Writer Mother Monster: Stephanie Burt, "I was raised with the expectation that I would excel in a career and have time left over for kids, rather than the reverse, because the people who raised me didn’t know I was a girl."

(April 24, 2021) Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, professor, and transgender activist who the New York Times called “one of the most influential poetry critics of her generation.” She has two children, ages 11 and 15 and describes writer-motherhood in three words as “busy, conflicted, resourceful.” In this episode, Stephanie talks about claiming motherhood, finding kinship with Mr. Spock, the horror of The Giving Tree, the misery of octopus motherhood, role-playing games, X-Men, and more.

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 as we make space for creative endeavors.

Transcript

Stephanie Burt

Lara Ehrlich

Hi everyone, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest today is Stephanie Burt. Before I introduce Stephanie, thank you all, as always, for tuning in, and please chat with us during the interview. We’ll be able to see your comments in the comment section and we’ll weave them into the conversation. And if you enjoy the episode, please become a patron or patroness to help keep the podcast going. 

Now, I’m excited to introduce Stephanie. Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard. Her most recent books are After Callimachus: Poems and Translations and Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems. A chapbook of poems about superheroes and other pop culture figures will appear from Rain Taxi this summer, and another full-length collection of poems from Graywolf in late 2022. 

She’s also at work on an anthology of queer and proto-queer poems from before the 20th century with the critic, scholar, and musician Drew Daniel and is part of a fan collective on a book about the X-Men. Stephanie has two children, ages 11 and 15 and describes writer-motherhood in three words as “busy, conflicted, resourceful.” Please join me in welcoming Stephanie.

Stephanie Burt

Hi.

Lara Ehrlich 

Hi, Stephanie. Thank you so much for joining me.

Stephanie Burt

It’s an honor. I’m not sure where to go from here, but who is? I know many parts of the world are still completely in it, but around here, it feels that we’re coming out of the pandemic-imposed isolation just a little bit, and I feel like coming back out into the world, in the way that a lot of us have tried to engage with it all the time—through videos and podcasts and things and on this high-quality podcast— feels good. Also, I promised you Lockheed [holds up a purple crocheted dragon].

Lara Ehrlich 

Tell everyone who this is.

Stephanie Burt

Okay, so this iteration of Lockheed was crocheted by my friend Fiona, who is very, very good at running tabletop role-playing games, which we can talk about. I own a couple different Lockheeds in different media that people have given me. As some of you know, Lockheed is the purple space dragon and loyal companion of Kate Pryde of the X-Men, the Red Queen of the Hellfire Club, the captain of the Marauder privateer—the figure about whom I have altogether too much to say. It is one of my favorite rabbit holes, and we don’t have to start there. 

I also want to introduce you to another of our favorites around here [holds up an octopus plush doll], and one who has nothing to do with the X-Men but quite a lot to do with poetry. This is Octavia Rivets Parsley, who follows the naming convention of the characters of Catherynne M. Valente novels, which you may be familiar with. They’re the Fairyland books. They’re good for reading aloud to kids. Octavia spills a lot of ink because she’s a writer and an octopus and is a very good parent. I don’t know if she thinks of herself as a mom. She generally gets very quiet on the subject.

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s amazing.

Stephanie Burt

If you know something about octopus parenthood, you know why she might want to not admit it one way or the other.

Lara Ehrlich  

And for anyone who doesn’t know about octopus parenthood, now we have homework.

Stephanie Burt

Yeah, it’s actually really disturbing. Octopi are super smart, and you shouldn’t eat them—and I say this as someone who eats cows.

Stephanie Burt

Their relationship to couplehood and reproduction is not one you would want for yourself. Is that right, Octavia? That’s right, Octavia. 

Lara Ehrlich 

Should we say more about that, or should we look that up on our own?

Stephanie Burt

They die.

Lara Ehrlich 

Okay.

Stephanie Burt

Generally, motherhood is the end of their lives. I know it feels like that for humans sometimes, but for an octopus, it’s sadly literal. It’s okay. We can move on.

Lara Ehrlich

Well, that was a good transition into motherhood. So, you have all the mothers lined up and ready to go?

Stephanie Burt

No, some of them are upstairs. Also, some of them are pretty clearly non-binary parents. At some point, I suspect—I mean, I’m a very boringly binary trans girl, but I suspect you’ve had some non-binary parents on the podcast. We can talk about parenting and gender and how they are more than five genders, but we don’t want to lead with that either. You’ve probably got some questions to ask me. I’m gonna shut up now.

