← New Books Network
New Books Network
Amanda Parrish Morgan, "Stroller" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
00:49:22
An interview with Amanda Parrish Morgan
Loading summary
Transcript45 lines
- [00:00]
Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast, do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary, and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon. Extra value meals are back. That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just.
- [01:06]
McDonald's Advertiser
$8 only at McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery.
- [01:14]
State Farm Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast, Smart move. Being financially savvy.
- [01:22]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Smart move.
- [01:23]
State Farm Advertiser
Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you ch, bundle, home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
- [01:45]
Marshall Po
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:49]
Frances Sachs
Hi, my name is Frances Sachs. I'm joined by my guest, Amanda Parrish Morgan, and we're here to talk about her new book, Stroller. Welcome to the podcast, Amanda.
- [02:00]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Thanks so much for having me.
- [02:02]
Frances Sachs
I thought I would start off by asking you what inspired you to write the book? Where were you in your life when you wrote Stroller?
- [02:11]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Sure. So I had been wanting to write a little bit of more about parenting that came at the topic from a perspective that wasn't totally sentimental and also wasn't totally just purely research based. I, you know, I had a bunch of books like 10 Things to Do if your child is anxious or something that were useful but like, you know, not really engaging intellectual reading, more like resource books. And then, you know, I'd read some memoirs that were. Some of them beautiful and some very sort of sarcastic, like, Mommy Needs a Glass of Wine or, you know, these kind of, like, glib parenting takes. And I just felt like the friends I have who had young kids around the same age as mine, we often ended up talking about things that I didn't feel like were being represented in the literature of motherhood. So I'd heard about this object lesson series that Bloomsbury publishes because of a book called High Heel by Summer Brennan, another Object Lessons book. She was on, I think on maybe the Takeaway on NPR or one of those midday shows years ago. And I had just heard her talk about the premise of the series as using an everyday object as a way to delve into sort of bigger societal and cultural criticism. And I just thought it was such a cool concept. So I had loved the series and followed them a bit, just sort of as a reader, and then saw in would have been late 2020, I think, sometime at the beginning, in the pandemic phase, that they were having a call for new proposals. And right away I thought of running strollers specifically, because I run a lot. And I had been, you know, using mine a lot and thinking about as a metaphor, the way that the stroller running with the stroller made me stronger, but also while I was using it, made me slower. And then when I was without it, I could go faster. And it felt sort of just like an interesting metaphor for motherhood. So, yeah, so I pitched that idea, and the editors wisely said, why don't you expand it a bit to be strollers in general? So the idea started from my particular book with the running stroller metaphor, but my interest in the series had predated that by a few years.
- [04:28]
Frances Sachs
You speak about your experience both using the stroller in the way that we always think about strollers, like, you talk about just as a means of transportation, but you also go a lot deeper into the stroller and explore it as a nexus of culture, gender. Can you talk a little bit about the way you're understanding stroller as a metaphor, just broadly, some of the categories you use in the book?
- [04:56]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Oh, sure. Yeah. I love that you use the word nexus. I feel like I use that word all the time. I'm working on something right now, and I keep coming back to that, the visual image that I get when I hear that word. And I do think that when you're thinking about any object and its Cultural implications. That is what you're really thinking about. So I actually have the book here, and I'll just sort of say quickly some of the metaphors that I wanted to really think about. One of them is the ways that a stroller is literally pushing a child out into the world in front of you while also keeping them close. It's kind of a thing I didn't know was a philosophical debate until I had kids. But some. Some people feel like you shouldn't put kids in strollers because it's hostile and like pushing them away. And some people feel like that for that reason, it's better to wear your baby. And so I sort of started thinking about that and how for me, obviously in the book, it becomes clear that I use my strollers quite a bit. But I felt like, well, I do actually want to push my children out into the world in front of me. Not in an unkind or unloving way, but I want them to see the world around them. And eventually they need to live in the world without me. So they need to. They do need to have some independence. So I was completely up for the idea of thinking of how we transport our children as being deeply symbolic. I hadn't realized that other people were debating this already. So that's one of the metaphors I also thought, kind of like I was referencing briefly with the running. I ran track and cross country in college and still run pretty competitively. You know, I'm a master's runner now, but for an adult, I run quite a bit. And I had this idea in my head that once I had children, like, was I going to be able to continue competing? Would that be time wise, possible, logistically possible, even just physiologically, would I be able to do that? And I sort of started thinking about all the ways I was made stronger by being a parent. In the most literal sense, pushing the weight of the stroller made me faster. But also just how that felt like such a perfect metaphor for motherhood, too, that there were lots of things that I loved doing that I had to