Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

If only you’d listened to us, none of this would have happened.

We took two-hour breaks to read bedtime stories to toddlers and tried not to calculate the total number of hours spent working as mothers and employees, confused as to which came first. We were overqualified and underutilized, bossy and always right.

(Breastfeeding was supposed to be painless they told us. Breastfeeding was beautiful, they said. Well, we would like to drag their nipples over asphalt and see how painless and beautiful they thought it was.)

She had responsibly tucked her phone inside her landfill of a purse because she was a good mother, which in that place meant an undistracted mother.

Children turned men into heroes and mothers into lesser employees, if we didn’t play our cards right.)

we were working with less time than the men in our office. That was just a fact. Thirty minutes to blow-dry our hair in the morning. Ten minutes to straighten and curl it. Fifteen for makeup. Three minutes for jewelry. Sixteen minutes to pick out an outfit. Forty-five minutes of cardio in the evening, followed by the occasional fifteen minutes of abdominal work.

Someone should teach a graduate course on the intricacies of our time. We wonder if, perhaps, Shonda Rhimes is available?

That suddenly your diligently built-up immunity toward all these things, like name-calling and popularity contests, would up and leave the second someone took aim at your child.

One of the best things about Ardie was that she could be just a little bit mean exactly when Sloane needed her to be. Sloane’s most closely held tenet was that women could not be real friends unless they were willing to talk shit together. It was the closest thing she knew to a blood pact that didn’t involve knives.