Motherf🙃cked

We are all drowning, but thank you for the card!!!

One night not too long ago I completely lost my shit at my kids. Even though parenting with grace in this neverending pandemic/crumbling democracy/dying world is near-impossible, I am not generally a yeller. I can be cold, bitchy, or passive-aggressive, sure. As a writer I love a self-righteous monologue, developed over time in my head and then finally delivered in the hushed, wounded tones of a seasoned martyr, but I can usually get my point across without raising my voice. This time was different. This was a primal scream.

The thing I screamed was, and I quote, “IT IS NOT MY JOB TO CHANGE THE CHANNEL ON THE TELEVISION!!!!!!” I performed this scream the way Leonardo DiCaprio performed Romeo Montague in 1996 when he defied those stars; I threw my head back and my fists up at the ceiling, squeezing my eyes shut, putting my entire body into it. My children were stunned. Max started to cry. I immediately felt terrible.

Two things are true. You’ll hear that a lot on parenting therapy instagram, which I am fed daily thanks to my penchant for Googling things like “5 year old keeps flipping me off,” and “how to tell if your preteen is depressed or just being an asshole.” In these videos, a pleasant-faced woman in her 30s or 40s will tell you in a gentle voice how to deescalate a child’s emotional meltdown by speaking to them calmly and acknowledging both their feelings and your parental boundary. “Two things are true,” she will intone, making meaningful, sympathetic eye contact. “You really want to keep watching those grown men on YouTube putting Shake Shack burgers into a blender and spinning a wheel to see who has to drink it, and I already gave you seven warnings that screen time is ending and you need to fucking deal.” I’m paraphrasing.

But, yes: two things are true. Two things are always true. The ends of every binary exist as surely as all the points in between. The desire is as true as the boundary it meets, the intention as true as the outcome. When I screamed at my children it was an explosion of misdirected anger, and that anger was as true as the misdirection. For context, I had just gotten out of a three-plus-hour car ride, during which I was sandwiched between my kids’ on the dreaded back seat hump in a Hyundai SUV that on its best days smells like old french fries, my knees up to my chest to avoid our dog, who jerked around skittishly underfoot. My ass was numb and my mood, resentful. I had surrendered both my phone and my wireless headphones to Max, so that he could watch videos instead of whining. 

So when I finally got out of the car, sore and sad and pissed off, and schlepped my kids and their stuff into the house only to have my dictatorial five year-old immediately start screaming at me to turn on the TV—“SCOOBY DOO! NO, NOT THAT EPISODE! I WANT THE ONE WITH THE SNOW GHOST!”—before I had even taken my coat off, I Hulked out. 

I actually think that mothers (or primary caregivers of any gender) have a lot more in common with Bruce Banner than might initially meet the eye. Despite my repeated exposures to the Marvel cinematic universe (usually distracted by my phone while my sons shout “Mom! Look! Thor just chopped Thanos’ head off!”), I have yet to remember much about any of the characters, so I had to look up Bruce’s backstory, but here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

Banner is physically transformed into the Hulk when subjected to emotional stress, at or against his will. This transformation often leads to destructive rampages and to conflicts that complicate Banner's civilian life. 

Sound familiar? I mean, hopefully not to you. Hopefully you are evolved and in touch with your feelings, and able to express anger and sadness without bottling it up and vibrating like a Coke stuck in a washing machine, ready to explode at whomever has the bad luck or poor judgment to brush up against you. But repressing my rage to the point of melting down is kind of my thing. It’s not healthy, and it’s not fun, for me or anyone around me. But I suspect it’s something most parents, and even more specifically most mothers, can identify with.

As the only woman in a house of thus-far cisgender boys, I often feel like I am living in a little microcosm of the patriarchy. For all of our progressive politics and liberal values, Jeff and I succumb to traditional gender roles with frightening predictability. Jeff earns almost all of the money, and therefore it is taken for granted that his daytime hours (and, often, nights and weekends) will be spent working. While Jeff does about half of the grocery shopping and is the exclusive dog walker/wrangler, I take on the majority of the childcare and domestic chores: I cook almost every meal, I usually do both school drop-off and pick up, and if a forensics specialist dusted for fingerprints in our apartment, mine would be the only set found on the vacuum cleaner, the dishwasher, and the laundry appliances, not to mention the toilet brush. I also carry the bulk of the all-encompassing “mental load” for the family, serving as the scheduler (and subsequent rememberer) of all appointments, play dates, vacations, and out-of-state-relative birthday cards/gifts, ad infinitum. I remember when my kids have tests or projects due at school even when they don’t. I keep a running tally of their vegetable and fruit intakes so that I can make informed decisions when they come begging me for treats. I feel an inner twinge, not unlike ovulation pain, as soon as they grow out of their current shoe size. That sort of thing. My brain barely belongs to me, much less my body, which having finished its stint as a milking machine now functions as a hybrid jungle gym/chair/stress ball, and what’s worse, all of my tireless work, all of my constant sacrifice, is almost completely invisible.

