The Daughter Lode

Mothering my mom. Plus, a sort of statement of purpose for my "media empire."

Mother and Daughter by Edvard Munch. Via Artvee.

I’m beginning this note at 5am from my mother’s bed on Long Island, which I’ve been sharing since she fell ill last Wednesday.

I won’t go into the specifics of what’s wrong—a combo platter of infection, chronic ailments, and geriatric conditions (plus, randomly, a spider bite!), which in concert are complicating efforts to precisely diagnose and treat her. But this seems to mark the beginning of a new phase in my mother’s aging, for which I’m largely unprepared, especially given that I’ve never had kids.

No, I haven’t previously had to care for another human being in the inconvenient, intimate, sometimes utterly disgusting ways my mother currently needs to be cared for around the clock. It’s a difficult exercise that also feels vital, at once a massive pain in the ass and an honor. It’s the kind of endless frustration that both puts you on edge and deepens your capacity for patience and compassion. An experience that sucks so hard as you're going through it, but in the end truly grows you.

While I’ve never been a mom, as a Gen X divorce kid, beginning in the mid-’70s, I performed more than my share of certain kinds of mothering—of myself, my sister, my parents. Being overburdened in that way at a young age might have been the biggest factor turning me off to motherhood. Although I often joke that I “lucked into” childlessness by way of adenomyosis—a painful condition that led to my hysterectomy at 43—and insist that through my 20s and 30s I kept myself largely unaware of my lack of desire for kids, I recall now that as a teen, I talked about wanting to be the last link in a chain of girls in my family who felt unmothered.

It’s a family legacy I can trace back to my maternal grandmother, who in 1919, at just 3 years old, lost her mom to the Spanish flu. Her father—my great-grandfather—was so overcome with grief, he couldn’t function. He sent my toddler grandmother to live with an aunt and uncle, rather than raising her himself.

Being literally unmothered herself seems to have hampered my grandmother’s ability to be the kind of warm, caring mother that mine needed. That and other factors led to my own experience of feeling unmothered. Once I became aware of this legacy, I knew I didn’t want to put another generation through it.

So, I spent Mothers’ Day mothering my mom, in different ways than I have before. It was the least superficial, most meaningful Mothers’ Day we’ve ever spent together.

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I’ll have a lot more to say about this eventually—maybe in my next memoir-in-essays, which I’m suddenly brimming with ideas for. (At last!) But I’ll keep it vague here, to maintain my mother’s privacy, and because I’m still going through this. I like to wait until I have critical distance and greater perspective on experiences before publishing fully formed essays about them.

I won’t write about it for Oldster, where my readership is exponentially larger, and includes my family—at least not yet. But it is totally Oldster fodder!

This brings me to something I’ve wanted to say for a while about “Botton, Ink.” my “media empire” as my husband Brian refers to it:

It’s been a while, but in the past a few friends, colleagues, and even someone from the Substack team expressed concern about my level of overwork in publishing three newsletters, and suggested I bring them all together under one umbrella. I didn’t take this advice, and I’m glad I didn’t.

Yes, I’m doing a lot, in three different places. It’s exhausting, but also very satisfying to me, and apparently my readers. As I develop these separate publications, I’m finding ways to add efficiency of effort, and lighten my load in little ways. The thing is, each of my newsletters achieves something different for me:

• At Oldster Magazine, which I consider my “flagship” newsletter, I’m “Exploring what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life,” something I’ve been borderline obsessed with since I was 10.

• At Memoir Land, I’m continuing the work I’ve been doing for years in the personal essay and memoir spaces—as an essayist and memoirist myself, as a ghostwriter and teacher, as an anthologist, and as a long-time essays editor at Longreads and Catapult.

• Adventures in *Journalism* (the newsletter you’re reading right now) is more like my blog. I write more personally here, about my weird career path, and about things I’m going through. It’s a much smaller audience, just about 2,200 subscribers (as compared to Oldster’s nearly 44K, and Memoir Land’s 27K), which I don’t really try to grow. It’s a place where I reveal a little more of myself than I want to share with Oldster’s and Memoir Land’s big audiences. It can feel like a nice little exhaust valve, and also a scratch pad for ideas I might want to develop further, later—like the piece above.

Week in and week out, it’s a heavy load publishing all three. I need to get to a place where I can carve out more time for my own writing and crayon drawings and cartooning and other creative projects.

But this is hands-down the best job I’ve ever had, a job I ironically created for myself after experiencing ageism in the job market. I’m really proud of the work I’m doing in all three places. So I’m just going to keep at it. All of it. (I’m working on press kits for both Oldster and Memoir Land. I believe what I’m doing is newsworthy.)

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In the meantime, wish me luck with my new side gig playing nurse to my mom. It’s difficult on so many fronts, including that it has stranded me two-and-a-half hours away from my home in Kingston, NY, and my beloved Brian, and plopped me back in the hometown I’m happy to visit, but deliberately left decades ago. And it looks like I’ll have to spend a lot more time here going forward.

In my mom’s small one-bedroom apartment I have zero privacy, or quiet to think. (I just banished her to the bedroom while she was talking loudly to friends on the phone, on speaker. Lol. I asked kindly, for what it’s worth—so far I’ve mostly managed to remain reasonable and kind, but I am emotionally strung out, and on some level definitely regressing. And I feel my patience wearing thin. I can hear my Long Island accent creeping back in, too! ) I don’t have most of my stuff—just as much as I could throw into a weekend bag early last Wednesday morning when my sister called to let me know what was happening.

Because of the current situation, I had to miss my in-conversation last Friday night with Lucy Sante at The Hound Books in Roscoe, followed by a dinner, which made me really sad. Fortunately,

Jesse Sposato

offered to fill in for me. I hear it was a great event.