Washington Post Solo-ish essay on baby fever and why I want to be a mom

I wrote about the subject I think about every day, and an incident recently that made me think about it in a new way: wanting to be a mom, and why being childless feels worse than being single ever did, for the wonderful Solo-ish section at The Washington Post. If you're not a regular reader, I recommend it; I learn a lot from the pieces I read there, which are always insightful (I don't mean that as a brag, humble or otherwise; I'm referring to the other writers, like Nicole Hardy on being a "female bachelor" in her forties and travel as her suitor and Laura Barcella on being a "crazy cat lady" and all the bylines you see there).

Here's a snippet of my piece:

In the minute or so that I helped her to those gulps of water, which still managed to spill down her dress despite my carefulness, I felt an overwhelming urge to pull her close and give her a hug. Her mix of delicateness and strength, her ability to communicate nonverbally, her gorgeous eyes staring back at me as if we weren’t strangers, all completely sucked me in.

If I could feel so much for a child I didn’t even know, who belonged to someone else, how much love would I have for a child I named and fed and cared for every day? That question haunts me.

Read the whole essay

New by me: That's Not a Vagina, new moms and sex, Khloé Kardashian’s new book

Sometimes, I'm very prolific in a given week, and other times, by happenstance, several of my articles go up in one day. Both of those converged yesterday and, as I was making my way from New Jersey to Savannah, I had 3 new pieces go up. I'm writing a bunch more this week, so stay tuned or follow me on Twitter, Facebook or check out my Contently profile, where I've shared most of my clips. And please always feel free to pitch me article topics at rachelkb at gmail.com if you see something interesting happening.

The first is about the blog That's Not a Vagina for The Daily Dot, which is all about educating readers about the difference between "vagina" and "vulva" and celebrating the vulva.



The next is about new moms and sex, for my DAME sex column. And I highly recommend Emily Flake's book of essays and cartoons, Mama Tried: Dispatches from the Seamy Underbelly of Modern Parenting, which I quote in the column, but you really need to read in its full form to appreciate. I just gave a copy to a friend with a newborn and she laughed out loud.



Lastly, I reviewed Khloé Kardashian’s new book Strong Looks Better Naked, published Tuesday by Regan Arts. Key points: she's great on body image and not counting calories, and the book's ghostwriter, Pablo Fenjves, was also the ghostwriter for O.J. Simpson for his book If I Did It, which I find fascinating (in case you don't know, Kardashian's father Robert Kardashian represented O.J. Simpson, and Kris Jenner was friends with Nicole Brown Simpson, and the case is mentioned in the book). Fenjves has also ghostwritten for Bernie Mac, Janice Dickinson and others.

Why all I want to do in my new home is get knocked up

While the title of this post is not strictly true, neither is the title of my first piece at The Mid, "I'd Trade My Dream Career for a Baby." More accurate would be the title I submitted it with: "I’m 39 and Sad That I Have Books Instead of Babies" but both are true in their way. If someone said to me, "If you stop ____, you'll get pregnant" and the blank was writing one of my columns or editing anthologies or, ahem, writing extremely oversharing personal essays that probably embarrass my boyfriend, I'd probably do it. After all, nothing else has worked so far, right?

But of course I have career goals, and this year one of mine has been to write for at least 12 new publications in 2015 (I'd love more, if you're an editor who wants to work with me!), an average of one a month. I've done my best to be both a specialist in the fields of sex and dating and erotica, but also a generalist, and am incredibly proud that my new work this year is mainly focused outside of bedroom activities because I have plenty of other interests. So I write about hoarding and Google alerts and libraries. I've got a few others in the works about my life and assorted passions, and for me, writing about an array of topics helps me not get burned out writing about sex and leads me down paths I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.

So no, I'm not only focused on having kids, because I know that certainly won't help, and some of what I've been reading about just how unhealthy stress is on the body, especially for pregnant women, has been quite sobering. That more than anything has made me think hard about how I want to live, how I want to work, what I want my days to look like. The last few weeks have been stress city between moving and money and what's felt like not enough time. The bottom line is that if freelancing isn't a good fit, I will have to find another way to make a living. I don't know yet and won't really know until the fall what the best path is. Some will depend on outside forces, but as a Serenity Prayer devotee, I'm trying to look inside and ask what I'm capable of, what feels right, and what's sustainable vs. what's pie in the sky. I don't know yet, but I do know "dream career" can't mean "work as much as possible, and think about work whenever you're not working." That hasn't been healthy and isn't worth it, and wouldn't be doable with a kid anyway. So I'm pulling back a little and trying to plan a summer that is fun and filled with love and friends and travel and searching and openness.

Not related to any of this, savor for love and enjoying the moment, because they made me smile yesterday, here are some heart shaped scones, which were very good (though I thought they were chocolate chip and they were actually blueberry, so had a little surprise bite the first time):

My Mother's Day sex column for DAME on sex positive parenting

My new DAME sex column is up and it's tied to Mother's Day so I focused on mothers who've been shamed about sex and mothers who approach parenting from a sex-positive perspective. Those may seem like two separate topics, but I think they all tie back to how women, and mothers especially, are expected to act a certain way and if they step out of line, watch out, which includes how they parent. I quoted Jillian Lauren (from her new memoir Everything You Ever Wanted as well as Kendra Holliday, Airial Clark, and Crista Anne. See the column archives here.

My parenting fears all in one essay

Over at SheKnows Parenting, I wrote a very personal essay, "Why hearing 'you'll be a great mom' scares me," about something I was told this summer and the thoughts it brought up.