The Motherhood and Technology Working Group is hosting a book launch for group member Emily Bloom’s latest work, I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art.
I Cannot Control Everything Forever is Emily Bloom’s journey towards and through motherhood, a path that has become, for the average woman, laden with data and medical technology. Emily faces decisions regarding genetic testing and diagnosis, technologies that offer the illusion of certainty but carry the weight of hard decisions. Her desire to know more thrusts her back into the history of science as she traces the discoveries that impacted the modern state of pregnancy and motherhood. With the birth of their daughter, who is diagnosed with congenital deafness and later, Type 1 diabetes, Emily and her husband find their life centered around medical data, devices, and doctor’s visits, but also made richer and fuller by parenting an exceptional child.
As Emily learns, technology and data do not reduce the labor of caretaking. These things often fall, as the pandemic starkly revealed, on mothers. Trying to find a way out of the loneliness and individualism of 21st-century parenthood, Emily finds joy in reaching outwards, towards art and literature–such as the maternal messiness of Louise Bourgeois or Greek myths about the power of fate–as well as the collective sustenance of friends and community.
About the Author
Emily C. Bloom is an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College, where she teaches literature. Her book The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 (Oxford University Press, 2016) was awarded the First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association. She has previously taught at Columbia University, the US Air Force Academy, Georgia State University and, most recently, she coordinated lifelong learning programs at the Wartburg Adult Care Community in Mount Vernon, NY as a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow. She has published on the topics of care, disability, technology, and modernism in a range of publications, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, Public Books, Lit Hub, and The Irish Times.
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