Writer Mother Monster: Rachel Zucker, “The person who made Candy Land should be killed.”

“The person who made Candy Land should be killed.”
Rachel Zucker is the author of 10 books, including, most recently, SoundMachine. She lives in Maine where she is the mother of three boys ages 21, 20, and 13, and describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as “attachment, attachment, attachment.” In this episode, she explains why she identifies with Rip Van Winkle, what it’s like to go through a divorce in the midst of a pandemic, and why she thinks the maker of Candy Land should be killed.

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: Rachel Zucker

January 28, 2021

Rachel Zucker is the author of 10 books, including, most recently, SoundMachine. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Zucker is an adjunct professor at New York University and at the Antioch Low Residency MFA program. Founder and host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People), Zucker is working on an immersive audio project (also called SoundMachine) and a book of lectures called The Poetics of Wrongness. She’s the mother of three boys ages 21, 20, and 13, and she describes writer-motherhood in three words as “attachment, attachment, attachment.”

Lara Ehrlich   

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is Rachel Zucker. Before I introduce Rachel, 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 patron or patroness on Patreon. And, as always, chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio and we’ll weave them into the conversation. Now I’m excited to introduce Rachel. 

Rachel Zucker is the author of 10 books, including, most recently, SoundMachine. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Zucker is an adjunct professor at New York University and at the Antioch Low Residency MFA program. Founder and host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People), Zucker is working on an immersive audio project (also called SoundMachine) and a book of lectures called The Poetics of Wrongness. She’s the mother of three boys ages 21, 20, and 13, and she describes writer-motherhood in three words as “attachment, attachment, attachment.”

Now, please join me in welcoming Rachel. Thank you so much for coming on today.

Rachel Zucker  

It’s great to be here. 

Lara Ehrlich  

I’m thrilled to have the chance to speak with you after reading all of your amazing work, but specifically your work on motherhood, which we’ll get to. But first, you told me before the interview that you wore a special necklace for Writer Mother Monster?

Rachel Zucker  

This [holds up a necklace that says MILF] was a gift from my soon-to-be ex-husband for Mother’s Day a few years ago. This is the first time that I’m wearing it publicly. It’s the one of the strangest Mother’s Day gifts that I could imagine because in addition to wondering when I would ever wear this item, my then-husband asked me to open it in front of the children. Then I had to explain what MILF was to my youngest, Judah, who was 10 or 11. That was my Mother’s Day. I felt like if there was ever a time to wear it, it was here.

Lara Ehrlich  

Absolutely, this is the right place. To have been a fly on the wall during that conversation though.

Rachel Zucker  

Yeah.

Lara Ehrlich  

I mentioned you have three sons ranging from 21 to 13, which are very different stages of boyhood, I imagine. Tell us a little bit about your sons and what your house is like with this range of masculinity.

Rachel Zucker  

Well, there’s no one answer to that, of course, because each stage has been very different. I mean, there were six and a half years when I had just two that were very close together and that was an experience in and of itself. Then having my third be eight—and six and a half years younger than my two older boys—was a whole other experience that’s sort of like raising an only child. Not entirely, because his relationship with his brothers is very, very close, but in terms of the difference between having two children very close in age to having one with nobody close in age was really different. 

Then, of course, they started leaving. I had zero, then I had one for a very short time, then I had two for a long time, then I had three, then I had two, then I had one, then I had three. Because of the pandemic, everybody came home. That’s a very interesting kind of experience. 

Mothers and mother writers are experiencing this pandemic in so many ways—obviously, having younger children and losing school as a thing that used to be dependable, or having to share space for work in ways that most mothers hadn’t had to do before, not to mention employment disruptions and loss of jobs. I’m sure you’ve seen all of the statistics about the way in which the pandemic is specifically undermining mothers—and absolutely mothers of color to a much greater extent than white mothers, but mothers also as a group are losing so much in terms of job equality and jobs. 

In any case, my experience of deciding to get divorced but then quarantining with my husband and my three kids, two of whom were supposed to be in college, who were at ages where we didn’t expect for them to be at home, was very intense. 

Right now, I have no children in the home. I have a puppy who’s downstairs and you might hear her at some point. She is 10 months old. I’m halfway through a three-week period of time, in which my oldest is back in college and my middle son and my youngest son are in New York City with their dad. Three weeks is a really, really long time for me to be away from both of them. 

And also, two years ago, at exactly this period of time, I went to McDowell for the first time, for the only time in my life, and I was there for 28 days. That was the longest period of time I’d been away from my kids, but I was in a community of other writers and artists. This period of time is the first that I’ve been really truly alone. Three weeks before this, I realized that it was my husband’s first time being alone in his entire life for more than, like, two days. So that’s a whole other experience. 

Alone is a different kind of alone right now. I’m living in Maine, which is not where I’ve lived for my entire life; I’ve lived in New York City. I’m living in kind of a seasonal community, so there are very few people here right now. The population density of Maine versus New York, and specifically of where I am, is pretty astonishing.

Lara Ehrlich  

I want to talk more about motherhood and writing, but tell me what it’s been like the last couple weeks of aloneness in Maine versus New York City. Are you finding that you’re able to work? I’m hearing from a lot of writers that this pandemic period is either very productive or not productive at all. We have different expectations for ourselves and different feelings around what productivity even is, so what is it to you right now during this period?

Rachel Zucker  

Yeah, I was going to say, productive in what way? I’m really working on that. I’m working on that in therapy. I’ve been working on it for a very long time. I haven’t written anything since the pandemic started, and I wasn’t writing hardly at all before that and barely able to work on my podcast. I taught two classes in the fall, and I’m working with a group of students through Antioch now. But what I have thought of as work is … no, I’m entirely unproductive. 

On the other hand, I make dinner—not in this time that I’m alone, but I’ll talk about that in a second, but before these three weeks, it was like I was running a restaurant, because we were all in Maine. I take COVID very seriously and have since the very beginning, and we were really, really in lockdown, very isolated. It’s heartbreaking in a certain way, and I feel sorry for myself, but on the other hand, I should get over feeling sorry for myself. 

I’ve been getting divorced this year and going through mediation, making the decision, working it through with Josh, talking to lawyers, figuring things out, legally and financially. And then emotionally, I am still technically married. I’ve been married for 23 and a half years, and we were together for three years before we got married. So that’s my entire adult life. 

I’m trying to figure out how to date, how to date as a 49-year-old woman, during a pandemic, when I take COVID really seriously, and I am basically Rip Van Winkle— like I woke up 25 years later, and I don’t know what Tinder is. What is this? What is it? How do female humans do this? I am almost finished with mediation, I’m thinking about how to tell the kids, thinking about the number of hours of therapy that I’ve been lucky to be able to have, and the time in between, I’ve been talking to my friends and working on it. If you want to think about it that way, it’s the most productive year that I’ve had in a very long time: very intensive parenting, very intensive self-reflection—it’s kind of a birth in a sense, because I’m giving birth to a new self. 

On the one hand, I’m in this kind of old lady body, but I’m also totally an adolescent, because the last time I was not married or in a monogamous, very serious relationship, I was basically an adolescent. It’s kind of all over the place. I think I’ve read three full books since the pandemic. I’ve listened to more music than I had in the past. I listen to a lot of New York City Public Radio. A lot of podcasts, too, but not as many as I used to, actually.

Lara Ehrlich  

Are you missing the time? I listened to a lot of podcasts, too, when I was commuting, and now I’m not commuting, so it’s like you have to be very selective about which podcasts you’re going to fill that time with if you’re taking a walk or something.

Rachel Zucker  

I recommend one: Appearances with Sharon Mashihi. First of all, it’s fantastic. There are a lot of issues around being a mother, wanting to be a mother, being a maker, wanting to tell a story about motherhood. Really interesting. It’s a really compelling and well-made podcast that does the thing I love, where it goes into the meta meta. And it’s made by Kaitlin Prest, who has done a lot of work that I love, like The Shadows and The Heart. I love those podcasts. I mean, they’re really like art.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, definitely, a great podcast is like art. Speaking of podcasts, you have your own podcast. Tell me a little bit about that. You said it’s been a little hard to focus on putting them out. It sounds like you have so much going on, I can understand why that would be. But tell me a little bit about the podcast, who some of your guests have been and the topics that you’ve addressed. For anyone who is interested, the website is fantastic, so everyone should check it out. But tell us more about it. 

Rachel Zucker  

Sure. I am not being self-deprecating. Commonplace is fantastic. I don’t know that it’s art. It’s not a highly produced show the way Appearances is. It’s a long form, conversation podcast. The episodes are often between like an hour and a half and two hours. We really take a deep dive. It’s very similar to this but without video. I’ve had, I think, almost 90 people on. Mostly it’s single artists, mostly poets. 

I’m just going to mention a few of the writer mothers, although it’s not in any way limited to writer mothers, but just off the top of my head: Sharon Olds, Claudia Rankine, Sarah Vap. Makenna Goodman was the most recent episode. Makenna and I were talking about her first novel, The Shame, which is about a character who is also a mother of young children and whose motherhood is very central to the plot. It’s a great book I highly recommend, a short, riveting novel. I recorded a conversation with Darcey Steinke before the pandemic about her nonfiction memoir called Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life. It’s about menopause and whales and sexuality, and it’s totally awesome and amazing. It’s also a kind of short book, total page-turner, totally compelling. 

