I feel like the algorithmic decrepitude of the discourse has had its way with Mother’s Day a million times over. In the early days, we had the first-gen-parents-on-social-media sincerity train. Then that quickly morphed into the “mother’s day is complicated” counter-narrative. And once that horse was beaten to death, we ended up where we’re at, which is kind of like, everyone doing their own thing but no one wanting to make too big of a deal about it for fear of getting dragged to hell for not acknowledging that mother’s day is not a monolith and that the possibility exists that there might be complexity and nuance (*insert the one eyebrow raised emoji*) to a capitalist-driven, Don Draper-manufactured day of hegemonic recognition.
This is me throwing my hat into the ring, I guess. A reflection on some stuff that’s been kicking around in my head of late, as I think about being in this role that I never really envisioned for myself – a classic case of building the plane as you’re flying it. Real “Jesus take the wheel”-level shit.
I didn’t ever think I’d be a mother/parent. Growing up a very committed “tomboy” and then being forged in the crucible of 90s counterculture and my nascent understanding of feminism meant that I rejected a lot of signifiers of normative culture, especially essentialist notions of what it meant to be a “woman,” including the idea of aspiring to be a mother – to the point where I offered my mom my uterus when I was 16 – didn’t think I’d ever need/want it. I also didn’t think I was particularly caring or nurturing. The narrative told about me, that I absorbed from a young age, is that I was/am selfish. That I was the kid no one had to worry about, because I would always take care of myself, first. Not necessarily the defining characteristics of mothers anywhere. And also (since we’re talking about it already) with the benefit of time/therapy/distance on my side, kind of a weird play to turn the coping mechanisms I had to develop as a wee one to navigate the environment in which I was raised, against me.
I didn’t have the greatest models for conventional mothering (although shouts to my sister for doing her best) – my mom was an 80s lady working mom dealing with what I now understand to be a traumatic childhood/young adulthood. I had my material needs covered, but I don’t think many adults were interested in my interior life. I didn’t have people showing up to my limited extracurriculars (not surprising: I competed in these weird elementary school brainiac provincial competitions; deeply surprising: I was on my high school rugby team ?!). I was mostly alone, rattling around with a cat under each arm and reading like my life depended on it and spending a lot of time in my own head. The rich humanities education I received by being an avid reader and a lot of time with PBS as my babysitter taught me more about the human condition and how to be/how not to be than anything else.
I have an, ahem…very very punk attitude to authority, in the “don’t tell me what to do” sense. 13+ years ago, when the Dotytron and I were kicking around the idea of having kids, at an outlaw family function, in the middle of the standard white-people-talking-about-nothing-around-a-table-while-food-is-being-served of it all, I idly mentioned that we were thinking of having a baby. “You’re not ready to have a baby,” his mom said, and well – that was that. It was ON. Ain’t nobody gonna tell me what I can or cannot do. It is cosmic funny that the living bit of stardust and off-the-charts emotionally astute, small professor I produced in the Big Yam was borne out of spite, but there is something poetically resonant about that as well.
I had one of my dearest, oldest friends stay with me recently. I’m always hyper-aware of the noise and chaos of my house, especially when I have child-free people spending prolonged time with us. I asked her if she had found her stay restful, worried that the churn of daily life with 5 bodies careening around each other didn’t grant her the vacation she had wanted. “I like it,” she said, “it makes me feel like what I imagined as a kid it would be like to live in a ‘nice’ family.” Burned into my memory is her lying on the couch during a very mundane weekday, drifting off in the early spring late afternoon, with the windows open while the kids practiced piano and I prepped dinner in the kitchen. Another time I reconnected with a friend after a long absence and she came over to work on a project together and as the chuckleheads tumbled in and out of the house in their underwear, she said that she really liked the energy of my home, that it felt full of life.
When I take in and reflect on my mothering, and compare it to the inchoate aspiration I might have nurtured somewhere (though aspiration is too lofty a word) for what I hoped to co-construct with the people I am responsible for stewarding through the world, those observations from my friends felt very affirming.
My therapist recently asked me if, as a kid, anyone ever told me they were delighted by my presence and glad that I existed. My response was a hearty, LOL WHUT. Umm…no. As the Big Yam would say, “are you okay?” When I relayed that story to someone, they said to me, “well, at least you know your kids won’t ever be able to say that,” and that hit me so hard. There is hardly a day that goes by when I don’t tell each of the goons that I love them. Q’s response, is always, “and I love you” instead of the more conventional, “I love you, too” and it is a perfect turn of phrase. On days where I wake in my own bed, invariably the Big Yam stops by first thing, on his way to shovel fistfuls of cereal into his mouth to drop a kiss on my head.
I’m doing the thing. I’m parenting. I’m building an expansive network of community and love and care that wasn’t modelled for me, but that I somehow made manifest. My kids are being raised with a porous definition of family and know they have aunties and uncles beyond blood who care about them. I have built a house that is full of life and activities, where the people that occupy the house are entangled and expressing themselves, where their quirks and idiosyncrasies are celebrated and nurtured, where there is space for their interior lives to burble up and make itself known, where we place a premium on consistency of care, where we have our own secret language and in-jokes and codes that differentiate us from everyone else, where we see and are seen by each other. I’m doing what I didn’t know was possible.
