Yesterday, on the day I had scheduled to “finish my essay” (most likely was not going to finish, dream big, disappoint big) and had coordinated babysitting with my dad, my eight-year-old daughter, Eleanor, reminded me over breakfast that I needed to schedule her dentist appointment because she had a new hole in her tooth.
Holes are generally suspicious things, so I checked and there was indeed a hole, a cave in her permanent molar. A cave of sugary delights, of toothbrushing avoidance, of late night, post-brush cravings, of not-enough flossings, of ignorance, of not-enough dexterity, of inadequate toothbrushes, of not enough means to hire a nightly two-minute caretaker to brush all of our teeth or hold us accountable when we do not, of negligence, of tiredness, of forgetfulness, of bad teeth genes, of bacteria’s poop, as the dentist would later put it, which, of course, made Eleanor gasp and me laugh at the delightfully vulgar image. Yes, this was a cavity. And yes, this is also #ametaphor for what I have been trying to write about this past month, which is mothering.
I say mothering even though I am not yet sure what I mean by mothering, based on the complicated animal and human and English history of the word and experience, which I am writing about in my other essay on mothering, that is not yet ready to publish, though I wanted it to be and tried very very hard for it to be. Perhaps what I mean by mothering is all of the ways in which mothering has been used, intended and not intended. The ways it has been connotated and contorted, manipulated, politicized, genderized, moralized, specified and broadened. I’m not sure how to define the word or how to describe the experience. Though I like to be specific with my words, sometimes all of the words and experiences associated with a word work better than one definition. And so whatever mothering means to you I probably also mean, though I have not experienced or witnessed all of these versions, only my own. Even in my own experience, though, mothering is complex and contradictory, and cannot be encapsulated.
After Eleanor, and her older sister, Lydia, left the house for school, and after my dad generously came and picked up our two-year-old, Liv, I called the dental office to schedule for the next day or so. This is a big deal for me, to call, as a recently diagnosed ADHD mother and a hater of phone calls and of coordinating schedules and of driving and of interruptions and of time restraints and of most of what we deem as mothering in modern America these days. [Taking a bow, thank you, thank you. My life has these distinctive hurdles, yours will have yours, thank you for applauding my particular victories.] The office was booked the rest of the week, but had an opening that day in a couple of hours.
I debated booking that appointment, then, per usual, felt a little guilty about debating it, then guilty about feeling guilty about debating it. I’m a human, not a machine without feelings, even if machines can also write poetry now.*
Obviously the dentist sucks, and especially during arranged babysitting—of allllll the places to be when I could be alone doing what I want to do and rarely have time to do????? I considered coordinating with my husband, who was willing to take Eleanor in, but he was coordinating a ride to drop off his car a half hour away for an oil change. “Would you rather do that?” he asked. Absolutely not.
So after considering how painful cavities are and how Eleanor would not be able to concentrate and would most likely interrupt me endlessly until the tooth got fixed—she is also neurodivergent and pain overwhelms the executive functioning desk of the brain—I booked the appointment. And yes, the secretary waited while I flipped this decision over in my mind like half-cooked pancakes: my desires perhaps also needs vs her needs/when do kids’ needs matter more than moms’ needs?/aren’t these needs really desires?/must there be a distinction?/okay, alleviating pain is more important than shattered dreams, but also shattered dreams is a type of pain?/fine. I’ll take her in.
At least the secretary was paid to wait for me while I thought this over while still on the phone, assuming she was paid by the hour or on salary, probably less than she needed to cover her expenses or her human need for rest, but paid nonetheless. Again, the modern history of American motherhood was on my mind as I thought about this paid secretary and the resentment I unfairly felt toward her and her ability to clock out at 5pm. (This was all imagined and assumed, of course. She may have had children at home and covered 30% more of the home and childcare than her partner, but ya know. Whatevs.) Mothering as labor, mothering as unpaid labor, mothering as a privilege, mothering as a divine role, mothering as a gendered role, a lower-class role, a disposable role, a biological role, a revered role, pancakes and pancakes of research and experience and observance and history and portrayal were flipping over in this sad, sad phone conversation.
After I hung up, still sad and disappointed from the turn of events—Mommy is also learning how to identify her emotions, chilies!**—because I am someone who handles death with more grace than I do minor inconveniences, I decided to reframe and parent myself the way my own mother used to do with me when I complained as a child: “Yes, this sucks,” she often acknowledged and validated, thank god. “And . . . how can we come up with a way to make it not so sucky?” Ooof. The call to action I sometimes resented and sometimes needed, though not always, and you bet I remember every time my mother failed.