You’d asked me what I wanted to make sure we talked about, and we don’t have to talk about it, but it drives me nuts that it’s so hard to have solidarity amongst women, amongst mothers. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that motherhood is so intense, at almost every stage. It’s hard to be interested in menopause, when you’re obsessed, understandably, with sleep training. It’s hard to think about, “I wonder what it’s like to try to have sex after a hysterectomy in your late-40s after a divorce,” when you’re just like, “Oh, my God, my nipples hurt from breastfeeding.” 

None of this is intentional. It’s not the way the patriarchy separates and divides women, although that’s also happening, but it has a similar effect in the sense that so many women I speak to now say, “Oh, I never saw a woman nurse before I nursed.” And starting to go through menopause and then having a hysterectomy and, now, sex post-, pre-, and during divorce—all of these kinds of things are central in my life, as are how to be a mother to adult children, how to be a mother to adult male children, how to gather the strength to accompany my third male child through puberty, knowing what I know and almost wish I didn’t. That’s what I’m so obsessed with, and I’m desperate for wisdom, experience, advice from mothers who are half a generation older than I am, but it’s hard to have that conversation when we’re at such different stages.

Lara Ehrlich  

And generations, I would imagine, right? Like, I can ask my mother for her advice, but her generation was so much different than mine. Breastfeeding wasn’t necessarily encouraged when she was breastfeeding me, but when I had my daughter, it was “breast is best,” and there was such pressure there that she couldn’t quite understand and therefore be able to guide or advise me. Did you know that you wanted to be a mother from the time you were young, or was that something that snuck up on you?

Rachel Zucker  

I knew I wanted to be a mother. It was one of the first things I knew about myself. There’s a conversation online that you can find somewhere between me and the writer Sarah Manguso, back when Sarah did not have her son and was pretty sure that she didn’t want to have kids. She really felt that she wanted to continue her life as a writer without the hindrance, without the interruption of motherhood. We had a long email conversation back and forth about this. 

I was pretty upfront, and people were sort of shocked, because I admitted at that time that I felt like I kind of didn’t understand women, on some level, who didn’t feel this deep, biological desire. I didn’t really know much of anything else, but I knew I wanted to be a mother. But that’s changed so much for me, as things have gone on and as I’ve investigated where that desire came from. I think part of why I wanted to be a mother was that I wanted to do it differently than my mother had done it. You hear this all the time, and I couldn’t have imagined feeling this way. 

My mother died in 2013, and now, going through this divorce, oh man, do I want to talk to my mother, and do I understand my mother in a way I did not before, I really blamed my mother for my parents’ divorce, which was very traumatic for me. 

One of the central damaging things was my mother was a writer and an artist, and I thought she chose her work over me, that she was ambitious and did the best she could, but it wasn’t really good enough—and then she got divorced and ruined my life. I have a very different understanding of that right now. I’m coming to the point of recognizing that I was going to make this choice, which I didn’t think was the choice that was that I was gonna make to get a divorce.

Lara Ehrlich  

Tell me a little bit more about how the desire to be a different kind of mother than yours played out, particularly when your kids were young, and what you might have tried to do differently than she did when it came to your writing and how you prioritized your craft and your family.

Rachel Zucker  

I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and do art projects all the time. I’m an only child, so I really wanted to have, like, four children, and I only wanted to have sons—this is before I had sons—because I didn’t want to recreate the relationship of me and my mother. Lord knows, there’s nothing the same if you just have sons. I mean, it’s such crazy bullshit, because I’m still a mother, just like my mother was a mother! 

My understanding of gender and my experience of gender have changed so much since I was a little girl wanting to be a mom, different from my mom, that it’s just a joke, you know? That I thought that would solve all the problems. 

My mother was really a feminist and kept her maiden name. I went to yeshiva from first grade to eighth grade, and my parents were the only divorced parents for the whole time that I was there in my grade, and my mother was one of the very few mothers who worked. The level of pity for me that was generated for the wrong reason… So I had some idea that I was going to be, like, some kind of Betty Crocker or something, and that this was going to be sustaining to me. Like I was going to be grateful every single second and was going to love being pregnant. 

I hated being pregnant. I was sick every second, and everything was disgusting. You know, I am a birth doula, I’ve been a childbirth educator. I do not find birth disgusting; I do not find pregnancy disgusting; it’s beautiful. I’m just saying, when I first got pregnant, and every time I got pregnant, I was like, this is not what I thought it was.

