wip, 2024
I’ve been thinking about motherhood a lot lately. And lately could really mean anywhere from the past 15 years to 3 days.
Specifically this week I’ve been thinking about how I need to read some accounts of what it’s like to parent young adults. Not a how to, but something about the emotional landscape of it. I want to know - what does this feel like for other women?
Generally when I think I want to read about a specific something my thoughts often turn to how I would write about it. It felt sticky.
As part of Rachel Larsen Weavers Artist/Mother book club (hell fucking yes, as an aside) I read My Work by Olga Ravn which I v. highly recommend. The book tells the story of a new mother and her experiences over the first few years of her childs life. In the book, the mother is front and center. The baby is ever present, ever demanding in that specific small baby way, but the baby is not the story. It can’t talk or question or make choices or really have experiences outside of her that are shaping her narrative.
The mother’s story is of course forever changed due to the introduction of the baby, can only exist because of the baby, but at it’s core it feels like it’s hers alone - an intense and mostly internal experience that can clearly be defined as separate from the baby’s. (Do I just feel this because I no longer have a small baby whose life feels inextricably intertwined with mine? Hmm.)
Work about this initial phase of motherhood - the birth of the mother I guess we could call it - feels plentiful. But what about the women whose motherhood is now adolescent…and raising teens of her own?
Once your children grow into themselves and live out their own lives alongside you, the story is hard to delineate. As they have experiences and challenges of their own, some new thing is created… it can feel like two worlds colliding in a very different way to the early years. This space that both parent and child inhabit, holding their individual experiences, getting woven together to create a shared story from individual strands.
In the new space I’m primarily with my child as the mother. But I can also show up in another way, back as the child with my own parent. In some moments, I retrace my parent’s story in relation to me, the child, too. The tapestry is knotty and deep in places, woven years ago. Other parts are dangling threads and fresh space, yet to be sewn.
And so I’m wondering - how do Mothers tell this part of their story? How much is ours to tell? Where do the lines get blurred or boundaries crossed and narrative intertwined too deeply? When Mothering can feel so consuming - how do we mark out the borders?
There are less of these stories around. As someone who first shared publicly on the internet in 2007 and saw the rise of the Mommy bloggers (I’m sorry don’t hate me I didn’t coin it) I’m wondering what happened. Is it as simple as the kids grew and we understood consent in a new way? Was the blurring of the stories really too hard to extract? Are women who are typically old enough to have teens finding it harder to be heard - middle age being a notoriously invisible milestone for so many women? Do these conversations happen more in community and friendship circles? Are we just fucking tired?
I have no answers for you. WHEW FRIENDS, what a thing to be able to say! I! Have! No! Answers! For! You!
Even this piece of writing about it feels messy and threadbare…. but maybe that’s a reflection of its infancy? It’s still being fleshed out, being processed and made sense of. Making collages around these themes and working in a constricted way in how much can be expressed has felt soothingly appropriate and almost reassuring in its frustration.
Yep. Motherhood can expand the edges in us. But it’s as ferocious as it is beautiful.
What I do know is that I’m not the first person to arrive here and I’m not the only person here now. I guess part of starting to make this work and sharing it at this early stage is that age old story of needing art to connect us and to help us find each other. To ask, are you here, too? (special shout out to both Penny and the Women in Revolt exhibition for reminding me of that this week - read and go see if you can!)
I know there will be mothers who have figured this out and written their stories long before I was even born. I know they’ll help me get mine down too. (let me know if you can point me in the direction of work I should be ingesting please!)
Yes, I am there too. Or at least on the edge of it. 💛
Love this and feeling very much on the brink of this unknown myself... Anecdotal stories from friends with teens are terrifying me but then I also feel our experience will be different - not better necessarily, just navigated in a different way. Here for your tales from the edge always! And did a little squee for my shout-out THANK YOU ❤️