tell the story in the most compelling way possible. Then you trust your editors to cover your ass and to protect you. When I send things that are deeply personal, I always say, “Okay, has this gone too far.” I also have a sister who’s a victim of assault, and I check everything with her because she’s a victim, and I never want her to feel more victimized. 

Another thing that I always think about, too, is nieces and nephews. I remember one time sending in a bunch of writing to my brother who’s 16 months younger than me. We’re very close, and I sent him a bunch of writing that I had done, a lot of which hasn’t ever seen the light of day, about our family. I asked him to fact check me, and he sent me this lovely letter, which I actually talked about and quote in the book, where he said to me, “I might not remember things the same way you do. I might not even agree with the things that you learned from our similar situations. But you need to see say what you need to say.” It was just this wonderful, gracious letter that once again said, “Your story is your story, and you have to tell it.” 

And so often, I think the most necessary stories don’t get told because of fear and power dynamics. I always try to go far and then pull back, but it has been a learning curve. And my sisters let me know.

Lara Ehrlich  

Well, that’s good. Right?

Lyz Lenz  

Oh, absolutely. I would say I don’t come from a family of simmerers. We just blow up. And that’s great, you know, because simmering is actually the scariest to me.

Lara Ehrlich  

It’s true. I think my family is a bunch of simmerers, so I appreciate people who just tell you what they have in mind. But speaking of fear and power dynamics, I think that’s a good entry into your actual book here, Belabored. Can you give us the elevator pitch for the book, for anyone who hasn’t seen the jacket copy?

Lyz Lenz  

It is part memoir, part manifesto, about the politics of our bodies during the nine months of pregnancy, and I try to make it as accessible as possible. I acknowledge there are many roads to parenthood, and there’s also a choice not to be a parent. Or sometimes that choice is not a choice. Sometimes that’s just made for people, even if they wanted another choice. I include the four trimesters of pregnancy and birth. I really feel like they encapsulate a political and cultural dissonance about the way we police bodies in America. 

That’s what this book is. I talk about the history of pain medicine, I go to Philadelphia and take a serial killer tour, so it’s not all gory birth stories. I have like a whole chapter basically just about turkey sandwich, which is one of my favorite chapters.

Lara Ehrlich  

And it’s so funny, in addition to being educational, political, and thought provoking, your personality and your sense of humor and sense of joy comes through in the book. It’s quite an accomplishment to get all of that into this memoir/manifesto.

Lyz Lenz  

Thank you. That’s very nice. It was very hard to write because when I sold the book, I was one kind of mother. I was married. I was upper middle class in the Midwest, two children, a boy and a girl. I had done it. But then when I sat down to write the book, I was a single mom. I still had my kids, still lived in the Midwest, but I was relying on my parents for money for Christmas presents and really struggling. When I sat down to write in a very different mother. Okay, one second—I’m gonna pick up this dog.

Lara Ehrlich  

We welcome dogs on the show. Kids and dogs. Oh, especially really cute, tiny ones.

Lyz Lenz  

She’s more like a squirrel than a dog.

Lara Ehrlich  

Wow, what’s her name?

Lyz Lenz  

Her name is Jolene. She’s a dachshund Maltese mix. We tried to go for a walk today, but we couldn’t because it’s snowing, and her little paws were cold. But yes, I am a different kind of mother than I was when I proposed the book, and a lot of my perspectives on issues have changed. I think a great example of that was the pain medicine issue. I was like, “I’m gonna write this chapter. It’s gonna be all ‘hell yeah, pain medicine.’ We all need epidurals. Let’s have an epidural right now.” And upon further reflection and further research, I saw that the history of pain medicine is really complicated and has been used for forced hysterectomies, and the way that so many life-saving operations for women have been developed by doctors doing experiments on enslaved women without their consent, and also without pain medicine. 

I think what would have been a very different kind of book suddenly became far more nuanced. I almost bought my way out of the book contract, because I didn’t get a lot of money for it, but a friend was like, “Just write it all into the book. Write all the problems with the book into the book.” And so, I did.

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s a wise thing to say, actually, because it is not a simple concept or theme. Pregnancy and all of the history of medicine around it, it’s very fraught. Working that out in the book was a brilliant thing to do, I think. Tell me a little bit more about how your perspective changed between selling the book and writing the book. What was it about that period of motherhood or your situation after a divorce that then led you to a deeper contemplation of these issues, a more nuanced approach?