Yes, I do believe in complaining. Complaining has saved me in many ways the way anger has. Complaining has drawn attention to my overwhelm, my exhaustion, my sickness, that which I no longer or have never wanted to do. I also believe in creating a life so I don’t need to complain so fucking much. For my own sake. And possibly for my mother’s sake.
In my essay I’m still working on, I wrote about the way my mother’s visionary artistry came out in the way she mothered us kids.
“My mother had and still has a remarkable ability to frame what must be done into something beautiful, even desirable. It is the artist in her that imagines a new way to see, a new vision or paradigm, an attractive way to shape as if with a potter’s hands what life hands her or mandates for her. This is what made her an exceptional coach, the few times she chose to coach a young women’s volleyball game, or my younger sibling’s basketball games. She never played these sports herself, she wasn’t offered these options herself as a girl growing up in the 60s and early 70s, but she could pitch a story and she could inspire.
When my younger brother became anxious before his gymnastics meets, she would get down on her knees, look him in the eyes, tell him he was strong– “Look at your muscles! Let me see your muscles!”--and that he could and would do it. “I believe in you,” she’d say. My mother believed in us more than we believed in ourselves, and it seemed her willpower encouraged us to accomplish or perform the way that we did. To this day, she remembers only our best performances as if these alone, and not our failures or poor performances or lost games, summarized our capabilities.
Later, when my mom had to work outside the home for money, after the whole U.S. housing market crashed and she and my dad lost their home, my mother became a part-time realtor. She had a way of envisioning a home, a whole new way of life, the way she explained her sales pitches when she’d come home. This ability was and still is a type of magic I both admire and resent. The ability to make diarrhea look like the elixir of life.”
And so the not-so-shitty story I told myself yesterday about failed plans and disappointment and not enough time and boring tasks was this, and it must be stated because good job me:
“I’ll use this appointment as a writing break because breaks are also good for writing. Let things settle a bit. An hour and a half? I’ll bring my laptop if the appointment goes too long. It’ll be okay. If I don’t finish—and I actually want to finish because I enjoy it and want to get closer to understanding my mysteries, always fun—I don’t finish. I have tried hard and in many, many ways, but I couldn’t do it, and that happens…………..often. Which is okay?”
It is not lost on me that I interrupted my day of writing about my own story of mothering to do some mothering things. Or that I am sharing this un-edited post on one day of mothering instead of my planned edited essay on mothering because I didn’t have time or energy or health to finish the essay I wanted.
I picked up Eleanor. We went to the dentist’s office. Her cavity turned out to be even bigger, a massive [black hole] unto itself. (I am not entirely sure what black holes are or if this metaphor makes sense, but I don’t want to look it up right now.) She may need a root canal and she has three more cavities, not ideal, not smiling about it, but okay because even though we do not have dental insurance, we have savings, and we are literally a privileged and lucky exception in this way, since most Americans live paycheck to paycheck because few can afford what they need and that is also very very stupid. The appointment lasted three hours and I did not write a word, but instead filled out papers with many repeating questions which was confusingly unnecessary, but that’s just my opinion, and I held Eleanor’s hand.
Often the part that gets the most attention in stories like this, the part that gets glamorized and romanticized about mothering, the part that convinced me to want kids as a literally bumbling twenty-four year old, is that I held my daughter’s hand when the pressure got intense in her mouth and she got scared. She squeezed my hand many times. It was tender as all hand holding is, especially with children.
And the paperwork, the double checking of the secretary’s billing mistakes, the conversations with the dentist and assistant, and scheduling, the money to pay for the cavity filling that costs as much as a year’s worth of occasional house cleaning or nannying, is mothering too. And the rest sucks and the rest wasn’t worth the hand holding. When I say worth I’m talking about my ever-accumulating, mostly waste of time mental pros and cons list of mothering. I don’t know if the list is some scheme to prove to my mother and all the patriarchal world wrong about motherhood or some kind of study I intend to include as a footnote in my letter that says goodbye to American family life or my children, but either way, no one, especially me, should trust the letter. It has dubious intentions and the results will only lead me to abandonment. I don’t know why I keep a tally, but I do. I’m confessing now.
Maybe somewhere down the road, my daughter will remember yesterday’s hand holding, maybe she will develop a reservoir of impressions of hand squeezes over our lifetimes, maybe the connection and trust we created yesterday may accumulate and stand out in her own glittering artwork or comics or essay she creates some day if she so chooses to keep creating, I hope she does. She may not. The problem is, though, and why I keep coming back to my pros and cons list and the idea of whether or not this is “worth it,” is the bad experiences are accumulating too and there’s more of them.
