Tenderness and Anger

I never expected my transition to motherhood to be easy, but I did want it to be simple. That’s sort of hilarious to me now. Simplicity? What was I thinking? Nothing has ever been simple! Not one single thing! My mind is a labyrinth of complexity! Can’t find anything in there – and it’s only getting more and more muddled! That’s probably what all the writing is about really – I’m always trying to sort stuff out, make piles, get my wits about me. What is an essay but a little mind pile? A poem a littler one still? Maybe by writing I’ll settle something. Simple? Hilarious. And motherhood, no surprise, is the most complicated place I’ve ever been. 

My son, Thomas, is eight-weeks-old today, and I’m reading Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, which really might be a mistake! Not a mistake, but by reading it right now I’m definitely opening up a big can of worms for myself. Oh my, I sense a theme. When poets become parents there’s such a strain, such pain! Woe, woe, woe! Too existential, too sensitive, we can see it coming from miles away! I’m generalizing, exaggerating, maybe not all poets, but when Rich expresses pain and suffering she becomes a mirror for me, allows me to look at myself. I’m suffering. I saw this coming, and now it’s here. What I am experiencing is difficult, and I am suffering.

In Rich’s book, which is somewhat of a sacred text on the subject of motherhood, particularly motherhood as it relates to feminism and creative women, she does not sugarcoat anything, does not mask or hide her anger. The first chapter, the only one I’ve read so far, is called “Anger and Tenderness.” In that order. I can tell already that this book will take me a long time to get through. Reading it is almost like peeling back my own skin. It’s uncomfortable to read a woman’s discomfort in motherhood. There’s something shocking about it. I find it shocking in myself. And I’m a progressive liberal woman, right?! Somehow, in spite of that, I still carry in me this assumption about motherhood, this expectation. Isn’t a woman supposed to put on motherhood like a garment that fits her perfectly? Wasn’t it supposed to be like that for me? 

The first chapter of the book is full of pain and grief and complexity, and this essay isn’t really about it at all. I don’t have the presence of mind right now to write a decent book review. The chapter is excellent – you should read it! I should read it again, really, because I think I hardly even absorbed what I read – I mostly felt it. It invited me to feel a lot of feelings that I’d been holding at bay, and made me wonder, really wonder: why did I want to have a child? A dangerous and almost shameful question to ask oneself, I know. As soon as I became pregnant, I knew that, in some ways, I was losing what had always felt most precious to me, most essential – my time, my freedom, my glittering solitude. Especially toward the end of my adulthood without children, I had constructed a life and home and work for myself where practically every moment was self-directed and spacious. I could live in the way that gave me lots of room. I was rich in one of the greatest luxuries the world has to offer: time. It took years to get there, so many odd ill-fitting jobs, so much deliberate building and choosing to reach that place. And it was glorious.

And yet, motherhood was what I wanted. It really was. Even amidst all my glorious luxurious time, I knew I was in a state of before. There was something coming next, and it would be huge. I was standing on a rug, asking for it to be whisked away, out from under my feet. We certainly could have waited longer, but my impatience and curiosity swept in. I began to feel ready, whatever readiness is (oh, that biological clock!!!), and we began trying for a baby. It felt like the next logical thing, good timing, the next life stage to enter as my husband and I draw near to our thirties. And I’d always known or expected that I would be a mother someday, like a sort of destiny — so I became one, joining in for one of the most common and universal experiences in the world. Super normal stuff! In the grand scheme of things, is this really a big deal? 

Oh my, I would argue that it is. I would argue that it’s a very big deal. 

From Rich: “Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother, one of those givens, when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself. That calm, sure, unambivalent women who moved through the pages of the manuals I read seemed as unlike me as an astronaut. Nothing, to be sure, had prepared me for the intensity of relationship already existing between me and a creature I had carried in my body and now held in my arms and fed from my breasts. Throughout pregnancy and nursing, women are urged to relax, to mime the serenity of madonnas. No one mentions the psychic crisis of bearing a first child, the excitation of long-buried feelings about one’s own mother, the sense of confused power and powerlessness, of being taken over on the one hand and of touching new physical and psychic potentialities on the other, a heightened sensibility which can be exhilarating, bewildering, and exhausting.”

