Motherhood, Redo
“To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.” —Maya Angelou
Mothers. You can’t live without them, and you can’t kill them. Well, you can but it’s a very, very bad thing to do, possibly the last taboo along with killing your children. There you go, a tribute to mothers that references matricide and child slaughter. Very biblical, mythical and yes, didn’t Norman Bates kill his mother or was she dead already when he stuffed her?
Anyway, moms are all the rage these days. Moms competing for sexual desirability, making insane lunches in Bento boxes, complaining, boasting, drinking at Marianos and Trader Joes, competing for the best mother ever award which marks them as bad mothers because competition is so triggering. We see them everywhere, dancing with their offspring on TikTok, yelling on reality television, modeling clothes and being interviewed along with their model offspring. Our current Vice President is a mother and the Speaker of the House, and we have mothers all over the globe running countries and being bad asses. This is progress.
With my mom.
What isn’t progress is the fetishizing of motherhood, the claiming that it is everything and that one’s life compromised completely by having a baby. Especially if you are wealthy, employed, white and have help. So many mothers in this country have no help which means no job which means poverty and blighted hopes for themselves and their children. The public schools are in crisis while the usual social networks are vanishing. And then there is all the judgement, the public condemnation, the video evidence of superior mothering which is further proof that mothering has become a competitive sport.
You know what? People have been doing this for a long time and they didn’t spend all their time either complaining or bragging. They got on with it. My mom was a working mom, an architect and a mother of three. She made dinner; she went to the farmers market in 1969! And she cooked, sewed and worked like a rock star. How was her mothering? A mix. How was my father’s fathering, uh, deeply shadowed by drinking too much on occasion? Did we feel loved and adored? Yes. Did we feel safe and precious and proud of our parents parenting? Absolutely not. We were busy being selfish, self-absorbed, children. And then angry and sullen teenagers.
Is this new? Well, no. What is new is the lack of shame, the public boasting and bragging, preening and performing. Look! I’m a mother! Yes, I’m on my cell phone 24/7 and when baby reaches their tiny arms out for contact, for conversation, for human interaction they are met with a square that obliterates your face. I recall being bored stiff, first with that toothless smiling, the repetition of ‘mama,’ the endless days of carrying around the love of my life who awarded me by puking, pooping, and babbling about absolutely nothing. There was no cell phone in 1993, there was barely an internet, there was television and a swing that gently rocked that boy while his mother, his non breast feeding (his fault), guilty mother tried to write another novel and instead mostly cried and watched those giant baby heads in Teletubbies fill the sky, because what else was I supposed to be doing? Making a video?
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach