On Mother's Day
Thoughts on the day & a few on-theme book recommendations
I experienced breathless awe when each of my boys arrived in the world. I counted fingers and toes and thanked G-d over and over. At the same time, I envisioned the many ways I might get it wrong. Is this a worry unique to mothers? I asked myself. Do fathers fret over the same things?
Oh, those early years! I remember the constant exhaustion. From lack of sleep but also from worry — about keeping them safe and modeling our values and loving them with a stand-in-front-of-a-moving-train-if-needed kind of love. Plus, there was all that laundry.
Three times I returned to work. But my longing to be home with my babies — and guilt, if I’m honest — became the albatross I wore until I chose to leave that gainful career behind. I schlepped around two versions of me. The old one was fading from memory while the new one was struggling to factor herself into the evolving equation of our family. Who was I anyway?
I wrote about that journey, about the figuring things out, and about motherhood, too. The writing helped in so many ways.
The terrain changed as the boys got older and I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was ill-prepared, that I didn’t have the proper shoes or equipment. My love for them, however, kept growing, taking new shape and form based on what they needed. Sometimes, I was like a houseplant, silent but present. At others, I geared up like a warrior to protect them. All this without a map or a manual.
Breathe, said the OB way back when. It’s all in the hands of G-d, the Jewish people have pronounced for millennia. Here’s a room of your own, a space to write, Miro said when the contractor arrived with the sheetrock.
Meanwhile, time marched forward. The boys crawled, walked, dropped my hand, read books alone. They biked without training wheels, always adding new links to the chain of independence that cast them farther upstream from me. They stayed out late with their friends. They learned to drive while I shrank in the rearview mirror. I had to figure out what I could and could not write about them, to know publicly and privately they were their own people.
To my surprise, something deeply spiritual puddled inside me once they left home and we settled into our empty nest. I missed them. I struggled with the silence of a once-loud house. But I also knew it was a gift to raise them and let them go out into the world. That it wasn’t something to take for granted.
On days when Miro’s at work and the quiet is deafening and I cannot think clearly enough to work, I allow myself a small luxury. I try to locate the old parts of myself in the basement where we keep the toys and in the shadows my boys — now men — cast as they step deeper and deeper into the rest of their lives. There’s no way to catch up with them, but I’m finding my own way, one step at a time.
Motherhood is surely different now. My expectations of Mother’s Day, too, though I still miss the handmade cards, drawn with crayons and decorated with tissue-paper flowers. Instead, the boys will call from the far-flung places where they live and my voice will catch in my throat with gratitude, with love. Miro and I will visit my mom. He’ll write me one of his sweet, corny poems. I’ll write a note to myself on a pretty card I bought at Trader Joe’s.
Meanwhile, I’ll spend the day asking: Does motherhood break us in pieces or make us whole?
By way of a response, I will touch my belly, recalling its once-fullness and feeling the wrench of its now-emptiness all at once. And I’ll know, as if G-d Himself has come down to tell me, that the answer to my question is both.
Some Mother’s Day Reading
My all-time favorite books featuring mothers are from my childhood: Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey and Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman.
Recently, though, I happened Brood: A Novel by Jackie Polzin, a gorgeous little novel about raising chickens but also motherhood. Now I can’t get that book out of my head.
Hila Blum’s How to Love Your Daughter explores the tangled nuances of the mother-daughter relationship.
I’m sure I’ll think of more titles once I publish this. I’d love to know your favorite books about motherhood, or parenting in general.
Thanks for Being Here
I know this can be a complicated day for so many reasons. However you spend it and with whom, be kind to yourself.
Happy Mother’s Day.
Love,
Merri