Hello. These are the dog days of summer and so we took it literally and added a new dog to our menagerie. I read an article I should not have read about the mother who strangled her children and I cannot stop weeping for them, those precious babies who deserved better. I am still querying my novel and although I have gotten lots of lovely replies, the one breathtakingly unkind one is the one which I recall.
It is this late-summer funk in which you find me, crushed but not destroyed, choosing to be grateful and choosing life over death, joy over pain. This piece is one of the first I wrote for Substack, and because motherhood turns a person over and over like the never-ending tumble of laundry in my machine, it’s still true now.
I hope you enjoy this essay, and please share it with a mother who needs to know that she is not alone.
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Today I screamed at my kids. The window broke in my aged Ford Explorer because my three-year-old played with it, my kids had asked one thousand times for snacks even though we’d already eaten the equivalent of a 7-11 end-cap in junk food, which of course I feel guilty about. So I yelled at them, STOP! They stopped and then we all cried.
Actually - “cried” is too gentle. I sobbed until my throat hurt.
I’m not really mad because my kids are, wonder of wonders, kids. They’ll break stuff, they’ll eat too much junk food, they’ll talk loudly about poop in the middle of a conference call. What makes me sob until I can sob no more is the feeling that every time I fail, I don’t deserve them; I haven’t arrived as a mother and I never will.
As an adoptive mom I’m keenly aware of how hard my husband and I worked to have kids. It feels like there’s not a bureaucratic form we haven’t filled out or a lawyer’s office we haven’t paid our life savings to. I worked really hard for the title of “mom”; I waited a very long time for this.
This was no quickie in the backseat or, alternatively, long-stemmed rose romance and hotel room and well, you know the end of that story. This was interviews and savings and home studies and paperwork and more interviews and lots of hope that failed and hope that finally succeeded.
So how can I possibly lose my cool at these walking miracles? How can I tell them to stop and make them cry, how can I ever get tired of being called “mom” when that was all I wanted for so long?
I feel that I don’t deserve them. I see myself as though from a great height and I shake my head in disapproval even as the self I am watching has a face red with frustration. What a disappointment, I cluck. What a sad place you’ve arrived to, when you hoped to arrive at glowing, patient, life-giving motherhood.
My five-year-old daughter is wearing a fluffy mint green sweatshirt with a sequined unicorn on the front today - her outfit is the outward expression of her inner life. She has no such thoughts about arrival. The only place she wants to be is snuggled next to me on the couch on this blustery day, reading a book about princesses.
I have scared her with my outburst, she looks at me with trepidation in her big brown eyes. This is where I realize it, as though a cartoon anvil has thunked me on my thick head. I have arrived. This is motherhood. Whether I deserve it or not, I have the heart and trust of these precious kids. I am their mother, they don’t mind that our skin colors are different, they are unconcerned with DNA. They want me to be safe and kind, to apologize and give kisses when I forget how to keep my cool. They want me to be generous with my time and myself, they want to make mistakes in the safety of my nest.
Today I screamed at my kids. Today I apologized for screaming. I told them I was sorry, that I love them dearly, that mommies get frustrated too. I did not tell them that this is the dream of motherhood which has finally borne out long past hope, past fluffy sheep toys and lullabies. I did not tell them that motherhood is the story of endless failures and constant pressure, that I will fail, but I will never abandon them and I will never stop trying. I did not tell them that I have arrived, that motherhood is lurking here in the heartbreak and the mistakes and the making-up.
I did not say this to my kids. I just said I was sorry and they gave me sticky kisses and patted me on the head and asked me to read The Five Little Monkeys which I gladly did. But I thought it: I’ve arrived at the most beautiful place I could ever be, may I never take it for granted.
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