No one mentions the psychic crisis of bearing a first child!!! 

Becoming a mother has felt really hard. Harder than I even expected, and I definitely did not expect ease. Still, to express any sadness or anger about it, to even acknowledge the complexity or “big dealness” makes me feel this pressing guilt, this shame. Isn’t it supposed to simple? And not only simple, but simply good? Isn’t this what I wanted? Yes, of course it was. You can want something that will stretch you beyond your limits. You can want your life, even when your life includes suffering. I wanted to become a mother because I knew it was waiting for me. I wanted to step into it, begin what was ahead. Motherhood felt inevitable, like a tiger ready to pounce from behind a tree. I wanted to face it. I wanted to see what was there. And also, I wanted my children. I wanted to meet them, know them, spend my life with them. That is what I wanted most of all. And that is a huge thing to want. 

I’m a writer. After years and years of writing, practicing, working, scribbling, writing hundreds of essays that some but not very many people read, more hundreds of poems that have been revised and re-revised, even after writing a whole book that is actually published and real, it still feels transgressive to say it out loud. I still feel like an imposter. But, I think writing is something I need to do, something also inevitable about me. And I can sense that I am meant to write about motherhood, that the two things together are somehow where I belong. 

In some ways, I think I looked forward to motherhood as something to write about. But saying that makes me feel really weird and bad. I didn’t become a mother just to write about it! No, that would be cruel and incredibly selfish. But it was part of the fantasy version, the dream for the future, imagining the essays I would write, the poems, the photographs I would take, the art I would make. 

Actually doing the writing now feels different than the fantasy. Much more fraught. Almost like I shouldn’t even be doing it. Writing about motherhood, already, feels almost too vulnerable, too tender, too close. Maybe that’s because it doesn’t only involve me, it implicates my child too. Maybe it’s also because I desperately want to do right by him, I want to shed my self-consciousness, my self-absorption and give as much as I can to my child. A writer is always taking bits of the world for herself. Claiming things. Am I taking bits of my kid’s childhood for myself by writing about it? That’s a big question to ask.

I almost wish I could mother privately, without telling anyone else about it. I wish for simplicity, quietude. I wish, more than anything, to be a truly excellent mother, knowing that I’ve already come short of my own expectations, have already failed and will fail again. And I don’t know how to live without writing. So I guess I don’t know how to mother without writing either.  And I think I’m worried that somehow makes me a “bad” mother. Where is that feeling coming from? 

One thing I know for sure – every time I face a problem, a challenge, writing is one of my best and only ways to deal with it. Writing is one of the most empowering tools I have. Writing is where I am able to take a good look at myself, sort out the things that need to be sorted out. And I am facing a big challenge now. So here I am, dealing with it. 

Mothering small children is honestly an absurdly self-sacrificial thing to do. I knew that, but I didn’t know it. Now I know. Now I’m caught in it and there isn’t an escape. The enormity of this shift is sort of terrifying, the way the intensity of my life ramped up in such a profound way and will not let up. This really is a “psychic crisis” – Rich got that exactly right. I haven’t quite recalibrated myself yet to feel like this is normal. It almost feels like I’m in some sort of temporary intense situation, like summer camp, like it will end. It won’t end. Tommy will need me, me, intensively for years, and years, and years. No one else can be his mother while I am living. When he cries, I am the one he wants. He doesn’t even know yet that we two are separate. When Isaiah walks in the room, he turns his head and gazes at him, clearly excited to hear his voice. But Tommy hardly looks at me, hardly sees me or reacts to my actions. We are together all day, every day. We sleep side by side. Developmentally, he can’t even distinguish himself from me yet, he literally doesn’t know we are separate people. My voice belongs to him, like his skin, like his hands. My face is like the sky above him, my scent like air. How do I reconcile being needed like that and also still being myself, my own? How do I integrate that, go on living? 

