mother tongue
This is the final email in a series on the Jersey Devil. I highly recommend you read the first, second, and third emails first but I’m not your boss.
Before I finish this series, I need to tell you something I've been sitting with: talking about women and motherhood as a nonbinary person feels like speaking a language I'm fluent in but was never meant to speak. I know these stories intimately, carried them in my body, inherited them through family lines, but I also exist outside their intended audience.
Writing about motherhood from my position feels like archaeology. I'm digging through stories that shaped me, trying to understand how narratives of reproductive trauma became the foundation of everything I thought I knew about monstrosity.
I need to tell you that I know the "real" origin of the Jersey Devil legend. It wasn't born from reproductive trauma in the Pine Barrens but emerged from colonial politics. Daniel Leeds broke with his Quaker community over an astrological almanac. Later, his son feuded with Benjamin Franklin, who used his own almanac to mock the Leeds family. The monster was originally a tool of 18th-century trolling.
But the folktale survived nearly 300 years and took on its own life. The Jersey Devil legend I grew up with, the one that kept me scanning tree lines for red orbs in the dark, isn't about politics. It's about how we transform desperate moments into entertainment, how we make women disappear from their own stories of pain.
I keep thinking about the moment after. Not the curse, not the birth, not the monster flying up the chimney. The moment when Mother Leeds, fictional or not, is alone with the knowledge that this story will never be about her.
In every version, she disappears. She becomes a prologue to her own pain.
But what if we stayed with her? What if we asked: what did Mother Leeds need that thirteenth winter? What if the community had seen her exhaustion as something to tend to rather than something to fear?
I think about Mary Toft, who convinced doctors she was giving birth to rabbits, and I wonder if she understood something: that if society insists women's inner lives are powerful enough to create monsters, they might as well use that power deliberately. Mary took the logic that blamed women for everything and weaponized it. She turned their own mythology against them.
But Mother Leeds never got that chance. The story consumed her before she could shape it.
I never want to be a mother, but I spent years believing my capacity for creation was tied to my ability to heal, to prove that breaking cycles was possible. The same logic that made Mother Leeds responsible for birthing monsters made me responsible for proving that love could transform generational pain.
In writing this series, I've begun work on a fictionalized retelling of the Jersey Devil origin story. It's been healing and complicated and sometimes gross and scary, giving Mother Leeds the voice she never had. In my version, she has real feelings and wants. She has a son she can't help but love, even if he is a little monstrous. Even if loving him means accepting that some things can't be fixed, only held.
There's something unsettling about writing her story, about claiming the right to give her what the original legend took away. But maybe I'm working through the process of understanding my own mother as a whole, complicated, damaged person who also holds deep love. Maybe I'm learning that mothers can be exhausted and overwhelmed and still fierce in their protection. Maybe I'm figuring out how to hold both the harm and the love without having to choose between them.
Mother Leeds deserves better than disappearing into her own story. She deserves to be remembered as someone who knew exactly how much she could carry, and who had the audacity to say so out loud in a moment of desperate honesty that we've been turning into entertainment for three hundred years.
Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here too.
I love you,
Liah Bean