Welcome to The Mother Lode
an introduction to this newsletter
Welcome to The Mother Lode!
If you haven’t already, I hope you read the about page to learn what to expect with this publication and why I created it. The bottom line? Motherhood can be a lonely endeavor. Maybe you were lucky enough to make some mom friends at the baby-play class or at the co-op preschool. Or you had kids around the same time as your pre-motherhood friends and were able to transition into a supportive community in the After. But no matter your unique situation, the early years of motherhood are solitary, even as you never seem to find yourself alone.
The hardships of motherhood aren’t always talked about. I’m grateful that some social media accounts are beginning to counteract the sugarcoating of motherhood with honest, no holds barred postings like those of Mother.ly, Scary Mommy, and Not Safe for Mom Group. But what if there was a place where we could discuss the difficult parts of motherhood, examine why they are so hard, and also whether we might do something about it? That’s what I hope The Mother Lode might be. An exploration of motherhood, which of course means an examination of gender roles, and the patriarchy, and the societal structures that continue to expect that mothering should be our primary endeavor as women.
Motherhood is a tricky job; it demands so much of you that you often feel like you have very little left of yourself. That dissonance can feel unbearable and so sometimes we lose ourselves in motherhood because to try and reclaim parts of our lives for ourselves feels too impossible an endeavor.
But it’s time to learn how to be mothers without sacrificing ourselves.
Like so many mothers, the pandemic was both an agony and an awakening for me as I faced an impossible situation: mothering 24/7, with no breaks, no babysitters, no place to send my kids. To be clear, motherhood was not easy even in the Before. Yet the pandemic shone a spotlight on how little society supports us, how many people still shrug their shoulders at the needs of working moms, saying: well, if she wanted a career, why did she have children? What exactly did she expect?
Men are allowed to have both children and careers and yet there is still a denial for women of this very same right. You can currently see it playing out in the halls of Congress.
Ever since my awakening, I have been trying to rebel against the structures that aim to keep women in their place, both for my own fulfillment in life and also so I can raise daughters who do not feel like they have to remain small to make others more comfortable. It is not easy work, but I know I am not alone in it. This newsletter is to give voice to the many women who are trying to reclaim space for themselves in a world so intent on denying them.
A taste of what’s to come via some of my favorite quotes:
“To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life.”
Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply
“I have to get away from him, just so I can forget for hours at a time that I’m a mother, until suddenly I’ll glance at my watch or hear a child shouting and remember. But I know it's what keeps me sane, the forgetting. If I lived inside of my love for Josh and Kate all the time, I would be trapped. I would burn up from the intensity of my own feelings, and nothing would be left of me but a little pile of ash.”
Dani Shapiro, Family History
“...[My] mother groomed me to take more than I should. Taught me how to form my body into a clay jar to hold the spillage of her. I see now this is always happening to girls.
Girls are carrying too much. We are spilling over, top-heavy and destabilized, but praised for our maturity and adaptability if we take it, denigrated if we do not. Trained not to rage, we work in code, our bodies the medium. We eat anger and quietly metabolize it to keep you comfortable.”
Nina St. Pierre, “A Girl, Dying” in Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“Patriarchy is the house in which we all live. It possesses all of Western culture and industry and has for centuries. But I knew what she meant, the way that a part of one’s mind that one has worked hard to expunge of patriarchal values can suddenly regress. Even the most self-actualized women I know have embedded voices in them still faithful to the power structures they have long intellectually condemned.”
Melissa Febos, Girlhood
“She wanted to tell the girl: It’s complicated. I am now a person I never imagined I would be, and I don’t know how to square that. I would like to be content, but instead I am stuck inside a prison of my own creation, where I torment myself endlessly, until I am left binge-eating Fig Newtons at midnight to keep from crying. I feel as though societal norms, gendered expectations, and the infuriating bluntness of biology have forced me to become this person even though I’m having a hard time parsing how, precisely, I arrived at this place. I am angry all the time. I would one day like to direct my own artwork toward a critique of these modern day systems that articulates all this, but my brain no longer functions as it did before the baby and I am really dumb now. I am afraid I will never be smart or happy or thin again.”
Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch
“Birth is not merely that which divides women from men; it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them, she is not herself; when she is without them, she is not herself, and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.”
Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work
“If I had had a big accident, or I’d been mugged and had precious things taken from me, I would talk about it. But we don’t talk about the things motherhood takes away from us in this way. And the thoughts and freedom we lose when we become mothers are invisible, because what we gain – the love that defines our relationships with these golden children – is so huge.”
Clover Stroud, My Wild and Sleepless Nights
"Mothers have martyred themselves in their children's names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.
What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible burden for our daughters to bear—to know that if they choose to become mothers, this will be their fate, too. Because if we show them that being a martyr is the highest form of love, that is what they will become. They will feel obligated to love as well as their mothers loved, after all. They will believe they have permission to live only as fully as their mothers allowed themselves to live. If we keep passing down the legacy of martyrdom to our daughters, with whom does it end? Which woman ever gets to live? And when does the death sentence begin? At the wedding altar? In the delivery room? Whose delivery room—our children's or our own?
When we call martyrdom love we teach our children that when love begins, life ends. This is why Jung suggested: There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent…
What if a responsible mother is not one who shows her children how to slowly die but how to stay wildly alive until the day she dies? What if the call of motherhood is not to be a martyr but to be a model?”
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
Stunning! I now have great books to read. I've only been a mom for twenty-five years. I can't wait to be a person.