It is May, the month of Mother’s Day, the month my mother died and my daughter was born. I lost a mother 15 years ago and became a mother 8 years ago today, though I would say nurturing was inside me long before I became a parent.
That’s not to say every female is a mother or every person should procreate. It’s also not that I want to stereotype women or mothers as nurturers. I think all humans have the capacity to nurture, some do it better than others, women are both socially programmed and given more examples of this a lot of the time. But the nurture of other human beings is a skill we probably all have some inclination for and can learn.
Motherhood is not easy, though.
Pregnancy, labor, and birth aren’t easy.
I had two early (“biochemical”) miscarriages one before my first baby and one in between my two living children.
I vomited about 100 times across two trimesters of both (successful) pregnancies.
I screamed bloody murder during both vaginal deliveries. It was unfathomably painful, and yet it felt like I’d achieved something amazingly empowering.
When I was 20 weeks pregnant with my first baby, I found out she would be born with a cleft lip and probably a cleft palate. This meant she wouldn’t be able to breastfeed. She would require numerous surgeries. She would need speech therapy and orthodontic work.
Then in labor I nearly bled to death when my placenta deteriorated and came out in pieces while other pieces remained stuck. I ended up having a D&C three weeks after my first baby was born.
And my first was not an easy baby. I had 2 hours sleep the first three days of her life: 6hrs sleep in a 72hr period. I was an absolute wreck. I couldn’t sleep because I had to pump colostrum every 3 hours around the clock. I kept pumping 7 times a day for 7 months and by then I was nearly insane with sleep deprivation.
I lost count of the amount of times I wanted to let my baby scream it out and learn to put herself back to sleep in the night. Plus, being a cleftie, she swallowed a lot of extra air through the holes in her lip and palate, which caused gas and indigestion (basically colic). It wasn’t until her first surgery at 7months, and me quitting overnight pumping, that we all slept a tiny bit better. Still she didn’t sleep through the night until she was 18months old.
The second baby didn’t sleep much better, the difference was I could pull her onto my boob at any hour of the day or night and we would both fall soundly back asleep. So even though she also didn’t sleep through the night for about 18months, we slept much better in general and breastfeeding was such a profound gift that came naturally the second time around. The first was bottle-fed both breast milk and formula. My second breastfed for 3.5 years!!! I had to pry her off my uni-boob (the other side stopped producing milk) on my 41st birthday. I was done. Daddy put her to sleep for a week or two so I wouldn’t have to fight it out with her.
I can’t say I’ve loved every minute of motherhood. The sleep depravation for the first year was emotionally unsettling. Watching my baby go through 3 surgeries before age 2-and-a-half, set my nerves on edge. I was afraid she might die. Afraid of how this kind of bodily trauma might be remembered by her. Afraid that I might even be making the wrong medical decisions (no one believed that, but it was still a fear that I had). I felt guilty for changing the way she looked as though how she was born wasn’t quite acceptable. I have to remind myself year after year that the point of these plastic surgeries is to produce the “best possible outcomes,” in as many areas of life as possible. To improve her eating, chewing, sucking, breathing and ability to speak. To make her more socially acceptable, perhaps, but more so to increase her ability to communicate, be understood, make friends and thrive in society.
She also had adverse reactions to morphine after the first two surgeries. Both times we lived through another 24-48hrs or extreme sleep depravation with a baby thrashing all day and night from this adverse response to drugs (surprisingly not as much from the physical pain of surgery).
But motherhood/parenthood is so much more than sleep deprivation and difficult medical decisions. It was hard to make decisions about when and whether and how to work after having kids. I have been a working mum, a stay at home mum and a work from home mum. Plus motherhood / parenthood is definitely WORK (and it was government-paid work for the years I lived in Australia).
I had a business as a piano teacher and kept teaching a dozen or so students per week after my baby was about 4months old. I didn’t stop teaching until after my second was born. I considered quitting my writing career in those early years. But less than two years into parenthood the Covid pandemic exploded across the globe, and the last thing I wanted to do was give up my dreams of successful writing right when it felt like a monumental shift was taking place in our world.
