Hello and welcome to my newsletter! Thank you for being here. Life is wildly different than when I started taking myself seriously as a writer—pre-pandemic and pre-parenthood—and sometimes it feels like it would be easier to give it all up. But not writing feels like not taking full breaths. So this newsletter is, in part, a way for me to keep breathing. To salvage a little bit of my writer self, in between the nursing and diapers and art projects and puzzles.
I’m calling this newsletter Field Notes because that’s so often what writing is for me. Observing and wondering over the places I find myself—and the self I find in those places. My writing obsessions always inevitably circle back to motherhood and travel, my internal and external landscapes, the journeys that transform me. So that’s what you’ll find here—dispatches from the places I inhabit.
And, in the thick of motherhood, notes are mostly how I write. A quick thought thumbed one-handed on my phone while I nurse my son, before it flits away. An email to myself while I watch Winnie-the-Pooh with my daughter. A sentence scribbled in a notebook in the middle of the night. And when I can find it, an hour here and there to pull those notes together. To say what it’s like where I am.
I’m writing this note in the garden of our Airbnb, two blocks from the ocean in San Diego. A string of lights hangs between the palm trees, above a struggling orange tree and an overgrown fern. Doves are cooing, and every so often a massive pelican shadow floats overhead. San Diego’s expansive blue February sky startles me, unobstructed by the rainclouds or towering evergreens of my own Portland sky. But it’s not just the sky that’s startling, it’s this long-lost feeling of elsewhere—the casting of myself against a different landscape. It’s also startling to have this time to myself, to be a writer alone with her words.
The other day, while Rob got in a few hours of work, I gathered my energy and courage, the diapers and snacks and sunscreen. It’s always easier to stay home, but I want to give my kids opportunity for adventure and curiosity, so we were off to see the seals in La Jolla—blowouts and tantrums be damned. I drove our enormous rental SUV slowly in the right lane the entire way like a tourist, as if I hadn’t spent a decade in this swerving, speeding Southern California traffic.
Maneuvering the stroller down the ramps to the viewing platform, I congratulated myself on finding a place with both shade where my 4-year-old daughter could watch the seals and a bench where I could nurse my son. After Dez pulled his mouth away, gazing up at me with a satisfied grin and milk dribbling down his chin, we joined June at the wall. A baby seal scooched across the sand to give its mama’s belly a forceful nose-nudge. She’d just been lying there, trying to have herself a little moment in the sun. She rolled over, exposing herself, giving up her body, her time. The baby latched on, began sucking with all its might, its sleek little body pulling pulling pulling on hers.
I wondered: Did that mama seal have anything else she wanted to be doing? Do animals just fall naturally into the role of motherhood, the biological duty of their bodies? Are humans the only ones who wrestle with our competing selves? Like trying to be a writer and a mother at the same time—anything and a mother at the same time?
And then I wondered: Are these normal thoughts to have while watching seals on vacation with your children? Am I okay?
Travel has always been my cure-all. Don’t know what to do with your life after college? Travel. Feeling crushed by the endless Portland rain? Travel. Need some inspiration, some perspective? That’s right, travel.
Leading up to our San Diego getaway, our first flight since the pandemic, I’d built up a lot of expectations for how it would cure my mothering weariness. I would write for hours! Run every day! Sleep wonderfully! Complete a conversation with my husband! But a few days into our trip, I realized something obvious: there’s no vacation from parenthood, especially parenthood with two small children. Sunshine doesn’t make your baby sleep through the night or fix his maddeningly short naps. It doesn’t relieve your anxiety over eczema or create extra hours of not being needed in a day.
At my son’s 6-month pediatrician appointment, the nurse handed me the routine postpartum depression screening and proclaimed, “This is your last one!” As in: you’re out of the woods! I filled it out the same as always: enjoying life as much as ever, no trouble sleeping, no anxious thoughts, no inexplicable crying. Now, just a few weeks later, those answers aren’t true anymore. Maybe they weren’t then either, and I needed to cast myself against a different landscape to see myself clearly. (Which actually is part of the magic of travel.)
After the seals, I had a night of insomnia, awake for all but two hours and not because of my baby—just me and my swirling anxious thoughts. I had a day of uncontrolled weeping, and when my daughter asked me to play tag with her, I didn’t want to. I did it, but I was pretending to play, and that made me cry again.
I’m spiraling, I texted my group of mother-writer-friends. I’m on vacation and I should be happy but I’m not. They responded immediately with solidarity, one of them with this: There’s no cure for motherhood. She wasn’t being heartless; she was being real. She was saying: This is hard, and I’m in it with you. And she’s right of course. There is no cure for the heart-stopping, life-altering, all-consuming love of motherhood. I don’t actually want there to be.
