one of my mothers
Welcome to the Sunday post.
I just finished reading a printed and bound risograph text, an anthology, called Mommy Wound, and I can’t wait to write to you about in the coming weeks.
As for me, I’ve been writing a Mommy essay for quite some time and it’s in its final stages. I find myself steeling against any saccharine sentiments about mother’s day. Too many mothers everywhere suffer—from acts of war, from poverty, from misogyny. As a start, let’s give all mothers payment for domestic labor, free childcare, paid leave from work when needed, and freedom from harm, how about that?
Anyway, I’ve carried this colander over a thousand miles south to my current home. It once belonged to an anarchist couple in an open relationship who lived next door to me. They were from the midwest. They handed it off to my housemate, a gay man I lived with for about five years. When I think of all my mothers, he is among them. It was from him that I got my first real lessons in how to channel frustration in constructive ways, via his modeling. He got me interested and involved in grassroots projects in the small town we’d both adopted. He made nutritious Ayurvedic recipes that neutralized our opposing doshas. We processed our feelings, danced our asses off, had arguments, and we watched tv in silence. I listened to his accounts of cruising the park and the sex club, and he listened to my sometimes dumb affairs with men and timid attempts at affairs with women.
After he moved out, he taught me about caregiving. About painstakingly cleaning the body of a loved one who had passed. And then he taught me about taking vows and committing one’s entire life to service. The last time I saw him in person he was wearing a saffron-colored robe accompanied by a chaperone, visiting me in the hospital room where I had just become a mother myself.
Once in a while I think about giving this colander away. Then I remember its history. How many bunches of spinach it held in our Olympia kitchen. How I packed it to move back to Los Angeles. How it was sometimes just a holder of fruit, decorative, in my various L.A. kitchens. I’m a mother who has often wondered if, in past lives, I was never a mother. It’s all still new to me. My commitment with regard to motherhood is only ever to be good enough. As I’ve told many people, my only goal is for my kid to mostly feel neutral or positive about me when she sees my phone number calling hers in her adulthood.
On a day like this one I think of my lineage of mothers, not just the one who birthed me.
Happy Mother’s Day to those who celebrate. To those who don’t—I feel you. Love to all the muthas, with or without human children. Above all, be a good enough mother to your self.