I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art

An eloquent and intimate debut memoir about navigating the gap between expectation and reality in modern motherhood.

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.

With lyrical and enchanting prose, I Cannot Control Everything Forever is an inspired meditation on art, science, and motherhood.

EMILY C. BLOOM is a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow at Sarah Lawrence College, where she teaches literature. She also coordinates lifelong learning programs at the Wartburg Adult Care Community in Mount Vernon, NY. Her book The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 was awarded the First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association. She lives with her family in New York City.