Lara Ehrlich

All of those things are perfect. Let’s talk about the three words that you used to define writer motherhood: busy, conflicted, and resourceful.

Stephanie Burt

Yeah, if you want to be a good parent, and especially a good mom, and do other things, you’re busy by definition. And you’re busy even if you have the finances and local and regional availability of people to help you. And many of us don’t. Now we’re finding we need other resources for our teen, and we’re learning how to get those. 

Part of the busy-ness is realizing that there are a lot of things you can do if you learn how to sort what’s important to you, what’s important to the people you care about, and what’s actually not important. You learn how to sort what is actually your job from what seems like it could be your job, but you can delegate or blow it off, and how to sort what’s on a deadline from what’s not on a deadline. 

I think a lot of us feel pressure to put our kids first every minute, which is not, in fact, helpful, even though putting your kids first every day is generally a good idea. 

A lot of us feel so much pressure to do this or that or the other thing that has a deadline, and if it doesn’t have a deadline, we don’t do it. That means things that are of the highest significance to you personally—and maybe to your family or to the other intimates in your life—never get done. 

I’ve tried to encourage the people around me to figure out what deadlines are fake and which ones are real and to find time to do the things that we actually want to do. But sometimes you just can’t. So that’s busy. 

Conflicted … I don’t know if that requires explanation. Your kids need you, or someone like you, constantly when they’re little, except when they’re sleeping—and then, who knows when they’ll wake up. The more people like you who are around you, the less you have to be on call all the time. And even as your kids get older and want more time without you or want more time with adults who aren’t parents, there is still the conflict of “should I be doing something for my household right now? Should I be doing something for my kid? Am I letting my partner, or one of my partners, do something I should be doing?” 

My history, because of what my work situation has been and because I was so lucky in the way I was treated professionally early on, has been of sometimes letting my partner or my partners do things that I could have done and sometimes doing the thing myself. And there’s a conflict around that, however it shakes out. Everyone who’s a parent has their own take on that. 

I’m a mom, I am a parent who is a woman, and that makes me a mother, and I really like being a mother. Until the early 20-teens, people thought it was a dad, and that felt really awful, and I didn’t understand why it felt so bad until I figured out why it felt so bad. 

For several years, I tried to be sort of non-binary gender fluid—what my pronouns are depends on what context you encounter me in person, mostly in order not to be super disruptive to the people I was already close to. That was better than trying to be a guy, since I am a woman, but not as good as transitioning and saying, “Hello, I am a girl. My pronouns are she her, and I’m a mom.” 

It took a while. 

I have had some experience not only of being asked, “How can you do all these things and still be a mom?” but the experience of being rewarded for the lesser amount of engagement, less than 30 percent of the household work that people expect dads to do in couples that are straight-appearing. I have experienced of a lot of kinds of privilege I didn’t want, some of which I no longer have and some of which, unfortunately, are matters of habit. I think about that a lot. I’ve been able to get out of things at work by saying, “I’m sorry, I have to go parent, I will be right back. My kid needs a sandwich.” And I love doing that. I recognize that some of my colleagues who are cis women who have less job security than me, can’t or won’t say, “I gotta go from this meeting, I’ll be back in 10 minutes, my kid needs a sandwich,” because they think it makes them look unserious. And that’s fucked up. Everybody should be able to say, “I’ll be right back. My kid needs a sandwich”—unless you are, you know, a cardiac surgeon in an operating theater or onstage in King Lear or onstage in Cloud Nine. There are very few things that aren’t worth interrupting if your kid needs a sandwich, and I want to encourage everybody to walk away from their meetings if their kid needs a sandwich and try to set an example of that. That’s conflicted. 

And also, the conflict within parenthood, whether or not you’re a writer, whether or not you’re making art actively that day, the conflict between doing things for your kid and letting your kid do the thing and saying, “I’m sorry, kid, I’m busy—do the thing yourself.” It’s very, very hard. It’s especially hard for me because I was raised by a de facto stay-at-home mom, and I think those of us who were raised by parents who did gender in that way maybe have a harder time with some boundaries. If your model of how to be a mom is you must give up everything for your kids all the time, that’s wonderful if your kid is one and you have an adequate access to childcare because you have to live that way anyway, but if your kid is 10 …

Lara Ehrlich

I hear what you’re saying about feeling as though telling your kids to do something for themselves is conflicting. I also grew up with a mother who was there and did everything with me and still helps my child when she has to go to the bathroom, and I’m like, “She could do it herself.” But my mom goes with her, and that’s hard to break.

