You know you’re the mother of a two year old when you write the word “roundup” and your brain immediately unearths “The Last Cookie Roundup” from Sesame Street to play on a loop in your kinder-addled mind.
I hadn’t planned to say anything particular about Mother’s Day today, which is why my usual Friday newsletter wasn’t your traditional celebratory mom content. I love celebrating my mom, but I also understand that motherhood can be a very sensitive subject for so many people, and I believe that mothering can be done in all sorts of ways, not simply by those biologically related. I have been mothered by friends and parents of friends. I have seen childless friends mother their animals and their communities. Motherhood is about so much more than biology; it’s about the feminine energy we bring to a space, and how we show up for other people in the ways mothers have traditionally done.
But I realized I had more to say about motherhood, and about my mom in particular, this morning when I got a little choked up reading
‘s newsletter about mothering. On speaking of her 20-year-old son’s imminent departure to Japan for an eight-month stint, she writes:“One day I asked him if he agreed that the closer a child is to his parents, the farther away he has to go to be independent of them. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘maybe.’ Is that why he chose to go to Japan? ‘Oh no,’ he said. Then: ‘Maybe.’”
For years, I carried an immense amount of guilt for having left the south for New York City. In places like Mississippi, it’s generationally expected that children will stay close to home. While both my parents supported my move to New York City and encouraged my independence, it has also broken their hearts that I moved far away when I was 22 years old and never returned. It breaks my heart, too. But like Val touches on, I think sometimes a far-away move can be a sign of great comfort. It is a parent’s job to help their children realize their greatest potential, and my parents never wanted to hinder me from discovering mine. I needed to go away, and they knew that, despite the ache it would create in their hearts and bellies.
If you regularly read this newsletter, you know that I talk about my mother often—I practically don’t shut up about her—and I didn’t want this day to pass without resending a few of my favorite pieces on my mom and becoming a mother.
“I Love You This Much” is one of my all-time favorite essays, and one I started writing when my own daughter was just a few months old. “When you have a child, you’ll understand,” was something my mother always said to me growing up, and it chaffed me for a multitude of reasons. This essay was inspired by that, and I spent years pitching and pruning it until I decided to publish it here on BLURT on my mother’s birthday.
“The Postpartum Rage Room” is another essay I spent years tweaking, pitching (getting all the rejections), and re-tweaking, until I realized that I should share it via this newsletter, because keeping it on the hard drive of my computer where no one can read it doesn’t benefit other moms, which was the entire impetus of the piece. I wanted to talk about postpartum depression, yes, but more than that, I wanted to talk about scorched-earth, hormone-rooted, white-hot rage that followed me into the fourth trimester. Because if you know, you know.
I loved writing “Pear Salad” and used it as a way to pay tribute to my family’s southern and Lebanese heritage through the lens of food, but also to my mother, who came to Los Angeles for five weeks after my daughter was born to help with the baby—and also me.
Finally, “Living in Limbo” was one of those pieces that took nearly a decade to send out into the world, because writing about your mother’s cancer is complicated.
While there isn’t necessarily one particular theme that stands out in all my work, you can see traces of my mother throughout most of it. She is my greatest champion and cheerleader. One who always believed in my potential and wanted me to see it with my own eyes, no matter how far away from her it would take me.
I need to bookmark all these essays and read them! Happy mamas day to you
Sweet! You do have an amazing Mom!