Notes on Mothering
Because I started my career as a journalist, I can’t help but think in holiday-themed stories. So, it is with Mother’s Day a month in the rear view mirror that I belatedly begin an essay on mothering.
Earlier this week, I bought myself some flowers. Peonies are my favorite, and I look forward to this time of year when I can swing by the home of the local man who grows them in his yard. Aren’t they gorgeous?
I’m 3/4 of the way through a book, and I needed to switch gears. Drink some tea. Eat some peanuts. Close the windows to reduce the impact of the sepia-toned Canadian wildfire smoke sneaking through the screens as it swirls over New Hampshire in a cutoff low-pressure system. Find the dog and return him to my lap.
I had hit “stop” on the audiobook version of "The Push" by Ashley Audrain. Spoken words are a treat for a slow reader like me. Plus, the narrator is as good as the prose, which is not always the case with an audiobook. Which is also to say that Audrain’s writing is an enlightening yet disturbing collection of heartbreaks that puncture the experience of mothering. You can find the title at bookshop.org or your local bookstore.
“The Push” is not to be confused with another book titled “Push”, the story of teen mother Precious Jones. “Push” was the 2009 movie for which Gabourey Sidibe’s acting debut earned her an Academy Award nomination. “Push” is also on the list of most banned books of the past school year. That list says a lot about the kinds of people we marginalize and the kinds of stories we’re afraid of having others read.
Since the first chapter, I’ve been saying to myself how much I would’ve appreciated Audrain’s book when I was a new mom. Right alongside, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”, the book I first saw when a college classmate who intended upon graduation to start law school, not raise a child, clutched it during her senior year. The pull-out method had failed her.
Back then, the thought of thumbing through a pregnancy guide repulsed me. The fear of being pregnant haunted me for years until we decided to have children. You spend so much of your life trying to avoid something. Then, all of a sudden, you want that something so badly before it’s too late. It’s a colossal mind fuck. When the pregnancy stick I bought at CVS revealed two lines, I focused on the happy parts—chocolate milkshakes, daily prenatal vitamins, registering for cutesy onesies and decorating a nursery.
But would I have picked up Audrain’s book when, in my early 30s, I was expecting my first? Probably not. I wanted motherly information dressed in clinical fashion, not fiction, so I bought that same pregnancy guide which my college classmate had read.
I was generating weather graphics for the evening newscast when my obstetrician called me at work. “I believe we’re dealing with an ectopic pregnancy,” she began gingerly. “I suggest you to get to the hospital as soon as possible.” I returned the receiver to its cradle and walked to a bathroom stall where I sat and stared at my lap as a cascade of quiet tears rained on my dress.
Portsmouth Regional Hospital is where the staff was supposed to hand me my first-born, not send me home with empty hands and swollen eyes following a shot of methotrexate in my butt. After I told my mom, she ordered a pink azalea shrub delivered to my home. I sat in bed and worried that I’d never have children.
Even though a baby wouldn’t be born when we expected, we had already planned to move out of the section of the 19th century clapboard we had been renting. The quirky landlady who owned the entire house delivered a matter-of-fact response to our premature good news. “There’s lead paint in your place. You’ll need to leave before the baby is born.”
So we left. We moved back to Tulsa where I had been offered a contract as a meteorologist at the NBC affiliate. By then, I was pregnant for the second time. As the baby grew, the viewers grew more vocal. “She needs to get some clothes that fit,” chirped one viewer. “She’s so big, she’s covering half of Arkansas,” said another. Never mind that Arkansas is a different TV market altogether. Cards and small gifts would soon follow.
I eventually gave birth to two daughters over a span of two years, born with no complications and each a week overdue. I was in the hospital giving birth to my first daughter when I bumped into a work colleague and his wife. I don’t remember at what stage of the parenting journey they were that day, but I do remember they had given birth to three stillborn babies a few years earlier.
A news photographer from my station arrived at my bedside in the maternity ward. He had been assigned to shoot video of me with my newborn for a brief voice-over that an anchor would read during that evening’s newscast.
Two weeks later, a phone call rattled me from sleep, the type of deep sleep generally wasted on people who aren’t parents. It was the intern. “We need you to come to work for storm coverage,” he said sheepishly. “But I’m a mom,” I protested. “I have a baby. What will I do with my daughter?” The intern was no older than 20. I’m assuming the conversation felt as foreign to him as it did to me. For a few moments, it didn’t register with me how mothering and working were going to work.
Before my last shift at work, I had told my boss that I would return to work two weeks after giving birth. The mortgage on our first home weighed on us, and paid leave was not an option, so I used the two weeks of vacation time I had accrued.
Returning to work two weeks after giving birth was just enough time to sit without a donut cushion and to walk without discomfort. It wasn’t enough time to rest or to bond with my daughter. It wasn’t enough time to heal the episiotomy, and it wasn’t enough time for the vaginal bleeding to stop. But it was the ideal environment for mastitis to develop. I called out sick. The doctor called in a prescription for antibiotics.
When I gave birth for the first time, I remember feeling powerful. I felt inextricably linked to all mothers: my mother, my grandmothers, all mothers on Earth. While shuffling through pictures to include in this essay, I came across a note that my grandmother in Germany mailed to me 22 years ago.
Oma marvels at the picture of my daughter with her “black” hair, which would eventually turn to blonde. She’s careful to spell out my daughter’s name, even using manuscript for the middle name to make sure it’s not misspelled. I’m touched.
It’s 2023. All of my grandparents are gone. We’ve raised the two daughters. One is separated from us by the Atlantic Ocean. By year’s end, the other will be separated from us by the Pacific. It is in this chapter of my life that I am reinventing myself. It is in this chapter that I have started writing.
Last week, I toured the Moffatt-Ladd House & Garden in Portsmouth, NH. Somehow, you never get around to visiting a place when you live twelve minutes away by foot. My former city was a colonial seaport known for trading and shipbuilding, and John Moffat was a ship captain. He planned the Georgian mansion as a gift for his son. Here’s the mother’s room where she would’ve received visitors after she had given birth.
In little Polly Moffatt’s room, when she was ten, she used a diamond to etch her name and a short poem on her bedroom window. I’ll give you a hint: Roses are red . . . except she spells “sugar” the old-fashioned way. Other than a 5th grader who availed herself of a loose diamond, the story sounds relatable, mother-to-mother.
It rained the day we were there, so the window looks fuzzy.
Motherhood is one of the most meaningful parts of my life. It has brought me some of my greatest joys. But it can also feel like a collection of pressures—the imagined, the real, the social, the religious, the familial, the economic. Those pressures and the stories we’re encouraged to keep quiet make motherhood harder and more isolating than it needs to be. I hope we can progress as a society where, one day, parents are no longer boxed into rigid gender roles and where families have the structural supports they need to thrive. We’ve come far.