Stephanie Burt

Yeah. We’re trying to work with our older kid, who’s very, very shy and is 15, who’s wonderful with people he knows but really has a hard time coming out of his shell, to the extent that we’re looking at what would be the right school for him now, and we don’t have an answer quite yet. We have hypotheses. But it’s hard for me to remember when to ask him to do more things himself and when that’s not an appropriate demand for that particular kid. 

I think that’s not only a learned behavior that has to do with stay-at-home moms, I think it’s also a birth order thing. I think older children are more likely to find themselves being taken care of in that way that can be excessive. And second children, third children are maybe more likely to say, “I’ll just go make my own sandwich.” I don’t know how weak a correlation it is, but it’s a correlation. Our younger one, who’s 11, will make their own sandwich, if necessary, although, honestly, they know how to, especially in pandemic, order a sandwich. They’ll order sandwich after sandwich, and they never eat the crust.

Lara Ehrlich

Oh, yes, sure. What can you do.

Stephanie Burt

My younger one … we like a lot of the same things, but we don’t like a lot of the same foods. Of course, I like a lot of weird foods. So, that’s conflicted. Should we just go to resourceful?

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah.

Stephanie Burt

You have to find not just inner resources but outer resources. You have to know how to ask for help. I think I told you I’ve gone from “let’s not tell people” to “it’s helpful to be open about this.” We are a poly household. I have multiple partners. I don’t want to talk about their lives, because that’s not my story to tell, but I can absolutely say having multiple adults who are close, who are family, who are trustworthy, who have been in our pod during the pandemic, and who were just there is so great. These are adults who our kids know, that one or both of their moms trust absolutely, and who give our kids resources, from personality types to specific kinds of know-how that their pair of moms happens not to have. The older I get, the more I see it—there are a lot of ways to be a good mom and a lot of ways to be a good parent—and the more I’m a fan of the ways that have more than two adults and adults who are not blood relatives.

Lara Ehrlich

They used to say, “It takes a village,” right?

Stephanie Burt

I mean, it’s associated with a very fascinating, very flawed human being who turned out not to be great at running for office, but the slogan’s good. The slogan’s exactly right. That’s something that my mom likes to say, “it takes a village,” and she would know, because when I was little, she didn’t have enough help, and you could tell. I’m their only daughter. I have three younger brothers, and by the time my youngest brother showed up, there was a lot more help available, and she was happier.

Lara Ehrlich

I’ve been really open with the fact that my parents live 15 or 20 minutes away from us, and the only way I’ve been able to do anything, including this podcast, is because they’re watching my daughter. Otherwise, I would not be able to do anything. So yeah, the more adults, blood-related or not blood-related, however you can build a village, I think that’s so important. Tell me a little bit more about yourself as a child.

Stephanie Burt

I was so bad at being a child. Oh, man. I wrote a book about this. It took me a long time to realize that most people in our culture were happier as children than as teenagers, because I found the emotional roller coaster and the complicated social life of being a teenager absolutely fascinating, even when it was miserable. And, I mean, of course people thought I was a boy, so that sucked, but at least I was able to hang out with girls and be part of the set of very geeky social worlds and have an actual group of people to play role-playing games with and be on a quiz bowl team and have, in a lot of ways, a pretty satisfying, geeky teen social life, as opposed to being a child, which I was terrible at. The world of childhood was extremely gender segregated, which is still true in a lot of places but less true than it used to be. I had very few friends. My parents didn’t know I was a girl, because I didn’t tell them, and I’m old enough that they wouldn’t have understood or would have understood and concluded that I was gay, which I am, I date women, but—

Lara Ehrlich

It’s more complicated.

Stephanie Burt

Right, right. I really think that for a while they thought I was going to grow up to date guys—not that there’s anything wrong with that, but, no, gay here. But that’s a different rabbit hole. 

Me as a child: I loved reading, I loved reading about chemistry and biology, and I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy and a lot of comic books, and I didn’t read anything realist. I didn’t understand what the attraction was to realist fiction. I was probably in my early 20s before I really understood why people read realist fiction. Now I teach a science fiction class, and I read less realistic fiction than I did 10 years ago, but I still like George Eliot. 

