My mother died suddenly in 2013 at just 67, when our older daughter was two and our younger daughter was an infant. Before that, my mom helped watch the girls while I worked. I’d drive to my parents’ nearby home and work upstairs in their cozy loft while they read, snuggled, and played with my girls. In retrospect, it was this beautiful stolen season: I got the support I desperately needed, that feeling of being a part of the village so long a part of our shared human history—and I also got to walk downstairs each day and eat lunch and have coffee breaks with my own dear momma. It was the experience of motherhood I had hoped for.
After my mom died, everything unraveled for a while. I felt so alone. Motherhood was a vast dark ocean, and I was clinging to the sides of a rickety little dinghy.
Other than a brief stint working on-site part-time for a contract position, I’ve always officed out of our home (I still do). In those early years of being a new mom, depending on the season of life, I worked between 10–40 hours per week, with varying degrees of success and sanity on a day-to-day basis.
The romance of working from home wears thin when you realize that working and parenting are not really things that can happen simultaneously. This realization sinks in approximately 14 minutes into your first day of working from home while trying to care for one or more children.
Between the feedings and the diapers and the naps and the fighting and the I’m huuuuunnngrys and the spilled everything everywhere and the Can you fix this? and the scraped elbows and the When are you gonna be done, Mom? — any amount of real productivity felt purely accidental, or was the result of desperately putting on Scooby-Do episodes at 11 in the morning and locking myself in my room.
Many days, I said no to doing things with my girls because I had a deadline to meet. Or I said yes to them, because I felt guilty, or because I genuinely just wanted to be with them — and then was left frantically working until 2am, long after they’d gone to bed, to get in a workday that had started at 9pm.
I often felt like both a sub-par parent and a sub-par employee. Some days, I was. I cried in frustration, and beg-yelled to please be left alone so I could just string together a few connected thoughts. I slept through early morning Zoom meetings, forgot to get cupcakes for my kid’s birthday at school, mixed up due dates, was late for every damn thing, and zombied my way through assignments and tea parties alike. That’s the reality.
There were wonderful days, too, moments of grace and revelation and transcendent connection. Some moments I loved in an otherworldly way, like my whole body was made of warm light. Other days felt like I was falling from an airplane with no parachute. My children are the most effective teachers I’ve ever had in my life. And when I say effective, I mean like in the way that doing 100 squats a day will give you an amazing butt: the triumph comes with some brutality. Like most personal growth, it has mostly all occurred in the trenches.
Saying the real things out loud
I resented being a stay-at-home mom sometimes. I know this is a generally frowned-upon thing to say. It’s almost always followed up solicitously by some version of, But kids are amazing, for sure. So amazing. Best thing that ever happened to me. There is this expectation that we temper our messy feelings with a sweeping declaration that negates what doesn’t feel or sound good.
I don’t think I need to balance out my real human experience with less-messy narratives. So I will let the first statement just be its own reality: I resented being a stay-at-home mom sometimes. At times, I was swallowed by the fear that I was losing the very essence of myself. My creativity, time to write, time to take care of my whole self, my hunger for solitude and silence, my friendships—all of it was getting subsumed under this identity of Mom that so often felt like a too-big coat draped around me.
There’s a robust body of mindfulness research (I know, I know) that says our greatest joy is found in living fully in the moment. And yes, that’s real. This is also real: it was so hard to be with it all sometimes.
Yes, there are women who genuinely love full-time motherhood. They make of it an art, feel themselves called and enlivened and energized by this job. They are amazing to watch, and I honor and salute them. I love to see people living enthusiastically into their purpose.
Me, I have often felt like the guy in those 90s commercials wearing the white coat. You know the one: I’m not a doctor in real life, but I play one on TV.
Meaning, some days I was really feeling the role, absorbed in the storyline. I was so connected with the character of Mom that I was Mom, like on the inside, too. A lot of other days, I was reciting lines and looking frantically around for stage direction and waiting for some benevolent off-camera Director to call, Cut! And…that’s a wrap, people. Good work today. Why don’t y’all head on home and get some rest?
Some days I felt out of control, desperate, and deliriously exhausted. I’d watch some mornings, nonsensically enraged, as my husband biked off, unencumbered. He only had one job to do for eight whole uninterrupted hours, surrounded by things like other grown-ups, recognition, annual bonuses, and health care.