find new ways to do them, and sometimes felt sort of either awkward or it was more difficult because I was bringing my kids with me or having to get a sitter or whatever, but that I was still able to, oftentimes in a more intense or more meaningful way, engage with things that matter to me. Like, I would even say writing for me went into that category too. And then one of the other things that I thought a lot about with strollers as a metaphor is the way that A stroller is such a visible signifier of status and how so many other parent purchases and you know, like the, the stroller is the most visible one. But there are all sorts of things like this with baby gear and the things you buy for young children, everything from like what type of bottles you give your child or if you give them bottles. And it really made me think about how as for me, at least as a new parent, I felt like this sort of surprising desire to associate myself with a group of like minded people in a way that I hadn't really experienced before. Like, I'm not a big professional sports fan. I'm not, I mean, I'm political in the sense that I vote and I care about elections very much, but I'm not like a going to big political organizing usually type of event person. So I hadn't ever had that like, hey everyone, see this label I have, I'm whatever, I'm progressive, or I like the whatever sports team. And I started as a, as a parent to feel like, oh, wait a second, now I'm in this large community of people that I really might have nothing in common with other than the fact that we have kids the same age. And if all of a sudden, you know, as silly as it sounds, I make fun of in the book the fact that my stroller was always really dirty like that, even though I'm making fun of myself a little bit, it sort of felt like an important way to say, like, I have other things in my life besides appearances that matter to me. And besides vacuuming my stroller, you know, like I'm gonna have goldfish in it and I'm gonna show up in sweaty running clothes pushing it, because I also work and I also care about running and I also have parts of my life besides organizing the logistics of my children. So I just, I really started to think about how this isn't specific, the metaphor isn't specific to strollers, but how objects are a way to either signal a desire for belonging in a certain group or an allegiance to a certain belief system. And I guess that's something I'd always known intellectually, but I hadn't really experienced myself before. You know, like, I'm not a big car person. All those other kind of groupings that I tend to think of with objects hadn't felt particularly important to me until I'm at this phase where I was leaving the job I had had for a long time and not sure which parts of my identity from before parenthood would carry over.
- [10:02]
Frances Sachs
You had a really Great line in your book that said, in the same way that certain makes and models of cars, the presence of a little free library or an NPR tote bag can signal a whole set of economic and cultural alliances, strollers can do the same. And I thought that was just so apt. One thing I was thinking about though is it seems like there might be more of a hyper focus on the idea of attentive parenting. You called it. And it's less like I belong to this specific group that like likes this type of music or I identify politically with this type of. Or I'm left leaning or right right leaning. And it's more, there's more of a focus on. Am I like the spectrum of attentive parenting?
- [10:59]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Yeah, definitely. I think there's so much interesting going on there. And just in your comment slash question, I think first of all, even the idea of there being different parenting styles that a person could claim is a pretty new concept and you know, the spectrum of range of years of American parenting, I think a lot of it does have to do with social media, which I know is such an easy target to just talk about social media all the time. But there's a new book I'm really eager to read called Mom Fluence that just came out by Sarah Louise Peterson. And it's kind of getting at this idea of, you know, as easy as it would be to just like make fun of mom influencers, which I sometimes enjoy doing myself. It's. There's something more complex going on that we're trying to signal certain not just as you said, like tastes like music or even big beliefs, like political beliefs or, you know, people might wear like a cross or a Star of David as a religious indicator that we're trying to signify something that isn't concrete. But we can all. It's almost like we can summon it or we would know it if we saw it. But like I want to show I'm the kind of mom who takes my kids to the park. I'm not so, you know, self serious that we don't watch any screens. But we don't watch a lot of screens. We read a lot. But I'm not a snob about what my kids read. You know, there's in a way that I've never had another part of my life where I felt the only thing I could think of like this maybe is when I decided where to go to college. I grew up on a wealthy suburb in the northeast where it was like a big deal not only to get into college, but to Then put the sticker on your car and like, you know, use that as a shorthand for this huge range of things about yourself. And I guess I did feel a little bit like that as a parent, where the type of parent you are isn't just about parenting. It's also about everything from your own class and taste, but then back to parenting again. It's also about how much you love your children, which is such a thing, a vulnerable thing to feel judged about. So as much as I wanted my dirty stroller to stubbornly say, like, you know, I don't spend my life, you know, cloroxing my UPPAbaby $1200 stroller, I also would never want someone to say like, oh, that woman doesn't care if her children eat mold, or of course I care. You know, like, I sleep in my kid's bed when they have the flu. Like, I care so much. So that tension between hyper vigilance or overattentive, you know, which of course every parent's gonna fall somewhere different on what that means. And more like ambivalent or free range or whatever you want to call it approaches to parenting, it feels really difficult to navigate personally. But then also socially, does that feel.