Lyz Lenz  

You know, I think, one, it was a research and actually reading about it and talking to women in my circle. An example of that is I had viewed eating while pregnant as this very restrictive kind of a thing. I found it to be a judgmental experience for people. I think this has a lot to do with my body size before I was pregnant and what my body size happened to be while I was pregnant. I was privileged enough to be able to eat a bunch of Cheetos and not have people scrutinize me because I was—quote, unquote—"an acceptable size,” and all of a sudden, I’m pregnant, and I’m in this world where my eating is scrutinized. I remember talking about this with my neighbor, and she was like, “I found it freeing, because for the first time in my life, I was able to feed myself without people judging what I was eating.” Because of a different body experience, when people were like, “Are you sure you should be eating that?” She was able to say, “No, I’m feeding the child within me. Actually, I’m anemic and I need to.” 

I wanted to pay respect to those stories and create a space for alternative narratives, but the fact being that it’s still an issue of control and how we control the way women eat and the way unruly bodies eat. A lot was changing my perspective. I was just throwing myself into the research. I read, like, millions of history of pregnancy books and talked to tons of people and went places and did things. 

Also, the way I was getting treated as a different kind of mother was becoming very apparent. This happened when I was researching my first book, God Land. My divorce was in process then, we were still in therapy, and I was experimenting, when I went into conservative spaces, “Okay, I’ll do this interview with a wedding ring on, and I’ll do this one without it, and just see how people treat me.” Obviously, it’s not a scientific experiment, but I was getting treated very differently, based upon whether people thought I was a single mom or a non-mom or married or not married.

Lara Ehrlich  

Can you tell us a little bit about that? Can you think of an example?

Lyz Lenz  

I have two examples. For my book God Land, I went on this week retreat with Baptist ministers and their wives—which tells you a lot, you know, it’s “and their wives.” When I showed up, I was not wearing my wedding ring, and I was having a hard time talking to people. Like, if I sat down next to a minister and started talking to him, it was very like, [no response]. I’m not an idiot. I know what this is about. When I’d say, “Do you want to see pictures of my kids and my house and my husband?” Then we’re talking. You know, was I safe, or was I unsafe? And whether a woman is safe or not depends on whether she’s married, whether she’s performing gender in the way that I want her to perform gender. Now, sometimes, the motherhood is erased, or it’s not helpful to the narrative.

I recently wrote about Amy Coney Barrett and how she uses her white motherhood as kind of as a shield to hide a lot of the really anti-mother, anti-parent policies. We saw a recent ruling that now prohibits women from getting that abortion pill. I don’t want to call it that, but I’m just gonna call it that for shorthand. Now you have to go in and get it, and that’s just absolutely ridiculous. 

I had written about that and about how, throughout history, white women have used their motherhood to perpetuate some pretty evil stuff like school segregation, and the Catholics got real mad at me. That Bill Donohue guy wrote this whole thing that was like, “How dare this woman attack motherhood in such a fashion. She must be anti-motherhood.” And I’m like, I would like to have a million kids if it was a good idea. I really love being a mom. I was like, huh, interesting that my motherhood is not convenient for your narrative about the attack on motherhood. So yeah. Those are just little snippets.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, and actually, now we’re circling back a little bit to something I wanted to talk more about, which is men’s perception and policing of women, particularly women as mothers, and what our bodies should and should not look like. And you said early on that men often get mad at you.

Lyz Lenz

I wanna add a little nuance on to your question, very respectfully, as women often police women’s performance of gender far more than men do. 

In the book, I write about how in extreme performances of gender, women are able to ask for things—pregnancy, marriage, planning a wedding. That’s the whole bridezilla thing. All of a sudden, this woman feels empowered to ask for things, and maybe she’d never felt she could before. 

Anybody who’s been pregnant, nine times out of 10, it’s not a man sitting there saying, “You think you should be drinking all that caffeine?” I think that’s an important part of the nuance of the conversation. I’m not trying to hashtag “notallmen” here, but I am trying to say that we need to be more nuanced in our dialogue about men versus women. 