Blissfully-retired people would come up to me, probably just returned from a 10-day Scandinavian river cruise, and coo and congratulate. There I’d be, with my brand-new baby, my teething toddler, my hair unwashed and my clothes wrinkled and smattered with dried spit-up, my body aching—and they’d tell me to “just enjoy every minute.” I knew they meant well, and I get the amnesiac power of nostalgia. But also, part of me was just like, Geez lady, read the room.
I don’t know what kind of mom that makes me, other than not alone.
I don’t think it’s necessary for me (or any mom, any woman) to regard these moments of exasperation, unfulfillment, or longing as wasted time. These aren’t feelings I shouldn’t have had, or something to be ashamed of. They just…are.
I don’t think it’s necessary for me (or any mom, any woman) to regard these moments of exasperation, unfulfillment, or longing as wasted time. These aren’t feelings I shouldn’t have had, or something to be ashamed of. They just…are. They’re as natural and human as my moments of contentment and elation. They have seasons and things to teach. Under this huge umbrella experience called Motherhood, they all belong. I know that wrestling with this complicated identity has never meant that I love my kids any less.
Even today, when I see new moms at church or in our neighborhood, I always ask how they’re really doing. I always say, “Parenting is a beautiful gift, and it’s also okay to not love every single minute.” Sometimes they laugh knowingly, and sometimes they start to cry. When we’re struggling in silence, even when that struggle is the most normal, near-universal thing in the world, we can feel so defective for not feeling how we think we should be feeling.
Saying the real things out loud can be a form of tender medicine, I’ve found.
Saying the real things out loud can be a form of tender medicine, I’ve found.
Crossing a threshold into a new form of motherhood
In 2018, for the first time in eight years, I found myself facing the prospect of whole days to myself again. I know there are women who have done it for longer, and bless ’em — but eight years is still a long time. In Introvert Years, it’s like 100. I couldn’t believe that much time had passed. I had a second grader and a kindergartener. The river-cruising retirees where definitely right about one thing: it all went by like I was holding a scoop of water in my hands.
Before I had kids, I spent hours a day alone. I quite liked it. It was jarring to have that open space suddenly shrink down, to have every spare minute and square inch of my body taken up, occupied, demanded. It was equally as jarring then, nearly a decade later, to have that space reappear. Only now I was a totally different human being. The whole world was different, and I had to figure out how to be in silence again.
The night before our youngest daughter Stella’s first day of kindergarten, we snuggled up in the dark before bed. (For the record, before-bedtime snuggles are probably my very favorite ritual.) We talked about her first day of kindergarten, and how we were feeling about it. She had been buzzing all day long, spontaneously jumping up and down with excitement as she’d talk about finally going to school. We talked about the last five and a half years together.
I got to tell her I was so grateful for our time together, because I was. And I got to tell her I was happy for her to go to school, because I was.
I got to tell her I was so grateful for our time together, because I was. And I got to tell her I was happy for her to go to school, because I was.
I asked her how she was feeling. She said, “I’m feeling nervi-cited, Mom.” My girls invented this word to describe that mix of emotions that comes with treading unknown but anticipated waters: nervous + excited.
The next day, as we dropped her off, I watched her bouncy energy suddenly drop as she entered the chaotic classroom. Our girls attend an immersion school, and the teachers spoke to her in Chinese, which of course she didn’t understand yet. She didn’t know anyone. Everything was big and new and unfamiliar. She looked shell-shocked, like she might start crying — not out of sadness, but just out of not knowing what the hell was going on.
She looked like I had felt so many times in my life, so many times in the previous eight years. My chest welled up with that tidal wash of empathy.
I knelt down by those tiny tables and chairs. “How are you feeling, kiddo? What’s going on in your heart right now?”
She looked down at the table, staring hard. “I’m feeling nervi-cited. And a little shy.” I assured her this was normal on such a big day. She nodded.
She was so quiet, so unlike her usual bombastic self. “Mom?” she said, still looking down, willing herself to be brave. “There’s something else. With the nervi-cited and the shy. It’s miss. I’m going to miss you. Nervi-cited-shy-miss. All of that.”
Yes. All of that.
