Control Freaks

Arjun S. Byju employs Emily C. Bloom’s “I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art” to investigate how tools of empowerment set us up for disappointment.

By Arjun S. ByjuOctober 3, 2025

• Science & Technology

• Memoir & Essay

MOST MILLENNIALS I know start and end their day on Google Calendar. Appointments, errands, and meetings are slotted perfectly into little rectangles, as are phone calls and hangouts, game nights and vacations. It’s not just time we seek to master with the wizardry of modernity but also romance, illness, wealth, and happiness. Dating apps algorithmize love, Oura Rings track heart rate and sleep quality, geolocation services tell us where to go. When I’m away from home, I speak to my cat through a microphone on her automatic feeder, and should she sufficiently supplicate, I shower her with kibbles. Even though I feel like I’m bumbling my way through adulthood, the world wants me to believe that I am in control.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we millennials approach pregnancy and parenthood with the same attempts at mastery. Timing conception against application cycles and promotions, parents-to-be juggle ovulation strips, pregnancy tests, genetic screening, and work from home—technified blessings and curses. Back in the office, parents heed with zeal the invitation to digital dominion through livestream footage of toddlers, text updates about potty and snack breaks, requests for FaceTime. It’s exalting and exhausting that the mind can be in so many places at once, tugging at a thousand virtual puppet strings. Should we be surprised that we millennials are the advance guard of the anxious generation? Sticking the proverbial landing requires extraordinary vigilance and surgical dexterity, but we’d be wise to concede that a fair amount of luck is involved too.

This is the prevailing vision that Emily C. Bloom interrogates in her debut memoir, I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art (2024). Tracing her journey from trying to conceive to early motherhood, Bloom decodes the contemporary parent’s tools of information and jurisdiction, and how they conflict with chance and disappointment.

She has no shortage of material. After leaving her tenure track position in an Atlanta English department to support her husband Evan’s career in New York City (a move that, in her retelling, was akin to spitting in the faces of the gods of the humanities), Bloom and her husband decide to have a baby. The day after she discovers her first pregnancy is not viable, she attends a job interview.

Bloom conceives again, this time agreeing to genetic testing. Improbably, she and Evan are both carriers of a gene for Pompe disease, a syndrome of glycogen storage that leads to muscle wasting, heart and lung failure, and death at around age 10. The odds that she and her husband are both carriers are one in 1.6 billion. Still, the syndrome is autosomal recessive, so there is only a one-in-four chance that any baby they conceive would carry two copies. They undergo additional testing and are flattened again by their inconceivable bad luck. After contemplating in good faith what it would mean to care for a child with Pompe disease—Bloom imagines heart-wrenching birthday parties for a toddler who doesn’t know how few she has left—the couple decide to terminate the pregnancy.

Devastated but undeterred, she and Evan plan for in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). Readying herself for ovarian stimulation and egg harvesting, Bloom attends her first reproductive endocrinologist appointment only to discover that, miraculously, she is already pregnant. Several weeks later, chorionic villus sampling (CVS) confirms that this fetus does not have Pompe, though she is a carrier of the gene.

After a routine pregnancy and delivery, Wilhelmina (“Willie for short”), fails her newborn hearing tests and is diagnosed with sensorineural deafness. Roughly a year later, fussy, losing weight, and urinating, Willie spends a week in the hospital and is confirmed to have type 1 diabetes. Willie is saddled with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), round-the-clock insulin shots, and $3,000-a-pop hearing aids; on the docket of future interventions are an insulin pump and cochlear implant.

Of course, this all happens during the pandemic, and Bloom leaves the administrative university job she recently secured to become—after a decade of postgraduate training—a stay-at-home mom. Alone in her small apartment, counting carbs and attending virtual sign language classes with her daughter, Bloom finds solace in art.

Bloom’s story, on its own, sounds like first-rate misery lit. How she and her husband kept on is genuinely baffling, and I’m reminded of a line from Middlemarch: “We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’”

Yet what makes Bloom’s memoir so exquisite is not her recounting of the setbacks but her reflections on how her fate was mediated by technology—how modern tools dealt her the highest highs, the apogee of biochemical supremacy, but offered little help in handling their own failures. As a student of the classics, Bloom invokes Greek tragedy and the ineluctability of fate, but she struggles to put words to the confusion and disappointment of undergoing several rounds of genetic screening only to bear a child who has multiple life-limiting medical conditions.

