Nobody tells you your kids will fill you up if you let them. Maybe some people gave birth to that idea right away and felt, in becoming a mother, a kind of worthiness that they never needed to prove. But I was someone who felt, from the start, almost terrified of being a not-good-enough mother. And I’ve labored under that ever since.
Only recently do I feel I’ve stepped fully into motherhood — and it’s been nine full years. I wonder – will I keep moving further into it? Or is it a porous kind of space that one moves in and out of? Once you're over the border, can you stay there for good? Sometimes I think that being a mother can be taken from me at any time, and I wonder if that’s something that can be healed by the love of your child. I think that maybe it can.
I can remember the first time Olive looked at me with that faraway look: like I was not her mother but a Mother – a kind of character you’d encounter in a mythological space, with a bigness reserved for talking animals and gods.
It was one night – my night – I was tucking her in, and I had a flash of inspiration about what a “mother,” one who was not me: not sometimes resentful and reluctant and tired and annoyed, might be able to do. She might be able to make a cup of warm milk and draw the covers up, and say a peaceful goodnight. And like a fairy godmother had made me a princess, I did those three things. And Olive looked at me as if she'd never seen me before: as if I'd finally become the thing that she'd always wanted. As something inevitable — pre-written. Who wouldn’t find comfort in that?
Usually, her dad does bedtime. While I need his help, I've also given him the sweet task. Who doesn't love those moments right before sleep when your child’s eyes finally get heavy and they say one last nonsensical thing, as if they are already in their dream worlds and giving you a hint about what might be happening there.
If I’m honest, I think I feared the intimacy of the moment: that doing it well might push me into being a mother forever, which of course I already am.
It turns out that the prospect of “mother” is one that we all need, even mothers! We all need to imagine that life has some simplicity in it - that hard things like bedtime can come with great ease, that the day can be left behind us so we can sleep, and that there will be a fresh new day in the morning waiting for us when we wake up. There’s really no reason to believe this unless you had a nurturing figure who said that such a mindset was OK, welcome, even, in the project of being human.
I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that women hold this power innately. I’m saying the exact opposite, actually: that motherhood is something that anyone can do if only they have the willingness to step into the realm of the imagination. If anything, the mother is a kind of non-binary power — the ability to take the position of being in between two things, awake and asleep, and not to stake claim on one or the other, but instead be the bridge.
I watched my neighbor step into his role as mother figure from afar. He, not incidentally, had 6 months of paternity leave, which was longer than his wife had. She went (happily) back after three months, and he continued to be the primary parent, going from flustered to poised in the short moments I saw him in the mornings, getting into the car, going from stroller to carseat, or carseat to home. I observed how his arms became skilled at holding the baby, who was eventually calm in his arms. His whole gaze was softer and he and the baby had begun to seem like they were in some uncertain reverie together. It was astounding to watch - both because I experienced some of that myself and also DIDN'T experience a lot of it because I was worried about work, about money, about our living situation -- all kinds of things that make mothering so particularly hard.
Mothering, day in and day out, is a tireless alchemy. It shouldn’t be martyrdom, but sometimes it turns out that way – fueled by the feeling that there isn’t enough – that one person can only generate enough for one person, and when that one person is another person, there’s nothing left for the other.
But I’m here to say it gets better. Sometimes even overnight.
Days later, Olive drew the covers over me, unexpectedly. I had gotten new sheets, and I was kind of complaining about them, how even though they were 100% cotton, they were still kind of scratchy, and she was helping me put the sheets on the pillows and the duvet cover on the stuffing inside. If anyone has not put themselves INSIDE a duvet cover and pretended to be a monster to their unsuspecting kid, I recommend this for you. I was happy and not happy about my new domestic choices and got into bed to feel it all out.
“Let me take a picture of you,” she said.
And before she did, she did just what I had done. She drew up the covers to my chin. And I felt just what she had felt. How this tiny, subtle movement was so caring, so tender, so unexpectedly warm, and I said so. She nodded in a way that she knew entirely what I meant, just from that one night. Maybe that's why she had looked at me so mysteriously. It was as if she’d been shown something so subtle, so significant, that she suddenly believed that love was so simple. That’s the power real care can hold — quiet, mutual, and transformative.
Beautiful, Happy Mother’s Day ❣️