The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

Sharon Olds

Sometimes, it’s hard to see past the monolith of motherhood. We often find ourselves reflecting on the classic pillars of the “motherhood experience”: obstetrics, child development, mother-child bonding, unconditional love, chicken pox. Our culture tends to focus on the development of women as mothers, but not on their development as an individual, complex person. Meanwhile, every person raising a baby out there has a wildly distinct experience that is generally kept hush-hush in public conversations. By sharing our stories and listening to each other, we can crack some of the tropes of motherhood.

In this entry, we meet Rebecca*, who gifts us with candid, thoughtful reflections about how her relationships have shifted since she became a mother. While she navigates the straits of having three young daughters, she is also balancing a full-time job, her marriage, her friendships, and her own identity.

I want to put out there that it’s possible and/or totally inevitable that her story doesn’t parallel your own experience of motherhood, marriage, or friendships. The landscape of relationships out there is as vast and mysterious as the deep sea. It’s impossible to generalize “motherhood”, despite all its monolithic glory. If any thoughts come to you during this reading, I would love to hear them if you are willing to share!

As a mom, there’s no space for you to be vulnerable or weak when you’re with your children because they need so much. So much of just your role as a mother, at least in my experience so far, is just security. It’s just: I’m here. I’m steadfast. I’m not angry. I am your rock. Period. Stable as hell. Because everything in a kid’s life changes every single second.

Rebecca

Rebecca describes herself as a “cisgender woman in a heterosexual relationship”. She married her high school sweetheart when she was twenty six and loves him to the moon. Growing up in a small town in the Midwest, Rebecca was one of the only women in her friend group to wait and have children later. When she moved to the East Coast for graduate school, she had to build a new support system from scratch. The shifts in friendships really became apparent once she “reluctantly stumbled into motherhood” when she turned thirty. When asked about friendships today, Rebecca easily slices her friends into two separate categories: mom-friends and nighttime-friends.

She defines mom-friends as friends she made when she became a mom, but “not because they’re mothers necessarily”. She says it “just marks a time in [her] life in which they became [her] friends”.

“Mom-friends have become so essential,” Rebecca describes. She admits that a huge part of why motherhood has been fulfilling so far was because of the opportunity to bond (and “commiserate”) with new friends who are also going through these challenging transitions. An important part of the mom-friend bond for Rebecca is the opportunity to vent, to be vulnerable, to break down the motherhood tropes with someone who can empathize.

“If they’re close enough, you can be like, “this is really hard”, and “you know what? I didn’t love my child for the first 10 weeks of their life”. You can say, “I don’t want to have a second child because I can’t wait for the time where I don’t have to be a mom anymore”. Those are the things that I have heard said, and things that I’ve said that make it really vulnerable.”

Vulnerability can be really hard for a mother because of societal expectations. A mother carries on her back the tropes of unconditional maternal love – the “instinctual”, the “selfless”, the “sacrificial” woman whose ultimate mission is inseparable from being a mother. The emphasis on these tropes diminishes the actual experience and humanity of the person within the mother.

“You as a mom are not allowed to say, “today my kids suck”.  You as a mom are not allowed to say that; you as a woman are not allowed to say that. Not that long ago, before women were allowed to be in the workplace, all they had that was theirs and theirs only was kids, kid-rearing, and motherhood. Your power came from your ability to bring that life into the world. If you say, “this is not always great,” you are sort of giving up the only power that women have only ever had to themselves.”

Rebecca argues that “communal therapy” with mom-friends helps normalize some of the feelings of isolation and frustration. She argues that it helps to keep her marriage stronger.

“I decided at some point: you’re the person I’m going to be with forever and ever and we’re going to figure shit out and I’m going to commit to that every morning I wake up.”

“On the surface of things, he is somebody who stands right there with you,” Rebecca describes her husband. Everything had always felt equal between them since they were 15; they stood by each other while moving across the country and changing jobs. “And then we had the girls,” she states.

“You don’t realize how much you learn as a woman just through being a woman in society that men really miss out on. I don’t know a single woman who made it into her 30’s who has not bottle fed either a real person, a baby animal, or a doll. These are the things. We are still raising our little girls to be mothers, and not raising our little boys to be fathers.”

Suddenly, she is the only one who could pump and breastfeed the girls. She needs to take more time off of work. She needs to stitch her “body back together”. She stays home more so she knows what the girls’ cries sound like. She knows when they’re hungry. The pediatricians call her instead of him. When the diapers run low, she is the one who notices.