- [13:47]
Frances Sachs
Like a specifically American affliction?
- [13:53]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
I do think so. I mean, when I was writing the chapter in the book that's about strollers and other cultures, I sort of struggled a bit with that chapter and said to my editor, you know, I don't want to sound like I'm trying to claim to be a cultural anthropologist about, you know, the entire world's parenting practices, especially because I basically only write about European countries in that chapter because that's where I've lived besides the US and where I had connections with people to speak with about their personal experience. But it does feel like something that kept coming up in actually many different sections of the book is that it's this very American concept. Dr. Abby Bales, who I interviewed about as a physical therapist, said this line something like, it's such an American thing to create a product to deal with a systemic shortcoming. And in her case, she was talking about lack of childcare and lack of support postpartum health wise for new moms. And how the running stroller is like, oh, you don't have time to have any time to yourself. You don't feel like you can ask for help with the child. There either isn't or isn't accessible childcare. Great. Well, here's a stroller that you can exercise while you're using It. But I think that that concept kind of more generally is a particularly American idea that the product itself is a way of solving a problem or is a way of aligning yourself, maybe in part because some of those structures aren't in place. Like, when I spoke with the friend who lives in Germany or who lived previously in Germany, she talked a lot about systems and, like, just ways of that life was designed to be easier to navigate with young children. And so if that's the case, I would kind of imagine that what type of stroller you have doesn't loom quite so large. If it's kind of a given that everybody's going to rely on certain frameworks for getting through the work week with young kids or for, you know, finding a way to get fresh air in the winter when you, you know, whatever the specific is.
- [15:59]
Frances Sachs
What do you think that says about the way we understand mothers in this country and the way we understand the responsibility that mothers have, where it's so much more of an individual plight than it is maybe a communal one. Do you feel like that has rung true with your experience of motherhood?
- [16:20]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
It definitely has. It's also a little bit complicated for me by the fact that I'm not much of a joiner. And I think that's like a misunderstanding, a misconception on my part to think that community has to mean joining. Like community can mean. I have to remind myself of this, that American motherhood feeling very individualistic or even isolating. That doesn't have to mean like, oh, I love to go to the park alone with my kids, or I love to go on a hike alone with my kids. That's not at odds with, like, community support and community structure that supports parents. Like, something as basic as the school day not lining up with the work day is. That's not at odds with me loving alone time with my children. But I think the idea that parenthood is deeply individualistic is so much a part of how I have always thought about parenting as an American. It takes a lot of sort of deliberate reflection to realize how unique that is. I don't know if this is quite an answer to your question, but we live pretty close to where I grew up, and my parents live nearby, and that's such an enormous help. I'm close with my parents. They help with the kids a lot. But I think all the time about how there's sort of a movement, I think, right now among new parents to make these groups like Name of the Town Moms, or like a Facebook group of Moms of whatever the town is. And my initial response to all of those, especially when I was just having a brand new baby or was pregnant, was to sort of think they were silly or to want to make fun of them and to. To be like, oh, I would never join something like that. Like, I'm not gonna be on a Facebook group. And so I guess that's the cognitive dissonance for me is, like, not seeing myself as a big joiner just by disposition. And also, honestly, a little bit of snobbishness that thinks, like, a Facebook group of moms. Like, I wanna. If I'm gonna be in a group, I wanna be in a book club, which is my own snobbiness. But at the same time, like, there are real ways that women or whoever is taking care of the primary caregiver for their children need support that we don't have. Like, I'm lucky that my parents live nearby. So if we have a snow day and I'm on a deadline, I can ask if they can help out. But that's pretty unusual, I think, for a lot of my, you know, the other women who I live in town with or who have kids who go to school with my kids. And so on the flip side of that, I've found these moments that are like, initially, I want to judge them or laugh at them or distance myself from the moments. I mean, not the people. But then on closer reflection, they're actually really beautiful. Like, there's a chapter that I wrote about sort of the pressure on women to lose weight and start exercising shortly after having children, which I think is, of course, a problem. But. So there is a group of women that I would often see running in hot pink matching T shirts with strollers. And part of me was like, oh, hot pink T