The Sun

Creativity, vitality, new life, celebration, childlike wonder, self confidence, joy

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“Is it hard to be a mother?” you ask me in the kitchen out of the blue on a Monday evening in January. 

I am standing over the stove cooking you a second round of spaghetti because the first one had sauce on it (a war crime). “Of course not,” is my knee-jerk terror response; my only guide is the thrum in my ear: what would a good mother say? How would a good mother answer?

You are eight years old. Long limbs and hair that cascades down your back, unevenly because you won’t let me take you to a professional to cut it. Your eyes are big and blue and you sometimes use them for the purposes of evil when you want something I've already said no to. The weight of you in my body years ago is a tip-of-my-fingertips sense memory, one of the only ones I have. Pregnancy is a forced embodiment, or to put it in nicer terms, a grounding, even for a person like me, a woman who has tried so hard to forget she even has a body. 

Every week that you grew inside me, you outpaced the progress my doctors planned for you. Larger than life even before you had a life. I swelled and stretched, my fingers outgrowing the ring your father gave me. I had to fish around in the closet to find the box he’d presented me with to put it away. I ached from head to toe, but especially toe. Plantar fasciitis, the doctor said, a spreading of the ligaments in the arch of the foot from the weight of me upon them, the weight of us. It felt like walking every day on broken glass.

Everywhere I went, people commented. People love to comment on a pregnant body. All the things they never get to say aloud, finally hurled out of unconscious mouths. They think it doesn’t matter, because a pregnant body is not one but two, a pregnant body is temporary, a pregnant body belongs to all of us. The grips on the show I was working on constantly joked about how I must be having twins or triplets... The man at Pinkberry looked me up and down and said, "You're gonna have a c-section"... The woman who waxed my eyebrows said, "You must be having a girl, girls steal your beauty."

When you were born, ten pounds five ounces, four days after your due date, a forced eviction via c-section (Dr. Pinkberry was right), I held you in my arms and thought who the hell is this? I loved you immediately, though I had been told not to expect it, that it was okay if I didn’t. But don’t worry, love came cascading, fast and full, but after love, there was something else: confusion. I thought I would recognize you. After all, we’d been together all those months. Arduous and endless months. But you didn’t look like me. You didn’t look like your father. You didn’t even look like yourself, the self I know now.

You were beautiful, to be sure. Thick black hair, almost long already. And because you would never fit into any item labeled “Newborn,” you had rolls of baby dough skin, rolls on your arms and legs, a tiny beautiful roll on your forehead like one of those wrinkly dogs. I barely worried about your neck, the many nightmares I’d had leading up to you, where I’d worry about supporting the neck — that worry was unnecessary, you were born with your head held high. The hair you’d later grow was blonde, but the thick black mane never fell out, so for awhile you looked like you went to a punk rock baby salon.

Is it hard to be a mother? 

Sometimes I think you started talking so early because you knew I was lonely, that I needed someone to talk to. And though I promised myself I would never bother you with the particulars of my problems, because it wasn’t your responsibility or your job to be anything other than a child, you intuited them anyway, High Priestess Daughter of Mine.

Your first real word (after “mama” and “dada”) was “doggy” at around nine months old. I’d heard you saying it for days, but I shook it off, chalking it up to my pride, and perhaps a little projection. But then, we were in Vancouver for a long summer where I had decided not to enlist any childcare (a mistake) while your father directed his first feature film, and the only thing I really knew how to do with you to pass the time was walk. We walked into a pet store one day, maybe to buy treats for our dog, Gus, or maybe just because I was bored, and there was an old german shepherd asleep on the floor. You pointed right at that dog and clear as day shouted “Doggy!”

The man behind the counter looked up. “Did she just say—?” Someone else heard it, so I wasn’t crazy. You were talking. From there the words came flooding. You remembered songs and sang them. You started being able to really talk to me around fourteen months, sentences I (and others) could understand, complex (for a baby) thoughts and ideas. You were (and are) remarkable. Even now you narrate your day in made up songs. I catch you singing in your room, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, while you’re drawing, while you’re watching TV. Sometimes I’m not even sure you know you’re doing it. Music pours out of you always and it started when you were so small nobody even knew what to make of it.

For the nine months before you spoke that beautiful first incantation — doggy — i regret to inform you that yes, it was very hard to be a mother. I didn’t realize that it would be. I had always been so maternal, I thought, drawn to the children at a party, remembering the thrill of being under a buffet table imagining while the grown-ups did whatever grown-ups did at parties (drink). I was young when I had you. Twenty-eight. Which is not actually that young if you’re talking about the world and its mothers, but which was very young for me. I didn’t know anything about almost anything, though I thought that I did. It was like I was in some kind of race with a demon to gather up a family before it caught me. I pressured your father into dating me, pressured him into living with me, hounded him to marry me, and then knocked myself up as quickly as I could (He wouldn’t tell it this way, he’d tell it differently of course, because he loves me and he doesn’t regret it, but it’s true that if I’d let him set the pace we’d be getting married… a few months from now). 

