Mothering is a village responsibility—stop blaming your mother for everything
We ravage mothers like we ravage our planet. We all need to take care of her.
The family dog had only just recovered from Parvo. It cost at least $900 and some sleepless nights laying beside her to save her. The new washing machine had also flooded the main floor laundry room that week, causing the water to flow down into the furnace. The washing machine was insured but the furnace was not — another $800 or so.
At the time, my lonely marriage consisted of two polite strangers who had no business ever marrying each other in the first place. I was 18 when we married; he was 34. We had been sort-of dating (albeit chastely, with only kissing) since I was 16. He was a prosecuting attorney. Though I had been a “gifted” student all through school, I had just barely qualified to graduate high school, exhausted and depressed from supporting myself since age 15 in a city where I knew virtually no one and had no family.
We thought we had enough in common. We thought our care for each other was enough. I was too young to know what being in love should feel like. My parents never married. My grandfather beat my grandmother and his children. What should a good, healthy marriage look like? Only sitcoms offered direction.
A famous church leader in our religion once said that any two good people could be happily married if they tried hard enough. But that never proved true. I would later conclude that a marriage of parallel lives, one where my husband took little interest in who I was as an individual and never asked to read my writing or probe my mind for opinions, feelings and dreams; where he couldn’t remember much about me… like my full name or my birthday or what I liked to eat… wasn’t normal.
My body forced me out of the marriage. Pretending at happiness amidst loneliness and rejection exhausted me. At the time, I thought I had a thyroid problem. I experienced only 1–2 hours of physical energy each day. I remember trying to walk our young and rambunctious golden lab in the snow and it felt like walking through the ocean with my feet buried under the sand. I saw medical and naturopathic doctors, I peed in a box for 24 hours to have my thyroid tested, I saw an energy healer, and nothing really helped or explained the cause.
Of course raising four children all two years and fewer apart from each other was tiring. Being the only one to get up with them in the night for most of eight years, when they woke up 6–10 times a night, sometimes made me delirious; once, while nursing my six-month-old son, I thought he was speaking to me in Spanish. I don’t even know Spanish.
I planned this family since I was a child. The husband part was never too clear, likely due to not having my dad in the picture, but the mothering part I practiced for years. Every time my mother scolded me or teased me cruelly, every time she called me a bitch or a shithead, every time she busted my lip open, every time she threw objects at my head, or made me clean up my own vomit immediately after a knee operation, or ignored and neglected me, I retreated in my mind to a scenario of how I would handle the same situation when I was a mom. I knew I deserved better; I knew I would be better. I would be the perfect mother.
Loving them gave me energy. It gave me purpose. I could do things for them on little sleep that I can’t do now for myself sometimes even with a full night’s rest. No matter how tired I was, I couldn’t help but smile when they woke up from a nap and our eyes met. When I fetched my youngest from preschool, we were the most excited to see each other of any parent and child there. I am, and always have been, madly in love with these people.
The children were not the problem.
That same week that the dog almost died and the washer flooded the furnace, while feeling bleak and doleful about my marriage, I brought my tiny squirt of a kindergartener to school. She walked ahead of me just a little, excited. Just as she was about to reach the sidewalk in front of the main doors, a church friend backed her truck up too quickly. She was about to hit my daughter. Time halted. My heart stopped beating. For only a second, I didn’t know how it would end. For only a second my body flooded with terror that my child might die. I lurched forward to yank her out of the way just in time, hit the side of the truck with my hand, and loudly chastised my friend.
I crumbled. Every suppressed emotion from the past few weeks forced its way out of my body in heaving sobs I couldn’t stop. Another mom I barely knew — I don’t even remember who — drove me to her home and listened as I talked and cried. I phoned my husband, told him what happened, and informed him I was going to remain in bed indefinitely (spoiler alert: two days). I directed him to phone our church’s women’s group for help with meals, laundry and the kids.