I read a lot. I had a couple friends, one I was very close to, and we just spent all the time that we could creating our own long, intricate narrative involving Star Wars figures, like little action figures, and we repurposed and renamed them in order to make them part of the science fictional future where they have their own adventures. So, that was really fun. 

His name was Danny, and I think he’s a lawyer in Chicago now, but when he became a teenager, he decided that he wanted to have a teen boy’s social life and drive around and do teen boy things. We moved away, from McHenry County, Maryland, to Washington, D.C., and instead of having one friend, I played with Star Wars figures in the closet—literally, by the way, in the closet. I made new friends who I could play tabletop role-playing games with and do theater tech with and be in high school debate with and be on a quiz bowl show. I was a terrible high school debater, but I really liked quiz bowl. So anyway, I was terrible at being a child, and my parents worried a lot. I decided in first grade or so, after seeing some Star Trek, which my father had on after work, that I have a great deal in common with Mr. Spock, and enjoyed pretending to be Mr. Spock, which apparently is a very common trans girl thing.

Lara Ehrlich

Really?

Stephanie Burt

Oh, yeah. The thing about Mr. Spock is he’s a very good model for trans girls, especially trans girls who are not out to themselves yet and for people assigned female at birth who don’t like performing femininity and therefore for early women in science. If you think of yourself as Spock, you don’t have to perform masculinity or femininity.

Lara Ehrlich

Oh, wow. 

Stephanie Burt

You can just perform fascinating.

Lara Ehrlich

Okay, let’s talk more about this.

Stephanie Burt

The end of the previous thread was my really wonderful, kind, thoughtful, normy parents decided, understandably, although mistakenly, that I thought I was Mr. Spock, and therefore, that was the beginning of my adventures with child psychiatry. Apparently, I fell down a lot as a child. I had a relationship to my body that was not very productive and predictable, so I was sent to the kinds of physical therapy that kids who have CP are given. I don’t remember that, but I remember years and years of adventures with a very well-meaning child psychiatrist, who is not around anymore but who tried very hard and was not the right psychiatrist for me. 

But they knew that something was wrong, and it was clear if you were interacting with me as a child in any way—other than “can you please give us the right answer on a test?” or “what’s your favorite Samuel R. Delany novel”—there was clear that there was something weird and kind of wrong. Today, of course, we’d be talking about the autism spectrum. 

A number of my friends, not so much through the poetry community as through science-fiction communities and comics and fandom communities, are self-diagnosed adults with autism. But again, generationally, I wasn’t there. I was just terrible at being a kid, and so, I have this fairly optimistic and idealized view of teen life, when, in fact, for so many people, ninth grade is the worst, and actually, fifth and sixth grade were the worst. Long answer. We can talk about Star Trek.

Lara Ehrlich

Maybe Star Trek leads into this, but you mentioned that for the first however many years of your kid’s life, you were perceived as a dad. Did you know you wanted kids, and did you have a sense of whether you wanted to be a dad or a mom?

Stephanie Burt

I knew that I hated everything about masculinity for me. It’s great for guys—like, we’re raising one. It’s great to be guy if you’re a guy. I knew that if someone had told me, at any age at all, “Here’s a button. Push the button and you’ll be a girl,” I would have pushed the button. Actual transition, when people are already thinking of you as someone with your dead name, it’s a little more complicated, and I was very scared. I was scared of disruptions, I was scared that I wasn’t trans enough, I thought I was not a good candidate for transition. My generation—I was born in the early ’70s—was told you that you had to be suicidal and also, possibly, that you had to date men. It’s just a lot of garbage, but that’s what they told you, so I just kind of kept on trying to be a guy and accumulating friends and job responsibilities and bylines.

I knew that I would rather be a girl and, therefore, didn’t want to be dad, because dads are guys. My father is a very, very good, generous, helpful person and is very comfortable being a guy, but, you know, I’m a girl. 

Did I know I wanted kids? The answer to that is I didn’t know. I didn’t know that I wanted kids or that I was on a track to have kids until my wife and I got together, and it was clear she knew that she wanted kids, and it was clear that if we were going to stay together, one of the good reasons for being together was we’d be good co-parents, which I hope we are. It was clear that if we chose each other, that would mean me choosing kids, so I knew I wanted kids as soon as I knew that I wanted to be with her. 