After the eternal appointment and booking the next appointment for her other cavities, Eleanor and I were both tired and hungry, so I dropped off Eleanor with her dad, and went to pick up Liv at my parents’ house. While holding Liv and complaining about my tragic day to my mom, Liv threw up suddenly on my chest, so I ran to my parents’ bathroom and put Liv in the tub, threw off my sweater and jacket and Liv’s too, then washed her off while she cried. If it weren’t for my motherly empathy and my adrenaline and strong gag reflex, I would have cried too because her pain evoked a terror in me of losing a night of sleep to clean up vomit, which would inevitably result in my own vomiting, my other kids’ vomiting, and probably dad’s vomiting, dominos of vomit, see you all in two weeks. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: sickness is a catastrophe on a family.
My dad had left prior to this, so it was my mom, after a long day of work, who jumped into action by throwing me a sweatshirt and putting the barf clothes in a plastic bag that she and I fought about what to do with. “I can just wash them here,” she offered, to which I replied, “No, I’ll just throw them in at home so I don’t have to drive back and get them.” The bag of vomit clothes is sitting in my laundry room unwashed even now.
My husband had already managed dinner from our pre-made dinners that are worth it in my other pros and cons list about food and prep, and so luckily I scarfed down crock pot ribs and green beans while keeping a terrified and attentive eye on Liv who got saltine crackers and soda for dinner. She did not throw up again and the mystery and beauty of a child who vomits only once and not more is something perhaps only a caretaker can appreciate. So it was just a random barfing up of crayons? Not the flu? What a mercy, the kind you only appreciate after imagining the worst.
Feeling exhausted because I’ve got fibromyalgia and every once in a while I get these flare ups, days on end, I crashed on the bed and the children just crawled to and around me like ants while we watched The Mindy Project, which is not appropriate for children, including mine, especially when Mindy mentioned having a sculpture of Danny’s penis, and later when Lydia asked, “How can you be pregnant if you’re not married?” and I looked at her and said, “Same way,” because I had given her the sex talk last year and she had assumed some things like marriage. She gave me a look of fear, then disgust. But I absolutely cannot watch children shows, especially when I’m having flare ups, but let’s be honest, even when I am not. I zone out with the kid shows, even though they are so busy and chaotic with so much going on at once, the annoying sounds eventually making me more irritable and on edge. When I had enough energy again to put Liv down, it was my turn tonight, my husband and I rotate, I put her down, then sent the girls to bed after brushing Eleanor’s teeth myself because I no longer trust her. But my older girls are in this new stage–an eight and nine year old stage– where they can mostly do everything themselves, including reading until they fall asleep, though I am still shouting orders from my bed to keep their neurodivergent brains on track. It is a new, full of grace period, where bedtime is not the tornado it once was, which uprooted every ounce of good parenting we may have done during the day. My children usually become quite cute and nostalgic and cuddly even though I don’t care because I have other things to do– “Goodnight, Mom and Dad” or “Goodnight, Mama and Papa,” as Lydia sometimes randomly says, which makes us laugh–Papa? There was a time long ago when Lydia randomly called me Mother and I enjoyed it like a poem whenever she said it. She no longer calls me this, and I can’t remember when she stopped. Probably during the early Covid years when we all, but especially me, turned into demons.
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There was a time at the dentist office, though, when Eleanor, with gauze and clamps in her mouth, raised her hand. This was a signal the dentist gave her that meant “I’m in pain.” She raised her hand unabashedly. I say unabashedly because when I was a kid, and I honestly couldn’t tell you why, I hid my pain. I hid my vulnerabilities. I didn’t want others, especially those who could embarrass me or break my poet heart, seeing my pain, my sadness, my fear, or any emotion that wasn’t happy or pleasing. There’s probably some repressed trauma there lol. Maybe as a result of my gymnastics coach who used to scream in my face to get on the bars again and again until I quit landing on my head because I suddenly had the twisties, but I don’t know. There were multiple times, probably because the decay had gotten to her roots or nerves, hence the possible need for a root canal, when Eleanor raised her hand. When they removed the items from her mouth, she would say, “That hurts me.”
To witness my child state her own pain as if it were any other thought, to reject this pain because she knew she didn’t need it in this context, to tell another person, a kinda scary, older person, to stop hurting her like it was a matter of fact, well, let’s just say I added this to my pros list. A part of me, the frightened part of me that pretends I’m okay, the part of me that hides or lies to myself, that says to me your pain, your flare ups, your fatigue, your aches, your suffering, your sickness, your overwhelm, your burnout doesn’t matter; the afraid part of me that says you are not a good enough mother, person, lover, friend, daughter, writer unless you do more and well; the part of me that shrinks because there is a fear that unless you do what needs to be done for everyone else, the dinner, the attunement, the nightime tuck ins, the storytelling, the not complaining, the [adequate] toothbrushing, the kid shows not the bad shows, the laundry, the cleaning, the scheduling, the phone calls, you can’t be here. Your pros must outweigh your cons or you shouldn’t be here.
