Lori Grimes for Mother of the Year

Last week I re-watched most of The Walking Dead to find out exactly how many times I almost flipped a table and stormed out of that relationship. And I noticed something: motherhood. I mean, I noticed it again. It’s hard to talk about Lori, Carol, Michonne, and now Maggie without thinking about the way that the show constructs motherhood as a concept. (And I’ll get back to that in a future post.) This time as I was watching I noticed that the thing that Lori was clowned on the most was a thing that could possibly save me as a mother.

Let me digress for a second: the thing I love about my Facebook feed is that it is a finely-tuned Pandora station. Through a complex algorithm (mostly “likes” and unfriending motherfuckers), I get all the goodness delivered to my doorstep. And, like Pandora, some of it is old news. So when this gem showed up in my feed proclaiming that to continue being creatives, women should stop at one kid, I looked at the date and dismissed it as old news that didn’t affect my life at all. The thing is, though, that I couldn’t really dismiss it as I looked around at the wee monsters and their associated chaos. So, reluctantly, I revisited the post and had a conversation with other mothers — strangers to me — about the article and the ideas in it. It’s an old article so there were rebuttals and responses. It might have been easy to think that those internet strangers and I have nothing in common; that their struggles aren’t mine; that my children feed my cr…