shirts? Really? Like, they have to be pink. You know, I'm having all of these, like, again, snobbish reactions and. And thinking, like, well, when I'm going to run with my running stroller, I'm doing it alone. Like, as though that were somehow not just what I preferred, but somehow better. And then when I talked to Abby Bales, the physical therapist, I was sort of expecting her to. To right away get on board and say, like, yeah, those groups are pressuring women to work out too soon, or, you know, why is it all about the weight loss? And she said something else instead, which was much more like, anything that gets a group of new moms who may not have any support network together is a good thing. And so she was saying, even though As a physical therapist, she has concerns about the physiological. Physiological alignment and stuff. When you're running with a stroller, you could be at higher risk for injury, like, legitimate medical concerns. She said, for mental health, those kinds of groups can be such a lifesaver. And then again, I had to think, like, oh, yeah, that. Of course, it's. That just kept. That type of thinking kept coming up again and again or something that at first I had wanted to think was silly or embarrassing or cheesy or whatever. And then I either realized one, I had also enjoyed or benefited from that kind of a group or that kind of a system, or on the flip side, that I would realize, like, okay, well, the only reason I haven't needed to go to a group of people running with strollers is because I ran cross country and track in college and I'm already comfortable doing that. Or because my husband's a high school teacher and he's usually home before it gets dark, so I can go for a run, you know, so to just sort of interrogate my sort of misogyny that I, you know, was directing at a lot of these activities for moms or support groups for moms, and seeing that they came, you know, about to fill a much deeper need than just, oh, people want to hang out and wear pink. Which was my sort of initial, very superficial critique of them.
- [21:11]
Frances Sachs
Maybe it is. It's difficult to think of it as something that's a pluralistic venture and that groups of mothers together, if for some reason it's less. There's less of an identity in that and more of. Because like this. This feeds back into the way you were talking about consumption. We associate motherhood with an act of production. So maybe it loses its value a little bit in that way in the public imagination.
- [21:44]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
I think that's really smart. And I think, you know, in the first chapter of the book or the second chapter, I guess it's called Babies as Babies as Products and Baby Products. And I started thinking a lot about. Especially I finished the book before last summer's overturning of Roe v. Wade. So I wasn't. I mean, I should have been more presciently thinking about the rollback of reproductive rights in the US but since the book went to production, that happened. And I started thinking a lot about what it means to view women as both as a producer, as a laborer, like an unskilled laborer in the most literal sense, where, you know, labor with the baby being born, and then that. Does that make the child a commodity? And that really that line of thinking really rang true to I taught high school for a long time and now I teach college. So like the way I've seen parents talk about their children in terms of students, and it really started to make me connect a lot of different critiques I had had about, you know, everything from the way parents were involved in their children's schooling to the way online grade books are used in public education, to the way moms are portrayed in this sort of like ubiquitous, harmless, yet embarrassing monolith like that. Those things are all deeply connected, as you said, to the way that we view moms as our mothers, as consumers. And I just read an interesting piece by a former colleague of mine, Ann Fernandez wrote about how frequently we see the word mom used as a synonym for the word woman. And I think all of these things are really, really connected, but particularly in this political moment where we're seeing legislative and policy consequences to thinking of women as unskilled laborers, especially when they're mothers, in a way that's really alarming, even if in the book it sort of was more of an intellectual exercise to think through that. And then in the year and a half since I finished writing the book, it's been like, wow, I wish that didn't fit so neatly in with what I had theorized in that chapter. To then come to see that play out in real life feels, you know, disturbing.
- [23:58]
McDonald's Advertiser
Tis the season for all your holiday favorites like a very Jonah's Christmas Movie and Home Alone on Disney.
- [24:04]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Did I burn down the Tory? I don't think so.
- [24:06]
McDonald's Advertiser
Then Hulu has National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.
- [24:09]
Marshall Po
We're all in for a very big Christmas treat.
- [24:11]
McDonald's Advertiser
All of these and more streaming this holiday season and right now, save big with our special Black Friday offer Bundle Disney and hulu for just $4.99 a month for one year savings compared to current regular monthly price and 12 watts offer for ad supported Disney plus Hulu bundle only then $12.99 a month or then current regular monthly price. 18 plus terms apply.
