Deborah Lipp

Happy Mother’s Day. Woot. I have some thoughts on the topic.

I think I spend about twenty percent of the time thinking or fearing that I’m a bad or inadequate mother. Our culture gives us a picture of motherhood that is both sub-human and super-human. “Moms” are a thing, whether a glowing, lovely thing, or a harried, wearing mom-pants thing. What has continually thrown me about motherhood is that it’s not a thing; it’s me being a mom, other women, both ordinary and extraordinary, being themselves; we happen to be mothers, and motherhod happens to be consuming, but it isn’t an identity. It has no personality traits. It’s simply a part of the lives we have. And that utterly violates our expectations.

It started in pregnancy. Here are two things about pregnancy no one will tell you: It makes you gassy, and stretch marks itch. So here I was, thinking I was the frickin Madonna, all round and soft-focus, and instead I was belching and scratching my belly.

And then I had a baby. I’m a very distractable person, I need lots of things to focus on or I get bored. Yet somehow I thought I’d enjoy focusing on a baby. Which can’t talk or do a little dance or really do anything interesting except glow and pee. I used to prop books on his little head when I breastfed. Because breastfeeding? Wonderful but not really occupying.

What I ended up bringing to motherhood was me. All my good and bad qualities; not “mother” good and bad qualities. So I’m impatient, easily bored, I say inappropriate things, I’m short-tempered, and a shoddy manager. (Mothers need management skills. There’s like, paperwork.) I’m also smart and funny and blunt and I get people. I get Arthur. I have the knack for seeing inside someone and knowing a lot of what’s in there, and Arthur’s a person who needed that, even more than most kids. So that worked out for us. That’s maybe the best part of us as a family.

Sure, motherhood changes you. Like, utterly. Reaches in and rips you open with a love bigger and more demanding than anything you’ve ever known. The thing to me that motherhood is, at its heart, is that love. The other stuff, that yes I’m more short-tempered than I was before, and have more gray hair, and am a much better cook, well no matter who and what you are, you adapt and change in response to your own lifestyle and the people in it. In my case, one of those people happens to be my son. Motherhood didn’t give me cooking skills, a life in which they were useful and needed did.

What motherhood is for me is simply this: How much I love him. Not that he loves me. Not what I do right or what I do wrong. Not any social accoutrements of parenthood. Just love. And the longing to be and do more to fulfill that love.