Lara Ehrlich  

My God, all three times.

Rachel Zucker  

Yeah, I was actually pregnant four times and had a miscarriage, which was also not what anybody described. None of this is what I thought anything was gonna be like. But I really wanted to be a writer, and I also was a writer. I think I thought for a long time, “Yeah, but I’m not like my mom, because I’m a poet.” Like that was totally different. The stories we tell ourselves. 

I do think that having three children is was a very, very different experience than growing up as the only kid, and it’s not just about being the only kid. That time was very unpleasant and lonely for me. Neither of my parents were ever focused on my childhood. They were focused on me, but I didn’t have friends. We didn’t have other families that we hung out with. My parents did adult things with adults. And I was their kid.

That does not describe my life in the past 22 years. I went to the playground, for example, many thousands of times. I’m a really good cook. My mother didn’t really care that much about food. She was like, “If you’re hungry, you’ll eat peanut butter and jelly.” But I made the regrettable decision, because I’m a really good cook and my kids love food, to cook, like, a gourmet meal every night. Why did I do that? I mean, it’s one thing to do it during a pandemic, when it’s the only pleasure you have. But, I mean, I really made a ridiculous number of foods for those young children with their discerning palates. Stuff like that. 

I didn’t travel the way my mother did. I did not hire a nanny, in the way that I had a babysitter for my whole childhood. I sent my kids to daycare, which was a very different experience. I’ve never been able to do what my mother did, which was to say, “I’m working now. Go away,” or to just go away herself. I have struggled with that so pointlessly.

Lara Ehrlich  

You said you went to McDowell and that was the longest time you’d been away from your kids? Did you have to kind of force yourself to go? How did you finally carve that space for yourself, and were you conflicted about it?

Rachel Zucker  

I had traveled without my kids for shorter trips, almost from the beginning. That was important, I think, because the emotional and physical labor of parenting was not shared equally between me and my husband. In fact, it was really far from equal. He was a great dad, and is a great dad, but he was not doing anywhere close to half. The only time that I was able to almost not be a mom, or almost take a break, is if I was just entirely not there. My husband’s a very capable person and would rise to the occasion when I would go away. When I was there, he couldn’t maintain the level of competence that he had when I wasn’t there. 

It’s not that I had never left them. I left them with him in a way that I know is hard for some women. I didn’t have that problem. But it was more like going away for an extended period of time to write. It was one thing to teach, it was one thing to make money, it was one thing to fulfill a family obligation to go to a best friend’s wedding or something, but to go to write was something that I couldn’t imagine. 

I was a McDowell fellow and a Sustainable Arts Foundation fellow, and I just want to say that I applied to McDowell many, many times, and I applied to lots of residences many, many times and was rejected and rejected and rejected and rejected, every single time. I remember after I had my miscarriage in April 2005, very soon after I found out it was a blighted ovum pregnancy, I got a string of rejections from McDowell and from all the other writers’ colonies that I had applied to. I had waited until my older boys felt old enough that I could go, and I knew I wanted to have a third kid, so it felt like this was my only chance. When those rejections came, I mean, it was all of the disappointment of losing the pregnancy and all these other things, but the rejections for the writer’s colonies were just brutal. 

When I was a kid, I went with my mom to a writers’ colony called Covington Colony for the Arts, the only colony that allowed children to come. When I had kids, there was nothing like that anymore. They stopped letting children come, and many residencies you had to commit to four weeks, so it really was prohibitive to almost every mother that I knew. 

I had a whole drama about these residences in these colonies. The Sustainable Arts Foundation is specifically supportive for parents who have a child under the age of 18, I believe, who’s living at home. I really recommend people who are parents apply for that or look it up. It’s a beautiful thing that it exists, and I’m really grateful for that. I’m hoping that more of these colonies and residences and fellowships can start to accommodate fathers and mothers but particularly mothers who can’t otherwise participate in these amazing opportunities. I don’t think people think very hard about how exclusionary it is. 

McDowell was a profound experience. It was the first time in my adult life that I didn’t have to make dinner every night, that somebody fed me. That was very emotional, actually, to be cared for in that way. I’d never had that experience—not from my mother, not from my father, certainly not from my husband. I loved going to dinner every night and being with other writers and talking.

It was not easy. Both of my older sons were really struggling at that time. I think that in 28 days, there were at least 10 times that I thought I was going to have to go home. And I really didn’t want to go home. But, you know, I would have if I if I needed to.