“It’s these little things that we’re all, myself included, contributing to that make motherhood in some ways harder than fatherhood. And my husband is 100% there. He is all in when it comes to being a dad. Even if the work that we are doing day to day is 50/50, I’m still doing all the management.”

Rebecca’s frustration with the blatant imbalance that flooded her marriage came as a shock. She expresses that she feels incredibly lucky that the foundation of their relationship is strong, and they are able to discuss the problems as they arise. “We need to stop saying that everything should be equal,” she retorts, “instead we should think about fair.”  She reflects that the inequality isn’t only biological – it’s how we’ve been conditioned in ways we didn’t choose. She looks at the new challenge in her marriage as “covering each other’s weaknesses”- learning and developing ways to find balance as a parental unit and as individuals.

Rebecca also sensed that it was difficult for her husband to get to know his children and what role he played in their lives.

“I knew my girls way before he knew them. To some extent, their personalities now are similar to what they were in the womb. If I had described to you the children that I was carrying, to some degree it would be these children. I got to know them so well.”

Benjamin*, her husband, was able to take a chunk of time-off at work to spend one-on-one time with their oldest daughter  in their first summer as a family. With the younger daughter, he wasn’t able to do that. Rebecca noticed that “it really changed their relationship. It took a lot longer for him to get to know her. He misses it. It made becoming a parent harder for him”.

Beyond the logistical balancing act that marriage may encounter with children, there is also an emotional balancing that needs to be addressed. Rebecca jokingly referenced a book called “How to Have Children Without Hating Your Husband”, which helped her name some of the shifts.

“There are so many things that tell you how to have a good marriage, but there aren’t many things that tell you how to balance this physical, immediate love that you have for your children with this esoteric, very brain driven love that you have for your spouse. One you choose, one you don’t choose. How do you balance those two loves? How do you not get consumed by one or the other?”

Some of what we learn about partnership and parenting is through observation and experience. Rebecca notes that her own parents had a difficult relationship with each other and got a divorce. Her becoming a mother has also prompted profound reflection of her relationship with her own mother.

I was like – holy shit, the only other person I feel this way about is my mom!

Rebecca

Rebecca followed in the footsteps of a long line of women who worked in education. Her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother all worked full-time most of their lives, a historic rarity. She didn’t “identify with motherhood” at first, and found it difficult to imagine herself sacrificing her independence to take care of a bunch of drooling babies. When asked about what she may have learned about motherhood from her upbringing, she shared, “hearing my mom and the older generation’s experiences of motherhood, both good and bad, led me to make a lot of choices within defining my own sense of who I am as a mom”.

The intergenerational trauma and learning regarding motherhood directly impacts how women slip into their roles as mothers. Rebecca’s mother’s story is totally different than her own. Her mother had married “late” (in her 30’s) after “sowing a lot of wild oats first”. Rebecca speculates that one of the only reasons she was married was because she “was ready to have kids”. She never really had a partner in raising children, and got divorced when Rebecca was a teenager. She and her own mother’s relationship was one where the “two women broken by circumstance loved and hurt each other in equal measure”. Rebecca’s mother often felt isolated and alone.

Rebecca reflects that she and her mom are “close friends”, but sharing her challenges can be difficult because of her mother’s trauma. She says:

“In some ways, it’s hard to talk to her about my experiences. She says, “well you have it so much better than I had it”. But I’m sure she never really had a voice to say “I had this bad experience”’.

On the other hand, she’s grateful for the powerful and foundational relationship with her mother. She can share her developing identity as a mother with the woman who carried and raised her from birth.

“I don’t know that I appreciated my mother. I don’t think I appreciated the connection that we had and the physical love behind it. Now we’re connecting as adults over a bond that we’ve had your whole lives, even when she were an adult but I wasn’t. To realize, I’ve been completely obsessed and in love with this person and never, ever realized it until I had my own person that I was insanely in love and obsessed with.”

Despite all the difficulty, Rebecca finds wonder and gratitude in watching her young daughters discover the world.

“My oldest just started this new thing where she says “It’s a mysteryyyyy” and she’s just really cool – she’s just a cool human being. I am cultivating this person who didn’t choose to be here. That’s a lot of responsibility.”

Thank you to Rebecca who shared these intimate details of her life with us! Thank you Sam Bavelock for the cover art made from beet juice. Thank you to all the humans willing to converse about motherhood in the interim to help me write this in a semi-cohesive way. This entry may not reflect your own experiences, and of course there is a lot of nuance here with various family structures, gender roles, culture, and the list goes on forever. Motherhood is such a monolith to tackle, so this really just represents a morsel of one person’s reflections.

*Names are changed for some semblance of privacy!