This is why I have a lot of problems with “hell yeah, vote for women.” Well, no, I live in a state that has a lady governor, and it’s going terribly. It’s just awful. I think it’s kind of true but also a little bit reductive. When we miss the nuance, we miss the ways in which patriarchy is internalized and the way we internalize it and the way we, as women, do corrective behavior on other women. It’s obviously the same with racism, too, right? Like, we can think we’re good, but we need to start thinking about the way we have internalized harmful norms. 

What was the second part of your question? Why do men get mad at me? I think, first of all, I’m just a loud person who asks questions a lot. People deserve to get mad at me sometimes. But I do think that there is something about a woman who has nothing to lose, and that happened, I think, when I got my divorce. I grew up very religious and was taught that that was not an option. You don’t do that. And, once again, I will say, my parents, we’ve been on a journey, and they were very supportive of me when I made that decision and are still supportive now. But it was really scary to just say, okay, everything that I grew up learning, I’m now going to turn my back on wholeheartedly. Basically, it felt like jumping off a cliff. And in that process, I learned, I’m gonna be fine. Do you know what I mean? 

I learned a couple things. I learned that my happiness was not ancillary, that it was actually the point. And that all people deserve to have good and happy lives. It’s not selfishness to want that. It’s not selfishness to ask for it. It’s not selfishness to take the time you need to write. It’s not selfishness to go for the career that you want. And I think we often tell women that no, you gotta die on the cross, and you don’t have to. Walk down from that cross, go do what you need to do. It’s not great up there. It sucks. 

I kind of realized I had nothing to lose, and I started making bolder choices. I started writing more boldly, in a way that I didn’t before I started asking harder questions, not just of myself, but of the people I was talking to. I don’t think it was a sudden change. Maybe it was also getting more confident in who I was, as a writer and a career person. It was trusting myself more. But I do think that there is something very powerful about a woman who walks into a room and says, “I don’t need you. I’m here because I want to be here.” 

Doing the podcast with my daughter, we interviewed a witch expert, and she said that the first witch trials were not about medicine and healing. They were just women who were independently wealthy. That was a slap in the face reminder that a woman who doesn’t need all that other stuff is a real threat and a real destabilizing threat to power. 

I think that’s some of the dynamics. I don’t want to give myself too much credit. I’m also kind of annoying. Probably that there. I’m sure somebody’s listening and like, “Yeah, but you also kind of suck.” And it’s okay. To the hypothetical person who I just invented in mind, I will push back a little bit and say, what we value as obnoxious in a woman, how would we see it in a man? An antagonist in a man has far more value to characteristic than it is in a woman. But you know, I also might just be annoying, it’s fine.

Lara Ehrlich  

You know, you make it hard to follow up with a question, because the answers are just so amazing. And I find myself nodding, and then I’m like, “Oh, now I have to ask you something.” It’s amazing. I’m fascinated by the nuance that you added to that question. Thank you for doing that, because it is such an important topic to discuss about how women are our own worst enemies, both of each other and of ourselves. I’ve noticed that in moms groups myself, I have an amazing one in Boston that is full of non-judgmental, bold, tell-it-like-it-is moms. And then there were a few others I tried where it’s like you ask a question, and then you get 50 comments about how you’re doing everything wrong.

Lyz Lenz  

Can I tell you about the time I got kicked out of a moms’ group?

Lara Ehrlich  

Please do.

Lyz Lenz  

Okay, this is such a good story. I live in the Midwest, obviously. I’d been taking my small baby to the lake and just walking with her into the water and sitting her down, you know. She’s a baby. She can’t go anywhere. It’s like, dip you in the water, shake you off, throw you on the towel. No big deal. But there’s this woman, and this is a group of very intelligent, successful women, and they were like, “We’re taking our three-month-old baby to the lake. What kind of life vests should we get?” And I go, “Well, as long as you don’t toss her overboard, I think she’s gonna be fine.” And people just ignore my comment. And they’re suggesting all these other things. This thread goes on for a couple days, and then she got a life vest for her baby, and she posted a picture of her baby floating in the bathtub with the life vest on. She was trying it out. And I’m sure she’s an amazing mom, but I replied, “Is this cruelty to babies?” And then suddenly I couldn’t access the group. It might’ve been a little bit more snarky. I think it was like, “LMAO is this baby cruelty? Should I report?”

