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This episode continues from the previous one: “I’m Fucking My Daughter’s Husband”, except it tells its story from the perspective of the son in-Law, who carries on with his clandestine sexual relationship with his wife’s mom. Listen as he talks about them navigating a means of carrying onward with their erotic adventure while his wife and father in-Law remain clueless as to what’s ongoing between them.
Which means that while Stewart was still figuring out who she was and what being “fuckable” meant to her, the world was busy schooling her on both fronts. She couldn’t leave the house without the male gaze following her in the form of TMZ photographers, couldn’t arrange her face without becoming the cultural signifier of every single woman who’s ever been told, “You’re so much prettier when you smile.” Plus, it was the aughts (“The Nineties and the early 2000s were really horrific for young women. Don’t you feel that way?”). Her anxiety got so bad that she’d lie on bathroom floors, unable to unclench her fists — so bad, at one point she had to be hospitalized (“They were like, ‘She’s dehydrated.’ I was like, ‘I’m not dehydrated. I’m fucking flipping out.’ They gave me an IV and a mild sedative, and I started calming down and my hands started opening up, because you fucking atrophy”).
Heeding the advice of the intuitive, I began to look for something other than the occasional massage or Zumba class that could provide some semblance of “self-care.” I began to imagine a kind of mother who spent her time in ways that actually led to an expansion of herself: the Wild Mom. Her answer to the obliteration of motherhood was not to accept it as ongoing and inevitable, nor to obliterate herself further. Because while she — er, I — love my children, being their mother is not enough. Being myself is paramount.
Allison, a mother of four from the Midwest, developed an intense crush on a guy from her choir and asked her husband of over ten years for an open marriage. Clara, a 45-year-old mother of two from the Boston area, opened up her marriage after emerging from a pandemic “breaking point,” where she lost her job and found herself the primary parent and homeschooler while her husband consumed himself with work and conservative politics. Sasha, from the San Francisco Bay Area, went off to the coast for weekends, often with MDMA and her boyfriend, while her husband stayed home with their 8-year-old. Brandy, a 20-years-married-with-two-teens research librarian from Massachusetts, became obsessed with the K-pop band BTS after a friend shared one of their music videos and traveled to New York, L.A., and New Jersey for concerts and to meet up with other fans. Anais, a queer Oakland mom, found a form of wildness in sobriety, where she could no longer lean on the crutch of drinking as an escape from parenting.
Miranda looked into surgeries, experimental treatments, miracle stories of children who beat the odds. She posted her diagnosis in mom groups on Facebook and chased down leads from commenters. It was love packaged as defiance, believing that, with enough research, she could find some way for even one of these babies to survive, even for a little while.
