HeyJaredThe Mother Letters
Field notes on birth, death, and mothering from a Pennsylvania-born-and-raised second-generation community midwife.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Sep 4, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 8, 2026
Latest issues
no. 3 (opens the original)
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WRITER’S NOTE: When I first began this Substack, my intent was to keep a primarily utilitarian newsletter for mothers still in their childbearing years, with the occasional personal ramble. However, I am not much good at sticking to the utilitarian. Consider this note fair notice of veering outside the lines I originally sketched for this publication in 2023.There will still be lengthier opinion-based essays rooted in my vocational work, including a hearty piece that has been growing across the
no. 2 (opens the original)
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Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shineand tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.— Mark StrandMom, is a cat’s body in the shape of a circle?Sometimes. Cats can make their bodies into all kinds of shapes.Oh. What is the shape of a bat?He discovered book jackets just this past week, the lanky four-year-o
no. 1 (opens the original)
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The year of dayswithout you and your body swept byas quick as an afternoon;but each afternoon took a year.— Donald Hall, p. 71, WithoutI have been learning a lesson ever since you walked with God and were not: the lesson of irrevocable loss. It is a shape-shifting lesson, meaning one thing one day and another the next, and I make sense of it by turning my back while I work, and hearing and seeing only in glimpses. Mirror, mirror on the wall, where do my mother’s footsteps fall? I forget at times
Midnight Journal Entry (opens the original)
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Everything I do is half-finished these days: journal entries, laundry loads, one hundred and forty-eight Substack drafts, six double-sided page letters to friends, nights of sleep. I feel caught perpetually between the doing and the undoing, the doing and the re-doing. I am the woman who unstitches by night the tapestry she wove by day. I know how to be in liminal spaces, but do I know how to be once I step out of them? Slowly the murmurs of the grave I am walking towards reach my ears, and I be
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