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, yeah. That’s not out of line with the type of things I see—or I did see, because I did not stick around in those moms’ groups.

Lyz Lenz  

No, you got to find your people. I mean, that’s true for all aspects of your life, right? It’s not just parenthood. It is your writing—you have to find the people you trust to critique your writing. You’ve got to find your people. And yes, we people are very good at policing choices. And obviously, the problem wasn’t that she was getting a little life vest for her baby, which is wonderful; the problem is when you say, now all people need to do it my way, or I’m somehow morally superior. 

I think there’s something in this, if we look at the system. It’s easy to blame women and write viral posts or blow up in a mommies group or mom bloggers, but I think we also need to realize the way in which women have limited power. When you raise somebody to say that your whole goal in life is to have children, and now you have children, and that’s also the only way you can exert control over your world, then of course, we start fighting about baby Boppies. My youngest is now 7, so I don’t even know. I recently learned that we don’t do Rock N Plays anymore, because my friend was having a baby, and I was like, “You have to get a Rock N Play,” and she was like, “They’ve killed babies.” And I was like, “Oh. Don’t get a Rock N Play.” Things change. 

But when you create this closed system where women can’t have power and can’t access power, and that their status as a mother is the only way in which they can access power, I think that’s the real problem to critique. That’s a real source of the behavior. It is funny, I always click on those posts when the mommy bloggers are fighting, but I do think it helps us to put it in the context of let’s look at the system that we’ve created and critique that shaming behavior.

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s a great point. I want to take a leap back and ask what inspired you to write this book in the first place?

Lyz Lenz  

Well, I gave birth twice. Back in 2015, and probably 2014, I was writing a series for Jezebel about mythology and motherhood, and I was talking about myths and non-myths, like the “wandering womb” and those kinds of things. I fact-checked them to see where they came from and ask: Do these exist now? And what kind of myths do we rely on? I was trying to sell a very different book, and nobody would buy it. In fact, I think this is about early 2016 that I’m sending this book out, which was just a book on womanhood, and I remember editors being like, “Oh, this has too much religion in it. Americans are not interested in religion”—sad trombone—because then the 2016 election happened. 

But a very wonderful editor who was at Norton at the time was like, “I like this book, but I can’t sell it. But also, I want you to take your writing from Jezebel and turn it into a book, because people pitch us books on motherhood all the time, but I don’t see books like this. I want a book that really gets to the heart of things.” We worked together on a proposal, and that’s what the literal genesis of the book came out of. 

But, you know, I’ve heard Maggie Nelson, the wonderful writer, say, “Every story is a story of a body.” I think about that too often, and I think pregnancy is a great way of really encapsulating that and talking about that, how you cannot separate flesh from reality and your reality. I think about that often when I’m writing: How does this interest me? Why am I interested? Why do people care? And how does this affect the body, like the fleshy reality of our lives? I think that was the theoretical motivation of the book.

Lara Ehrlich  

Did you always know you wanted to be a mother?

Lyz Lenz  

No. I think I was always kind of like, no way. I’m not gonna be a mom.

Lara Ehrlich  

That was me.

Lyz Lenz  

But first of all, by the way, choosing not to be a mother—that it was perfectly wonderful, fine choice. Absolutely no shame for that. But I married somebody who wanted kids, and also, I don’t think I was fully against it. I just knew that I needed to do a lot of self-work, and that was really hard work to do. I was in therapy a lot. I had to go through some things with my lovely mother. We had to talk about things and come to some understanding. I think part of that healing made me excited for kids. Everybody’s journey is so complicated. But I’m so glad I did.

Lara Ehrlich  

How did you change when you became a mother? And that’s such a big question.

Lyz Lenz 

I remember my mom asking me on my first Mother’s Day—my daughter was born in March, and then it was May—she was like, “How do you feel now that you’re a mom?” I was like, “I feel like myself but fatter.” I actually put that in the book. I don’t know. Maybe people who know me might think differently and fight with me on this. Of course, my perspective on some issues changed, and things that I thought I would always do, I don’t do them now. Like I was never gonna give them sugary yogurt. And now I’m just like, “Please, eat a protein. I don’t care if it’s chock full of sugar, just eat a frickin’ protein and stop yelling at me.” My patience for battles was dwindled. Obviously, it changes your cell structure, and it maybe made opinions that I might have been softer on a little bit more extreme.

