Melissa Ashley Hernandez
April 30th, 2026
Sara Rauch is the author of What Shines from It: Stories and XO. She gets up at 5:30am every morning to fit in writing time. She is the Poetry Program Coordinator at The Care Center in Holyoke, MA, where she encourages teen and young moms to find their voices through writing. Her home overflows with books, and her sons are all avid readers. Every day she is grateful for a life full of wonder, family, and words.
I sent out a query on Bluesky asking for people who wanted to talk about their experience with motherhood to reach out. Three people responded and asked to participate. I conducted these interviews more as conversations, which felt more personal and, by extension, more appropriate for the vulnerability that can arise when discussing this topic. I went in with no prepared questions, just an open mind and a desire for humanness through the stories of strangers.
This was Sara’s message to me:
Prose writer here and mom to two, stepmom to one–my first story collection explored the decision to become a mom from a bunch of different angles; would LOVE to be a part of the issue!
(You can read our Mums issue here!)
Interview with Sara Rauch
WILD WILLOW MAGAZINE: Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview, Sara. Can you talk a bit about why you wanted to be interviewed about this topic?
SARA RAUCH: To answer your question about why I wanted to be interviewed on the topic of deciding to become a mom and what that’s looked like in my life and in my fiction, partly what drew me to your call was wanting to share the experience of my decision as something other writers might relate to.
For a really long time, from the time I was a teenager until into my mid-30s, I did not want kids. I wanted a creative life, and it seemed impossible to have kids be a part of that (I laugh a little at this naivete now!). In my 30s, around the time that a weird little nagging voice started to pipe up with ideas about “starting a family,” I was in a long-term, committed relationship with another woman. She had originally wanted kids, and I’d always said no to that, but when I expressed the possibility that I might be changing my mind, she balked. I can only see this in retrospect, but because I couldn’t talk with her without fighting over what I was struggling to understand, all my questions and worries came out in my writing.
Writing fiction was still pretty new to me at the time, but it turned out to be a really fertile (pun intended? lol) place to explore what was essentially an identity crisis. After all this time swearing I never wanted kids, who was I to start wanting them now?! At least half of the stories I wrote during that time (ultimately published in What Shines from It) had to do with pregnancy and/or babies in various forms — abortions, miscarriages, fertility issues — babies that wanted to be born but couldn’t, for whatever reason. During this time, I got caught up in a (mostly, but not entirely, long distance, emotional) affair with a married man (not a secret; my second book, XO, is an autobiographical account of those years) – again only with retrospect, I can see that part of me was “borrowing” his life, trying it on in an emotional way. Eventually, both of those relationships ended, and I was single for a while.
During this time, I did a LOT of soul searching. But my desire for a family didn’t ebb — honestly, some days I am still surprised by this. But I met my husband, who already had a son from his first marriage, and we had two sons in fairly quick succession. I wasn’t wrong to think that it would be hard to balance motherhood and writing: it very much is! Balance, as a writing mother, is an impossible word. At no point has it been easy to keep writing a part of my life (though, honestly, that was true even before kids), but I’ve kept at it, mostly because I want my kids (now 7, 9, & 18) to see me honoring and valuing a creative life.
WWM: Your story inspires me with so many questions! In your first publication, why did you specifically focus on difficult topics during your struggle to understand your initial desire for motherhood?
SR: This is a really good question, though I fear my answer is somewhat boring! When I was writing the bulk of the stories in What Shines from It, I was in an MFA program, learning how to plot and how to raise stakes and how to give my characters secrets and… all the things. So I suspect it was purely by (perhaps subconscious) accident that I gave my characters such emotionally thorny situations to deal with. It was such a fraught decision for me; perhaps I felt that the only way to fully represent that struggle was to make my characters struggle even more mightily.
WWM: And how did writing about these difficult and emotional aspects of pregnancy and motherhood shape your decision to become a mother? Because, as you said, you did later end up having your kids, but did those thoughts that you explored in your first collection follow you years later when you were experiencing your first pregnancy?
SR: It’s interesting, because I wrote the stories (mostly) during a two-year period, then three years passed, and the collection was accepted while I was pregnant with my first kid, and I was editing it when he was a baby, so I was reengaging with the material in a very different way. But I found that the emotional aspects of what I had written held true, even if the circumstances were different. My first pregnancy was uneventful, but early motherhood was different from what I expected: it was exhausting, but also a little boring. That surprised me! My second kiddo arrived seven weeks early and spent his first three weeks in the NICU – a situation I hadn’t written about (and still haven’t) – and then having two kids at home was its own whirlwind. I don’t remember a lot of those days. But when it was hard, and it often was, I thought of the stories. How much I had put my characters through, and how they represented pieces of me: the surprise of changing my mind, how much I had wanted a family, and what I had given up to get to motherhood. The big difference, I suppose, is that stories end. Being a mom doesn’t.