That’s what our church’s women’s group was for. But through seven years of living in a small northern town without family or friends to help, I only received help with babysitting once or twice (and one of those times I was giving birth in the hospital — the other times I gave birth at home); I received only a few meals after the birth of my babies; and I received help on one occasion cleaning up a massive amount of electrically charged styrofoam peanuts the kids tracked through the house like Satan’s dandruff, emptied from a giant stroller box.
This was all the community help I ever received. I provided care and even financial relief for several women over the years. It was my turn to collect without shame. So, I did. I spent a couple of days in bed while kind and generous women performed service for me and our family.
Why does this story matter?
Because years later, after we divorced and needed to square up in family court, his court affidavit charged that I was ineffectual, without mentioning any health concerns. He claimed that I regularly needed help from church women who came into our home to feed and babysit the children. I believe he even used the word “heavily,” but it would take me too long sifting through boxes of court papers to confirm.
If his accounting were accurate — what would be wrong with this? To “heavily” receive support. As though this is not exactly how parenting is done in cultures around the world to raise even one child, much less several?
He argued as though needing support from other people besides himself drew an obvious conclusion: bad mother. Incompetent mother. Not-doing-enough mother.
We expect women to sacrifice their lives and identities for motherhood until they cannot give anymore and when they can’t, we call them broken. When they need to self-invest, we call them narcissists. If they experience strong emotions, we call them “crazy.” How many times have you heard these recycled narratives used on a woman? I have lost count.
Being a mother is impossible
In honour of Mother’s Day, Elizabeth Gilbert posted this on Instagram:
Recently I was at a conference where the question was asked, “HOW MANY OF YOU ARE AFRAID OF TURNING INTO YOUR MOTHER?” Nearly everyone in the room stood up. This made my heart ache. My heart ached not only for the people in the room — who were all beautiful, creative, imaginative, and wonderful human beings. It made my heart hurt for their mothers — who will never stop being judged as failures. Because, my God, we never stop blaming the mothers, do we? How many years, how many dollars, how much energy have we all spent as a culture, talking about how mothers have failed us? What I want to say today is: Can we take a break — just for one day — and show some mercy to the mothers? Because being a mother is impossible. I don’t mean that it’s difficult. I mean: IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. What we, as a culture, expect from our mothers is merely that they not be human. Mothers are meant to be some combination of Mother Mary, Mother Theresa, Superwoman, and Gaia. It’s a merciless standard of perfection. Merciless! God help your mother, if she ever fell short. God help your mother, if she was exhausted & overwhelmed. God help her if she didn’t understand her kids. God help her if she had no gift for raising children. God help her if she had desires and longings. God help her if she was ever terrified, suicidal, hopeless, bored, confused, furious. God help her if life had disappointed her. God help her if she had an addiction, or a mental illness. God help her if she ever broke down. God help her, if she couldn’t control her rage. God help her, because if she fucked up in any way, she will be forever branded: BAD MOTHER. And we will never forgive her for this. So this is my question: Can we take a break today from judging the mothers, and show them mercy, instead? This doesn’t mean that what happened to you at the hands of your mother was OK. This doesn’t mean that your pain is not real…it just means that maybe her pain was real, too.And if you are a mother, and you never stop judging yourself for how you are failing…can you let it go for one day? For one day, can you drop the knife that you are holding to your own throat? Mercy. Just for one day. Mercy on you. Mercy on the mothers.
Mothers can’t do it all. We need a support system with partners who validate and value our work.
Mothers need partners and a culture that sees pregnancy, labor, birth, breastfeeding, and childrearing as more than simply the dues we pay to be female persons on this planet.
Mothers need partners who see us as more than vessels for their children.
Mothers need recognition for the work of knowing whose socks are whose and which child can’t stand onions and who likes their back tickled a certain way; for the work of even thinking to document our children’s lives with photos and journaling; for the work of really listening to our children talk about their school problems and coaching them to solve them, or the work of offering them thoughtful and individual solutions instead of trite advice.
Mothers need recognition for the work we put into healing our own traumas so we can show up better for our children and the world around us. Our self-care is not selfish; it’s an investment and it’s for everyone.