And then… there I was, all of a sudden, a mother. The dog who caught the car. It would be years before most of my friends started having children of their own, so nobody had warned me. I was worried about breastfeeding, I knew I wanted to do it, especially because I’d hoped to have a “natural” childbirth (I had an LA doula and everything), and I’d ended up with a c section instead. I had read vague threats on the internet about what would happen if I didn’t respond to every single sound you ever made with a boob in your mouth, so I made myself available. It was daunting and exhausting and I was still drinking then. Though friends insisted that it was okay to have a couple glasses of wine and still feed you, I wouldn’t do it. Somewhere deep within me, in a part it would still take nearly a decade to reach, I knew that alcohol was a dragon I would one day have to slay. There was no fucking way I was giving you spiked breastmilk, lest you develop the taste I had for it.

And so when I wanted to “relax” or “let loose,” I had to pump, and fill up baggies and freeze them and unfreeze them and sterilize bottles and wash little parts and plug the machine in and wrap my hand around my tit like an orange and squeeze so I’d get enough milk to feed you so you wouldn’t be hungry and I could tap out for a few hours in the bottom of a bottle of wine.

Is it hard to be a mother?

I was raised by a brilliant, inexhaustible love explosion of a mother. She is indefatigable, even now at almost seventy years old. She is joyful and playful and gets down on her hands and knees to play with children. I’m sure it was hard for her, but she never showed it. And when I was two years old, she put her job on pause for over a decade to raise me and my brother. That was a good mother.

I don’t like to play. I wish I did. I know you want me to love it. 

I entered motherhood without a solid plan.  I wasn’t going to leave my career and stay at home indefinitely, I knew that, but also, having a nanny felt like an affront to the very idea of motherhood as I understood it. Help was for people who didn’t want to spend time with their children, and that wasn’t me.

Until it was. Until I was so tired it felt like my eyes were bleeding, and I’d be sitting with you on a big rubber exercise ball bouncing and bouncing and gritting my teeth, begging you to fall asleep. I’d try to write, sometimes with you in a mechanical bouncer thing your father called “Robot Mommy” but you hated it, you could tell the motion wasn’t fluid, that you were being soothed by a machine, and you’d cry and cry until I’d strap you to my chest and make shushing sounds with my mouth as I reached around and over you to try to see my keyboard. The well of creativity dried all the way up. I was tapped out. Exhausted. In desperate need of help.

Is it hard to be a mother?

There have been many women who have helped to raise you. Laura, Laney, Courtney, and Kinga. Laura, in her seventies when she came to hold you and sing to you and speak to you in her beautiful Scottish accent. There were green alligators and long-necked geese she’d sing and sing. Laney, who had so much energy, she could fold every piece of clothing in the house while you played and sang and laughed around her. Courtney, who would clip one of your dress-up dresses on the collar of her shirt with a chip clip and pretend she was your long-lost princess sister, while you dragged your yellow yarn wig across the kitchen floor. And Kinga, who came three weeks after your brother was born and who is here with us, even now. Kinga, who’s facial expressions sometimes echo across your face. Kinga, who’s sense of humor is infectious, who taught you to draw and to read, who’s Polish accent comes out sometimes in your brother’s voice, when he emphasizes the wrong syllable of a word or says “cactus” or “fountain.”

I am grateful to these women. Beyond grateful. Gratitude feels insufficient when you’re talking about a person who has loved your child as you do, who has shaped them, and who has held you up and supported you by wiping tears and boogers and butts and playing the same game a hundred times while you pursue the thing you came to Earth to do.

Is it hard to be a mother?

As soon as it starts to feel easy, something changes. Your brother is your opposite, and every tool I’ve honed and forged in the years of raising you does not work on him. I need new alchemy and new tools. 

And there are so many things to apologize for. You like to ask me who’s driving you to school in the morning, and when I say “Daddy,” you say, “I knew it, I don’t know why I even asked, will you ever drive us?” When I remind you that I drove you all last week, you scoff and roll your eyes. The guilt is real. The shame is real. But you’ll live if I don’t drive you to school. I promise, you’ll be okay. 

Is it hard to be a mother?

The Sun is about celebration, victory, vitality, and new life. The Sun represents a time when you are present, when you understand that your life is good while it’s good. 

I’ve given birth to three brand new people in the last decade — you, your brother, and me. My mother self is a complicated woman with resentments and shame and aspirations that don’t always pan out. She wants to be Bluey's mom, but she can only manage that in very small increments. She tries her best to give honest answers to crazy or uncomfortable questions. Sometimes she gives way too much information and thinks, fuck, that’s gonna end up in a therapy session in a couple decades. 

But my mother self has joy too. And she knows how to apologize. She mothers me too. When I’m feeling guilty or distant or like I’m not measuring up, my mother self reminds me that I’m a person too, and that we’re all doing our best. It is hard to be a mother, but it’s worth it. I’m glad that I did it, that I’m doing it. And as much as I can, I’m trying to remember how good my life is, how there is good happening right now all around me.

Is it hard to be a mother?

I wish I could say I was put on this Earth to be a mother. There’s a romance to that, a fist pounding on the table like a gavel, a way of saying yes this is who I was always meant to be. I think I was meant to be your mother, and your brother’s mother. But motherhood itself hangs off my body like a too-big dress, like I’m in someone else’s closet, someone older and wiser, someone for whom things like this come naturally.  The best I can hope for is loving. I am a loving mother. A mother who fails sometimes, but who always wants to be the best I can be for you. A good enough mother.