I find myself wanting to make sure you don’t think I’m a bad mother, to convince you that my children are everything I hoped for and at times didn’t know I’d ever have. But I shouldn’t have to. Postpartum motherhood is a profoundly beautiful, unique and tender time. It is also not for the faint of heart, with its potent cocktail of sleep deprivation, physical healing, anxiety over keeping a small human alive, loss of personal time, and shifts in identity. Add a pandemic, and it’s a miracle any of us are still standing.
There’s Instagram Motherhood, and then there’s Real Motherhood. What I’m saying is sometimes you can be in sunny, shimmering Southern California watching the seals with your beloved kids and the clouds will still descend. And then a few days later, inexplicably, you’ll watch the sunset with your baby in your arms and your husband by your side, while your daughter writes her name with a stick in the sand, and you’ll realize that the clouds have lifted. All of it is motherhood, and what helps is being able to say: This is what it’s like where I am.
In some ways, travel did heal me. An essential part of myself returned the day we entered the airport—when I watched the anticipation on my daughter’s masked face as she hefted her pink unicorn backpack through the terminal, when I saw my son’s eyes fill with wonder at his new surroundings. I felt like a traveler again, but I also saw the spark of travel in my children. The possibility of elsewhere, and what it can reveal to us.
Thanks so much for reading,
Kaitlin
What I’m Writing
This is old news, but since this is my first newsletter, I’m sharing it here in case you missed it. I was delighted to be included in the The Best Women’s Travel Writing (Vol. 12). My essay, “Come and See,” is about an Indonesian volcano and the fine line between disaster tourism and bearing witness. Buy it here.
What I’m currently writing is … a book proposal! I’m pretty shy about works-in-progress, but I figure the more I say it out loud, or write it in a newsletter, the more obligated I am to actually see it through. It’s a memoir-in-essays about (surprise) motherhood and travel—journeys into the unknown, explorations of uncharted territory. Stay tuned for updates!
I’m writing in community with other women writers over at Project Redux, where we’re reading the epic Scandinavian trilogy Kristin Lavransdattar and writing about whatever it inspires in us. You can follow along on Instagram at @project_redux or online at projectredux.com – or read my essay on being a mother-writer here.
You can find links to all my published writing on my website at www.kaitlinbarkerdavis.com.
Who I’m Reading
After my son’s birth I took a deep dive into books on motherhood—novels, memoir, narrative nonfiction, poems, all of it. Here are a few of my favorites:
Like A Mother by Angela Garbes. Personal experience paired with research on the science and culture of pregnancy, this book is full of examples of how astonishing women’s bodies are. Did you know that “the nutritional and immunological components of breast milk change every day, according to the specific, individual needs of a baby”?? Wild.
Ordinary Insanity by Sarah Menkedick. Personal narrative, interviews and research on the crisis of fear and anxiety in American motherhood. I learned fascinating things about women’s bodies from this book too, like: “The hormonal surge in estrogens in the first trimester alone is akin to taking four hundred birth control pills in a day.” Again, WILD.
And Now We Have Everything by Meaghan O’Connell. I devoured this hilarious and honest memoir of early motherhood.
What Kind of Woman by Kate Baer. Every woman, mother or not, should read this stunning poetry collection. She says in a line what I would need thousands of words to get out.
The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling. A novel that so accurately portrays the grit and glory of mothering a small child. My favorite passage: “motherhood is not a house you live in but a warren of beautiful rooms, something like Topkapi, something like the Alhambra on a winter morning, some well-trod but magnificent place you’re only allowed to sit in for a minute and snap a photo before you are ushered out and you’ll never remember every individual jewel of a room but if you’re lucky you go through another and another and another and another until they finally turn out the lights.”
I wish all these brilliant writers were my friends, but I highly recommend reading this gorgeous essay on motherhood by my actual writer friend Melissa Poulin: “Mother Lode” at Poetry Northwest
Where I’m Going
I’m not sure where we’re off to next, but I do know my daughter has had it with car travel. After driving from Maryland to Oregon and back again at the height of the pandemic, she’d been to 38 states before she turned four. She’s a champion road-tripper and asks about once a week when we can go back to Arches National Park, but flying to San Diego reminded her that airplanes exist. “I know!” she proclaimed after the flight. “Next time we go to Maryland, we should fly!” (As in: Hey parents, here’s a tip—airplanes are awesome and were invented for a reason.)
Here’s my other super obvious travel tip: Check your passport expiration! As we started dreaming up our next adventure, my husband pulled ours out of the back of a drawer. Turns out they were both expired, his nearly two years ago. If you’d told me before the pandemic that one day my passport would go unused long enough to expire without my knowledge, I’d have laughed. But I never imagined the past two years happening either.
So, there you have it. Planes are faster than cars, and check your passports!
Spot on mom! And as my mom always reminded me-this too, shall pass.