Meaning beyond motherhood

5 questions for Erin S. Lane, author, facilitator, and cupcake expert

Erin S. Lane is here to put a glitch in all your algorithms—a godly woman who can quote the hell out of a Bible verse and just wrote a book about why motherhood isn’t more sacred than all other human relationships, a foster mother who doesn’t in any way see herself as somebody’s angel or savior, a facilitator and gatherer who can be found dancing on her instagram and a shy gal who has a lot of skepticism about human beings and all our bullshit.

I love someone I can’t pin down, someone who remixes my ideas about who they are, while inherently remixing my ideas about who I am. Erin is that someone and then some, and in her new book, Someone Other Than a Mother, she’s offering her most destabilizing witness yet. Whether you identify as a mother or not, whether you are invested in the idea that motherhood is special or not, there is something for you here. It might be nourishing (finally, someone is saying this!). It might be provocative (but if I’m not special, what am I?). I don’t know what it might be—tell us in comments. And for goodness sake, buy the book and subscribe to Erin’s fantastic newsletter.

I give you, fresh-as-hell, straight-out-of-North-Carolina, Erin S. Lane…

Courtney Martin: You write: “It doesn’t matter how you get there but that you get there. Show up to your own life. Move into the neighborhood. Make your home, children or no children, in such a way that you have room left to love the tender world beyond it. Open your desire like a door and ask how it might, impossibly as the poet Alice Walker says, transform into something like devotion.” YESSSSS! This is part of what I was trying to say in my book Learning in Public as I pushed back against the mantra “everyone wants what's best for their kids.” Well sure, but what about other kids? And why just limit our fierce energy for our own children--it’s not like it’s a limited resource? Why do you think we’re so obsessed with this narrative that our primary duty is solely to get our own kids the best stuff? 

Erin S. Lane: Okay, super generous read on this one: I think we’re so obsessed with giving our kids the best because (1) we often know our kids the best--or whoever lives under our own roof the best, so we feel good and helpful and useful when we’re able to resource these people well--and I get it, there’s little I love more in life that feeling useful and (2) we often get to see the direct benefits of resourcing our people well--like, when I sign my twelve-year-old up for a therapy, I am also hoping it will make her less of an asshole to me. So the problem, I think, is a failure of imagination or empathy caused by a failure of proximity. And the remedy is not to care equally about all people (because, as an Enneagram 5 personality type, my fierce energy absolutely feels like a finite resource!) but to arrange our lives in such a way that we intimately know our neighbors and consider them our people. That’s absolutely one of the reasons my partner and I went from being “childfree for the common good” to becoming foster parents: as two hard-core homebodies, we decided the deepest change worth chasing was in the place we loved and guarded most.

Your book came out right as the Alito brief was leaked and the conversation around motherhood, choice, and rights exploded, once again. How do you see your book's message as related to that conversation? (I can think of so many ways, but wondering how it hit you.) 

Oh, woman. The Alito brief hit me like a familiar punch. One of the core messages of the book is that the veneration of motherhood in America--or what I call maternal exceptionalism--is hurting all of us. Not because mothers don’t deserve to be celebrated but because we often celebrate a woman’s relationship to her children to the exception of others, like the relationship she has with her work or her friends or her self. (I use “woman” and she series pronouns here not because all mothers identify as such, but because the veneration of motherhood relies on femme of a center stereotypes.) So, this is why women who are childless, childfree, or making unlikely families are stigmatized as immature or selfish: it’s not that they’re not capable of sacrificial love but rather their love isn’t as easily understood and, therefore, capable of being controlled. And, IMO, cracking down on abortion access is principally about control--a minority of the least effected trying to control the morality and mobility and, even, mortality of the most effected. So, the veneration of motherhood--and their children--becomes a smoke screen for the actual flourishing of pregnant people. This is why it makes me real nervous when a pregnant friend tells me everyone wants to know the gender of her baby but not, like, where her body hurts. 

