Observations On Motherhood

When it comes to perspectives on motherhood, if I am deeply honest, I feel I have little to share. It is the area of life that my inner critic reigns loudest, at times almost unbearably so. I do not have tips or tricks or things that I feel I have or am doing all that well. But I do, based on years of unique circumstances, feel I have observations worth noting. While not in order of chronology or importance, I hope they somehow weave together in words what they have woven together for me in meaning and perspective. 

I don’t know of a more charged topic in all of history or modernity, religion or secularity. From The Virgin Mary to abortion – be those gospel or blasphemy to you – the near unmatched weight that all aspects of motherhood carries in our world feels undeniable.  

I don’t know why the Jungian archetypes or mythical characters of fairytales and Disney movies (though they’re often one and the same), are about Devouring Mothers and Evil Stepmothers, with no male equivalents to be found. 

I know if you’ve ever hoped to have a baby and couldn’t for any extended period of time (not to mention for forever) that unless you’re a fellow sojourner on that path, it seems wisest to say nothing more than something resembling, “I’m here for you…” 

I believe women who give up their children for adoption love on a level and in a dimension that perhaps none other know. 

I don’t know what it’s like to lose or care for a mother. (Mine is currently top 20 in the world in CrossFit for 70+). I do know what a gift that is. 

I know what it’s like to have a mother-in-law that feels far more like a close friend, who agrees with you when you complain about her son, and will also keep your children. 

I don’t know how to address or speak about the loss of a child.  

I know that in six years of IVF and 1200 needles later, despite the reality of that pain, that only privilege affords the opportunity to keep trying for that long. 

I don’t know what it’s like to know all along, unapologetically, that one doesn’t want children and to feel ostracized or lonely or wrong because of it. 

I do know what it’s like to be a stepmother and a biological mother (both separately and at the same time) to both teenagers and a baby (both separately and at the same time) and while I have 1,000 thoughts on both of those, I’ll mention just a couple for now. 

On the former: I know no love mined more deeply than loving someone else’s child as your own. It seems nearly to defy the natural order, and no doubt that many forces seem set against it. And yet, probably only if you know, you know. 

On the latter and the age of children: only since having a new baby (now toddler) in the house have I realized how often we as adults romanticize the whatever-is-younger-than-the-age-they-are-now of our children. It could be one year ago or the day they were born, and yet it seems we are obsessed with looking backwards, of romanticizing how little they once were. The problem I’ve come to realize is that for them, at least in my observation, is that this often translates to romanticizing who they once were. They, like all of us (despite a digital world that can show you at all times who we were, and what we looked like), want to be known and loved for who we are…now. 

I don’t understand how they just up and leave one day.

And yet I believe this poem, one my husband and I have spoken about in theory for years but now knocks at the door, must be true. 

I know that the journey of motherhood (not unlike that of entrepreneurship) seems to simultaneously and unendingly be both wildly more relentless and inspiring than I ever could have imagined. 

I know it’s complicated for many. 

Be it tender or tragic, messy or magic, wishing you and yours love this Mother’s Day.