Good morning,
I've been taking a class on writing and motherhood and swirling in the perspectives of writers in the middle of both. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me there is motherhood and then there is idealized motherhood.
It seems we're living through a moment of intense writing and examination of care—both the systemic forces around it and our own childhoods. This is so important and I’m all for it. But, at times, especially in works dealing with the latter, I’m noticing an implication that there is a right way to be a mother and if you're not that, you're not a mother at all.
I don’t think this is true. A mother is a mother is a mother. If we have failings, they do not make us less a mother but perhaps less effective at a certain type of care. You wouldn’t tell a bad writer that they are not a writer. They simply don’t write the way you prefer, or even the way you think the world needs them to.
It feels important to untangle the two—our implied understanding of what good mothering is, and what makes a mother.
Many people can offer good mothering. They don’t even have to be mothers to do so.
But not all people are mothers. (A related book: Nancy Reddy’s The Good Mother Myth.)
In our conversations on these subjects, which have mostly been about the works of women in midlife, I find myself craving more perspective on the later ends of motherhood, when your own end is near and you're thinking of your own mother.
It’s a wholly different view. Arundhati Roy does a spectacular job of it in her recent memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. She could indict her mother, as many memoirists do, but instead, she shares the texture of her mother’s life.
It seems inevitable that the details you offer your child today are remembered later, long after you die, when your child is old. My son seems to notice every strand of hair I leave around the house. He folds my hair behind my ears when we hug. He twists my nose ring when he’s falling asleep next to me. Is this his body noticing me? How long will it stay with him?
In the works I’ve so far read by writers at the other end of life, their mothers aren’t always remembered with the same wounds that may have colored younger years, as if scabs have truly become scars. It seems as though these writers remember their mother’s texture, no more, no less. The way you might remember a writer’s imprint on you, whiffs of words that haunted you or held you.
In the last book of poems Ursula K. Le Guin wrote before she passed away in 2018, So Far So Good, there's a poem called “Theodora,” about her mother:
I think how fine my mother was.
Her doings and her things were lovable.
Her turquoise bracelets, her violet
dinner dress with a jeweled waist.
The way when she was undressing
she’d go around with her nylons
unhitched.
I think of all this now with tenderness
and comfort in the recollection.Oh I was so angry at her when she died
for dying, but at last that’s gone
and she comes to me again
with silver and turquoise on her wrists
in the sunlight.
I wonder if our youth is spent experiencing, our middle age evaluating and our older age remembering. I wonder how much I might regret not noticing while I had the chance.
Happy Monday,
Jihii