As modern medicine advances—artificial hearts, deep-brain stimulators, drugs that melt away cancer—how do we handle its limitations? I am petulant if my Uber arrives even one minute late. What if you don’t lose enough pounds on Ozempic or after bariatric surgery, don’t get a full head of hair after a transplant, don’t respond to ketamine or psilocybin? These things are supposed to work, we’re told. Many in Silicon Valley seem to believe that, with a few genetic tweaks, humans will soon live for over a thousand years. Montefiore Einstein Medical Center, of which I am a proud alumnus, ran an ad campaign with a similarly improbable message. A defiant middle-aged woman stands atop a mesa in the Southwest, cradling a baby. With the help of her doctors, the text tells us, Barbara Higgins survived three brain tumors and gave birth at age 57.

Are we setting people up for disappointment?

Like many women, Bloom begins her odyssey with a urine pregnancy test, the first instrument in the arsenal of data and control. More accurate than ever before, these tests can detect pregnancy at the earliest stage, which means expectant couples are also increasingly punished with the knowledge of early miscarriage—also known as “chemical pregnancy.” Similarly, Bloom examines fetal ultrasound and its transformation from military technology to ritual of popular culture. “When you are a woman of a certain age on social media,” she writes, “it is likely that your feed will be flooded with ultrasound images.”

But when things go awry, tools of empowerment yield even sharper pain. Bloom reminds readers of the countless women who receive baby ads even after they endure a miscarriage. The Photos app’s “Memories” feature pushes an ultrasound on its one-year anniversary. But nowhere are questions of control—when and how and, rarely, if we should exert it—more salient than in PGT. Edge cases are only modestly helpful: it seems fair to use PGT for Pompe, unreasonable for blue eyes. But what about everything in between? The moral gray zone is cavernous, with debates over selecting out for BRCA (“the breast cancer gene”), ALS, depression, cancer. A new Silicon Valley start-up, Orchid, promises embryonic whole genome sequencing, predicting risk for hundreds of conditions like heart disease and schizophrenia. Orchid’s mandate is to “have healthy babies,” and its CEO suggests that her clients (Elon Musk allegedly among them) are merely acting responsibly in their attempt to minimize “suffering.”

Sidestepping the ethical and economic questions—the average cost of one cycle of IVF is over $20,000 and Orchid charges $2,500 per embryo—there remains the emotional one: how do parents feel? Some have begun to speak of “gender disappointment,” suggesting a novel mental illness in which parents grieve having a child of an unwanted sex. Bloom alludes to the tiring pressure to have “perfect” children and the shame experienced by parents of differently abled kids. “In this climate of infinite perfectibility,” she asks, “who bears the responsibility for imperfection?”

The answer, of course, is usually Mom. Amplified by social media, every maternal decision from breastfeeding to vaccines to sleep schedules is laden with grave import. After Willie was diagnosed with diabetes, Bloom found herself asking what she had done wrong. Was it her carelessness in introducing cow’s milk too early that caused Willie’s immune hyperresponsivity? Or had it been the exact opposite, that she was too fastidious, too tidy around the house—the so-called “hygiene hypothesis”? In a world that acknowledges the lasting scars of trauma, in which the body is known to keep score, it is hardly surprising that theories around “fetal programming” have taken root. These argue that maternal mood and stress leave lifelong impacts on an unborn child.

Control and helplessness permeate our interactions with modern technology. I am supreme while surfing the web, listening to podcasts, ordering dinner, buying flights. My typing thumbs are emissaries for my indomitable will. Yet I have no meaningful understanding of how the little rectangle of glass works, and should it glitch or update—or, heaven forbid, fall in a puddle—I am forlorn, feeble, and defenseless. With Willie’s CGM, Bloom articulates how enmeshed we have become with technologies that alienate us simultaneously from our tools and ourselves. A vaunted improvement from the old-fashioned finger-prick approach, Willie’s CGM is a small device implanted under the skin of her arm that transmits data on the sugar levels in her blood to her parents’ smartphones. In response to these readings, Willie’s parents can give her insulin or juice. CGMs are considered a miracle by many diabetics.

Listening to its commands, Bloom is at once grateful and bound to the tool. She feels diminished to an automaton (“an automom,” she quips), porting around her daughter’s devices, batteries, and chargers, “becoming a mere custodian for these beeping, blinking, surging machines”:

My relationship with the machine is vexed—I’m dependent on it in myriad ways and I resent this dependence. I look at it often, checking and rechecking her blood sugar when I am with her and when she is at day care, when she is awake and when she is asleep. It is another screen that I forget how to do without. It’s changed the way that I mother my child. Sometimes, I find myself looking at her CGM to decide whether she might be hungry rather than asking Willie herself. I defer to the machine. When it goes offline, I feel adrift.

Similarly, in everyday life, I might ask a friend, How did you sleep? They check their health app. Several solid REM cycles. Are you hungry? I wonder. Let’s see how many calories I have left for the day. It’s for these reasons that Bloom hesitates to give Willie an insulin pump, another device with tubes and batteries, or a cochlear implant, wary of “implanting proprietary hardware into my daughter’s head,” rendering her “always […] beholden to a biotech company.”

