INVESTIGATION
This month, I waited to publish until Mother’s Day because my kids have been sick nearly constantly, and I took them to Disneyland for the first time, and Mother’s Day can be a doozie.
As I write this, I acknowledge that mother can mean a million things to different people. A mother figure may have any gender, any age, any presentation. We may mother ourselves. We may have a great, cis female mother, or we may have a variety of other options. The concepts of good mother and the right way to mother are fraught with stress and toil and pain. And, I like to hope that somewhere inside of the maternal, in whatever form it takes, there’s a succinct and caring connection.
So, as I use the word mother throughout this, replace it with whatever word or role works for you. I am a cis female mother and had a cis female mother, so I’ll write a little bit from my lens. I acknowledge and honor yours.
At this point in my life, my kids are no longer toddlers or babies or little kids, but they are also not yet big kids or teens. They are solidly in the kid category at ages 13, 11, and 8. At this point in my life, writing about my kids has become tricky, and writing about my own mother has become tricky. I have failed so many times as a parent, failed to be the person I wanted, failed to be calm, failed to be open, failed to find the right answer or say the right thing.
My mother struggled with mental health issues that she did not know she had. This was the 1990s in a small town in Florida. The internet became accessible to us for the first when I was 12 years old. There were few resources, little information. My mom bought self help books from the hippie store in our historic downtown. Those books lined the shelves beside Anne Rice and Stephen King, under a line of Disney VHS tapes.
I like to think the self help phase was Mom trying to learn from her mistakes, her remorse, her struggles. I like to think she did the best with what she had.
To be honest, it’s so much easier to write about my father. He died when I was fifteen, so his story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s easier to look at, to analyze. I don’t really have to compare myself to him, perhaps based on this simple fact that he was called Dad and I’m called Mom.
I have a really hard time letting go of my own mistakes as a mother. I have a really hard time bringing any mother to the page in a world that doesn’t seem to have much space for our mistakes. I want to reckon with those mistakes on the page. I want to reckon with the spaces that I’ve had to step in as a single mother, spaces that feel a little more like father. I want to reckon with what happened to me as a kid without blame. I want to understand. I want to write a story that will help my kids’ stories be better, their hearts stronger, if and when they engage with whatever it means to be or to be adjacent to a mother, motherhood, mothering.
EXPLORATION
This month, some readings about mothers.
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