Two things are true: I love my children beyond measure, but this job fucking blows sometimes. I am a loving, competent caretaker, and I am also often full of rage.

Just a few of my favorite books about this conundrum.

Much has been written by people far more knowledgeable than me about the crisis of modern-day motherhood. NYT columnist Jessica Grose’s Screaming On the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood and Sara Petersen’s Momfluenced: Inside The Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture are two very recent and well-researched examples. I am not a journalist (not a good one, anyway), and my favorite thing is expressing my unscientific opinions, so I understand if you don’t consider me an expert on this topic. However, anecdotally, every single mother or primary caregiver I know is currently being held together by the emotional equivalent of lint-covered pieces of Scotch tape. We are underslept, overworked, underappreciated, overstimulated, under water and, in general, over it. We wake up tired, then stay up late anyway because the post-bedtime quiet is the only “self care” time we get all day. Self-care usually means staring at a screen and getting tipsy or high. This cycle may not help us feel better, but giving it up can feel like letting go of the only tether we have left to ourselves—not our mother selves, who are on call 16 hours a day, or more if anyone has a virus, but our truest selves, the sedimentary layer underneath all of the wet wipes and crustless sandwiches and “good” socks that don’t feel “weird” and PTA meeting Zoom calls on mute while cooking dinner with literally all of the burners on at once and no that is not a metaphor, but also it fucking is! Two things are true!

I have always wanted to be a mother. I used to breastfeed my dolls, put stuffed animals under my shirt and then moan and wriggle and shake them out onto the floor, pantomiming birth. Becoming a mother felt like realizing a prophecy. My experience is not unique, I am sure, but if I and other people like me—people who have never doubted for a moment that they are meant to be parents, and feel uniquely suited to the challenge—if even we find ourselves, hypothetically, fantasizing about contracting a non-fatal illness that requires a medically-induced coma just so we can feel rejuvenated… then, I think, the system might be broken.

Motherhood, 2018. The little blue thing is a hot compress for a stress-induced stye!

Motherhood is transformative and meaningful. It expands our ability to love, deepens our empathy for other people, and gives us not only the opportunity to nurture a new generation of human beings who will (hopefully) be more kind and emotionally intelligent and socially conscious than we are, but also to re-parent ourselves in ways we didn’t know we needed. It is as close to magic, in moments, as life gets. It is, simultaneously, relentless, overwhelming, physically and psychically exhausting, and totally devalued by our current culture. American birth rates are dropping because we’re living in a frightening time, not just the pandemic and the Earth melting and the political discourse settling at the kind of low point in which “are Nazis really that bad?” is a question about 40% of the country thinks is valid—but also an impossibly rigged economy that means even middle-class couples can barely afford rent, let alone dependents. Republican lawmakers and a stacked Supreme Court seem hellbent on forcing unwanted pregnancies to term, but stop short of providing government assistance that would allow young or poor or raped or abused or addicted or just not-ready-to-be-mothers mothers to take care of those children they are forcing to be born. Day care costs can swallow paychecks whole, formula is kept locked up in pharmacies to make sure those who need it most can’t steal it, and public schools are being defunded, losing critical, important works to book bans so that when our kids are shot at school, the shelves will be free of any material that might lead them to challenge the status quo.

Are two things true? Or are a million things true, an Everything Everywhere All At Once multiverse of truths that writhe and sizzle as they clash against each other, creating a laser maze we have to crawl through on our bellies, hoping that we—and our children—can make it out relatively unscathed? Is the current model of motherhood, typified by gorgeously lit Instagram posts that tuck in the invisible, simmering rage like hospital corners on a perfectly made bed, destined to collapse? Will it be replaced by a less selfless, more tenable version, a reasonable midpoint between latchkey strays getting kidnapped while their moms drink lunchtime martinis and overscheduled kids with phone addictions whose moms self-flagellate over not buying the right kind of nut butter? Or will we all ride off into the apocalyptic sunset assuring each other through clenched teeth that we are fine, thanks for asking! as we scroll through ads that suggest we might benefit from microdosing MDMA for stress when we are done scenting our labia with special “hoo-ha” deodorant.

I really don’t know.

But for now, sure, I’ll take some flowers.