Many Mothers
I feel I may have written this in some other form once long ago; forgive me if I repeat myself. Mother’s Day is coming up, a day painful for so many, painful for me for so long. And the thing I think about most on that day is how much mothering is not unique to biology. We talk about the mother as the most important figure in a person’s life. How could we not? Biological mothers give birth, some against seemingly-impossible odds. Even with normal odds, the chances of pregnancy for a healthy woman of childbearing age are only 20–25% in any given month. The fact that we are all here feels, to me, miraculous.
As long as the biology is sound, it of course dictates predictable responses in mother and baby that bring them closer. Oxytocin, the meeting of eyes, the reassurance of the voice heard in the womb and now heard outside it — all these things of course have meaning that is indescribably important.
But so often these things, the natural course of things, are splintered by realities of the modern world — postpartum depression, addictions, poverty all play their parts. I don’t talk about my mother much; she is two years gone, and I’m still sorting how I feel about our relationship. I don’t feel ready to talk about her; I wonder if I ever will. On the one hand, the fact that I am here is more miraculous than with most, as my mother was born with a severe congenital heart defect that left her cyanotic for much of her childhood. She was one of the first people, in fact, to receive open heart surgery at Mayo Clinic, the first of many such surgeries. That we were together for much of my life is even more miraculous. But there are many other factors in my feelings, many things that as a mother myself now I’m even more flummoxed about than I was prior to adopting my own children. I can’t suss them out in one quick essay.
What I can talk about, though, is how fortunate I was that when my mother could not be the mother I needed, there were other women there to stand in, to guide me and help me believe in my own strength. It is very true that it takes a village.
I was so very fortunate in my village. When I needed nurturing that my mother perhaps didn’t know how to provide, the other women in my life, many of them childless or struggling with their own challenges with motherhood, stepped in. They never belittled me or mocked me for my bookish nature. They tempered my obstreperousness. They reminded me of my own strength and stood before me as role models to light the way. I’m so grateful to have known these women — many of them my aunts but also family friends — who believed in me when it was hard to believe in myself.
On Mother’s Day, it’s these women I find myself celebrating, women who remained childless out of choice or circumstance, women whose dreams were crushed for their own children not long after birth, women who initiated me into the balancing act of homemaking and career-building with grace and purpose, women who also shared my love of fantasy and science fiction and encouraged me in the writing of it when no one else did. Women, who, when I couldn’t conceive, didn’t chastise me for being flawed or a disappointment to my family, but who encouraged me on the road of adoption with open arms and willing hands, midwifing our dream of a transracial family.
On Mother’s Day, I think of mothering in the broadest terms, as a nurturing that comes when we most need it, as the courage that lifts us when we have none. I may not have received these things from my own mother in the way I might have wished, but I did receive them, often from women who had no reason to give such things to me other than their endless kindness. They were the boats that carried me across many a storm-tossed sea, and the lack of or distance in their biological connections to me makes their mothering all the more heartfelt. They did not nurture me because of any social preconceptions of duty or biological maternity. They mothered me because they wanted to.
I will always be grateful for and indebted to them.