- [24:29]
Windows Copilot Advertiser
Meet the computer you can talk to with Copilot on Windows. Working, creating and collaborating is as easy as talking. Got writer's block? Share your screen with Copilot Vision to help spark inspiration and use Copilot voice to have a conversation and brainstorm ideas. Or maybe you need some tech help with Copilot Vision. Copilot sees what you see. Let Copilot talk you through step by step guidance so you can master new apps, games and skill faster. Try now@windows.com copilot right.
- [25:00]
Frances Sachs
So you talk about it seems like maybe there's a long tradition of that, that line of thinking. And one of the ways that you explore that is through Victorian art and Victorian parenting. Can you talk a little bit about how the relationship between maybe like modern day consumptive parenting and, and the way we understand Victorian parenting through art?
- [25:29]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Sure. So I always have loved Mary Cassatt's paintings. And I know some people think they're a little sentimental, but I actually am a little bit of a sentimental person, so. But you know, when I was imagining, like as I was writing about strollers, I started thinking about other things like strollers, like prams. And I just had that image of this, you know, Victorian pram, both from photographs and from Mary Cassatt paintings in particular. And I started thinking about several things. One that I learned through the course of researching the book is that until very recently, it was considered sort of inappropriate or vulgar to advertise to women and particularly to advertise like child products or things for the home, in part for deeply sexist reasons, that it was assumed like, oh, these women wouldn't be able to help themselves from buying these products, but that the tradition of like most marketing for home goods being, you know, targeted toward, toward women is relatively new. And in the Victorian era, I think a lot of people have probably heard about the cult of domesticity and the idea that there were two spheres with women meant to be sort of the leader of the home sphere and the man meant to be the leader of the out of the home sphere. And I think so in terms of that those those two ways, I think it's interesting to see the intrusion of marketing into the home. It's not so much that the breakdown of woman at home, man out in the world. I actually think we still see that quite a bit, despite the fact that more women work outside of the home now than in that era. But what really shifted isn't so much the attitude that women ought to concern themselves primarily with the home, but the idea that, you know, it's. It's no longer considered vulgar for capitalist language to go into the home, which I don't necessarily think is a good thing. On the one hand, like, the reason for it's the divide between consumption in the home root being rooted in sexism isn't good either, of course. But like, what it's not. Maybe it's not as simple or straightforward of a shift as it might first appear. I think right now especially we're seeing, I mean, even just with aesthetics of like those long Prairie dresses and the. The color palettes that a lot of products for, especially for women, are being marketed. I think we are seeing a little bit of a throwback to. To that era and the sort of, like, fetishizing of making your own butter and making your own yarn and all these sorts of things, which is a whole other complicated, you know, thing about the economy of how that works. But so, yeah, so that was one angle of the Victorian thing. And the other thing which plays into this a little bit, I thought was so interesting is how, you know, the idea of a baby or anything like a pram being this archetype of innocent purity and then to smash that up against threats of violence is such a Victorian trope, too. And I think we still see that a lot now. Like, I had this very vivid memory of watching the movie of the Witches as a child, the Roald Dahl book. And there's a scene where a pram is about to go over the edge of a cliff. And I remember I'd read the book. I knew the baby survived, but as a kid, being like, I absolutely cannot watch the scene. And even when I rewatched the movie to write the book, I was literally covering my eyes. So I kept thinking about how that trope of the runaway pram is pretty common, and a lot of people think it's the movie. Battleship Potemkin is probably the first version of that, but it plays out over and over and over again. And then other similar tropes, like a haunted pram, or there's actually not a baby in the pram, but a devil. You know, like this idea that what looks like it ought to be this beautiful Victorian protective sweetness instead is something sinister or something dangerous or something violent or death itself like that. I think anytime I think about Victorian dualities, I think of a sort of Jekyll and Hyde type of inevitability of separate. Trying to separate two things leads to the problem itself. And I think even the Victorians knew that. So it's interesting to see how the pram works on sort of, like, the sphere of domesticity angle and thinking about the marketing and consumer shift that we have now. But then also how that. That dichotomy between innocence and danger, to sort of oversimplify it, plays right back into that. That same Victorian type of duality.
- [30:20]
Frances Sachs
And maybe that also has to do with the idea of another. The other metaphor that you were speaking about earlier, pushing away while keeping close.
- [30:30]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Yeah, definitely, in that you.
- [30:33]
Marshall Po
You.