Lara Ehrlich  

Thank you, first of all, for putting it out there, that those types of residences can be exclusionary. I found the same thing before I had a child; even then, it felt exclusionary. If you have a full-time job, it’s hard to take off. But then, especially after having a small child. If I see that it’s more than a 10-day or two-week requirement, I probably could make it work, but I don’t want to. I don’t feel that desire to be away for a month. Two weeks is probably a good number. On the Writer Mother Monster website, I’ll have to start listing some residencies that allow for shorter residency. That’s really important to writer moms.

Rachel Zucker  

Yeah. There are also journals. I’m forgetting the full name of it, but there’s a Canadian journal that’s dedicated to research about mothering [Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement]. And thank goodness you see that more and more. 

I think that thing that you just said is so vital. I think mothers are often made to feel guilty. Like, you’re choosing not to go away for four weeks. I just heard you say you couldn’t do that and then, “I didn’t want to.” I’m not saying that’s not a choice; it is a choice. I would support you, Lara, if you did want to go away for four weeks. But also, it’s not so simple as a choice, you know? 

I think that this whole word and concept of choice is very complicated for women in our generation. For many women now, motherhood is a choice. Not all. But for many women. And it’s almost as if once you made that choice, everything else is your fault.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yes. You asked for it, you’ve got it. Yeah, thank you for saying that. I even hear it from good friends of mine who are not mothers who respect motherhood and respect me, but they will say to me, “An employee of mine decided to become a mother, so why should I have to deal with her maternity leave?” You’re right that it’s a lot more complex than that.

Rachel Zucker  

Yeah, and to tie it back to the residency thing, those residencies were basically created for men with tenure track jobs, who were on an academic calendar.

As I said on Twitter, I’ve never had a tenure track job, partly because when my kids were little, I didn’t apply for tenure track jobs. In fact, I left teaching for a while because I was an adjunct and I realized I was spending all of my time either being a mom or being a teacher, and really, I had become an adjunct because I wanted to be to write. I was like, Okay, I’m barely making any money teaching. I’m going to stop. I’m not going to stop being a mom, but I’ve stopped writing, so I’m going to stop teaching. 

And then I was a doula. I tried all these things. When I got back into the job market, I had been gone for too long, I had too many books, I had been too successful. That’s not the only reason I didn’t get a job. There’s a lot of reasons. Part of it is there are so many qualified, talented, amazing candidates. The whole system of the way MFAs are just pumping out these very talented writers, but the supply and demand is totally off. 

But it is absolutely true that I was less hirable than some other people for junior faculty positions, because by the time I was full on the job market, I had six books, I’d won awards, I was too old. Nobody knew what to do with me. 

To then not be on the academic calendar—because you’ve been sort of kept out of academia because you chose to have children and do other kinds of part-time work—and have full-time work that’s not on the academic calendar, you can see these things piling up. And if you’re also paying back student loans, or if you’re, or if you’re trying to determine how much money does it cost per hour to send your children to daycare or to get a babysitter versus how much money are you going to make per hour as a poet? None. As a novelist? Almost none. If you’re just doing the economics of the family, you’re screwed. You’re basically screwed.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, no matter what, as you say, you choose, because it’s not really a choice.

Rachel Zucker 

Right. And, you know, it’s complicated, because I feel very grateful to not have had the grief that my friends had over infertility. I did have childbirth and pregnancy losses, but not to the extent that my friends did, and to want to be a parent and not be able to be a parent, and then to have people who are talking about their children like, “Oh, my God, I’m so tired. It’s so boring. It’s killing my soul. I can’t make enough money again.” It is painful. 

But again, these are the things that divide women, that divide working people, that divide artists, that divide parents from each other, instead of saying, “How do we make a society where people can make creative work—because we care about that? How do we support that and make a society where people can have children?” 

People are going to keep having children, and it’s not just a choice. Yes, it’s a choice—you can make a choice not to have children, too, and that’s also wonderful, but most people are going to have children, and if everyone stopped having children, we would eventually have some problems, or problems of a different nature. 

I don’t know. I just think we get to a whole lot of trouble with this choice thing, and then layer on top of that the tendency for women to be apologetic and accommodating. And mothers, on top of that. I can say with honesty, it is some dreary work sometimes, but I’ve never regretted having children. But there are many times where I’m like, holy shit, it didn’t have to be this hard. 

I have no children here. It’s been 10 days. That’s easy! I mean, I’m lonely, but come on. It is much easier.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, yeah. The other day, I was trying to do a Zoom meeting for work, and my daughter was sitting next to me at the desk, drawing. Then suddenly, she flipped to a coloring book page that I had done, and she was so angry, she threw a fit. She was on the floor. She was, like, trying to pee on the floor and couldn’t manage it. She was so mad. And I had to say to work, “I’m sorry, I have to turn my video and audio off and deal with this.” But oh, so much easier on days where she’s not there, to just have an adult conversation.

