I enjoyed this but it was very much not what I was expecting. I feel like a subtitle "essays on nonbinary being and parenting" is more accurate than "a memoir of nonbinary parenting" and would have better prepared my expectations. Because it is a collection of essays, there is no real narrative flow and the reader is taken all over the author's timeline, often within a single essay. In addition to feeling a lack of groundedness to time, place, and people, there was often an absence of emotional context and personal significance in the stories. I think this my partly be due to the personal nature of much of the material and the desire to protect the subjects he writes about. I wonder if it isn't also partly due to the history of trauma he mentions and writing about subjects that he is not emotionally prepared to disclose. There were moments of intense vulnerability that would poke through here and there and I almost felt like a voyeur at those times, as it felt like they were moments shared reluctantly. There were many essays I loved but many more where it didn't feel clear to me the core emotion or experience the author was trying to convey. He's had some unique experiences but, even in the most unique moments of our lives I feel we still often touch on themes universal to all of us. There were moments where he accomplished this, particularly when discussing his bond with his son Samson. Those moments were some of the most captivating and cherished moments I had with this text. I appreciate his voice and hope he will continue to grow his craft. He has important stories to tell and this book will serve as a valuable, less sensationalized point of reference and resonance for other transmasculine people considering becoming a "gestational parent."

I cannot recommend this memoir enough. As I was reading it I realized that when I was growing up it was Sesame Street that showed me what non-traditional family could look like. Grandparents raising children, single parents, being adopted... and so on. When my own children were growing up we started to see the first whispers of same-sex couples represented in the media. But it’s not a whole picture. Krys Malcolm Belc has an incredibly unique story and one that touched my heart. This is the type of story the world needs to listen to, especially when the storytellers are so giving of their stories. It’s so important to move beyond our outdated views of family, but also of gender and parenthood. This memoir allows us that vulnerable look at something many people are uncomfortable with or confused by.

I’m having a hard time reviewing this title because what it accomplished is so hard to put into words. It was wonderfully written, full of life and honesty, illuminating and in many ways educational. If you are unfamiliar with queer parenting, specifically non-binary or trans parenting, this will shed light on some things you may not have thought of, before. Belc’s memoir is a reclamation of narrative and an honest look at what parenting is, and how we cannot know what it means to be a parent until we are one, ourselves. The love and confusion and fear surrounding parenting is charmingly universal, providing the bridge of openness for the reader to dive in.

I loved listening to this author read their book. It was so honest and beautifully written. Very engaging. I simultaneously could not stop listening but didn't want it to end.

While many elements of "Natural Mother of the Child" will be familiar to longtime readers of the transition memoir genre, The Natural Mother of the Child is a standout among its peers for the quality of the very fine writing and the author's refreshing lack of idealism, either about his transition, his pregnancy, or parenting.

I expected a lot more to be made of Belc's pregnancy, but Belc portrayal is ordinary in a way that made intuitive sense. His story is, essentially, we wanted another kid, my partner didn't want to have post-partum symptoms again, and I wanted one of our kids to be biologically connected to me and had the parts, so why not?

In Belc's telling, being pregnant as a (semi-passing) transmasculine person is very different (for him--this is clearly a personal, not a collective, narrative) from being a pregnant woman; the experience is full of jarring dysphorias, such as the ballooning of his breasts and (a dysphoria-within-a-dysphoria) the new erotic relationship to him.

At other moments, being pregnant and subsequently a dad-gendered baby-maker seems, for Belc, and those looking in at him, to be a whole lot like being, well, a pregnant man--complete with gawking (and terrifying) neighbors--and subsequently, a breast-feeding dad (two years worth), a picking-up-from-preschool dad. In other words, being a dad who gave birth to his son is no stranger in Belc's family, as his 3 year old son observes, than being any other dad or mom.

The book doesn't explicitly make this connection, but I am struck upon reflection by the normalcy of dysphoria within the context of a parenting memoir. That is to say, the dysphorias Belc records, at least insofar as he relates to his own body, seem similar in kind and intensity to those of the normative pregnant person, i.e. the "mom-to-be." Many recent memoirs and novels (by white women) write against the conventional narrative of (white) motherhood as some sort of angelic realization of female destiny, emphasizing, instead, the costs to the body, the mind, and identity. Off the top of my head, I can think of ten or twelve titles, ranging from eye-rolling to excellent, by Lydia Kiesling, Julia Fine, Maggie O'Farrell, Ariel Levy, Emily Adrian, Megan O'Connell, Sara Sligar, Helen Phillips, Maggie Nelson, I could go on!