- [30:34]
Frances Sachs
The innocence is that you're under the protection of the mother, but on the other hand, she's also trying to claim some kind of autonomy. She's trying to, like you were saying, like she's trying to exercise, she's trying to go for a run and though it might make it harder and there, there is that distance that she's creating, she is ultimately still like it is still an act of motherhood to be pushing a stroller.
- [31:06]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Yeah, right. I saw there's this new also since the book came out, but this new self driving stroller that's being marketed right now that has AI capacities. And I just was doing a talk a few weeks ago about technology in intimate spaces and one of the people attending the talk pointed something out that I hadn't thought about. But in the video ad for this self driving stroller, you see the stroller wheeling itself along and oh, mom carrying, there's a baby in the stroller and she's carrying like a toddler in her arms. And the ad is meant to suggest, you know, like, oh, now if your toddler needs to be carried, you don't have to try to push the stroller with one hand. And how wonderful. And I had sort of been focusing on other aspects of the ad and the copy on the website, which is, you know, there's a lot to break down there. But the woman who was at the talk said, well, it's interesting that this isn't actually meant to decrease the workload of the mother, it's actually intensifying the workload of the mother. Because now, you know, if you don't have the self driving stroller, maybe the toddler has to keep walking even though he's having a temper tantrum and feeling cranky. Or maybe the baby is going to cry for a minute while you help the toddler, but now she's almost like being two places at once. Like a replica of the mom is for all intents and purposes pushing the stroller automated version and then she can do her caring to the other child at the same time. So, you know, it's not really about making less labor for the mom or the caregiver, whoever it is. It's about the expectation that not even for a minute is one child not attended to. And that sort of struck me as not just true about these AI strollers. But you know, what you said too about the idea that a mom might be trying to reclaim some time or some space by pushing a baby out into the world while getting things done and the autonomy that a stroller might allow that along with any autonomy or any ease right away there's this backlash of, well, because you can do that, you can also be doing this at the same time. And I think that comes into with the running stroller idea. Like, oh, now they're running stroller. So you shouldn't pay for childcare or take your child to a gym watch, you know, like, if they have a child drop off at your gym or whatever. That's not as good and as sacrificial and as saintly mother y as this crisp run with a stroller or like, let alone plop your kid in front of TV while you work out at home or something like that, or not work out at all.
- [33:43]
Frances Sachs
I feel like there's such, such an economy of danger right now surrounding every aspect of a mother's life, starting with, like, what you put into your body as a pregnant person. I'm choosing to eat organic, or I'm choosing to eat free range, or I'm choosing and navigating all of that with the economic pressures and also the time that it chooses that it takes to make these decisions. Do you feel like that was a source of difficulty for you when you were transitioning to becoming a mother? That fear based consumption and the time that it took?
- [34:30]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
I feel like I tried really hard not to, I guess I want to say, feel manipulated by fear based marketing, which doesn't mean I never, you know, fell victim to it at all. But I feel like I was pretty cynical about marketing any products as a way to like, to keep you or people that you love safer. I mean, obviously there are exceptions like a seatbelt or something like that, but I mean, I just, I. I did come into that aspect of parenting with a pretty heavy dose of cynicism. But I noticed how pervasive conversations about, like, did you buy this? As opposed to this were even more than I would have imagined. Like, I think I wrote this in the book, but I didn't have my kids particularly young, but I just. Most of my friends had their kids later than I did, and I did not have a lot of friends with kids at the time that I was pregnant. And I'm. I don't. I'm the oldest. My brother and his wife just had a baby, but I didn't have any, like, siblings with kids or anything. So when we were even just deciding, for example, what stroller to buy, it did not occur to me that there was like, I don't know, I guess I just maybe naively was like, well, I'm sure they all got safety tested and I'm gonna buy this one. I Don't you know, I didn't know of any particular need I had for a very specific safety requirement, but I felt like as soon as I did start to do things. Speaking back to our earlier topic of conversation in groups of mothers, a very, very, very frequent topic of conversation was like, how safe is whatever it was, this food, this formula, this crib, this stroller, this car seat. I mean, even to the point of people posting on online groups like, oh, that picture that you. You know, someone posts a picture of their child, like, oh, he's not clipped in quite right. And I just found that to be so overreaching and so inappropriate. I mean, I know there's a point, and everyone has a different one, where this is where you would intervene if you saw serious or whatever. But then I started to think a little bit more about how