What is The Sway?

The Sway is essays and musings (mostly) on motherhood from the trenches. It’s by me, Rachel Damgen. I’m the stay at home mom to a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, and I have no idea what I am doing on any given day. But I’m trying my damndest because this is the best and the hardest thing I’m probably ever going to do.

How did The Sway come about?

I started writing openly and vulnerably on the Internet as a teenager, but then stopped for a few years while I learned to be, and ultimately was, a professional journalist. I started up again when my husband and I made a surprising decision to move across the country from a small Southern town to a big-ish Northwest city in 2015. I posted what I liked to call “Facebook novels” for my friends and family with increasing regularity until I made the decision to leave Facebook and Instagram in the fall of 2020. These posts were a way for me to share my life, make sense of my world and discover that many of my friends were thinking and feeling similar things, sometimes even if we didn’t have similar experiences in the world. I missed all that when I quit social media. And so, The Sway was born.

Why is it called The Sway?

The name is in honor of that innate way we all seem to sway when holding a baby and then always seem to keep swaying unconsciously from time to time even after that baby grows up. I’m doing it right now to calm my tired and fussy 1-year-old, in fact, and I assume I will catch myself doing it in grocery store aisles and in the middle of my kitchen for the rest of my life. It’s one of the small ways parenthood changes us forever.

Who should subscribe?

Although I write from my perspective as a mother, I don’t think this newsletter is only for mothers. Or fathers. At least I hope it isn’t! It’s for anyone who wants to talk about the big and small things, the easy and hard things, the beautiful and ugly things in life and how we feel about it all. It’s for lovers of the em-dash, parenthetical, semi-colon and too-long sentence. (But not the Oxford comma.) It’s for anyone who has ever wondered if they are the only one who feels a certain way. It’s for anyone who values openness, honesty and raw edges. It’s for me, and it’s for you.

How do I get it?

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