on mothering (& moving!)
love in all directions
*full disclosure— this post was written in march and I only feel bold enough to post it now :)
I forget my headphones for my first solo hike since my daughter was born. I can play the music out loud on my phone speaker like some kind of asshole, but I decide to put my phone in my pocket and listen to the sound of nature around me. That is, until I start getting ideas, and the need to write them down immediately.
It’s a beautiful spring day and there’s barely anybody here. The deer are keeping their distance up by the trees. Once in a while, someone will pass me coming from the opposite direction, someone on a jog or walking leisurely with headphones in their ears that I covet. Pairs and trios of nature-goers talk about daily trivialities.
I hear large birds in the distance making noise; the sound comes from their syrinx, a special organ only birds possess. The air comes in through the windpipe and causes thin membranes to vibrate. I imagine the birdsong traveling out from their bodies, the energy of it carried upward above all the trees, and even farther to the sky.
I used to come here when I was pregnant and Carl was back in California working the job that he, just last week, got a full-time offer to return to for the coming year. When I think about California, it feels right. I think of the road trips we can take with our daughter as a family, all the places we used to go to that in retrospect seem empty without her presence. I think of the yearlong sunshine (minus the smog) and the beaches and the mountains. I think of pulling over on the side of the road and walking to the water, of rubbing moonstones between our fingers, of climbing rocks for a better view, of watching the big, fat elephant seals quarrel and slap their bodies against each other before succumbing to resting on the sand.
But coming back involves a measuring of the space from before to now. And there is obviously the major life change of having given birth within the span of this interlude, but there is also the biting question of what do I have to show for my time away?
While in Nashville, I found a job that I was hired for based on my merit; I’ve taught workshops and attended workshops (one of which was Tin House where I applied 19 times before ((haha)) and finally got in); I’ve found my little bookstores and a book club and a community and friends and favorite coffee shops and restaurants and plenty of things to do on the weekends. We go to the Downtown Public Library on Saturday afternoons our daughter loves to crawl around and play and look at all the books and watch the older kids who make puppet shows for her on the miniature Ryman Theater stage. We go to weekly swim lessons and then out to lunch and then stop at White Bison to look for candy. I said goodbye to an agent and then hello to the new one. I started anxiety medication and then got off of it. I changed therapists three times, then a fourth. I finished a manuscript and started another. I wrote upwards of twelve newsletters and published a ton online and in print. But to hold all of this with value feels like crap. And I constantly think of my baby (who is now technically a toddler), how I never want her to suffer the emotional weight of putting her worth into anything external. I am still very much practicing how to let it come from within.
The manuscripts will live on my computer until someday they hopefully live on shelves. The print magazines will gather dust in the closet, and the online things will be lost to dead htmls. I sometimes wonder what will happen to my website, the one that I get billed for each January and ignore the email because, whatever, I need a website, and who cares how much it costs, and is anyone even visiting this website and does it even matter, but still, I need to keep it, because?
I write all of this in my Notes App, ignoring spelling and grammar errors and resolving to fix them later. Writing all of this down feels like singing birdsong toward the ridges in the Western Highland Rim. I sing to the mountain laurel and to the blueberries and to the beech and sugar maple and tulip poplar, to the shagbark hickory with its spicebush, to the elderberry and sourwood, to the oaks and hickories. I write and it is my way of singing and so I sing and sing and sing.
*
I attend a Write Together Retreat for Write or Die. The theme is Motherhood with special guest, Aimee Suzara. I'm only able to hop into the author chat because it’s a Saturday and Carl and the baby are at the Library for a few hours. Aimee, who is also a mother, talks about the “labor of othering—a concept tied to the often invisible tasks associated with caregiving and work, and how these responsibilities can conflict with or undermine one’s creative practice.”
The other moms in the Zoom room nod their heads in unspoken, communal agreement. We are but a few members of the circle of mothers, but we stand for the collective. In other words, we get it.
There is a new understanding: when at the checkout counter of a grocery store, if someone’s baby is crying or if their toddler is fussing or if their child is having a full-on tantrum, you stare down at your phone or peruse the organic mints and hydrating powders and you leave the mother to handle it without your eyes or your judgment. A tantrum doesn’t even faze you anymore. You are tantrum-immune. Unless it’s your own child; then you think every single person is watching and judging and wants you to be better and do better even though you are doing your best.
So it feels nice to be in a room (a Zoom) with other moms who are also just doing their very best. And Aimee Suzara wants us all to converse, to commune, but I think a lot of us are sitting here and waiting for her to give us a magic spell, the one that will heal us.
She asks us, “How can we have our creative selves alive and awake and a part of our mothering lives, and vice versa?” i.e. how does our creative self fit into our mothering and how does our mothering find space in our creative lives?
Well, shit. I thought (and still think) I wasn’t capable of being mom. But I’ve been doing it for over a year now. And writing, well, shit, I am constantly second-guessing if I'm a real writer or if I'm worthy enough to call myself one, yet I’ve been writing since I was, what, six? Both are things I do despite the belief that I am not capable of doing them, that I cannot call myself a “mom” or a “writer” because the words feel like they belong to the real moms and real writers.
