On Motherhood...

I wrote this for a memoir contest. I didn’t win, but I still like this essay and it was a good practice in vulnerability. Please let me know if any of it resonates with you!

There are two types of women – one who embraces motherhood with zeal and one who mourns the loss of her own identity. 

I felt a bit like a foreigner in a new land when I became a mother six years ago. I was totally in awe at the miracle of life, but I could have never been fully prepared for how dramatically my life and identity would change. And now after two children, I am still working on embracing both identities as a mother and writer. Case in point – many of us moms in the pick up line at school can’t remember each other’s first names, but we know whose kids belong to who. Only kids call me “Cash’s mom” to my face, but I am sure many of the women think of me the same way. I’d rather they know me as “Jenna, the writer.”

I have an innate, strong sense of independence and I consider it one of my best qualities. In my early 20s, after earning a liberal arts degree and living abroad, I was ready to create my own identity as a working professional. Having children and starting a family was something I’d think about after I put in my time establishing my career, dating and checking out every hot spot in town.

My mother, on the other hand, was painfully shy and when she had children she felt like she could finally relate to other people with a natural topic of conversation. Her identity was built around her children.  After high school, she put off college and began working right away. When she met my father and married, it was expected and accepted that she would assume the role of child bearer and homemaker while he tried to get one of his many business ventures off the ground.  I never felt the same sense of purpose my mother did – and many of her generation – as a young woman to marry and start a family as soon as possible.

My mother loves to feel needed. She lives to take care and nurture, contrary to her aloof facade. When her mother died prematurely, she was left to care for her father and little brother.  And then again, when her father was diagnosed with lung cancer, she cared for him until the day he died.

“I can’t say I was always content being a wife and mother but I did love my girls,” my mother finally confessed to me after I became a mom.  “Life is a series of ups and downs and all we can do is roll with the punches.”  Her words gave me peace and I try to live by them each day. 

She tells me she used to feel a sense of pride when people asked her if she was my mother. Mind you, I was no wunderkind, just a fairly respectable kid with good manners. But she loved being associated with me because it was part of her identity. I was my own independent person, making orthodontic appointments for both her and I when we got braces at the same time. I reset the clocks in the house at daylight savings time, I planned my own birthday parties and packed my own lunches. She saw her value in preparing hot, healthy meals when I arrived home from school and lending her artistic talents to the school carnival. She sewed my patches on my girl scout sash and taught me how to spot a good bargain at the Gap. That was her version of mothering. 

I recognize the privilege of having a mother who built her life around me, but I wonder how my children’s experience will differ from having a mother chasing down news stories or worrying about how to finish her next book. Do they feel proud if they see my name in print or my book on the shelves at a store? Will they appreciate how I stop and scour every Little Free Library to find new books for them to discover?

Aside from the identity crisis, the emotional highs and lows associated with children is just something I was not equipped for either. The price you pay for the unbridled joy that children provide is the responsibility of keeping them thriving. In any given week, I vacillate between feeling totally inept and having heroic powers as I try to navigate the demands of motherhood, managing a household and keeping a career afloat. 

As I lie with my daughter after another tantrum, the permanence of our “arrangement” weighed heavy on me. For the next 15 years minimum, I’ll be the punching bag, social media police, rule enforcer and the shoulder to cry on. More often than not, I just get so exhausted by all the responsibility of it all. 

I have often tried to express this sentiment to my mother and she simply can’t relate. 

But also, comparing parenting in the 80s and 90s to current day is like trying to read the same instruction manual in two different languages. The world is a different place now than when my mother became a mother and the rules of parenting have changed dramatically. Social pressures, mom guilt – these constructs weren’t nearly as prevalent  back in the 80s. 

Eventually, my mother went back to college to earn an interior design degree and start her own business. I don’t ever remember her putting work before her family and I hope that my kids never will either. I am already so proud of the kind little humans that they are becoming and am erupting with love for them. What I’m still working on is figuring out how I can be content embracing two different and equally important identities so we can all live in harmony – me, my family and my conscience.