So I have worked from home, writing, blogging, reading, reviewing, editing and now also podcasting. Still I have cooked and cleaned and taxi driven my kids around, and I put them in preschool a few years before school so that I could focus more on writing during the hours they weren’t at home. Having them at school has been a godsend, though I don’t think a lot of parents like to admit this complex truth.
Still, parenthood has many rewards. Just the feeling of how much you can love someone outside yourself and how much they can love you in return is an intense, acutely painful reward. Painful because you would never forgive yourself if something went terribly wrong. Painful because you want them to thrive and be happy and healthy and you kick yourself for all the times you get so impatient and can’t wait for them to grow up and stop behaving like the child they are.
We learn so much about ourselves as parents. We are triggered by our own memories “I used to say/do that to my parents. Now I know why they hated that.” Triggered to the point of lashing out – smacking one child for hitting the other child, all the while saying this is not how things should be. No one should be physically hurting anyone else in this family. My anger is triggered more often than I care to admit. My patience is tested and I am found wanting. I’ve cried at the end of my rope, wondering if it’s actually worth it, or do I regret becoming a mother???
It’s hard to be honest about our doubts, our fears and our failures. Really hard. Because I don’t know what you think of me and whether you can relate or whether you’ll condemn me. And I don’t know what my children will think of me when they are much older and they look back on my failures and my struggle to be honest and to grapple with the triggers and re-parent myself a little bit—probably too late to do them much good… I won’t be surprised if there are things about which they will say “I’ll never do that to my kid,” because I traumatized them in some way. Like that one time I tried to let my baby scream it out, but I only lasted about 30minutes…and she learned that screaming meant she would eventually get her way, even if it took 30 minutes. That one’s probably a lasting trauma for both of us.
I look back now at how my own mother parented me, and I understand her differently. I understand why she held her tongue, suppressed her emotions, stayed quiet, patient, tolerant. Why she would occasionally walk away, or send us outside or to our rooms so she could have a little space to breathe.
I rebelled against her style of parenting. I became loud, emotional, occasionally volatile — vocal, dramatic, confrontational. Partly because I carried so many doubts about where I stood with my mother. I wasn’t always sure how she felt. I worried she couldn’t cope with emotional outbursts, mine, or perhaps even her own.
I didn’t want to repeat that uncertainty with my children. I wanted them to know how I feel. I wanted them to know they are loved even when I’m angry, exhausted, overwhelmed, sleep deprived, verbally losing my $#!t, or asking for space.
The older I get, the more I realize my mother wasn’t doing motherhood wrong. I simply interpreted her differently as a child than I do now as a parent. Her quietness wasn’t always emotional absence. Her restraint was not indifference. In many ways, it was survival. It was patience. It was love expressed through steadiness instead of intensity.
I don’t know what kind of adults my daughters will become, or how they’ll someday remember me. I suspect there will be things they admire and things they resent. There may even be moments they say, “I’ll never do that with my own kids.” And honestly, that’s probably inevitable. Every generation both inherits and reacts against the one before it.
Maybe healthy parenting isn’t perfection at all. Maybe it’s simply being willing to reflect, apologize, repair, and keep learning while our children grow alongside us.
Motherhood has humbled me more than anything else in my life. It has exposed my weaknesses, my fears, my impatience, my capacity for tenderness, and my desperate need for rest. It has made me confront my own childhood while simultaneously shaping someone else’s.
And despite all the work, fear, sacrifice, identity shifts, medical trauma, sleepless nights, and moments of doubt — despite all the times I have felt completely unequipped for this role — I can still say motherhood is worthwhile, and meaningful to me personally.
Not because it is completely fulfilling on its own—I still need many other outlets of self-expression.
Not because I loved every minute.
Not because I do an average-to-good job.
But because loving another human being this deeply changes you forever.
And perhaps that is what May means to me now:
death and birth,
loss and becoming,
mothering and being mothered,
all tangled together in the same season.
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