On mothering through the stages

where I ramble on about the messiness of mothering and all the feelings that come with it

I’ve been thinking about motherhood a lot lately. By lately, I’m talking at least 23 years and even more in the last eight after my mother died and then for the last seven years working on a manuscript about motherhood. The stage of mothering I’m in now is one where they might message me or call me to ask how to make stewed apple or where they can find something. They wrap me in their arms and hold me, peck a kiss on my forehead, rub my back. But it hasn’t always been this lovely. And still, sometimes we have gruff words for each other, but on the whole this stage is great.

I attended the M/OTHER festival at The Wheelers Centre last week and while this wasn’t the impetus for thinking about motherhood, it certainly was a catalyst for an eruption of feelings.

The M/OTHER festival had a range of panels with thinkers, artists and authors talking about some aspect of mothering. I was reticent to attend. I’m at the latent stage of mothering. My sons are adults who are mostly independent. Those hard years of wrangling them are done, mostly. We now have a more adult-to-adult relationship, which is something I had always looked forward to. But, and this a big but, there are still things that grate on me in my mothering role.

Some of this has to do with menopause (oh! no! that awful word we don’t like to say or think about) and some still has to do with just being a mother and trying to keep a hold on having some sense of pride…no, that’s the wrong word and importance is too strong…relevance is more aligned to it. Having a sense of relevance to these gorgeous young men who have seemingly turned out okay.

As my sons have moved through the stages of infanthood to childhood to teenhood to adulthood, my role has changed, or more to the point, my mother-work has changed. It’s moved from doing everything for them to guiding them to being close by but not in their faces while I make sure they’re okay to standing back and allow them to be adults. Each of these stages came with its own struggle.

Years ago in those years when everyone seems to have advice for mothers of babes, someone said small kid small problem, big kid big problems. It filled me with intrepedation. If I was struggling to get through the day with three kids under four, then how would I cope when they are big? The good news is that as they get bigger, so does your belief in yourself that you know your kids best and your instinct is pretty much right each time. So, you’re usually on top of it before disaster unfolds.

Anyway, the M/OTHER festival brought back memories of those early years with that feeling of being in some weird and ill-fitting cocoon that muffled all senses of anything else other than the kids. A deep lack of sleep, a fog that smothered. I attended a session called Nightbitch that had Kate Mildenhall talking with the author Rachel Yoder about Rachel’s book Nightbitch (where a stay-at-home mother turns into a dog from her rage “One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...”).

Kate Mildenhall and Rachel Yoder

I hadn’t read the book when I attended the panel (I’m reading it now) but the title resonated. I may well have also been a nightbitch in those early years. As Rachel spoke about those early years of mothering, I was reminded of the full range of emotions that those years brought. The rage, the love, the joy, the exhaustion. The desire to be doing anything other than mothering, the fierce protection of mothering my children so no one else could do it. The conflict within, continuously. The lack of domestic labour (including emotional labour) balance. Wanting to do anything other than mothering, but not wanting anyone else to do the mothering for me. The angst at whether I would ever be able to exist in society as anything other than a mother, the desperation for strangers to know that I was more than those other things, I was a mother. I was a mother and with that came the ability to do so much more than I could do before mothering. By mothering, I had levelled up in all my skills.

Toward the end of my years of peri-menopause (a stage you seemingly only learn about when you are in the middle of it…what is going on with that, women!? Some warning would have been great!), my GP sent me to the obstetrician as I had gone to the GP about extremely painful sex (I assume, like one does, that I had some terminal thing, like cancer, and was most likely dying…I was not). The obstetrician examined me, then in a matter of a fact way that only doctors seem to do, said Your eggs have dried up.

Okay.

Thanks.

Thanks for delivering hard-to-receive news in a delicate way.

I left her office with a script for some pessaries and a feeling of sadness. Sadness at knowing my eggs had dried up signifying to me an end of mothering, even though I didn’t want to have any more children. It made me think about what I was if I was no longer a fertile woman. Was I just a shell of a woman now?

One thing medical people always ask when you talk to them about menopause, is when did your mother go through menopause. Am I the only woman in the world whose mother never told you? My mother was no longer around when these questions were asked of me so all I had to go on was a sketchy memory of my father building Mum a space for a pottery kiln and wheel and, either it was said or I assumed, he had done this to make her happier in a dark time that could also potentially be known as menopause.

Maybe this was part of me building into my plans of our renovation a room for me to create and spread out in. A room of my own that was not filled with anyone else’s things. A room that I could close the door on and no one could come in to ask me a question about how to do something, or where to find something. A room to say to my family that I am something other than a mother.

But then, here, I write about mothering. Still.

The M/OTHER festival reminded me of the rage I felt over the years of mothering. That conflict within to soothe and care and love versus the desire to scream and rage and run. After 23 years of mothering, that conflict is there but it is diminished by time and experience. I know it, see it, acknowledge it, but I’m better (or more able) to voice it when any of my sons treat me with disrespect (a disrespect I recognise from my relationship with my mother when I was their age).

I’m lucky. I have a beautiful respectful relationship with my sons that has come out of some really hard years where my love for them raged against the demons that wanted to destroy them. My relationship with them allows me to say things that my mother never did. Things like, Hey, it really hurts when you treat me like xyz. And then we can talk through it.

One question that came up during the M/OTHER festival was about why mothers are not told about those really hard feelings that come up when you have a little one: the rage that will surprise you, the wonder at how the hell are you going to be able to do this and will you ever find yourself again. I remember thinking that when my kids were babes, but also when they reached teenhood. All I’d heard was that teen years are hard. But they are so much more than that. They are years filled with great conversation, with joy and love. Yes, the bigger the kid, the bigger the problem, but as parents you’ve grown with them so you’re better equiped. I’ve screamed and cried into my pillow or girlfriend’s shoulders more times than I could count. But I’ve also stood on the sidelines and grinned like there’s no tomorrow. The one thing that always saved me was some other mother, usually at a later stage of mother, saying, Hey, you’re doing great. They’re the voices I needed to hear over the years, not the nay-sayers who picked holes in my patchwork of mothering.

So, I say to all mothers out there at whatever stage of mothering, You’re doing okay, in fact, whatever way you’re mothering, you’re doing great.

Till next time, x Meg