This is the value proposition of Neuralink (among other brain-computer ventures), and Bloom acknowledges that what sounds dystopian to her is the gleeful fantasy of various others. She references Donna Haraway’s seminal 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” and its dream of feminist liberation through transhumanism. She also cites Mark Taylor’s concept of “intervolution,” the enmeshing of bodies, things, and networks begotten from wearables and implants. To Taylor, ceding control to machines has taught him a kind of extrospection. With a CGM, he insists, “I am never only myself, but am always also other than myself.”

Whether in service of healing or cosmesis, iterative reconstitution and replacement of the human body are likely to continue. We not only have CGMs and insulin pumps and cochlear implants but also intraocular lenses, gastric electrical stimulators, ventricular assist devices, titanium hips and knees and shoulders, breast and penile implants, pacemakers and defibrillators. Like the Ship of Theseus, how much of myself has to be changed before I am no longer me?

On another note, Bloom’s social circle plays a large role in her memoir. Her friends are mostly bicoastal academic types who, in her words, “all have the kinds of jobs that become identities in their own right—knowledge work that mired us in graduate education and precarious employment at the age when our mothers had us.” Lynne and James are “tall and blond,” “bohemian and patrician,” and carry a distinct “whiff of Europe about them.” They discuss apartment hunting, rescue dogs, and IVF while scouring the selection at the Strand bookstore. Then there’s Eleanor, the jaded single friend who, after running a marathon in Tokyo, complains about dating in her late thirties in New York City and decides to freeze her eggs. Yvette, who has had three miscarriages, is on a pro-fertility diet prescribed by her acupuncturist. Rounding out the coterie is Lana, who confides to Bloom over pizza (at a restaurant too trendy to take reservations) that she has settled on no kids at all.

Though at times verging on caricature, Bloom’s friend group is not unfamiliar. Polishing off school and finally, perhaps barely, stable at work, our cohort is deciding what comes next, trying to charm the fates, balancing on a tightrope and realizing that maybe life’s challenges have just begun.

For comfort, Bloom turns to art, and through the course of her book visits at least half a dozen museums—the Met Cloisters, the Rijksmuseum, Cooper Hewitt, and MoMA. Trying to process her miscarriage and termination, Bloom finds Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “the mother”:

You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.

Art, Bloom argues, is the medium for arriving at acceptance—the more abstruse, messy, and initially illegible the better. She is smitten by the multimodal triptych I Go to Pieces by Louise Bourgeois, which includes a fabric collage, a painting, and a poem from which the title of her memoir is borrowed.

This might all sound like hoity-toity liberal arts navel-gazing (even that term, navel-gazing, from the ancient Greek “omphaloskepsis,” invokes contemplation of the eternal tether to the mother), but in Bloom’s hands, it is convincing, soulful, and deeply human. Perhaps her synthesis succeeds precisely because it straddles both worlds, enmeshed in the most advanced technologies of the 21st century yet grounded in the past. Alluding to myth, she compares Willie’s CGM to Athena’s golden bridle, a miracle tool used by the hero Bellerophon to tame the winged horse Pegasus. Having slain the chimera, Bellerophon grows arrogant and attempts to ride Pegasus straight to Mount Olympus. Zeus strikes him down for this hubris, and the fallen hero spends the rest of his mortal life in shame.

Our tools can be our undoing; brimming with heady overconfidence, we might fly straight into disaster. Indeed, that’s the direction things seem to be heading. But there is an alternate course, one also set forth in ancient myth whereby we accept the limitations of our tools and embrace chance and dejection as normal parts of life.

I’m partial to the story of Arjuna (not least because he’s my namesake), the unrivaled archer whose discourse with Krishna constitutes the epic philosophical poem Bhagavad Gita. Granted the divine bow Gandiva—forged by Brahma, the creator of the universe—Arjuna is made invincible. Like the promises of nanotechnology, gene editing, and neuroenhancement, Gandiva was a gift straight from the heavens. With this tool, Arjuna accomplished many miraculous feats, including the vanquishing of the Kaurava princes, the villains of the Mahābhārata.

But one day, after the great battle is won, his purpose in life fulfilled, Arjuna discovers that he is unable to string his powerful bow. In a moment of crisis, he cannot remember how to use his most precious tool, nor recite the incantations that gave him his unparalleled power. With humility, Arjuna realizes that his earthly time has concluded, the work he was meant to accomplish finally done. Sorrowful but accepting, Arjuna drops Gandiva in the ocean, letting the celestial bow return from whence it came.