Happy Mother’s Day to 4.3 Out of 5 Women
Mother’s Day gets hyped like it’s the Lady Super Bowl — one day of the year just for women. If you made the team. If you didn’t, it can feel like an annual referendum on the things you haven’t gotten right in life.
Stoppit, that’s what New Year’s Eve is for.
Actually, I came to love NYE this year as the pandemic locked down my FOMO. I poured a Jameson, turned on CNN and went all in with Anderson and Andy. We bounced over to Don Lemon’s house, some viewers tweeted from their sofas, I snuggled into mine. There was no expectation that I be anywhere or anyone. I was one of the gang and I was giddy.
Fitting in is The Big Thing for most kids and my family moving a lot made it a central organizing principle. So I found it comforting rather than annoying when Mom would say, “Just wait until you’re a parent.” It sounded like the ultimate fitting in. She also used to joke, “Be nice to me, you’ll be old yourself someday,” which is a phrase she got from her mother. Neither of them did get to be old, which should have been a clue to not build my castles on that sand, but I wasn’t great at picking up clues, as evidenced by me making out with some of the same guys as my brother in college.
In fairness, a lot of the clues in college were off. My female classmates and I were told that the women who’d gone before us had shattered the glass ceiling. Which seemed reasonable; it’d been four decades since the first female head of government and two decades since the first woman was shot into Space. So the bulk of us dove into prepping to be first-gen working wives and mothers.
Our male classmates seemed to roam campus like puppies, all happy discovery. Even grocery shopping was a free-wheeling fieldtrip. At Meijer’s Thrifty Acres, while I grabbed toilet paper, my friend John beelined toward… a doll? It looked like an actual newborn; he saw performance art. He tucked it under his arm and strolled past a woman who thought for a second it was alive. Delighted, John reached into a bulk food barrel for rainbow kettlecorn to “feed” it, held it naked in the diaper aisle like he’d rushed there straight from home, laid it right on the checkstand conveyor belt, and left it on the roof of his car before “remembering” and getting out to retrieve it. Seeing him have a blast I thought, “Gawd, why am I so serious?” John wasn’t thinking about how or when he’d meet his wife, have kids, fit in work. Besides, hadn’t generations of career men balanced home and office life? We women could just do what guys did.
John went on to raise two amazing daughters. The other day I asked when he’d first thought about having children. He couldn’t remember. “Kids go with marriage,” he shrugged, “there’s no way to prep for either.” I don’t remember a time I wasn’t prepping. Before I could hold a magazine, I was propped in the grocery cart seat with BRIDE to “read” as I rode around the store. That progressed to stacks of parenting magazines at the OBGYN. I get it, babies come out of vaginas, but half of what makes a baby comes out of penises and dudes aren’t at the urologist’s reading AMERICAN BABY. Gynecologists, if you want to be that on theme, putting things into our vaginas interests way more people; get some porn.
So, update — that thing I was raised to do, to have, to be: I didn’t, I don’t, I’m not. Which felt a lot less personal when I learned that for 80% of childless women it’s by circumstance not choice. I’d had no idea. In magazines, famous women either share their “baby joy” or “refreshingly honest answers about choosing to not have children.” In film and TV women still come in just three varieties: young singletons, mothers/grandmothers and the childless sister/sidekick. Aunt Sidekick is too flakey or career-driven to be a mom and treats kids like aliens. Or kidnaps and renames them. Who writes this shit?
I do.
One show I wrote for was a family comedy that killed off the mom. In the next episode, the daughter builds a time machine to go prevent her mother’s death. The girl is visited by her future self who warns that this effort so consumes her life she doesn’t get married and have kids. (The cautionary tale was me?) I suggested that instead the girl’s friends fade away and she doesn’t experience the world. The guy who’d written the script said no. For him the threat of not becoming a wife and mother was the only tragedy dire enough to cut through the girl’s obsession. Throughout the week I weighed the cost of bringing it up again; I carefully said we were painting a pretty narrow bullseye for a meaningful life. He continued to push back, but ultimately changed the line.
Maybe that’s one of the gifts of otherhood, being mindful of which paths get validated, which don’t and helping all voices be heard. As was said (possibly by Einstein), “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
And miss the joys of being a fish. I hope at some point Mother’s Day will feel like Hanukkah to me: someone else’s tradition that I can admire without feeling left out. Sure, there’s a party over there, but I’ve got my own party and it’s a good one. More and more I’m enjoying the party that I’m at. Especially when I’m at my sofa.
Happy happy Mother’s Day to all you moms. I stand in awe of you. All you not-at-this-moment moms and those without moms, I stand with you. Party on, ladies.