talking about the danger or safety of various products was really just a way to sort of offload anxiety for things that we really can't control at all. Like, of course, the idea of something happening to your child is the most terrifying thing that I can even imagine. I was reading the most recent issue of the American Scholar, and there's a really beautiful essay by a man whose child spent some time in the nicu. And as I was reading the beginning of the piece, I was like, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to read this piece because maybe the baby isn't gonna make it out of the nicu. The baby did. And that. Then the essay continues. But I was thinking, like, I. That that fear is so present and so constant for all parents, so. But it's something that people really feel uncomfortable talking about. I think for all sorts of reasons. For me, on a very superficial and sort of wacky level, it's like, is that bad vibes to talk about something you're scared of happening? Like, are you inviting it in if you. If you say that? But, you know, everything from hearing women say, like, oh, I can't sleep at night because I'm always checking on the baby to make sure the baby's breathing. And then along with that, like, very real postpartum mood disorders like postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety and ocd. So you have that whole, like, on that extreme side of, you know, really diagnoses that need medical treatment and also support. Therapeutic support. But then along the lines of what every parent thinks, like, oh, my gosh, I'm in charge of this tiny, vulnerable life, and I don't know what I'm doing. Like, and also the World is unpredictable. Take aside even, like, the very real current dangers that we feel. I mean, like, I'll speak for myself that I feel like, you know, gun violence feels like a very real, tangible threat. But even taking aside something like that and just thinking, people get viruses that kill them sometimes, and people get hit by cars sometimes, like, horrible things happen in this world, and I now have a person in this world that I love more than myself, and I would rather die than live in this world without them. And you can't really do anything about that. You know, even something like gun violence. That feels to me like there are concrete actions that we as a society could take. I personally can't just go change things by myself. So instead, why not fixate on what brand of spoon I bought to feed my child pureed baby food? Because this one had one instance where a child choked with the spoon. So I'm going to control everything I can. So I think that the impetus and the instinct behind that hyper fixation on the safety of products just comes from an inability to. To really either confront emotionally or logistically, also to confront the much bigger dangers we all know, whether we admit it or not, are in our world and are just in some. Some of them just inherently a part of being alive. And some of them, you know, specific to our current and, you know, national situation right now.
- [39:49]
Frances Sachs
Something you said in the book that I thought was really smart was like, it's as if that the heightened heart rate and the nervousness and the checking, it's as if that will actually prevent the danger. Like experiencing those things itself will actually prevent the danger. And not to be reductivist, but that maybe can be brought back to the idea of mother as producer, in that it's a job. And if you work hard enough at the specific job, we can eliminate possibilities of, like, we can eliminate possibilities of things not going our way.
- [40:31]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And I think that plays out in another way, too. Related to consumerist models for thinking about families is that this goes back to what I've seen as an educator, that it's often the mother whose role is to come, like, run interference at the school when there's a problem. And it's. And that's the case whether both parents work or not. And I think there are lots of reasons for that, but I think one of them is this idea that it's the mother's job to shepherd the child unharmed. Whatever the family decides that that means whether that's like, without getting a B or, you know, Literally without bodily harm through childhood. And that if, if there's negligence, if that doesn't happen in, you want to place blame. It's, it's usually, I think even in like very progressive marriages and families where, you know, the parents themselves would say, oh, you know, we have, we share an equal parenting load and we have a very, you know, like, we have a non traditional or whatever they would say, view of gender breakdown. I just read Maggie Smith's memoir and she writes a lot about this in her own marriage. The idea that you can be in a politically progressive marriage and still there are certain ways that very, very often the mother assumes responsibilities, literal and figurative, in a way that the father doesn't. And I think that plays out just as you were saying with that it's the mother's job to worry and to be hypervigilant. I also think it goes back to something Victorian that we were talking about as well, which is that if the mother is supposed to be in the Victorian, and I think persistent worldview, the overseer of the home, that's part of the home sphere. And then, you know, maybe the man's going to be like guarding for intruders or whatever, like, you know, vigilant against human threats or something like. Or something like that. Yeah.
- [42:35]
Frances Sachs
Can you talk a little bit about the metaphor? I think this is the only one we haven't gone over yet, but the metaphor of stroller as threat to creativity.