Lara Ehrlich  

Can you give an example of one?

Lyz Lenz  

I always kind of just believed a doctor. You know, there’s science, there’s medicine, and we can trust the doctors. And I’m not trying to undermine faith in science and medicine, but we do need to understand the ways that science and medicine fail us, and how a lot of it’s built on misogyny and white supremacy. I remember feeling very let down by the medical establishment after the birth of my daughter, which was very traumatic. I had postpartum hemorrhaging, but nobody would tell me what it was. All I knew was I was just bleeding and passing out. I didn’t know anything that was going on. They wouldn’t even tell me how many stitches I got. And I loved my doctor, but she was so condescending about that. I remember just gaining tons and tons of weight—like almost 80 pounds with both pregnancies. My body was just like, Boom! Now you look like a kid in the Chocolate Factory who chewed the wrong gum. It’s fine. But so many nurses were like, “Lay off the milkshakes.” I’m like, “I haven’t had a milkshake in 10 months.” And also, even if I’d have had a milkshake, like, leave me alone, you know? I had gone in with this blind trust and acceptance of the medical establishment. 

It shouldn’t take personal experience for people to listen and change and grow, but some of those things were very helpful. My perception of women and work and the emotional labor we do and the loads that we carry, that radically changed. I was always like, “Yeah, this sucks.” But I think it changed from me being like, “this sucks,” to like, “let’s burn it down!”

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, it’s funny. That’s how I feel, too, very radicalized about motherhood, and particularly women’s right to be creative while being mothers and women’s right to have jobs while being mothers, that we need to be well-rounded people if that’s what we want. I have friends who want to be home full time, and they should be able to do that as well. There should be structures in place to make that possible. I think I’ll just wrap up with some actionable advice, since you are a mother who is balancing motherhood with writing with advocacy and work. Can you talk a little bit about how you prioritize your craft?

Lyz Lenz  

It changes. My kids are older now. I remember reading a blog post when I was pregnant with my daughter that talked about, like, my writing is my career, and it is a priority, and that means it’s a priority over folding clothes, it’s a priority over raking the lawn, it’s a priority over all those things that we somehow think we need to do that are really just ancillary to the task of living. I need to take care of my kids, obviously, but also part of taking care of my kids is being a fully well-rounded human being, and they need a mother whose life is not all about them, because one day, they’re gonna leave me, and they’re gonna be like, “Get a friend.” 

So I prioritize my writing. Especially in those early days, because it is my career, I’d wake up at 3 and 4 a.m., and then my stupid babies would wake up with me. It felt like stealing time—but you’re not stealing that time if it belonged to you in the first place. 

In my bedroom right now are baskets and baskets of unfolded laundry, and I don’t care. I don’t match socks anymore. We have this thing called the sock basket, and I just dump. Screw matching socks. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t do and I refuse to do, and if I have time, maybe, but I need to sleep. It doesn’t all get done.

I have just chosen to prioritize my work over other things. Does that mean that some days I don’t work out? Yeah. Does that mean some days, emails don’t get answered? Yeah. Phone calls don’t get returned. Text messages don’t get returned. Because this is my time, and I worked so hard to get here, and I’m so grateful that I have it. I feel like my career totally blossomed in the past couple years, and every day, somebody thinks I’m important enough to have on something like this. I’m just thrilled. Because, you know, hopefully, that means that I’m doing work that interests people. I just want to keep doing that and doing it to the best of my abilities, so I prioritize it. Does that mean that I don’t go on dates a lot? Yeah. I don’t know that people are doing that right now anyway. It wasn’t great before the pandemic, so let’s just blame it on that. Who cares? I’m doing fun, exciting work. There’s not one way to do this, but I always tell people, you’re not stealing time; that time belongs to you. Take it, and don’t apologize for it. Because your contributions to this world matter; you as a full human being matter. Go for it. Balls to the wall—no, labia to the wall, ladies.

Lara Ehrlich  

I just pictured that. But before the laughter—you brought tears to my eyes with this anthem of solidarity and empowerment, so thank you for both that and then the laugh. This has just been amazing. Thank you so much for joining me tonight.