I'm too busy being a mom to write an essay about being a mom

So here's an encore Mother's Day essay

Things are busy this month. You know what I mean. The best-laid plans and all that. So in lieu of a new essay, I’m resharing this one from two years ago, when many of you weren’t subscribers. So maybe it’s new to you.

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And then there were three (2006).

I always thought being ambivalent about something meant you could take it or leave it — that you were indifferent about it. I honestly think that’s what most people believe the word means. I’m embarrassed to admit that I only recently learned that ambivalence isn’t the absence of strong feelings: It’s feeling two contradictory emotions at once.

And now that I understand that, I can tell you — unequivocally — that I am ambivalent about motherhood. I hold so many contradictory emotions about being a mother that I struggle to write about it.

I am grateful and I am resentful

Becoming a mother was not easy for me. When I was pregnant with my first child, my water broke 10 weeks early. But it was too soon for the baby to be born, and so I sat in a hospital bed, leaking amniotic fluid, waiting for the day when the risks of keeping him in were greater than the risks of taking him out. When my son was born 23 days later, his lungs were underdeveloped and he couldn’t breathe on his own. So I went home, and he stayed in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

We lost our second child halfway through the pregnancy and then lost the third pregnancy to miscarriage. When I was pregnant the fourth time, with my daughter, my uterus ruptured at home. Then I had three more miscarriages.

By then, we had two precious kids — a boy and a girl — but when I looked around our dinner table, I still felt like something — someone — was missing. “This isn’t our whole family,” I told my husband. “We’re not all here.” So we tried one last time and had another little boy, our caboose. I remember calling my mom the night he was born and saying. “Everyone’s here now, and he’s perfect.” I still get very emotional thinking about how much we longed for that third child and how hard we fell for him when he arrived. I am incredibly grateful for all three of my preemies.

And yet, I’m resentful. I always knew I wanted to have children, but I had no idea what being a mother really entailed. And that’s despite watching my own mother raise four kids. So much of the work is cognitive and invisible. (I’ve often wondered if mothers shouldn’t take a clue from software engineers and create giant Kanban boards to make their work more visible, but that’s an essay for another day.)

“Mom” is my dominant identity, but not because I want it to be. I did for a time, and then I didn’t. But it’s hard to get that toothpaste back in the tube. In her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet

Maggie Smith

discusses the issue of identity and a longing to be more than “mom” — a conflict I don’t think men don’t experience because the “dad” identity contains multitudes. She writes:

I wonder: How will my children feel if they think that being seen as a mother wasn’t enough for me? What will they think of me, knowing I wanted a full life — a life with them and a life in words, too?

I’m dog-earing a realization in my mind now: I don’t think fathers are asking themselves these questions: Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside the home.

I’ve said it before (and so have a lot of other people): there’s a reason we talk about “working moms,” but not “working dads.”

This Mother’s Day, you may hear being a mom called the toughest job in the world, the most important job you can do. What you won’t hear is people clamoring for remuneration for that job. You may be lauded with superlatives (“World’s best mom”) and praise (“You’re my superhero”) and you may hear people say how much they respect mothers. But remember, our society considers childcare and domestic work unskilled labor and we pay very little for it when we outsource that work. As Elizabeth Warren explains, childcare is the infrastructure that supports our country — infrastructure that is provided almost exclusively by women at little to no cost, infrastructure that many Americans, and the capitalist organizations that employ them, take for granted.

I am relaxed and I am anxious

Gestating and giving birth to my three kids was hard. Keeping them alive once they arrived was even harder. The first baby struggled with respiratory issues until kindergarten. The second was diagnosed with idiopathic epilepsy at 17 months. She had uncontrollable seizures until she had brain surgery at 17. And the third got bacterial meningitis and became unilaterally deaf as a toddler. We are, if nothing else, a resilient family. And in some ways, that has made me relax. After surviving all of that, I really don’t sweat the small stuff.

I didn’t monitor my kids’ grades or use Life360 to track their whereabouts. They learned quickly not to call me from school when they forgot an assignment, lunch box or field hockey stick, because they knew I wasn’t going to bring it to them. I encouraged them do dangerous things carefully, and let them fail safely.

And yet, sometimes I still lie awake at night, worrying about whether I’ve made the right choices. So much of motherhood is guessing (and second-guessing). It’s trial and error. It’s a grand experiment, the results of which may not be conclusive for a couple of decades or more. You wonder if you’re doing the right thing. The best thing. The thing that’s right for this particular child. You suspect you may be doing too much. You regret that you didn’t do more. And the truth is, you may never know.

So while I am relaxed and confident during the day, I’m often an insecure insomniac at night. Like Maggie Smith, I would love to be someone who doesn’t give a fuck. “Or who at least gives considerably fewer fucks. But she is not that person,” she writes, talking about herself in the third person. “That’s not how she was built, The Wife’s factory setting is [give a fuck]. She gives so many fucks. All the fucks.”

I think this is the only photo I have of me and my kids on Mother’s Day. (2015)

I want space and I want intimacy

I remember a stage of motherhood that lasted about a dozen years during which I was so tired I prayed for an illness that required hospitalization. I didn’t want to be stricken with anything too serious: a bad case of dehydration that could only be treated with an inpatient hospital stay? A broken bone that would require being in traction for a few days (and then magically heal overnight)? An allergic reaction that wasn’t life threatening but could only be treated with IV antibiotics under a doctor’s supervision? Anything to sit still and close my eyes. During this phase, I also seriously considered joining the National Guard so I could have one weekend a month “off.”

Things are so much easier now, but I still want my space — both physical and mental. I’m not sad when my kids move out and go to college (after all, wasn’t that the plan all along?). I can go days without texting the kids who no longer live at home. And honestly, I get a little annoyed when they return and disturb the routines of my nearly empty nest.

And yet, when I see them, I can’t keep my hands off them. I volunteer to apply their sunscreen at the beach, massage their shoulders after a long flight, take a closer look at that funky mole on their stomach — anything for that skin-to-skin closeness the nurses encouraged when my babies were learning how to breathe in the NICU.

Kate Bowler wrote about this longing in No Cure For Being Human:

This is the burden of a mother’s love, how it must hover without landing.

I hear it when I introduce my own child saying, “Oh, him? I made him with my body. It’s no big deal, but it took the better part of a year.” And they laugh, and I get a moment to pretend it is not precisely what I think when I gaze at him sleeping, his shirt pulled up over his soft tummy. Oh, that. Flesh of my flesh.

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Like the word ambivalent, the word simplistic is often misused. People think it’s interchangeable with simple, but it’s not. While simple means plain, basic and uncomplicated, simplistic means treating complicated, complex issues and problems as if they were much simpler than they are.

There is nothing simple about motherhood. And the way we talk about it — especially on Mother’s Day — is way too simplistic. Motherhood is a labyrinth, a maze you can get lost in. It is magical and monotonous. Embracing the ambivalence — the complicated, conflicting feelings — may help us find a way out.

Also on my mind

1. Here’s what you need to know about the new pope.

2. I can’t wait to watch “Sally,” the new documentary film about astronaut Sally Ride from National Geographic.

3. Can we talk about how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rug is folded up underneath his piano (I would never have thought to do that) and Colson Whitehead’s insanely long sofa?! It’s so fun to peek inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers.

4. Lena Dunham wrote about why she broke up with New York for The New Yorker— the essay only made me more interested in moving to the city. (You can listen to it at that link, too.)

5. This is my new favorite self-tanner. I spray it on in the shower (after drying off).

   

   Photo: Tan-luxe.com

6. I have been buying myself Mother’s Day gifts. Next on my list: These leg candles, which I don’t ever intend to light. I’m going to copy

   Christina Bryant Herbert
   and put them on my bar.

   

   Photo: TheWebster.com

7. Mother’s in children’s books — a matrix, from Literary Hub. This is so damn good.

8. Last week at Cog, we published this hilarious essay by the brilliant Laura McTaggart. She wrote about her first Michelin star meal, which inspired me to write this essay about my favorite local restaurants for our newsletter.

9. I know high school and college graduates just want money as a gift, but I never feel good about just handing someone a check. If you’re the same, you can’t go wrong with gifting a few of these IKEA Fratka bags (you can ship them, you can check them as luggage, you can use them as a laundry bag!) with a card taped on top!

   

   Photo: IKEA.com

10. And this week’s poem:

    I Wish In the City of Your Heart
    by Robley Wilson
    
    I wish in the city of your heart
    you would let me be the street
    where you walk when you are most
    yourself. I imagine the houses
    It has been raining, but the rain
    is done and the children kept home
    have begun opening their doors.