But a huge, glaring difference between my writing life and my mothering life is that I have a pure and unconditional positive regard for my daughter. I’ve tried very hard not to put so much emotional emphasis on all the ~milestones~ and developmental markers, because every baby is so different and is truly on their own timeframe. (Like when she didn’t want to wear shoes at first and I was convinced she would never wear shoes but then in the course of one week she got used to them and now loves her shoes). Even if I'm anxious about not doing something right, I never blame my daughter.
I un-mute myself. I tell Aimee and the group that my creative self is alive and awake as a mom because I'm constantly observing my child, and that this observing cannot happen unless I am fully present to witness it, so I make myself be fully present to witness it. I am a mother when I am tired or sick (often both) or worried about my own bullshit or worried about actually important things. I cannot un-mother, nor do I want to, but I can stop writing and it wouldn’t have the same dire outcome.
I ask the question, “How do I treat the uncertainties in my writing life with as much acceptance as I do my child?”
I attempt to answer my own question by rambling on about sitting next to young people at coffee shops and overhearing conversations about love and sex and relationships and the waiting and the is it even worth it and the what are we even doing and the musings on what ifs and how comes and the what should I dos. These are all things that go through my mind all day, but not in regards to a love interest; rather, I am contemplating my identity as a mom and a writer. The other mom writers smile and react with the laughing/crying emoji and it feels good to be held here, to be seen.
Because that’s what I want from writing—to be seen and held—but not necessarily what I want from mothering. As a mom, I want to feel like it’s all coming naturally to me, like I can decipher every whine and cry and anticipate any need my daughter has. I want to be everything for her, to do everything, to remember everything, to be infinite.
But the mental inventory, the invisible labor, all the things Aimee Suzara speaks about—it’s all too much. It’s impossible. No one can do it. Yet, here we all are, doing it.
*
“I think you need to loosen the reins a bit,” my therapist says. We haven’t had a session in months because of an insurance hiccup, but now I'm finally back in the room sitting on the couch with a Starbucks iced oat matcha latte in my hand going on and on about the overwhelming amount of mental gymnastics my brain has been up to lately.
“I just feel like I don’t have a self,” I say. “I don’t know what to do with my days sometimes. Like, I really want to go out and do something for myself, but even if I do that, it’ll end. I don’t know if a trip to the botanical garden and then stopping for a bagel is going to spiritually fulfill me.”
“Well, it won’t,” she says. “But the time away is still valuable. I think you need to trust your husband, trust the grandmas, trust whoever gives you a helping hand and know that even if they’re doing things differently than you would, it doesn’t matter. Your child will be okay. You need the time to yourself.”
When I look up what mothers want online, the Internet tells me that mothers want a creative, supportive environment. They want to feel cherished and encouraged. I know my daughter needs me, that I am the person she needs most and will need the most for a long time to come. I guess what I want is to feel like myself and not succumb to the pressure of what I think a mother should be, should do, should endure.
*
“Mothering, the act of radical care-taking and supporting life, is fundamental to community building and key to creating community resilience, that supporting radical mothering work is supporting the creation of not only healthy and vibrant children, but revolutionary communities of love.” (from Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines)
*
When The Brittanys was published back in the summer 2021, I did not feel like myself. On pub day, I stopped at a food truck for teriyaki chicken and rice and ate it in my car out of a Styrofoam box. I was getting an influx of Instagram follows and tags and likes and messages—to the point of becoming completely desensitized to the praise. And also, the praise felt so forced. Like, yes, it’s pub day, and yes, you are lighting up my social media because this is the day you are told to do so. That day, I wanted to hide. I just wanted people to read the book, maybe in their car while eating teriyaki chicken, and enjoy it or not enjoy it (the book, not the chicken) and just keep moving on with their lives.
I felt like I had to completely change my personality for every interview I did, for every person I spoke to. The book was being marketed as some kind of teenage drama, not quite YA but, like, kind of, and every question I was asked was about my own high school experience and the craziness of being in a friend group where everyone had the same name and having gone to a school where everyone was rich and drove BMWs and G-Wagons and the pathways were lined with palm trees and swans floated around in the manmade lake at the center of campus.
But the book isn’t about teenage drama. The book is about a girl who has crippling anxiety and doesn’t know who she is and how she will forge her way through the rest of her life if she doesn’t come into her own, and soon. It is about breaking away from a pack, from the comforts of childhood, and leaping into the depths of adulthood. Maybe I really did have five best friends all named Brittany growing up, but that wasn’t put in the book to be kitsch. It’s in the book because it made it that much harder for me to stand out, or really, just to exist. When there’s already four other of you, why do you matter?
I felt like the book was written off like some cheesy pop song, but my agent at the time kept reassuring me that it would be a “slow burn.” He said it was something people could read in twenty years and it would read the same then as it does now. He felt like it was reaching toward the human experience of loneliness and coming of age, and I agreed. I do agree.
When I watch the interviews back, I wonder who that author is up on the screen and why she doesn’t sound like a real person. Why isn’t she talking about real shit? Why is she going on and on about those goddamn swans?
