Off the Record: Finding My Village in Motherhood

“Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-concious about it. We don’t guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it’s total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It’s feral. And it’s relentless.”

— Leah Rader

Girlhood. I remember it. Sometimes in dreams. Sometimes in a smell. A flick of eyeliner. A Volkswagon speeding past me. But it slips further away every year that passes. 

We used to sleep like sardines in my cotton-candy colored bedroom, in the house on the hill. A full bed, four or five of us, pressed together, safe. Outside, the Chinese maple bloomed every spring, our window framing it like a painting. We’d lie on our sides, spoon, spoon, spoon, spoon, the TV flickering until we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore. 

I remember lying across laps, staring up at faces close enough to blur, my eyebrows tweezed for an hour straight. Grazing my skin and pinching my nose to extract blackheads. A kind of concentration, a kind of closeness, I haven’t felt since. Flaws weren’t meant to be hidden but shared, like breath.

We walked barefoot for miles one night—through valleys, through streets—until dawn turned us home. We sat on the edge of the tub, soaking our feet in warm water, watching dirt swirl to the surface like something exhaled.

There were folded notes in tiny triangles, tanning in yards, tears, too much frozen food. There were late-night phone calls, knocking on each other’s doors at odd hours. Hair dye in bathroom sinks, shaving our legs side by side, swapping clothes that never quite fit the same way twice. Whispered secrets under blankets, the hum of a straightener in the background, the sting of perfume sprayed too close to skin. We traced constellations on each other’s arms, mapped futures in the air with our fingers, swore we'd never grow apart.

 Before careers, before money, before babies—we were on even ground.

We never needed plans. We just were.

What would become of us?

Our fates broke that even ground. Our sorrows, our trials, our babies. Somehow, the baring of our souls, the wild, unguarded closeness, peeled back as we aged, as we became mothers.

The afternoon I found out I was pregnant, I locked myself in the corporate bathroom of the fashion brand where I’d spent four years. The second line was faint. I sent a photo to my sister-in-law. A line is a line, she said.

The pregnancy was uneventful, mostly, except for the bleeding—a sensitive cervix, the doctor told me. It was COVID. We were all fears and fevers. News and nose swabs. Spray and space. But the hope was unbearable. We preheated our ovens to 350 degrees, waited for the edges of the cookies to brown. We waited for him to arrive.

There were cupcakes, pink or blue in the center. My friends were supposed to bite down, let the color bloom between their teeth. But they had to be delivered with masks, met with hesitation, with grief. Some friends were still waiting. Some had lost what they were waiting for. They held the cupcakes in their hands but couldn’t take the bite.

I remember crying in the shower. I hadn’t hugged my mother. I had sat through ultrasounds alone. And worse—I felt unworthy of celebration.

We were no longer just girls walking barefoot at dawn. Now, we were women navigating young marriages, miscarriages, IVF, and D&Cs. Chasing promotions, carving out careers, signing for million-dollar houses, or trying to make broken-down apartments feel like home. We had stretched and unraveled and stitched ourselves back together, learning that joy and sorrow were often tangled at the root. At night, when the house was quiet, when my son was asleep, I searched for answers. I scrolled through the What to Expect forums, clicking into threads like open wounds. It was a dark, dangerous, wild and wildly funny-at-times place where mothers of all kinds, all ages, all experiences, spilled their secrets—or maybe they just told the truth. It was where we turned to strangers to ask the questions that kept our hearts churning and our minds running at night.

"Is it normal to feel like I made a mistake?"
"I love my baby, but I miss my old life. Does that make me a bad mom?"
"Rant regarding weight."
"Watery discharge—17 weeks."
"4.5 months. Not rolling."
"I can’t take it anymore… WHAT IS THIS RASH.”
"I had a miscarriage two years ago, and I still think about who they might have been."
"Is anyone else just so lonely?"

It was raw, messy, unfiltered. A digital village where we whispered our fears into the void and, sometimes, someone whispered back: Me too.

I wondered if most moms had their tribe. Or if they were all searching for something, too.