WWM: What is your favorite piece of work themed around motherhood? I know that’s a bit of a loaded question given that you’ve written so much from different viewpoints, but I’m also wondering if having children changed this answer. Like, if I asked you in your 30s versus now, would the answer have changed?
SR: For a long time, pre-children, my answer to this question would probably have been Beloved and To the Lighthouse. Two remarkably different narratives about motherhood, what family is and can be, how history/time impact what it means to mother, to face loss, to let go. I still love both books, and they both still feel tapped into some essential truth about motherhood. Since having kids, I might add Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter, The Changeling by Victor LaValle (this book is narrated by the father, but allows the mother’s grief and belief to drive the action, which is refreshing), Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, and Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which features a group of bad-ass suburban moms kicking vampire butt. You probably noticed I didn’t mention any nonfiction here; much to my chagrin, I have not found a whole lot of memoir or essay that really speaks to me as far as motherhood goes. I did enjoy Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, but not enough to call it a favorite. I don’t necessarily think my experience of motherhood is unique, but I haven’t been able to find much resonance in contemporary nonfiction accounts. Perhaps this will change with time. Oh, and I would be remiss to not mention poetry: pre-kids, Anne Sexton’s work was some of my favorite – loved her clear-eyed, confessional tone about mothering her daughter. More recently, Rebecca Hart Olander’s Singing from the Deep End and Jenny Browne’s poems really hit home.
WWM: So many books and stories! I love that. With your craft, have your children directly inspired any pieces of writing?
SR: Perhaps related to my previous answer, kinda-sorta? I don’t write directly about my kids. They appear occasionally in my nonfiction because it would be ridiculous to try to pretend they’re not there. Perhaps especially because they are still young, it feels like it would be an invasion of their privacy to write about their lives in any specific way. That said, being a mom and having a family has influenced a fair amount of my newer fiction – I feel a lot freer to play with and/or push ideas and struggles about mothering and children when I can invent things. Even if those inventions are rooted in experience. I am put in mind of this Robert Flaherty quote that I happened upon recently: “One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.”
WWM: During your journey in discovering this new side of you, you ended up dating a man (your current husband) who already had a child. What was that like for you to be put in a mother-like position at that point in your life?
SR: This is a really interesting question! I remember feeling really unprepared for anything mother-like. (Has that feeling changed? LOL, not really!) My husband and his ex-wife remain on cordial terms and custody is shared, so I wasn’t really expected to step fully into a mother role. But it was important to me to have my stepson understand that I cared for him and wanted him to be a part of my life. I tried really hard not to disrupt the father-son relationship that I had become a part of: that was important to me, too. There is no real playbook for stepmothers (except as wicked) and that makes sense, because each stepmother’s role is different depending on what dynamic they’re entering into. So I did my best to adapt as we went along, and I think that’s gone okay.
WWM: What’s something that terrified you before having kids that ended up being nothing to worry about? And alternatively, what’s something that you worry about now that you have children?
SR: It’s funny because I can’t think of anything that terrified me before having kids. I grew up with an anxious mom, and either as a reaction to that or just innately (or some combination of both), I tend to lean toward being the type of person who thinks: “I’m not going to worry about the disaster until it happens.” Did I develop anxieties and do I worry now? ABSOLUTELY. All the freaking time. I worry about losing my sense of self in the seemingly endless tasks of motherhood, I worry about gun violence in schools and too much sugar and whether my kids know I love them and which video games to let them play and if they get enough protein and if I yell too much and if there will be world for them to live in when they’re my age and and and.
WWM: Motherhood is so different from person to person. Is there anything specific you wanted to speak about that maybe I haven’t touched on?
SR: You know, while I agree that motherhood is different for each mom, because we are individuals and our children are individuals and each family is unique, I also think that there is so much commonality across experience and how we tell our stories. I work with teen moms (as a poetry and ELA teacher), and I find that, despite the (sometimes very big) differences in culture, age, lifestyle, being moms gives us a very particular connection. When a student comes in tired because their baby is going through a sleep regression, I know exactly what she’s talking about. And when I share the kinds of back-talk I’m getting from my own kids, my students laugh – because they’re going through it too, or will be soon. My personal story is twisty, and very much my own, but I also strongly feel that I am part of a larger tapestry of experience. All these threads woven together create something unendingly rich and beautiful.
A huge thank you to Sara for granting us the time to conduct this interview! If you’d like to support her, you can visit her links here: Website | Substack | Bluesky
Wild Willow Magazine 