I have very brilliant friends. One of my brilliant friends wrote something in her Substack, Neither/Nor that has been resonating with me since I read it many months ago:
…Brach discussed different forms of intention and she gave the most warm reassurance that when we intend to do something like be less reactive, or to radically accept ourselves, or love in a more open, capacious way, we intend it because that is already “what we really are.” We want it and wish to move toward it because it is already within us. This subject appears in many of her talks. Sometimes she references Rilke in calling these aspirations “the winds of homecoming,” and at other times she references the writer John Bradshaw’s notion of homecoming, among others. For Brach, these intentions aren’t superficial ones like goals (write ten books!) but deep intentions about love, awareness, and connectedness. So, of course there are things that have gotten in the way of those aspects of ourselves. Many, many things block us from being these true versions of ourselves: our relational histories, trauma, world history, circumstance. But I am in love with this idea that when we want to be more loving and connected, it’s because that’s who we really are, and we need to do some work to bring that back to life in some way. Even if we are alive and not a dead oyster, we might actually be depleted, like a shell with nothing in it. Or a shell polluted with things that don’t belong, or just keep the shell in the garbage heap, blocking what it can actually do. Some of us might be a shell in the wrong place, who should have been collected and put lovingly in a place where we can help grow something.
The point here is that it is a return to something that already existed, even if that existence was heartbreakingly brief.
Around 7 years ago, I had a break. A slow and then very fast awakening to the realization of a life that I was living that I didn’t think I had chosen with intention. It was a very classic, Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime moment. I had premature twins. For a while, I had three children aged 3 and under. I got a masters degree on my parental leave, I had home renovations, I had changed my career path. I had parent council (!), sitting on Boards, and the kinds of dinners with people where you’re talking about/around your kids but with people who don’t know your kids – so comparing summer camps and mortgage rates and “the news” (but not the Panama Papers!). I was also capital M mother. I was baby wearing and baby-led weaning, and all the water bottles and every lunch and every snack and every vacation and every nature walk and every natural sunscreen and every extracurricular and every back-up pack of wipes and every childcare decision and every pair of splash pants and every stainless steel plate and every Valentine and every Montessori activity and every screen time limit and on and on and on. I also had my raves and my hobbies and my coterie of freak loves (I wasn’t that far gone, I was still me). But there was a long-lost part of me, that was rejecting this unconscious cosplaying of normalcy, that forced its way out and that made me crack open.
When I describe what was my life in the preceding paragraph, I think what might not come through is how joyful that life was. There were hard things that happened: a series of deaths, my bio-dad disowning me (just that ultimate rejection – haha), but on the whole I was happy. Not just content, but the blissful happiness of the pinks (this is a slang term for people who like, buy into the hegemony). I wasn’t the most in touch with my emotions (I was either happy, sad, or a rage-filled apocalyptica). And now, with the benefit of therapy and self-awareness and time and age and experience, I know that there was a lot of not-processing that was happening that facilitated the general, overall good times aura.
At any rate, it wasn’t sustainable. I broke and then I was gone girl. I went AWOL, FUBAR, SNAFU, you name it. I was unrecognizable to myself and to others. I couldn’t be contained and I just wanted away and out of that life. I was finding new ways of loving, new ways of being in my body, new ways of relating to myself and others, reconnecting with a politic and a sense of self and autonomy that had been sublimated for a long time.
Seven years later, having been borne back by the winds of homecoming, there are few days that go by when, for at least a moment, I’m not seized and immobilized by a deep shame for my behaviour during that time. I hurt people. The twins were three when I concluded that “they didn’t need me anymore” (!) and the Big Yam was five. I was gone physically many nights and I was gone mentally for a solid year and a half. I remember many an anguished conversation during that time when I would rail against the “societal standards” that put so much pressure on mothers. Why couldn’t I just live apart from my family for a year, two, the rest of my life? Why couldn’t I live in an apartment down the street, be there for breakfast and dinners, do school drop off and pick up, but still have my own life? Why would I be judged so harshly, against such a gendered standard, if I up and took off for a year to figure myself out? Why why why. It is a well that I return to, to take sips from, again and again. It is a hairshirt I put on, to remind myself of when I wasn’t my best self, and when I want to punish myself (which is often) for my failure(s) to be the “better person.”
Eventually, I had a slow and then very fast coming back. A return. A homecoming. I was loved by and spending a lot of time with someone whose pure, childlike pleasure in the company of all kids was a catalyst for bringing me back to my goon squad, and who also, in their big love for me and in their perseverance as I fought them loving me allowed me to integrate some key parts of myself. I could spend the rest of my life returning to the self-lacerating, masochistic pleasure of shame for my behaviour, then. Or, I could…not? I can instead look at what I have made and called forth into existence, without being taught how. I can extend to myself some of the compassion that I find so easy to give, with grace, to everyone else. I can revel and take some small satisfaction in my ability to make the living, breathing home(s) that I wanted, scattered all over, alongside a breadth of solid people with whom I chose and choose actively, with intention, to do life.
Edit: Note that in the time since I started drafting this, my bio-dad passed away. More on that, coming, at some point, as I sift through the complexities of the feelings. But his passing influenced the tail end of this post.
I don’t know what happens to someone to make them walk away from their kids, but I understand the feeling. The older I get, as the artifice and grand narratives unravel, I can see with greater clarity the obstacles that can stand in the way of our individual and collective return to our best, true, perfect selves. I can see what is in us, what we bring into this consciousness, with a clarity that pulls compassion in its wake. While we might not all be wired to be “mothers,” I know that we are all wired to do what mothers/fathers/parents do, which is love and care and create and be the bumpers in the bowling alley lanes that prevent our beloveds from ending up in the gutter. So much of what we need is to release. To let go and let the winds of homecoming bear us back. Even as I grip tightly to that which binds me, even as I try to reconcile that I may be selfish and I may also be someone who sometimes takes care of themselves, first…I know now that I also have within me the capacity to put myself back into the right place, where I can help grow something.
chinottoismynemesis 