I knew myself enough to know I would only be an okay parent with the right one or more co-parents. Lo and behold, that’s how it turned out. I love being a parent. Belmont, the book that I wrote that came out around the time our younger one was born … that’s a really rough, sad book. I have trouble reading from it now—although I’m maybe going to read a poem from it to you later—because it’s a book about trying to be an adult and settling down and getting a house in the suburbs. I love the town we live in; I think we made the right choice. But it’s a book about realizing that you’re a normal adult, in a lot of ways, and it’s about having small children and the time and energy demands of small children. 

But it was also a book about trying to be a dad, which sucked, because I’m a mom. When I go back and look at it, it’s a book that’s full of settling. Not settling for people, but settling for roles, and resignation and trying to cover certain kinds of bitterness with other kinds of happiness, and the happiness was genuine, but the bitterness was also genuine, because you can only go so far before your egg cracks. I don’t know if that’s a term that our wonderful cis viewers and listeners who have stuck with us this far will know. 

One of the things that’s absolutely changed from 2013, when Belmont came out, to now is the rise of trans-lit for trans readers and of trans culture. I hope I have a lot in common with the moms who are cis women, since a very large majority of moms and moms who are writers are cis moms, but I feel like now there’s something called trans culture and trans-lit that’s there, and I’m able to share experiences with both other trans people and the large, overlapping sets of communities and mothers.

Lara Ehrlich

That’s great.

Stephanie Burt

And with parents who are not women. The next thing I want to see that I haven’t seen yet, in terms of writing about being parents, is a lot of people who you know and I know are raising kids whose pronouns are something other than he/him or she/her. Increasingly, there are parents whose pronouns are something other than he/him or she/her, and we need to hear the stories, and instead we have the The Argonauts. Argonauts is a very interesting book, but this thing happened in YA in the early 2000s—there was a wave of books that say, “Hmm, someone I’m close to has a weird gender. How weird for me.” And then the next wave is, “Hi, I’m the one with the weird gender. Can I have the microphone, please?”

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Are we there yet, or are we starting to see that?

Stephanie Burt

We’re there with other kinds of writing. I don’t think we’re there with writing on parenthood yet. I know parents who are memoirists and essayists, and I know non-binary people who are memoirists and essayists, but I don’t know that there’s an overlap yet. I’m thinking of a close friend whose pronouns are xe/xem/xyr, with an X, who’s gonna be a parent soon, and I hope that in a few years, if that’s the kind of writing that xe wants to do, that some editors will get in touch with xem. Yeah, that’s the future.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. If you were to write that parenting book—

Stephanie Burt

I’m a mom—that’s not my parenting book.

Lara Ehrlich

Yep, that’s right. What would you want to see in those parenting books? What would you want to read in those parenting books?

Stephanie Burt

In those parenting books, I would want to see two things. First, I would want to see role models for today’s non-binary kids. Some of them would like to be parents when they grow up. And second, I would like to see models and constructive advice and what works, because there’s so much completely justified rage out there. 

There’s so much, very merited, wish to just forking dynamite, the heteronormative and mononormative and cisnormative and patriarchal institutions and habits and unspoken expectations that have prevented so many of us either from being the parents we want to be or from finding other kinds of creative and interpersonal fulfillment. There’s just so much crap in the way, some of which was always oppressive and some of which served a purpose in a society that no longer exists. 

I would like to see more of what’s worked. I would like to see more honest, imperfect, weirdo, “This works for me but not for you” and “here’s how this thing happened.” There are a couple books where a mom and their kid collaborated. I believe Hilda Raz wrote one with her son, who transitioned as an adult. It’d be fun to see more collaboration of various kinds. 

I’d like to see role models—like weird, imperfect, painful, here’s how we got here, here’s what we could have been differently, here are some things that worked. Because rage is valid, but rage is already available. 

And then here’s something else about the literature of parenthood and maybe a mother in particular: I just got done reading a very worthy and thoughtful book, in which almost everything that was being celebrated by this literary critic was revolutionary or subversive or designed to undermine things or attacks on all that is or visions of destruction. 

I think being responsible for young people is a good reminder that rage will only take you so far, that in some ways, the revolution is the easy part, that we don’t just need to see what is broken, we need to figure out how to do better. And sometimes that means building a splint or a life raft or just figuring out how to make it through the day. 

