Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 17: September, 2025

This blog post was originally published in my September monthly newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

At some point this morning, I had the thought oh yeah, I have to write about something for my newsletter, and then something leapt into my mind and I thought ah yes, easy, I'll write about that. Whatever that thing was has obviously since vanished from my atmosphere, so I will begin by trying to stream-of-consciousness my way to whatever it might have been.

My son has recently started TK, which is Transitional Kindergarten in California and an effort at state-sponsored universal preschool. In effect, kindergarten is now two years long. In the UK, I'm told this epoch of school is called Reception, which is very funny to me, because I am essentially imagining Mary Poppins greeting a gaggle of small children in a formal hotel lobby, explaining that she will be their education concierge.

Many parents around me are experiencing a lot of big feelings about their children being in TK "already"—I confess I can't relate. I keep making jokes about this being the expected progress of linear time, but on the more emotionally attuned level, I think I almost feel a bit of relief, actually. Or rather, excitement. I often reflect on one of the lines from The Duchess, Katherine Ryan's Netflix show that I think came out sometime during the pandemic. She tells her young daughter that she didn't have a baby "just so you would love only me—I want you to love and be loved by lots of people" (my memory of this line, not an exact quote). This was also my view on motherhood, even though I was not yet there at the time I watched it. The reason to have a child, I have always reasoned, was to eventually have a fully-realized person—to joyfully discover what would become an entire world of their own.

I'm definitely not judging those parents who find themselves gut-punched by time; that feeling passes over me in waves when he walks through the gates, away from and without me. I just think I'm also able to recall the version of myself that wasn't really looking forward to babyhood. I actually did not expect to like it, having a baby. I was expecting to experience a few things very concretely: postpartum psychosis or depression (what I actually experienced was closer to euphoria, or maybe hypomania); boredom (shockingly I was never bored; perilously close to mental and physical collapse, though, definitely); a longing to return to my pre-baby self (this I do feel, sometimes from a place of fear, where maybe she was better or more interesting than I am now, even though she is no more within the realm of reality for me to achieve than any version of a prior self). Now, I do think this preemptive expectation of detachment was, to some degree, a bit of apprehensive insecurity. I never expect people to like me, so likewise, I never anticipated that I would be my own baby's favorite person (his father is really the more universally likable one).

You might be thinking: Olivie, that's an objectively insane thing to say, and you might very well be right about that. But I have never seen myself as a nurturing person, and babyhood was something I was mainly prepared to do as one of the compulsory steps toward the child, and subsequently the future adult.

Ah! Now I remember what it was. And just in time, too, because I'm getting dangerously close to retreading a tired old topic. I wanted to talk about the fact that as my son gets older and more capable of absorbing new information like a sponge, he is beginning to ask a lot of questions, and it is raising the bar on what I, as a parent, have to perform.

Long before my son was born, I told my dad that I would never be the kind of parent who used the phrase "because I said so." He told me, with an air of arguably valid condescension, that I would likely feel differently when the time came; for understandable reasons, "because I said so" is something of a time-saving measure. Or it probably would be—but, fortunately, I place a different premium on the value of time, and have, likewise, an accommodatingly fluid schedule.

For me, the priority in child-rearing is to reward the existence of curiosity. "Be curious, not judgmental" is one of the cornerstones of Ted Lasso, and whatever you think of the show, this is a philosophy I lived by even before I discovered the delights of Roy Kent. Curiosity is also more important now than ever, I think, when we're bombarded with propaganda from every direction and literacy of any kind is at a shocking low. I've mentioned several times that I'm terrified of my son discovering the internet—but short of the whole social media experiment collapsing, I know I can't keep him from its ills forever. The only thing I can think to arm him with is the sense to know when to question the credibility of something, so obviously this cannot begin with parental shorthands, even when I do sometimes strain for the kind of answer that his partial sentience can comfortably grasp.

I think it's fun, this stage of parenting. I actually thought babyhood, too, was fun. That I find motherhood so fucking enjoyable is something I often lament isn't mentioned enough in the way we approach parenthood. It's a long, complex conversation, of course. One of those things where many things can be true. Motherhood being hard as fuck, for one thing. I'm self-sacrificing by nature and practically speaking, sociologically speaking, I'm on a pyre every day for this kid. I'm also staunchly pro-choice, and motherhood only made me more so—no one should have to go through any of this if they don't want to. The world is an oft-shit place and there are reasons to want or not want this role, all of them valid. But also, watching him evolve, witnessing him Become— it's fun. And what I especially love about this particular moment in parenting is the constant, head-spin realization that wow, I need you to respect and obey me because it's my job to keep you healthy and safe, something you occasionally don't feel like being, but I also want you to want to respect and obey me rather than me demanding it of you blindly, and also, sometimes even having these thoughts makes me feel insane, like is this a trend, asking this much of myself, intellectually-speaking? Then again, I am nothing if not in constant search of ways to split myself into many different factions, to be everything everywhere all the time.

And so: I am proud of him, and excited for him, and exhausted by the labor of explaining things to him, and invigorated by the prospect of all the questions he might one day ask. What will the conversation be, the day he understands what I do for a living? These are the things for which I trudge ever forward, benignly weepy, staunchly proud.