What is this?

A newsletter for people who have found themselves hurtling through an asteroid belt of epiphanies since becoming a parent, and want something fun to read.

How did it happen?*

I was seated in a room of a) women in nubby cardigans — birth workers — and b) people in suits and separates — M.D.s — for a seminar on maternal mental health when I struck up a conversation with two newly graduated psychologists. I mentioned some of the work I had been doing for a parenting site on existential grief in new moms, and asked them if they knew of any medical literature on the topic. They looked at each other and paused. “Huh,” said one. “Maybe try The Tibetan Book Of The Dead?”

They misunderstood me, but at the same time, wasn’t that actually the answer? Rather than giving me a copy of What To Expect and Goodnight Moon (a children’s book has never felt so much a nightly paean to death) when I became a mum, someone should have given me a copy of The Myth Of Sisyphus, photographed excerpts from Tom Stoppard’s plays, their scribbly copy of The Metamorphosis. We might not have had time to get through all the world’s philosophy before baby, but now it’s an emergency.

If you have suggestions for literature to go leaping through, you can email me here: janetamanley@gmail.com.

If you have other things to say, then I’d love to hear those too!

*h/t to Norman Maclean, who once wrote: “If the dead of this fire should awaken and I should be stopped beside a cross, I would no longer be nervous if asked the first and last question of life, How did it happen?”

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