Sarah Blackwood
The Awl
New York, United States
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Past articles by Sarah:
Men Like Him
The Lawrence Seldens of today. → Read More
YouTube Subway Videos and the Search for the Sublime
If you just wait patiently, maybe a wondrous vehicle will come and take you someplace you can barely even imagine. Hoyt-Schermerhorn, perhaps. → Read More
Parenting by the Books: Cut to the Feeling –
It started almost a year ago, in the car on the way home from Riis Beach, windows down, skin sticky with sand and sunscreen. “Again!” the two-and-a-half-year-old cried from the backseat. “Again… → Read More
Parenting by the Books: Kindergarten –
When my children were babies, I loved, and often reread, a short poem by Anne Winters, titled “Elizabeth, Near and Far,” that ends with these lines: That last line! It describes what I took to be a… → Read More
Parenting by the Books: ‘Little Women’
There is probably no more important text about early parenthood than the chapter in Little Women titled “On the Shelf.” It’s up there with the best of creative representations of mothers and babies… → Read More
Parenting by the Books: How To Do Things With Words
“Josh was saying curse words today!” he declared as he stepped off the bus home from his central Brooklyn public school. “Oh!” I exclaimed, and then a little conspiratorially: “what words did he say… → Read More
Parenting by the Books: James Cameron’s ‘Titanic’
It all started when my five-year-old caught a glimpse of a thumbnail image printed on the back page of one of his books. A boat tilting unbelievably skyward, its small rows of windows lit up against… → Read More
Parenting by the Books: ‘Charlotte’s Web’
Charlotte has woven her sac and laid her eggs, and my five-year-old — after a couple weeks of gulping down Charlotte’s Web night after night — has been asking for a reprieve. “Let’s keep taking a… → Read More
Parenting by the Books: The Portrait of a Lady
To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, miscarriage has an element of blank. It’s a form of emptiness, of possibility blinking out in front of you. Sometimes it’s a relief, but often it’s the maddening… → Read More
Holiday Dread: Being The Mom
Did you know, when you are The Mom, no one else will fill your stocking for you, so if you want a stuffed stocking you have to fill it yourself and then pretend to be surprised by what you find in it… → Read More
Parenting by the Books: Slavery’s White Women
You cannot trust white women. We knew that already. → Read More
Parenting by the Books: McTeague
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a parenting column must be in want of judgment on her parenting. So here we go: I can only remember maybe two times in the last six months when my kids, ages five and three, brushed their teeth. Maybe there was one other time, when they stayed over at my parents’ house? I’m not sure. Once, when my first son was around six… → Read More
Parenting by the Books: ‘Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson’
Is breastfeeding a captivity narrative? → Read More
Monstrous Births —
In 1847, Scottish physician James Young Simpson began experimenting with chloroform to help ease the physical pain of childbirth. By 1852, Queen Victoria was using it to dull the sensation of labor, which she described as “a dreadful thing,” “being like a cow or a dog.” Once the royals accepted pain management in birth, many others quickly and eagerly followed suit. The pain of childbirth had… → Read More