On Mothering and Being Mothered
Ever since I became a mother, Mother’s Day has been a fraught holiday for me. So many feelings come with it, happiness and love, of course, but also obligation, loss, disappointment. I guess in that way it is like motherhood itself, both mundane and transcendent So many layers of meaning in both the abstract concept of motherhood as well as the direct experience of it. Wrapped up in so many layers of emotion and cultural expectation, becoming and being a mother has at its root an intense biological imperative. Motherhood has so many irrational aspects and yet is the basis of our whole existence. As discovered by Darwin, a species is comprised of individuals whose parents successfully transmitted their genes and who’s children also successfully reproduce.
When baby fever sets in, you just want a baby. There’s no reason, the longing is deeply emotional. And then the shock of reality, babies are really hard to take care of! Especially in our society, where more often than not, you are often left to figure it out for yourself. Babies demand such a tremendous investment of effort, they are expensive not just in monetary terms, but also in energetic terms: so much of your time, energy, and attention. Human babies had to evolve to be so lovable and mesmerizing. Once you have one, you can see where if there wasn’t the intense bond of love and “cuteness” and societal pressure (or support), a mother just might leave them in the woods. Without the love and devotion of mothers to extremely needy and vulnerable human children, we might not exist as a species.
On Instagram, I’ve been getting feeds from bird boxes provided by Cornell’s Ornithology Lab. The images of two fierce looking hawks, delicately tearing off slivers of dead squirrel and lovingly feeding these two cute and fluffy, but also fierce looking, baby hawks. Believing that birds and mammals are conscious means to me that they also have similar feelings as us, why else would those hawks and other animals, constantly and faithfully, go to extraordinary efforts to feed their voracious babies. As I’m looking at these images, I am imagining their hearts swelling with love the way that mine does for my kids.
For a child’s healthy growth and development, a mother, or someone in that primary caregiving role, almost has to meld with them, to pay such close tension to them, figure out their needs, starting in infancy and intensifying through the toddler years. It can be a lot of fun sometimes but it can also be extremely difficult because it is relentless. When you’re a mom you never get another sick day, you can never really take a day off. Because no matter what, your kids are a part of you. Not only does it feel that way, but it actually is that way: throughout a mother’s body there are the descendants of all your children’s cells that passed to you through your placenta and then made their homes all over your body and are still there. You also have the cells of your mother inside you and possibly the cells of your grandmother, too.
Mothers play such a powerful role in their children’s infancy and early childhood. Our children are intensely attached to us and are highly sensitive to our emotions. Our mothers have to teach us how to function in our culture and take care of ourselves, but when we are small we can’t help but make many mistakes. A good mother has to correct her child, sometimes it is a matter of life of death. But to a small child’s experience, they are not doing it right. According to Thomas Harris in I’m OK, You’re OK, we begin to feel inadequate when we are small and then we carry that belief into adulthood. It probably fuels the intense reaction teenagers and young adult children can have at the slightest hint of criticism from their mother.
You would think that knowing from our own experience of how annoying mothers can be, we wouldn’t say the things that make our kids say “Mom!” But the urge is so powerful to say the thing that if your mother said it to you, you would respond with “Mom!”. As a matter of fact, your mother probably did say it to you. And how many mothers before her said some variation of that thing too. No one person can be everything to any one other person. But most of us did have that once, for a brief period of our lives, our mothers were everything to us, in a way that no one could ever be again. And maybe that loss is one of the things that fuels our complicated relationships with our mothers and our kids with us.
Many of my friends are Jewish or Italian and so I have had the opportunity to observe modern Jewish and Italian moms in action. They are my friends, and we have a lot in common, but I noticed a difference in how they mother their kids and how I mother mine. My great grandmother came from Strasbourg France, so my maternal line is French. There have been many descriptions of that cultural style and when I look to my mother’s and grandmother’s approach to mothering, it explains why my style is more laissez faire. A few years ago, my mother gave me an old family document and I realized that my great grandmother came to the US from France when she was 18, but then didn’t have her first child until her late 20s. I wondered what she did in those years, but by the time I started to wonder about it, everyone who knew her was dead. And like so many mothers before her, she has faded into the mist of time, except for the legacy of my mothering instincts.
What kind of mother are you? What kind was your mom? I read an article in the Atlantic where the author wrote that she didn’t have a warm and nurturing mom, she had a rough and ready mom, and it struck me as a great way of reframing motherhood. Of course all mothers are different, of course they are better at some aspects of mothering than others. Of course, no one mother could have all the qualities that society says makes a good mother. Of course we would have our mothering specialties. That we all bring our individual strengths (and weaknesses) to our expression of motherhood. Kids with doctor mons, or teacher moms, have things in common with each other that are specific to the specialization of their mothers. It also means that we could be bad at something that is traditionally thought of as a woman’s specialty and still be ok with it, outsource it, without apology.
When all’s said and done, Mother’s Day is important to me. Even though it’s sort of a made-up holiday, even though it’s not celebrated as it was initially designed, even though it is supremely inadequate that we honor mothers on just one day and demand miracles from them every other day. The bottom line is that I love being a Mom. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done, nurturing and keeping those two rapscallions alive until they reached adulthood and could do it for themselves. And my mom is a big part of why I was able to do it, both because of what I learned from her as a child and the support she’s always given me, including throughout my own motherhood. Thanks, Mom!