And sometimes that means really building something that other people can use that can be shared. I’m creating new habits and new family structures and, dare I say, new institutions. And that’s not just something that we’re trying to live. My kids and I have a lot of challenges still, but we’re not all by ourselves in the middle of the ocean. We have other adults who are there for us—and there in various ways for our kids. It’s something I’m trying to write about. 

What I’ve told people about the set of poems that I’ve been writing was that Belmont was about a lot of things that weren’t working, and Advice from the Lights, which I’m pretty happy with, is a poetry book that’s my childhood book and my trans coming-out book. It’s another book about teens, because everything I write has some kind of teen superhero presence in it. It’s a book that has visions of social life and visions of my own past and my own identities, but it’s not a book that has queer communities or adult communities. The next book of poetry that’s going to be out is a book about finding community and, in particular, queer and trans community but also fan communities and parenting communities. It’s a book about finding your people, and that’s something a lot of us need.

Lara Ehrlich

Definitely.

Stephanie Burt

And your media empire with this podcast is a small part of that. Thank you.

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me a little bit more about the community of motherhood. My guest last week was saying that she felt very stifled by the sort of white, middle-class mother performance, and she mentioned going to soccer games and feeling the judgment if she wasn’t at every game or clapping on the sidelines. If she took her work to the soccer game, she was judged by the other moms. It sounds like you’ve built a really strong and supportive community of other parents. Are there communities of parents that haven’t been as supportive or accepting?

Stephanie Burt

I want to see and acknowledge the pervasive reality and difficulty of the problem your other guest described. It is real. But I haven’t seen it, and I haven’t seen it for two reasons. One, is it that kind of pressure to go to every soccer game, to make sure your kid is playing soccer, and not to bring your work to the soccer game, that can be felt internally. You can feel that pressure on yourself. That’s what you grew up thinking being a good mom was—don’t bring your work to the soccer game. And I haven’t felt that as much, and I think that has to do with having friends who are very strong, professionally oriented moms, in the sciences in particular, but it also, unfortunately, has to do with being raised with the expectation that I would excel in a career and have time left over for kids, rather than the reverse, because the people who raised me didn’t know I was a girl. Trans moms and trans women feel other kinds of pressure to perform femininity and womanhood, especially visually. 

But the pressure of “how can you possibly put your career ahead of your kid, you need to have your eye on the ball at all times, and your kid is the ball,” I didn’t quite grow up with that. It is real, and it’s bad, and it’s in a lot of places, but it’s not as much inside my head. I felt guilty for pursuing my career, but I did it. 

The other thing that I’m seeing about how my experience has been different is that the friend groups we had when our kids were young and the friend groups that we’ve maintained have been, by and large, groups of strong women who pursued either serious creative endeavors or fairly demanding careers or sometimes both. A lot of that has to do with the way that you meet other moms and other non-mom parents. When your kids are young, it’s often through your childcare arrangements, and that means that stay-at-home moms meet other stay-at-home moms, and assistant professors of chemistry who were taking advantage of 40-hour-a-week daycare meet other assistant professors who were taking advantage of that daycare. The fact that our primary childcare provider was on campus, Harvard University Daycare, meant that there were women who would bring their work to the soccer games, and that made me feel okay about bringing my work to play dates and children’s theater and so on—although, when your kid’s onstage, you watch the kid. But when they’re off in rehearsals, you don’t watch the empty stage. You grade papers. 

My friends were people who were doing that, who were moms and sometimes dads, so we happen to have a group that was very academic. I think that created other problems. It created the sense for our kids that “you need to do good in school because that’s how you get a job,” but that’s a separate problem from the pressure to be a perfect sideline mom. 

Also, neither of our kids had any interest in team sports, so soccer was just not a thing. We tried fencing, which I actually recommend, if your kid wants individual, physical competition, because it stays co-ed for a very long time. You don’t get the segregation of kids by imputed gender, which can do a lot of harm. Fencing parents, some of them are preppies, but it’s very international. I like the fencing parent community. We left that community largely because our older kid, who was the one who was the fencer, wasn’t really suited for an intense sport. He was very short. Very short. And if you are a very high-level fencer, there are ways you can use your small size to win as well as lose, but if you’re a lower-level fencer, it generally happens that if one kid has shorter arms on the other … you see where this is going. 