*
I want to tell you everything, I remember typing into my phone in the hospital. I sent message after message to my mom while I was in the postpartum recovery room. Our daughter was two days old. I had been cut open on a table while Carl watched the doctors pull our daughter from my body. She emerged vigorous with a strong cry, as the doctor’s note states. She had such personality from the start. We have pictures of her on the exam table with her eyes squinted like what the hell, guys?
I was so adamant that I didn’t want any visitors at the hospital. I wanted me and Carl and the baby to be our own little bubble for a while before anyone came to visit. My tune quickly changed after I was told I wouldn’t be able to drive a car for six weeks, that I probably wouldn’t be able to walk more than a few feet for at least two weeks, that I had to wear a waist-trainer to redirect my organs to their proper locations.
My mom booked her flight within the hour and she was in Nashville a few days later. On her first visit, I don’t think she even left the house. There was something I wanted from my mom, or maybe something I wanted to give her. I wanted her to know that now I knew, that I understood, because I had given birth. But all I remember from her visit was that she wore a black and white blouse while holding the baby, a detail I thought was nice since newborns don’t see color. They only see patterns.
*
Something that really bothers me that I know shouldn’t is that I didn’t look beautiful when I gave birth. The nurses kept telling me I could have a stroke at any moment because of my blood pressure. I looked, and felt, like I was dying. Now I know that it was the preeclampsia, the magnesium drip, that whole ordeal, but I can’t help but feel robbed of the blissful image I imagined Carl would snap of me post-birth, the one where my hair is somehow clean and blown out and I was able to dab on some concealer or at least a little lip product and then the light outside the window would be hitting our hospital room just so that me and baby would both look like angels that had gently floated down from Heaven and into the bed, the bed that wasn’t, absolutely wasn’t, layered with what I only know to call puppy pads, placed underneath me in order to absorb the blood.
Carl handed his phone to a nurse in the operating room to capture the three of us, our first time meeting our baby. In the picture, my gel polish is peeled off, my hair needs a wash (and highlights and a tone and a cut while we’re at it), my eyelids are dark, my skin is oily and also dry at the same time, my eyes are vacant and sleepy and dazed. I'm not the person in the picture but I am the person in the picture. Carl looks fine for someone who just watched his wife’s insides become outsides and then insides again.
In the picture, our daughter is beautiful, her face glowing and serene. It’s almost like she doesn’t belong with the two other people in the photo, these mere mortals, when she is clearly a descendant of Venus or Artemis or Athena or whoever is the most powerful, smartest, most gorgeous of the goddesses, or perhaps even all of them combined into some star child, like the one from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Her entrance to the world—a new beginning.
One of my grad school peers who I have kept in touch with also had preeclampsia and a C-Section, two actually. She now has two beautiful, spitfire little girls. Hers is a friendship I appreciate more than I can say here, as we are connected not only by our past pain, but by our continued willingness to go on despite. In grad school, we had briefly connected over our quotidian headaches and hung out at the various graduate gatherings, but today, we have so much more in common despite living in different parts of the country and having completely different lives. I text her often.
We exchange post-birth pictures. In her image, my friend holds her newborn while her husband kisses her head. They both hold the baby, but my friend’s eyes are closed with her chin raised. “You actually look amazing and strong and peaceful,” I write.
I send her mine, all drugged out and oily and gross. She writes, “Well of course all I see in that photo is love in all directions from a family.”
*
As my daughter grows, my love for her deepens. She recently learned how to give attitude and furrow her brow. She’s already outgrowing her 12-month-old clothes. The love for her is only thing in my life that will never diminish.
She is infinite. There is no limit to her greatness. I watch her sip water from a straw and my heart can barely hold all of the joy and pride I have for her. She’s not an object to display or an accolade to showcase. I’ve done my best to keep her close, to gatekeep her, if you will. I joke with Carl that I can only post pictures of the back of her head. If we showed her face, the technology would break, the screen would become a series of 0’s and 1’s and shut down because it couldn’t handle her beauty, her pure beauty.
I'm still typing on my phone when I arrive back at my car. I sit in the driver’s seat and blast the AC. I put in directions to a local smoothie shop and email myself all the notes I’ve written over the last hour. Now that I have service again, a photo pops up from daycare, my daughter eating a soft pretzel outside with all her friends. She’s sitting on the corner of a purple blanket, her water bottle that I paid too much for up snug against her. She holds the pretzel in her right hand leaving her left open to feel the breeze, evident because of how her blonde hair is swooshed to the side of her face.
She is so beautiful that I start to cry. I can’t take it. It’s too much—her little body, her little self, her little life that I am blessed to bear witness to.
—
Psyched to have some nonfiction, “Sticker Wars,” included in the final issue of Full House Literary.
Check out last month’s GRWM (Get Ready With Me) featuring Noah Sanders at The Racket, and a few recently published interviews for Write or Die: Kimberly King Parsons, Barrie McIntyre, Katerina Jeng.
And finally…I’ll be back at UCLA Extension teaching Personal Essay (in person!) this Fall!!
This is beautiful, Brittany 💕✨
I’m a new mother and everything in this piece resonates so much. Simply beautiful. 💕