One of the things I found most inspiring about this book, which is to say your life, is the way you honor women beyond motherhood. You write: “Here is my solemn vow: I will look for the dazzle in the dimmer milestones. I vow to mark not just births but new beginnings; I vow to participate in the baptism of not just babies but vocations; I vow to throw down for not just graduations but the gradual titles of aging. And this vow, this vow of attention to how women are making, and have always been making, meaning beyond the bright lights of motherhood, will be how I make my peace.” Tell us about your Good for You dinners and other ways you're living this vow out. 

Yes, yes, yes. Just before the pandemic a friend offered to host a dinner with me for some undercelebrated group of people. And I immediately said, “Let's do one for women who aren’t biological parents.” And so about twenty women showed up and we sat around banquet tables and drank cheeky cocktails called “Blessed be the Fruit” and celebrated what we were good at (headstands, making playlists, mothering other people’s children) and named what we longed to be celebrated for (margin, making friends, mothering ourselves.) After that, there was enough interest that I partnered with my childfree friend Em and her boutique in Raleigh, called The Flourish Market, to start hosting Good for You Gatherings for anyone who was making meaning beyond motherhood, whatever that meant for them. We got one gathering in before the shut down in March 2020. But I’ve kept the party going on my weekly Good for You newsletter where I celebrate the less shiny bits of a life-lived. Think less weddings, babies, and white picket fences. Think more “Yay, you named a need today with joy and freedom.”    

The first Good for You dinner.

How did working on this book make you see your own mother differently? 

I actually interviewed my mom for the book. I had always been inspired by her “ministry of availability” to our community; she had this habit of buying houses with an extra bedroom for guests (just in case, you never know, God is good) that came to represent for me the heart of her devotion--and later mine. What I didn’t know before interviewing her was that there was nothing romantic about this arrangement; the extra bedroom was born more out of necessity than principle. A single mother for most of my childhood, she needed to work; which meant my brother and I needed a babysitter. The room’s first inhabitant was a foreign exchange student, who smelled of incense and body odor and occasionally greeted me after school. So my mom didn’t first set out to be a good neighbor. She first set out to be a good mother. (When I asked if she would have liked to have been a stay-at-home mom, she choked up and nodded without a word.) So hers is not my story. But I’ve come to see our stories as sister stories. Her desire for her children, slowly, grew into a devotion to house her neighbors. My desire for my neighbor, slowly, grew into a devotion to house my neighbor’s children. Again, to weirdly quote myself, “It doesn't matter how you get there but that you get there...Open your desire like a door.”

You look into the research on women and happiness, some of which says women reach their peak happiness in later life, maybe even when they’re 85! Paint a picture of fantasy elder Erin--who or what are you mothering? What’s bringing you pleasure and meaning?  

You ask the best questions. Yes, I am very much looking forward to being postmenopausal and happy. Fantasy Elder Erin is mothering herself, by waking up every morning and putting on hand cream and kneading her shoulders and repeating the mantra, “I'm so glad you’re here,” as if it were a greeting from the God of the Universe. She is mothering good writing still and being mothered by good writing still, even if she mostly listens to audiobooks now. And she is mothering a whole family of living beings, whether her children or her children’s children (though she’s a bit of a novice with grandbabies, having intentionally skipped over the baby phase herself) or her neighbors or her neighbor’s children (which is why she lives in the spiritual sandwich of an apartment building again). She also mothers houseplants and understands, once and for all, that overwatering is no better than underwatering. Her deepest pleasures remain making crass jokes with her partner who will ABSOLUTELY die after her and rubbing the warm belly of a fluffy mutt--no, make that mutts. 

Not yet elder Erin and her sweet fam.

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In honor of Erin’s labor, we are donating our subscriber money to Circle de Luz--a nonprofit that supports Latinx girls finishing high school. Pile on if you’re inspired!

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