The soccer sidelines thing is real pressure, it’s terrible, and it’s everywhere, but it didn’t hit me. I was always able to say, “I have a lot of homework.” The thing that we did see was with my older one, who has always been quite shy, when he was smaller and would have playdates, the parent had to stay for the playdate. You couldn’t leave. I learned to bring my work and hang out with other parents and learn about their work, parents who were often academics or quasi-academics. I would say, “I need to be within 10 feet of my child, and I’m going to sit here and grade 20 papers and listen to you talk about your particle accelerator.”

Lara Ehrlich

That actually sounds really amazing to me, especially now in pandemic times.

Stephanie Burt

There were really two moms who I bonded with the most over this stuff. One is in tech, and the other, she and her partner were both faculty in the physical sciences at Harvard, and she got tenure, and he did not, so they both got wonderful jobs in the University of California system, where they are really enjoying raising their kids who we miss very much. A few years after they left New England, she won a MacArthur Genius Grant and has been on TV, this episode of Nova, in which she explains why there is a moon.

Lara Ehrlich

Oh, my gosh,

Stephanie Burt

She figured out why there’s a moon. I really miss those playdates. We miss that kid.

Lara Ehrlich

That sounds incredible.

Stephanie Burt

I’m sorry, I can’t explain why there is a moon.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I was just gonna say, I kind of need to know now. I have to look it up.

Stephanie Burt

She’s a very good writer, but mostly she coauthors papers in nature on why there’s a moon.

Lara Ehrlich

I want to make sure that we leave time for you to read the poem that you prepared for us.

Stephanie Burt

I prepared two.

Lara Ehrlich

Great, even better.

Stephanie Burt

This is so much fun. It’s really an honor. Okay, so this is one of the poems that I think really worked out pretty well from near the end of Belmont. “Butterfly with Parachute.” The piece of children’s art described in the poem really happened. 

“Butterfly with Parachute”

A real one wouldn’t need one,

but the one Nathan draws surely does:

four oblongs the size and color of popsicles,

green apple, toasted coconut and grape,

flanked, two per side, by billowing valentine hearts,

in a frame of Scotch tape.

Alive, it could stay off the floor,

for a few unaerodynamic minutes;

thrown as a paper airplane, for one or two more.

Very sensibly, therefore,

our son gave it something, not to keep it apart

from the ground forever, but rather to make safe its descent.

When we ask that imagination discover the limits

of the real

world only slowly,

maybe this is what we meant.

That’s from Belmont, which is, I guess, two books ago, and then I’ll read you a brand new one. If you’re a magazine editor and you want this one, get in touch. As of now, it’s homeless. It will probably be in the next book next year, unless I decide I hate it by then, which happens. It comes from taking walks during the pandemic and seeing how trees deal and how we deal, and it comes from being worried about raising a tween and raising a teen. 

When they’re little, unless they have really serious, visible, physical health problems, and sometimes even then, we are told they’ll be fine. Kids are resilient. Kids will get through anything. And that could be true, but as they get older and have to make decisions and try to thrive apart from us, minute to minute or day to day, you realize that nothing’s guaranteed. There are a lot of paths to a flourishing adulthood but also a lot of paths that may not lead there. And that’s scary. This is also a poem that inverts the title of the plot of one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read, and if you know the book, you know the book.

“The Taking Trees”

Like poplars, they cracked dramatically open when frozen. 

They burn to renew, like the sharp scented pine. 

They send their asymmetrical spinning seeds into the blackening furrows of open fields, tire grooves, hoofprints, the gradual edges of streams. 

Like maples, they shade the next generation.

Like Oaks, they thrive in shade. 

Unlike us, they give their errant children to each according 

to their needs. 

Their rootlets hold one another in line. 

No martyrs, they sent us out into scrub to build or gather renewable materials

daily for almost a century. 

They say without knowing it’s true,

“We too will do fine.”

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you.

Stephanie Burt

I think it’s finished.

Lara Ehrlich

It’s beautiful.

Stephanie Burt

Glad you like it.

Lara Ehrlich

And I loved listening to you read. Tell me about the poems. Tell me about the space between the first one you read and the last one you read.

Stephanie Burt

I love that question. They’re both kind of pretend landscape, pretend naturalist poems, in a way. I love imaginary animals. I love the way the world looks. I love making things up. I love science information, especially the life sciences. I don’t really have a green thumb. I don’t have the patience or the schedule to be a bird watcher. I don’t really. I’m not terribly observant, but I see some things. I like reading about them. And that all of that is information, the various kinds of real trees, that’s all true. I’m not answering your question. 