Rachel Zucker  

Did you tell your coworkers what sin you had committed?

Lara Ehrlich   

I did. I try to be very open with my coworkers, because I’m in a senior-level, leadership position, and I feel like it’s important for people to recognize that there are mothers who work, it’s a pandemic, and sometimes the kids are sitting next to you—and just have realistic expectations about what that looks like. So yes, I try to always say, “It’s because I colored her coloring page,” or whatever the thing is.

Rachel Zucker  

Yeah. I’ve been trying to do a better and better job of telling my kids how much I love to work—I think my kids do know that—and to not feel horribly guilty about it. That’s also a weird thing that I used to do when they were little, sort of act like it was not what I wanted.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, I find myself wanting to say that to my daughter, too. I’ll tell her sometimes, “I would so much rather be playing with you than in this meeting.” And that’s true some of the time, but other times, no, I really enjoy what I do, and I would actually rather be doing whatever I’m doing at work. When she’s older, I might start telling her sometimes, “This is important.”

Rachel Zucker  

I think that’s part of why I became such a good cook. I mean, I’ve always liked it, but if I’m going to be honest, I didn’t love to play with my kids.

Lara Ehrlich  

I don’t either.

Rachel Zucker  

And I thought I was gonna do dress-up and imaginative play. I have a really close friend who also has three sons, and I can’t remember exactly what she said, but basically, I was always sort of confessing to her, “It’s so boring,” whatever it was at the time—like he wants to play Baku, God. Or, like, I just don’t really like Legos that much.

Lara Ehrlich  

And they want to play it for hours and hours.

Rachel Zucker  

Right! Or Candyland. The person who made Candyland should be killed. Chutes and Ladders? I mean, I will never play Chutes and Ladders. I look forward to having grandchildren, but I will never play Chutes and Ladders again. That is not even a game that should exist. 

Anyway, I was constantly saying, “I feel so guilty. I know they’re my children, and I love them.” And she would say, “But you’re an adult. You don’t have the same interests as a child because you’re not a child.” 

There were many things that I loved to do with my children, and I know that there are people who like really to play. My mom was very good at playing with my kids. She never played with me, but she was good at playing. I guess I feel like why do we have all this shame about it? Like, they’re not that interesting. They’re children.

Lara Ehrlich  

I’m totally there with you. I feel a lot of guilt about it particularly now in the pandemic, because my daughter is not in preschool, so she spends a lot of time with my parents who are good about playing with her, and I am with you. I’m just like, oh God, do we have to do blocks? Or do we have to do this puzzle for the 50th time or whatever. I would so much rather take her somewhere or go do something, but now we can’t go do anything, so it’s like this constant pressure to play, and I don’t like it. I don’t like playing. I don’t think I’ve ever really loved playing. I’m just not a very fun person, I guess. I don’t know.

Rachel Zucker  

And know what? There could be so many delicious reasons for that. Like, maybe you’re using your imagination for other things, so you’re a little short on imagination for playing. I don’t know. 

It’s this whole helicopter mom thing, and “now we’re screwed because we were too attentive,” you know? It’s never ending with the fault and the shame and the guilt. 

I don’t want to go back to the ‘50s, and I don’t want to go back to the ‘60s, and I don’t even really want to go back to the ‘70s. I definitely don’t want to go back to the ‘80s—the ‘80s were very bad—but I think we haven’t yet found a way to be truly good enough mothers and attend to our children’s basic needs, which include emotional needs, psychological needs, the need to feel loved, the need for attachment, the need for routine and dependency. I think I have a high bar for basic needs. But not the need to get into a good college—or any college. Not the need to have your favorite dinner every night, and if you don’t get it, something else. I made that mistake. Ugh. Not need to like to have playdates. No! When you’re old enough to go there on your own, you can have a playdate. I don’t know. “Playdates.” Even the word. 

Or like, one time, I took an Italian class briefly and this woman was ranting and raving. She was a mom living in the United States, and she was ranting and raving about the word snack. She said there’s no word in Italian for snack. I don’t know if this is true or not. But she said, “This preoccupation that you have in the United States as mothers with snacks. Why do children need snacks? Stop feeding your children snacks. Just feed them food!” 

And I know what she meant. Now children need their own language; their own way of being treated; we can’t call it food, it’s “snacks”; they have to eat at all times of day and night—but then, they also need all the limitations, and they need to be safe, and the world is so “horribly dangerous,” but if we keep them too safe, then they’re not going to be resilient. I mean, it’s impossible. 

