Mama Madness

Hello Dears!

Especially you mamas out there, because motherhood is kind of at the center of my being these days. And my mom’s birthday is on Sunday!

Most days of my motherhood pass by quite normally, frustration and elation, work and relief, setbacks and breakthroughs. There’s a balance that keeps me going forward. But the ups and downs of motherhood are very much like the ups and downs of anxiety or depression; maybe they’re the same thing, the one experience creating the other and around. We all have mini-episodes of too stressed and too sad, as we move through this life and especially as we move through the monumental task of shaping humans. When our brain chemistry cooperates and the world gives us a break, we can catch enough air in between these little breakdowns (ours and those of our people) to propel ourselves onward. But, those tough episodes can pile up, for us and for our partners and for our kids. When they do, I find myself having to sit back and assess, suddenly alone. Is this too much of too stressed or too sad? For me? For my babies? Is it time for some outside intervention, a new strategy, a new resolve? The answers are hard to pin down because of the way the world fluctuates, the way insurance and money complicate, and the way kids change. So we mothers just continue on, trying to raise the best of babies, trying to be loving, trying to do it right when we are surrounded by so much that seems just a little wrong.

In many ways, I have been struggling with this time of mama madness for a while, a period in which I know I must continue on but I’m not exactly sure how and not convinced that I have the resources to make it all work. I am beyond that realm in which a good book on getting a baby to sleep might offer hopeful solutions, beyond the stage when an expensive stroller with a holder for a latte might bring a sweet and ironic sense of bedraggled decadence. I am a little older now and I can see more clearly how timelines end. I left my intense and rewarding work because it became clear that I couldn’t throw all of myself into both my job and my babies. I’m focused on the parenting now, for better and for worse. And I am less distracted by the newness and the beauty. The beauty is still sustaining, but barely.

I adore raising my phenomenal little beings but I’m a little broken down, as happens to us women sometimes, surrounded by needs yet needing a little more ourselves. My love for my kids has become one of protective desperation, at times, so intense that the fun moves into background noise. I have reached the critical collision point where overwhelming responsibility crashes into idle mental space in the shadow of fear. I am reacting to this fear, pushing aside my own dreams so that when the dangers appear, I can throw my body in front and fight to keep my babies from the darkness of the end. In my practical life, I’m not quite so dramatic; I’m not dressed in the guttural ferocity of a mama warrior but I feel the impulse.

I walk this path of mama madness with determination and gritted teeth but when I pick up my head to look around, I recognize the absurdity. The other mothers on my path, the ones with real problems, aren’t aware of me. They have work to do. They are ensnared in dangerous worlds, raising children in war—between countries, among family members, through gross inequality. Their children know low blood counts, disastrous births, violence, poverty. These women are in it, with little time for contemplation, I imagine. They are actively moving their children into time, walking for them.

It’s easy to feel ashamed at my weakness when my parenting is hard in such a qualitatively different way. My kids are healthy and pretty happy, no sudden illnesses or markers of future difficulty. I don’t worry about the dangers of our neighborhood. I don’t steel them against the markers of race and class. I have prepared them to fight for other children and for the rights of other people, but they themselves are okay. And I should be okay too. I’ve merely turned 50. I quit work to raise children. I walk this path with great luck, actually, never having encountered the tragedies or the real dangers of people who are rightfully a little desperate. But time ambushes me anyway with the stories of the world. These stories find me with skill and rapidity; my Facebook algorithms know that I’m watching out for flu trajectories, climate crisis markers, and other monsters of mothers. They feed my fear effectively, efficiently. I hold Carmelo’s hand as he falls asleep and I navigate with my other hand through GoFundMe pages and email notices that paint horrific scenes of what is and what might be. The line that divides empathy and experience blurs.

And, motherhood is relentless. I love my babies so completely, with so much of my everything, that I know the worry has little chance to dissipate; the caretaking I do will continue on forever with this element of stress. We must stay the course, even if that’s not how good stories are made. Good stories are supposed to lead us into new terrain, protagonist change! And I want that. In movies, motherhood flies by in a first scene so that mothers can be those exciting protagonists. Some frenzied, disheveled woman trips her way through a kitchen of spilled-milk lateness, right before she loses her job, or moves to the country, or goes on an adventure. That’s the way our fiction tends to handle the slow, messy, painful reality of what it feels like to raise a kid in the United States.

The problem with these frenzied disheveled scenes is that beyond skipping over most of motherhood, they tend to caricature the reality. They turn mothers into slapstick comedians, at best, and victims, at worst. We do it to ourselves too, when we tell our stories. I lean on humor and my fellow moms compassionately one-up me with their bad-mom, bad-kid, hectic-life retellings. In these stories, we’re the protagonists who fumble through the obstacles of our existence. The funny replaces the desperate. But, while we allow ourselves to be lighthearted and self-deprecating, we mothers know the reality. We’re not the protagonists. Our kids are. And they’re little and learning and unpredictable and volatile and changing, changing, changing.

It’s our job to maintain, to be consistent, to be unconditional and we must stay in this place of consistent, unconditional selflessness for a very long time—not the ways of a protagonist. We may appear to be slipping over spilled-milk lateness but actually, we’re deftly allowing for our children to spill their milk, we’re late because we are allowing them time to figure things out. As we remain, unchanged, no matter how monotonous or self-injurious or trying, the kids make the bus, they study, they come home, they get a job or go to college, they fall in love, they grow, they change. In motherhood, our role is a little static, by necessity, but no less beautiful; we hold the ground so that they may launch off of it into the newness.

It’s strange that when I think about motherhood and it’s challenges, I don’t go back very far in time. I think about my husband and my children, how my actions might impact them and how their growth and movement might impact me. I think about the social and political world in which I find myself, those factors that constrain the boundaries of who I might become and who they might become.

But I don’t often think about my own mother when I think of my motherhood experience. She’s reserved for a different sphere. I don’t think her as much as I feel her. I feel her when I need comfort, love, and belonging. She is the soft part of my being that settles and rests. She is that deep core of my history—the one that is almost magically drawn to flowers, to the shapes of leaves, and the calls of birds, not because she obsessed solely over these things but because she put them in my path because they were in her path. She has loved me so completely and so long, even through her own struggles and foibles, that she landed deeply within me. She’s the wonder of legacy, the passage of time that I can feel preceding and surpassing me, the something bigger.

If your mother couldn’t offer you this, I hope that somewhere along the line, you have been loved so completely that you feel it. If not, why don’t you come over? Let’s have some tea. You can still be loved and more, you can love.

When I think of my mother and these people who care for us, I have hope that no matter how we have done, no matter how many times we’ve screwed up or become frustrated, no matter how much we are struggling now with the worry and the monotony and the selflessness, no matter how selfish we feel when we consider our own relative good fortune, I have hope that our babies will know some comfort and peace. They will know the beauty we have shown them and they will feel the time that we have given them, the time that is bigger than all of us. We mark the past and the future through our love and our stasis. Mamas, we are the creators of time.

Thank you for all of the love and the peace of forever my dear Mama! Happy Birthday!