- [42:47]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Oh, yeah, okay. So there's this British literary critic named Cyril Connolly who in the middle of the 20th century, I don't really exact year, but he said something like, there's no more somber enemy to great art than the pram in the hall. I may not be getting the wording exactly right, but I just. First of all, it was like, oh, who is this? I hate this person. And then all of the. Then I found out that many people responded to him in the way that I had of just like defensive rage or whatever. And many, many writers, artists, playwrights, actors have written in some way directly in response to the quote, pram in the hall. Like so much of the phrase has kind of become iconic in a way. And so I, I thought it was really interesting for me to think about from my personal experience, having children was not in any way a threat to creativity. Like, I would say the threats to creativity for me are like, you know, emotional discord or having too many papers to grade or things that have nothing to do with parenting. And I know that's not the case for everybody. There are lots of, of course specific ways that I'm fortunate. You know, like my, I mentioned before, my husband's a high school teacher, so in the summer neither of us are working in a school very much and I can have the time or whatever. So I know just to disclaimer. I know that's not the case for everybody, but I also felt like I had so, so, so many things I was thinking about in a new way once I had children. And there were also at the same time, a lot of these weird windows of time where I wasn't doing anything active, but I was in one place, like, for example, lying on the floor next to a baby's crib to try to soothe the baby back to sleep. Like, I wasn't going to go anywhere else. I wasn't going to talk to anybody. I wasn't reading or listening or any taking in information in a way that in my Norma, I sort of, I do a lot. And I would find myself thinking in those pockets of time in a way that led to creativity that I hadn't really experienced before. And I found that to be the case even after my children weren't baby babies anymore. But like we'd be speaking of strollers, like on a kind of meandering, leisurely paced walk and through a neighborhood I know well, I knew where I was going. I could be on autopilot and maybe one or both children would fall asleep and I would have forced, quiet, reflective time. And then sort of on the flip side of that, I also found myself reading these really rhythmic and melodic children's books. I mean, some children's books are silly and annoying, but a lot of them are really beautiful poetry. And I found myself just like the rhythm of sentences coming to me differently because I was thinking about things and in ways and in with language that I hadn't either ever before or in a long time. So it's not so much like, oh, I learned some new concrete information or did some new specific research that now I'm going to write about, but just that, you know, if I had been thinking about a book I was reading for my own research, and then I read a lullaby esque book that dealt with mortality, which seems like all children's books are actually about death. So then I would be like, oh, you know, then later that night as I'm trying to put someone to bed, my mind's racing and making different kinds of connections. So I guess to circle back to the pram in the hall idea, like I, I found in a really literal sense that my stroller was A vehicle for creativity because it let me take those sort of long, meandering walks, but also more metaphorically that just the phase of life of, you know, strollering was a boon to creativity. And then in just a really super logistical way, a lot of times I would walk until my kids fell asleep and then park the stroller and then just write sitting next to them. So that in a, I mean, a very, very literal sense, it was like a way to give me hours to work. And because time suddenly felt more precious than it had when, you know, I, I could, I guess because I felt like I had less control over my daily schedule, you know, someone could get sick or wake up at night or whatever. I became much better at like, oh, I have a 43 minute period of time where I could write while someone's napping in a stroller. I will seize that. Whereas previously I much more would have been like 43 minutes. That's not even enough time to. And I have to say, now that my kids are a little older, they're both in school, I'm like slipping into my old ways and I'll be like, oh, I only have an hour and I'm an hour that used to be a whole day, like writing time. So that's, I don't know, not really here nor there with the metaphor, but.
- [47:28]
Frances Sachs
So speaking of writing, is there anything that we should be looking out for that's coming, that's coming next from you? Are you working on anything new?
- [47:39]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
I am, I'm working on sort of what either is one book or two different books, not quite sure yet. But I'm trying to write about the idea of care, specifically in the classroom. I know I mentioned a few times I teach at Fairfield University here in Connecticut, but I taught high school English for a long time and I loved teaching high school very, very much. My husband still teaches high school. I've just been thinking a lot about this in the news right now. There's all this teacher shortages, which are real, and burnout with teachers. And then at the same time the mental health crisis among young people, which also feels very real, especially, you know, in my interaction with my college students and sort of trying to think about how these two things interact and specifically again, thinking about a capitalist model, like if we're telling students that they're a product and that if teachers instead of centering relationships are being encouraged to, to focus rather on, on data and numbers and that's sort of like what education has become is just totally outcome based, that there's a sort of common root in the student side of the crisis and in the educator side of the crisis. But anyway, that's. I'm not sure if that's one project or two, but very early stages of researching and drafting.
- [48:57]
Frances Sachs
Well, I am very looking forward to reading that.
- [49:01]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Thank you.
- [49:03]
Frances Sachs
Thank you so much, Amanda, for being on the show. This was great.
- [49:08]
Amanda Parrish Morgan
Thanks so much for having me. It was wonderful, Sam.