Belc's memoir, while dissimilar in tone, style, and references, from these (with the exception of queers Levy and Nelson, the latter of whom "Natural Mother" amply references), is most interesting when read in the context of this other contemporary conversation. In a sense, Belc's memoir resides in the Venn overlap of America's preoccupation with and fantasy of white motherhood and America's preoccupation with and fantasy of the transmasculine figure, whether as tormented youth or fully realized (or false, as per TERFs and evangelicals) white male.

There's are worthwhile questions to be asked about the commonalities between the archetypal white mother's dysphoria and that of the archetypal's transman's, of which Belc, in spite of his nonbinary identity, is a striking representation. Belc does approach these questions in a researched section focused on breasts as objects, almost, that exist in symbolic relationship to the individual marked as female. Quoting from various feminist critics and essayists, Belc records attitudes of pubescent cis girls to their altering forms and those of adult survivors of the earliest and most brutal mastectomies, as well as the "gender euphoria" of medically transitioning trans women as their bodies begin to feminize.

Belc is an able essayist, gracefully demonstrating the diversity of these attitudes--female identity is not one thing--while contrasting those with his own feelings towards his breasts and those of others (his wife's, held in sleep; the woman whose recent mastectomy he guiltily covets). It's not so much that Belc's perspective is different, because, as the examples he quotes from show, women have a vast range of experiences within and to their physical and imagined bodies. Rather, it's that Belc doesn't identify with these women, or any women. Not really.

Therein begin my struggle with Belc's project. Belc, irregardless of his gender identity, sees the world from a socially male perspective--meaning from within a conventionally male value system, the universe of brothers and fathers, but also of qualities and interests that are only gendered by virtue of culture, such as anger or violence or even physical fitness and restraint of the body.

On these subjects, Belc is reliably self-interrogating--fearing his own aggression toward his restless infant, decrying and wondering at male violence and observing how much dark longing to hurt he seem to have inherited from his own violent father. Readers with conventional, American attitudes toward sex and gender roles may find Belc's anguish over his masculine inheritance moving, relatable, or reassuring, as it apparently raises the bar for (white) male accountability while portraying a transmasculine experience that is easy to translate precisely because it so closely resembles that bemoaned masculine ideal.

As many critics have pointed out, such contradictory notions are logically untenable and ideologically suspect. A male (or transmasculine) anguish over violence that regards violence as implicitly masculine is raising the value of exactly that behavior over which it sheds tears. Belc, who like many conventionally minded transmascs before them (those most likely to get publishing contracts, especially), reports never crying after going on testosterone and regards his childhood physical aggression as a feature of early male identity. Many trans men report the opposite effect and plenty of cis men cry often (crying itself itself is observably cultural--see, for example, stiff British lips and any number of Mexican pop songs about or by sobbing men) and that many girls, particularly those raised by violent, domineering fathers, throw kicks and punches with full-throated bloodlust and identify with their powerful fathers rather than their weak-seeming mothers.

Belc doesn't mention other men's perspectives, though, trans or otherwise, and doesn't cite other trans critics thoughts, except to acknowledge that everyone is different and that Belc's perspective should not be considered representative. That's fair in context, but sits uncomfortably in a work that so frequently cites female writers on female identity. The lack of perspectives on masculinity from cultures that differ from his own and the tendency of Belc to evoke women's voices only as counterpoint ("I am not that") or, in the case of Maggie Nelson, external confirmation, undercuts the book's apparent larger aim of an outsider's inside view of capital-P Parenthood in the American family.

I believe there are people this book will speak to. Belc's expert prose and stoic narration makes a strong bid for Greatness, if such a thing would ever be afforded to either a pregnancy/parenting narrative or a trans author (no matter how masculine). I personally prefer my memoirs with a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater emphasis on the unknown than what Belc seems to be pursuing here, and god knows i have zero interest in men or white hetero-ish masculine identity (bleh) and a very low tolerance for uninterrogated trans shame (in which "Natural Mother" indulges too much). Still, what recent book has made me want to write an epic essay about it? That alone, I think, is testament to Belc's value in a larger cultural conversation. Something is cooking here that is, at the very least, worth consideration.

I really was drawn in an held by this story. Krys Malcolm Belc takes his story and tells it in a way different than every memoir type book I've read. The way that he uses different documents, quotes and facts as a jumping off point for the narrative of his life is unique and cool and engaging! The variety of topics in this collection of essays is broad from and circles around non-binary and trans parenthood In a fresh new way. I really applaud his vulnerability telling the story of his family.

As a Michiganders, I was particularly interested in his experience in different cities, particularly Marquette. While the story of his family is beautiful and wonderful, their time in Michigan clearly shows some of the hatred that still exists.

I recommend the audiobook--like most memoirs, I found this one felt super meaningful as told by the narrator.