What
Comes
After

Notes on an Emerging World

A book in five editions, written in public, on what happens when the professions, systems, and structures we relied on to navigate life begin to dissolve.

These five questions arrived mostly in the order I lived them. After becoming a mother, I grew insatiably curious about care — why the work of raising children feels so siloed and under-understood, when social reproduction is more foundational to culture and economy than almost anything else. Then came work: like many mothers, I began grappling with what it means to return to paid labor when childcare costs nearly as much as the salary it enables, and what it costs to step away. News came next. As a journalist who has always had questions about the media industry, I began to understand information less as a product and more as a means to wellbeing and agency — especially as the information landscape transformed around me. Then AI, because I live in San Francisco, at the center of that particular disruption, and as someone grounded in thinking about both humanism and productivity, I've become urgently curious about what it will mean to navigate life alongside intelligent tools as the social structures we relied on simultaneously crumble.

And then, woven through all of it: the question of me. AI has surfaced something I didn't expect — big questions about what it means to know yourself, trust yourself, locate yourself when the tools around you are becoming more capable and the structures less reliable. This has coincided, not accidentally, with being the parent of a young child and the child of aging parents at the same time. The sandwich generation question turns out to be an identity question. What comes after me feels like the right place to end.

Each chapter below contains essays, books, and personal notes on one question. New essays are published here as the thinking develops — earlier thinking lives in my newsletter, Time Spent. Completed chapters will be available in print through Time Spent Press.

From the foreword

A letter to my child

My truest reckoning with invisibility came when I paused my career to pursue motherhood and writing — two forms of work that are rarely recognized as work at all. Both are unprofessionalized categories of labor that can consume a life while sustaining many others.

What rules govern this universe of the invisible? Are they the same rules that govern the world of professions and measurable work? As I watch you, barely two years old, witness a world emerge all around you, I feel compelled to document my own witnessing. Neither of us belong to society in a recognizable way, and yet how we spend our time seems to be the subject of society's greatest moral questions.

The following notes are an attempt to find out how we might think about the worlds emerging around us — you, entering the constructed world; me, observing the one I once knew, dissolving.

I hope they help you choose how you would like to see.

— Mom

Chapter 01
What comes after birth?
Mothering as public practice

Observing a young child emerge has made me want to better understand our biological foundations. And being siloed in the domestic sphere has made me want to better understand care work for the public consequences it has — what feminists have long called social reproduction. This chapter is about what happens to your identity, your body, your partnerships, and your sense of time when you take on the work of raising another person. It's also about how those lessons, examined honestly, turn out to be foundational lessons for all of public life.

Library
  • Mothering as public practice
  • Garbes reframes mothering as collective rather than personal labor. It shifted parenthood from the realm of the personal to the realm of the communal for me, and while she also addresses the many limitations in our current culture of parenting, she challenges us to think about how to look at the work of caring for children as something of utmost importance, be it for our own children or others'.
  • In a chapter about ambition, Catherine Ricketts writes about children, work, and the mother-artist identity. She points to beautiful examples of mother-artists who have been able to blend the two, especially by centering their work in or on the home. Encountered through Mothers in Art and Design SF, the community that recurs across this archive.
  • bell hooks explains, in the simultaneously nuanced and direct way only she can, how Black women carved out spaces of love, dignity, and resistance within their homes, even under the most dehumanizing conditions. This opened up everything for me. Of course we can't compare the circumstances of slavery to the environments in which most of us get to mother today, but we can consider that any environment in which one mothers is a site for political choices. The way we approach the most mundane acts — making a bed, cleaning a kitchen, holding a child — can be politically and emotionally charged.
  • Parenting
  • Delahooke explains how to nurture a child's mind-body connection rather than managing their behaviors. Regulation in a child's physical body supports healthy relationships and loving interactions, in turn building the infrastructure that eventually enables the child to use reasoning and thinking to flexibly manage life's challenges.
  • I picked this up because I have a very active, very vocal new toddler and wanted something grounding. As a child of immigrants, most of what I do intuitively as a mom isn't as American as I thought. A child-centered life is actually unnatural in human history. The mechanism that makes cooperation possible is equanimity, not as a personality trait but as a practice.
  • This is a collection of papers that describes a way of seeing and caring for infants based on respect. I love that it's directed at both infant care professionals and parents. (It has never made sense to me that we expect education of the professionals we hire to care for our children, but we don't expect the same of ourselves.) There is so much literature on what to do with a baby. But few resources on how to be.
  • Interiority
  • Something almost no one talks about is what your body experiences as a caregiver to young children, through birth and breastfeeding but also through being a 24/7 physical comfort provider while still maintaining your autonomy. Montei's analysis connects this to consent at large, and to what cultural norms are embedded in touch.
  • The body is the specificity that makes a human experience universal. I've used this book — alongside two others — to make a case for writing the body back into experience: a Chapter 01 task in two senses, since mothering re-anchored me in my body and the memoir I'm working on is a memoir of waiting. Van der Kolk's book on how trauma lives in the body and how we can process it through embodied practices anchors that case.
  • A blend of frustrating personal experience and thorough research by NYT parenting writer Jessica Grose on the history of unrealistic parenting expectations in the United States. Helpful in understanding the history and structural gaps that make parenting so hard in the U.S., but also how much we've internalized about what parenthood is supposed to look like. A helpful primer for anyone whose fear of parenthood comes from unrealistic standards, and encouragement to parent according to your own values.
  • A thorough reality check about the impact of social media on our interpretations of motherhood, particularly from 'momfluencers' who are the modern-day incarnation of the very same narratives about idealized mothers, wives and heteronormative nuclear families that were peddled by glossy magazines in the last few decades.
  • Donath clearly differentiates between 'regret' and 'ambivalence' — interviewing anonymous Israeli women, ages 26-73, who regretted having children. The cultural context was specific enough that I couldn't fully relate to the women themselves, but the honesty of their emotional experiences was very eye-opening, and the regret-vs-ambivalence distinction has stayed with me. The first book I ever read on this subject.
  • In a different space we occupy — our marital relationships — we also experience tremendous change through the transition to parenthood. Here, psychologist Molly Millwood explores not only how women navigate the transformations of motherhood, but how it impacts their partnerships.
Chapter 02
What comes after work?
Care as the organizing principle of daily life
In development
Chapter 03
What comes after news?
Tending shared reality as civic care
In development
Chapter 04
What comes after AI?
Humanity in an intelligent world
In development
Chapter 05
What comes after me?
Identity, aging, and intergenerational care
In development
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