What are you supposed to do as a mother, or what are you allowed not to do, once you are in pain? Raise your hand? I have raised my hand so many times. So many people have seen me raise my hand, usually other mothers who recognize a mother’s bruised or broken hand when they see it. But they can only tell me my hand is seen. They cannot stop the drilling, the pain, the nerve shock, or the rotting root, and there seems to be no one, no system, no solution in America that yet can. And even though Eleanor tells me she doesn’t want children and I tell her to never have children if she doesn’t want to, so it may not be an issue anyway, I don’t want a life of exacerbation for her. I want something better, easier, kinder to her. I can’t make it all the way better for her, not alone. And even though I love her, even though she lets me hold her hand, even though she’s the greatest kid, way cooler than your kids prob, I guarantee, even though the stubborn Taurus in me is determined to live a happy, beautiful life with my kids until my bones are put in the ground, I want something more beautiful for her. Not because there isn’t some or much beauty in my life, but perhaps because there is not enough of it, or perhaps because I, like my own mother and her mother, and our partners and communities are often stretched too thin to appreciate enough of the world or our lives.
Perhaps what I can give Eleanor and my other daughters is simply the encouragement to keep listening to their pain. Audre Lorde tells us our pain is a message, our suffering is a message, and in this way it is a gift because it can guide us to what we need. Now readers, you don’t have all the context of why mothering for me and for many of us is so hard in America, you only have this one silly day. You don’t have the context, yet. That will come in my next essay when I am able to finish it. I am choosing not to finish it now because my pain matters too, I’ve been sick, I’ve been overrun with others’ needs, that’s simply a fact, thank you Eleanor for reminding me of this fact, and I simply cannot finish it now. Until then, I am wondering whether mothering for my daughters–if they want to mother and if they can–as things are now would be good for them, better for them than not mothering. That’s a horribly tragic thought, but I must express it because for me, mothering was always the only and ever option, the holy one, the divine one, the fulfilling one. There’s a pain in doubting all of that, especially after becoming a mother. But I must admit the pain mothering has caused me–as I have done it and known it–not only for my girls, but also for me.
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I am writing this small un-edited post to announce my real essay isn’t ready yet, somewhat out of an obligation to my own self-imposed deadlines and standards, somewhat out of a love for writing and for articulating my experience at all stages, somewhat out of an obligation to those who pay for a monthly subscription—thank you, sincerely, I see you and I make enough to cover my soda costs–, somewhat out of my own ambitions, my need for some kind of control, my stubborn and capitalistic tendencies. Wow, writing sounds a little like mothering.
I am also writing because there is a wound here. I want to raise my hand, to say I am hurting today, and I hurt yesterday, and I’ve been hurting for a long time as a mother and reading and writing about mothering has been hard to sit with, and reflect on, let alone publish. I am a writer, and I am also a mother. And I’m giving to myself what I need now: an articulation, a witness, more rest, and more time.
Ps. This essay was supposed to be published before midnight on January 31. Lost track of time. Good.
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*So AI can write poetry now and create art. Words and art from history are uploaded into the computer, which then creates algorithms that produce poetry and works of art of its own. The question is, is a computer filled with a wide expanse of human literature (although this expansive collection is exponentially biased, exacerbating our racial, gendered, etc biases) able to write poetry that is more human or less human than one human’s ability to write poetry? Riddle me this.
** Chilies, as in the hot peppers not the restaurant, is what I sometimes call my children. It was accidentally used once, and I’ve never been able to get rid of it since because it fits. I have an assortment of other terms I call my kids: boobies, bugs, turdies, cubs, lovies, babies, gurkers,*** etc etc. My kids, like myself, are all these things.
***gurkers: a term my dad *I think* invented to refer to babies and the way they spit up on your head. I believe my little sister Lissa once “gurked” on my dad’s head? But be careful of anything my dad says because he also says he speaks cow language, learned it in college, and we kids believed him forever until one day, when a cow crossed the road and I made cow sounds for my kids, and instantly remembered this about my dad, the way he got out of the car and moo’d at the cows and the way the cows all hurried as much as cows can off the road. Right then and there, with kids of my own did I realize that my dad did not speak a cow language**** or take cow language classes in college. This wasn’t an instant awareness, but a gradual one that culminated into this moment of realization.
****Although, now I am convinced that Eleanor speaks and understands dog language, so cow language COULD be a possibility, but I am still not convinced this is true for my dad, and know for a fact that he did not learn cow in college, but perhaps could have learned it on his grandpa’s farm (or some relative’s farm, can’t remember), though I don’t believe this is what he was referring to.)
I hope I do less harm than good as their caretaker. And often I wonder what csn I let slide. What IS necessary?