What is a Mother?
An argument against the asterisks
We made it through another week!
I hope yours was full of sun and laughter. Mine was! Thank God! But I also cried about my postpartum belly and fretted (putting it mildly) about my boys going on a camping trip this weekend. It was a week that covered every inch of the emotional spectrum, which is to say, it was a week of mothering.
A couple of weeks ago, I had some things to say about mothering — they weren’t necessarily “negative” (i.e. ‘This sucks’), but they were honest. If I remember correctly, I wanted to say something about how hard it is to absorb the distinct personality and preference of your child when it grates against your own. I typed out my thoughts but caught myself before posting:
“I can’t post this,” I thought, “it will make me sound ungrateful for my kids — or worse, like I don’t love them! I’ll sound selfish!” I deleted the post and stuffed my feelings as far down as my overstimulated brain would let me.
Then, of course, I got to thinking: how much about mothering is left unsaid in the fear of sounding like we don’t love our kids?
Put another way, how much time and truth is thrown out by mothers slapping asterisks around every honest thing we need to say about motherhood?
For example, ******My boys are so amazing and beautiful and kind and smart and learning so much and I know it’s hard to be little so what do I even know and I shouldn’t be complaining because they’re such a gift and a blessing and make me so joyful so often*********** but some days it feels like too much.
or
********I love my daughter so much and am so grateful that God gave her to our family and can you believe her smile and her life is healing pieces of our family we didn’t know were broken and redeeming the very station of motherhood for me********but I’m absolutely exhausted.
So, as I do, I polled you beautiful people on why you might hold back honest thoughts and observations about motherhood. Here’s what you said:
I don’t want to seem ungrateful for my children
I don’t want to hurt women longing to have children of their own
I’m afraid that the people looking up to me will think I’m a fraud
I don’t want to make motherhood sound terrible
I wanted to be a mom for so long that I feel like complaining is hypocritical
Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that motherhood is a dualistic reality: you either love it or you don’t, you’re good at it or you aren’t.
But that thinking falls apart as soon as we try to define what “IT” is.
By “MOTHERHOOD” do we mean
how we feel about our children?
how we feel about the tasks of motherhood?
whether or not it “comes naturally” to us?
who we are as mothers?
what we long for?
what we’ve sacrificed for our families?
how God’s met us in this phase of life?
what it took for us to get here in the first place?
our complex feelings toward the particularities of our family?
Of course, the answer to all of the above is yes. Motherhood is all of it. There is no clear delineation between my feelings towards my children and my philosophical understanding of what a mother is/does.
It’s what I do and who I am.
It’s my relationship with my children and my relationship with myself (and God and my spouse and other mothers and, and, and…)
It’s who I’ve been and who I’m becoming — all of it getting kneaded together.
No two elements of motherhood are diametrically opposed. It is in vain that we labor to separate the complex intricacy of mothering. They all touch each other all the time and it is better that way.
You may have heard the illustration of the waffle and the spaghetti used to describe male thinking vs female thinking (which is faulty in plenty of ways, but I have found some anecdotal confirmation). The logic goes like this: men’s brains are like waffles — everything has its own container; the contents of one container (i.e. love for children) does not interact with contents of another (i.e. plans for physical fitness). Women’s brains, on the other hand, are like spaghetti — there are no containers. Everything touches everything. To think of one thing is to think of all things simultaneously. (i.e. I love my children very much and want to spend time with them but I also need to work out and I feel guilt for putting my children in childcare to exercise but that’s the only way it will happen OR I know I should be exercising but I am constantly with my children so it is impossible OR I exercise so that I can care for my children well, etc.)
I think the same metaphor can be used in the way we think about mothering.
There’s an unhelpful, over-simplified, compartmentalized, waffle view of mothering (i.e. Nursing my baby and my hobbies are mutually exclusive, one does not affect the other.) And then there’s the more accurate, more integrated, more confusing spaghetti view of mothering (i.e. Nursing my baby takes time and during that time I think about my hobbies and my complex feelings about the time I now do not have to engage in them).
Here’s a visual:
Now, I don’t love this example. There are a few reasons, but the main one is that I prefer clean lines and less-kitschy design. So I made a Venn diagram, which is, admittedly, also too simplistic. But it’s prettier and less stressful for me to look at.
Everything touches everything. Two (or ten) things can be true at the same time, just like Dr. Becky said.
We can be in love with our children and need time away from them
We can be unceasingly grateful to have babies and admit that life was simpler before they arrived
We can enjoy pieces of motherhood and grieve the loss of our pre-parenthood lifestyle
One does not negate the other. We shouldn’t have to asterisk every honest statement of motherhood. Of course we love our babies and of course we miss getting into the car quickly. Of course they are our greatest blessing and of course loving them is the hardest thing we’ve ever been asked to do.
I’m not sure other vocations (this is a loaded word, we’ll talk about it eventually) hold as much subterranean honesty-shame as mothering does. And I’m not sure how to go about eroding it in my own life and relationships besides being honest about it myself.
In a perfect world, we’d all just mentally ascent to this, let ourselves off the hook, and get honest. But if you’re anything like me, it’s much easier to let other mothers off the hook than yourself. So maybe we start with each other.
Maybe a good start could be a mutual agreement to let other moms off the hook when they start justifying their honesty? Maybe we could start saying things like “Your struggle doesn’t negate your love for your children” or “Those parts of you can coexist” or “I get it, and I love your babies, too” or “You don’t have to justify being honest”.
Love this. I have a friend who often tells me, "you don't have to say that" when I start over-explaining or justifying. She lets me know she understands. It's so grounding. I'm *normal.* Such a gift. Thanks for this post.