We all need to work; we all need to parent; obviously, we do everything we can to make sure that whoever is taking care of them when we’re working is loving them and caring for them and meeting their basic needs; and the economics of that are impossible. There’s no ethical solution, especially not now that there’s no school. I think we’re all just screwed. I’ve nothing positive to say.

Lara Ehrlich  

There’s no way to win. There’s no way to be a good Mom with a capital M right now. I think it’s so important to hear that and to say that to each other, to say it’s okay if you don’t want to make three dinners, and should we be making three dinners? That’s the other question. My daughter won’t eat her dinner and then she’ll say she’s hungry. We’re working on saying, “Well then you don’t get anything more to eat tonight.” Anyway, I hear you on that. We’re nearing the hour mark, and we can keep talking all night, but I wanted to talk a little bit about your writing, your work, which, of course, I’ve read, and anyone who hasn’t, please do. The most recent book I read was SoundMachine—which, I feel like I underlined, like, every line of the book because it just sort of hit me in the soul. Would you call it a book of poetry, a book of prose, or somewhere in between? And tell me about the first piece in the book.

Rachel Zucker  

I don’t know if it’s a book of poetry. I don’t know if it’s a book of prose. It mostly doesn’t look like poetry, but it’s selling like poetry. So maybe it’s poetry? I mean, I say that sort of with some snarkiness. 

I don’t think there was a form that fit into the binary of prose, poetry, not to mention memoir, short story, creative nonfiction, essay, lyric essay, audio transcription. There was no one of those that was adequate to describing the experiences that I was trying to describe, which are primarily stories of motherhood. How do you record, or how do describe and communicate experiences that are internal or external, in the body, in the subconscious, the way you have the running tape in your mind all the time?

You’re writing the things you say to your kids, the things your kids say to you, maybe the things they’re writing, the people around you, your own history with your parents and your children, history and world events as they’re colliding with your domestic life, the public, the private—how do you do that? The novel wasn’t really invented for that material. In motherhood, as Tillie Olsen famously said, “You’re so terribly interruptible.”

What kind of narrative structure or lyric structure can contain or embody what it means to be interruptible but also have a relationship with the reader in which you don’t seem psychotic, frankly, because it’s not a psychotic experience. And there is form. Maybe I shouldn’t use the word psychotic. Interruptible.

Lara Ehrlich  

I know what you mean. There’s a narrative that makes sense, it’s just sort of fragmented.

Rachel Zucker  

Right. And the reason I shouldn’t use the word psychotic is because it implies that that’s pathological, which, first of all, there probably is a form that is experienced in psychosis that’s probably fascinating, but also, I’m just saying that the normative, beginning, middle, and end with a central narrator—that wasn’t going to do it. There’s the formal question. 

SoundMachine is a book that included work of mine from a long time ago and also not since the pandemic but very recent. It ends with a long poem that actually takes place not at McDowell but at a second writers’ colony that I went to. I won’t tell you which one because I’m very nasty about the experience. It just wasn’t a good experience. McDowell was an incredible experience for me, even though it was complicated. I didn’t really miss my husband, and that tells me important information. 

But the first poem is called “Song of the Dark Room,” and it’s a long piece that I wrote when my middle son was probably about 8, so 12 years ago. It was never published. I didn’t know what it was. It was about a particular winter when we were reading The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I went through a period of time where I read all the girl books to my sons, which was fantastic. 

But it was also a time when my middle son, Abraham, was having a very hard time falling asleep, so it was like sleep training all over again—and it’s very controversial and difficult to figure out how to help your child sleep, how to help your baby sleep, but it’s even more difficult when all of a sudden, the child at age 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 is having trouble sleeping. My kids still have lots of different kinds of trouble with sleep, and I have trouble with sleep, so it didn’t really get easier. There were all of these ruminations about what it meant to sit in the room with him and write. That’s what I was trying to do. I was trying to use that time to write, because he wanted me to sit there with him. The therapist was saying, “You can’t sit there anymore. He’s depending on you too much.” 

What does that mean? Where’s the mother writer self? And where’s the mother self? And where’s the writer self? And what does this have to do with discipline and practice and attachment and separation and giving your kid resiliency and autonomy but also not abandoning them? I still lie down with my 13-year-old. I judge no one, other than real abuse and neglect of any kind, but the other stuff, I have no idea. I have no idea how anyone should be a parent. I have no idea how I should be a parent. I just know my own journey. 

I know that I didn’t do it the same with my youngest. My friends still are like, “Why do you still lie down with him? That’s weird.” You know what? Because it works. And it’s a really nice time. And I wish I would’ve just kept lying down with anybody who wanted me to lie down, you know? That’s the thing. You realize later. You know, your 21-year-old is probably not going to ask you to lie down.