Mothers are entitled to financial repayment for all that they sacrifice to raise children. If they sacrifice education and career to raise children, pay them. If they work outside the home, provide quality child care. We don’t owe anyone our wombs and our love. We don’t owe this to the world. It’s valuable sacrifice and it’s worth something. We need to pay mothers like mothering is a job because it is. We need to pay them like we see their sacrifices as optional, like the quality of our world hinges on the quality of their work, because it does.
Mothers are entitled to a whole community raising our children with us because our children belong to everyone. A child well-raised by a community will hopefully stay away from drugs, and out of prison. (Which is not to say that everyone who winds up in prison has earned a place there–– not even close.) A child well-raised will be a good crossing guard, a good teacher, a good pharmacist double-checking dosage information, a good firefighter rescuing that last person from a burning building. Our children will drive cars and fly planes. They will support us all in our old age. Our children are needed by a whole system and so they need a whole system of support.
It is not our job to sacrifice our lives and identities on the altar of motherhood so that everyone else can have their needs met.
It’s too much. This job needs all of us. Working together to raise up a child is what makes this sacred. Sacrificing alone is a morality crime of servitude.
Stop implying this is what makes a good mother. Stop upholding this narrative.
Our Mother is dying
See the system for what it is.
Everything we do to women, we do to this planet.
We mine women for every last resource, investing little, restoring nothing when we’re done; we just move on to the next woman. Women do it to their friends. Employers do it with their employees.
Men do it especially well. A man’s wife leaves him; he quickly finds a replacement to raise his kids and clean his house. A broken young man’s girlfriend can’t bring herself to teach him one more thing; she’s tired and he’s still so far from being at her level. She breaks up with him. He cycles through girlfriends, levelling up in emotional intelligence through their emotional labour until he’s finally marry-able. This happens a lot.
How many men usher their partners through the Cycle of Abuse, using beauty for their own pleasure, throwing their emotional garbage around as though the relationship is a series of music festivals, sending in a clean-up crew of apologies and presents, only ever performing self-awareness rather than exercising it before the big event?
We ravage land; steal resources; act first and think later; expect someone else to fix what we’ve done; and invest an enormous amount of energy denying what we’ve done, denying heaps of evidence, and creating outlandish conspiracy theories to convince people who could hold us accountable that we aren’t to blame.
When our planet sounds an alarm after decades of generous giving and self-repair, when it says it can’t take it anymore, that it needs us to rapidly learn a hundred years’ worth of wisdom and behaviours, that it needs us to invest in it, we gaslight it and tell it to fix itself! At the very last possible second, we say we’ll change our ways because we believe in a future together. We beg it to please not abandon us.
A whole system of abuse undermines, belittles, manipulates and gaslights. Designed to subjugate women, it tricks us into viewing our subjugation as worship. We pretend that we worship mothers the most so that mothers hopefully won’t notice they are subjugated the most — especially if they are mothers of colour.
This system uses women as resources.
We do not honour mothers. We do not honour Mother Earth.
We do not hold ourselves responsible. We do not see our role in the system. We do not even see the system.
We blame, shame and abandon our mothers because we do not see the system.
These women we abandon know which of their children is walking down the stairs before the child arrives, having memorized the metre of their steps.
These women we abandon thought their heads would explode from too much love as they watched their children sleep.
These women we abandon remember the smell of their baby’s rotten belly button stump and kind of miss it. They remember what their baby’s head smelled like.
These women we abandon would love to spend a couple of hours at the gym but the list of everyone else’s needs, if neglected, will multiply and only steal even more self-care time from them later.
These women are soldiers, every one of them. They are nurses, every one of them. They are brave family and community leaders around whom dragons are not safe. They absorb injury after injury and still they limp to our rescue, then we obscenely criticize the quality of their work because we judge mothers against our ideas of what angels and gods would do.
Show mothers mercy. This planet and all of its human systems spins entirely by the force of their love.