The first one is a poem about watching a preschooler be awesome, and the second is a poem about watching a tween and being scared. You’ve given these kids so many things, and by that age, you know what you can’t give them, and you hope you can get those things from other adults. You watch them and you hope they’ll be fine, and you hope they’ll be able to balance taking for themselves and saying what they need and getting what they need against the kind of giving that you want for adults. 

One of my tests for my giving too much is asking am I being a martyr, or am I being generous? What choice would I want my kids to make when they grow up? Do I cancel this event? Do I blow this person off? Do I perform this aversive task because it might help someone else? 

And I really don’t know where my own boundaries are. I don’t have a sense of how much is too much. 

I’ve written about this in other poems. We are told as mothers and as people to just trust your instincts, you’ll know when enough is enough. I don’t know those things. I have no idea. I know what books I like reading and what music I like listening to and what my favorite comic books are and why I identify with certain fictional characters and who I love and who I care about and who I want to like me and who I want to be good to and hang out with and how much time I want to play tabletop role playing games. 

I know what I want, but I don’t have instincts that tell me where the right boundaries are, so sometimes I have to ask other kinds of questions: Are you being giving or are you being taking? Are you giving too much? Are you taking too much? One of the questions that I asked that is a little easier to answer is what kind of decision would you want your kid to make? 

That’s a poem about looking at a whole bunch of allegorical trees that know when to take and when to give and support one another with their root lifts and thinking, well, can I have that for myself? Can a kid grow up to be sturdy like those trees—which are not, of course, The Giving Tree, a book of terror.

Lara Ehrlich

Yes. It’s a wonder that that’s still considered a book about a friendship. It’s so scary.

Stephanie Burt  

"The Giving Tree is a book about what we’re told to do to ourselves as mothers: destroy yourself in the hope that your adult child, who is paradigmatically a son, will come back and cry over your stump when you’re dead."

Lara Ehrlich

It’s horrifying.

Stephanie Burt

Yes, it is, but it’s true to the experience of self-abnegation that a lot of us are told makes motherhood, and again, that’s the wrong answer. What’s the right answer?

Lara Ehrlich

What kind of mother do you want to be for your kids?

Stephanie Burt

Oh, busy, conflicted, resourceful, generous. I want to be a good listener. I want to be someone who sets the right boundaries for that kid on that day. And the right boundaries for one kid on one day are not the right boundaries for another kid on another. I want to be someone who’s really good at reading my kids, to know what that kid needs on that day. I want to be someone who shares their interests, as much as appropriate and no more so, and I want to be someone who gives them the right amount of space to grow. And someone who is able to put them in a space where they’ll find friends and they’ll find other adults who will help them grow, because I know I can’t do it all myself. No one can.

Lara Ehrlich 

Sounds like that’s a great mother. I think I’ll close with a question I’ve started asking, which is, if you had a message for writer moms, what would that message be?

Stephanie Burt

I think the message is reach out. Right? Like, you’re not as alone as you think you are, and if you are, now you won’t be. You deserve supportive friends, and you deserve space and time, and you keep reaching out until you find people. If you don’t have the energy, if you’re just out of spoons all the time, keep reaching out, where there might be people who share your interests and share your problems and share your disposition. And if you do have the interest or the energy, there’s someone who you can share that energy with besides your kid. Don’t self-isolate—which is a hell of a message for the end of the plague. Of course, it’s not over in other countries. If the plague is ending for you, you’re lucky, and I’m lucky. Oh, and also, this is not your fault. Like, the more self-help advice we get, the more we feel like if it’s not working, it’s our fault. And no, it’s not your fault.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you, Stephanie. 

Stephanie Burt

[Whispers] It’s the patriarchy.

Lara Ehrlich

That’s, like, the subhead of the podcast.

Stephanie Burt

We get to think about how to build things and make things better. In some ways, I’m coming from so much privilege. I know that I’m still part of the problem, because I’m implicated in the system that benefits me, even though I’m also doing the best I can as a mom. I want to acknowledge that.

Lara Ehrlich 

This has been amazing.

Stephanie Burt

Thank you for staying tuned. The audience may not know, we had to reschedule this a couple times, because the first date that we had, I had just been vaccinated and was literally delusional.

Lara Ehrlich

And then the second date, I wasn’t feeling well. This has been such a pleasure.

Stephanie Burt

Bye, everybody. Thank you.