Anyway, the piece continues through all of these arguments between the husband and the wife about how to make the kid fall asleep and snoring and how to keep him quiet and how to be quiet.

Lara Ehrlich  

First of all, I have to say, it’s reassuring to hear you talk about lying down with your 13-year-old. Our 4-year-old, about halfway through the pandemic, decided that she couldn’t sleep alone and that she was lonely. And who were we to say that a 4-year-old who doesn’t have friends right now has to sleep alone in her room down the hall? So, she has been sleeping with us for probably three or four months. We have a lot of those same conversations. None of us are really sleeping well, and what are the limitations, and my parents think it’s weird, but we’re like, “Well, you didn’t live through pandemic.” 

It raises all those questions when your child needs you, and you’re hearing different opinions from different places. I think that particular poem encapsulates this conversation so well. It taps into all of the things that we’ve been talking about, about being present but having other things that you want to attend to and feeling guilty about that. And there was this line where you say, “Even when I’m in the room, I’m leaving. Can he feel this? Is that why he grabs my wrist?” That sense of even while I’m playing, I’m sort of edging away from the blocks. That particular piece just really hit me hard. I loved it. Hearing you talk about it is wonderful.

Rachel Zucker  

Thank you. You know, I remember hearing you say this thing about your daughter, because I listened to the Katie Peterson episode, and I actually called my oldest son, Moses, after that, and for some reason we were talking about parenting, and I was like, “Did I really screw you up?” I was asking him about something in particular, like a sleep expert, a very sweet, lovely sleep expert. He dropped his nap when he was 2, and she said, “Go in the room and sit with him and tell him not to move, every time he moves. Just say very gently. ‘Keep your body still, keep your body still. No moving, this is sleep time.’” And I was thinking about that. I was like, what the fuck? That is the creepiest thing I did. I thought it was a good thing to do. 

I said to my son, people are so fucked up in their ideas about “you have to sleep with your child, you can’t sleep with your child, it’s incest, they’re never going to individuated.” And it’s like, everybody’s just trying to get some sleep and not feel abandoned. Why would you take a baby and put the baby in the other room? Unless you need to write. And if you need to, do it. Write. Or the fact that your daughter has nobody to play with—that is real. That is huge. That’s not caused by you, this social isolation. If a parent was doing it, we would call it child abuse. To me, it makes perfect sense that she would want to sleep in your bed, but it also makes perfect sense that you might get to a point where you’re like, “Yeah, but I’m also in the middle of a pandemic, and I need to not have your body on my body right now.”

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, my gosh, yeah. It’s that push and pull, and this is just a hyper example, I think, of parenthood. These are always the issues we deal with but put under a microscope, where the stakes are so much higher. But like you said, we’re just surviving, and you do what you have to do.

Rachel Zucker  

I hope we can come out of this with real personal and, more importantly, institutional change. There are things that we should never go back to. There’s no reason for in-person parent-teacher conferences. Just be done with that. A lot of things are opening up in ways that, hopefully, will give people more accessibility, opportunity, and potential for an equal playing field. The problem is that the pandemic, so far, has made every vulnerable group more vulnerable, and the few people who were basically immune to everything that could possibly go wrong in a person’s life have made billions of dollars. And it’s really hard to protest right now safely, so that constellation of things is very concerning to me. How do we continue to dismantle capitalism, for example, and racism and white supremacy and things that exclude women and exclude mothers? How do we do that? Well, I think that a major societal disruption, which is what’s happened, is one of the things that we needed to make this happen. But how do we like not slide back is really the question.

Lara Ehrlich  

Absolutely, yeah. And when it’s over, what left? Do we stay in the slide? Or do we learn from what we’ve experienced this last year and move forward? It’ll be interesting to see.

Rachel Zucker 

The last thing I’ll say about this is that it’s not primarily the job of mothers and parents with young children; it is primarily the job of people like me. I don’t know yet how to participate in that fight, to not slide back, to move forward. But it really has to be the work of women who don’t have young children at home, who are not struggling just make enough money or keep their jobs, so I don’t know yet how to do that work most successfully and powerfully. But I think this is a call to women my age and older, particularly white women or women with privilege and power of any kind. Now is the moment. Do not let us go back to the worst part of what was before.

Lara Ehrlich  

That is absolutely perfectly said. And thank you for saying it, and a perfect place to end, I think, with this call to action. Thank you so much, Rachel, for coming on for just your thoughtful and honest conversation. It’s been such a pleasure to have you. 

Rachel Zucker 

Thank you. Stay safe.