I feel stopped, shorted, wonderfully but terrifyingly. And it really is wonderful, I can’t downplay that. The true pleasure I feel in holding him, feeling his skin, in the sound of his tiny voice cooing, all of that is worth a lifetime of sacrifice. I would never want to undo his existence. Meeting him, getting to be his mother, is already probably the greatest joy of my life. But my self. Me. What do I do with myself? My lost time, lost mind?  I can’t even begin yet to find the answer to that question. And I know, I know I’m still in likely the thickest part. Everyone says it will get easier. That’s the story I hear from people further down the road – “it’s so hard, but it gets easier.” That definitely is encouraging, but it doesn’t reconcile the heaviness of this moment, the enormity of this shift. And it doesn’t reconcile my own self, my identity, the sheer amount of time I will spend on mothering from this point forward. Something is different in me, and it’s scary. This change is frightening. 

Am I just too sensitive? Too self-absorbed? I worry that I am. I worry that I’m shouting about something trivial, that I should just grin and bear it. I worry that all the other mothers are looking at me with side-eyes, like who’s that crazy poet lady and why does she think she can say it’s so hard? I don’t think they are though. From what I’ve heard from other mothers, we all think it’s really hard. We’re all suffering, especially in the immediate postpartum period. And we don’t really know what to do about it. Society and culture sort of give us nothing, radio silence, the admonition to be very happy (!) and fulfilled (!) by our children that we wanted (!!!), to figure it out ourselves. And to do it by ourselves, amongst ourselves, to not let it seep into the general discourse. Mother stuff is just for mothers, don’t talk about it too loud in a public place!

And all of this is part of the suffering. 

This past year, my spirituality changed profoundly along with my body during my pregnancy. Another massive shift atop all the other newness. To be honest, I sort of stopped thinking about God in any clear or specific way. My faith practice in Christianity sort of left my mind. I’m not saying I stopped believing or anything like that (but what is belief anyway?). But my idea of what I needed to do changed. I took a break from reading the scriptures, I stopped attending church (pandemic made this mandatory, but I also stopped watching the virtual services). I didn’t listen to any sacred music, hardly read any theology or christian thought – all of this unusual for me. So, what is left? 

At the end of my pregnancy, I was given a child in this wild holy moment. Birth, and now motherhood, feel wildly sacramental, in the true sense of the word. Something imparting divine grace – on par with marriage, with death, with the eucharist, with baptism. Why aren’t there priests present at births? Why aren’t there rites and rituals, smells and bells? This feels like the most significant thing that has ever happened to me, almost moreso than my wedding, than my baptism. I can see that now even more clearly in hindsight – giving birth was an enormous thing to do, and the days that immediately followed were equally as enormous. Where is the liturgy for this? With the birth of my son, my sense of God came rushing back to me, but very quietly, almost imperceptibly. A very dim whisper: “This is me. You will find me here.” All of this has eternal implications. This is where I learn what is true. This is where I come to the beginning and end of myself. It’s simple. It’s obvious. It’s profound. And throughout my pregnancy, it’s almost like I knew I was gestating this revelation. I didn’t need to read the scripture, I had the text in me. I didn’t need to go to church, hear sermons, sing songs, receive the eucharist, my own blood was like the blood of christ, my child’s body inside my body, the small death it takes to give way to new life. I didn’t need to pray, I had the prayer of his kicks, his movement, my body carrying his. I had the liturgy of doctor’s visits, ultrasounds, of drinking water. I prepared my child’s room like the altar guild prepares the altar for the service. I had all of it, to the point that to engage in the usual patterns of Christianity would be redundant to the point of overwhelm. So I set it down. And then it was handed back to me, wrapped up in a swaddle, when I gave birth. Like Father Richard Rohr writes, we experience Christ in great love and great suffering. What is motherhood but truly, deeply, both of those things?

You can’t discount the great suffering. I have suffered. I am suffering. I will continue to suffer, as all mothers do. The suffering written of in Adrienne Rich’s first chapter is profound. It shouts from the page. It rages. It makes me sensitive to my own suffering in motherhood, like pushing on a deep bruise, finding the place where it hurts the most. This is ordinary suffering, though. So ordinary that it’s a part of how every single person on earth got here. I’m here because my mother suffered. Your mother suffered too. And now I join in, experiencing it for myself. 

I do think there are varying degrees and circumstances of this maternal suffering. You can’t assume a single experience. What distresses me might thrill someone else. Where one woman experiences postpartum depression, another experiences the kind of fulfillment in motherhood she never knew she could hope for. I’m not sure if motherhood feels this fraught for every mother. Just as each birth is different, though the general narrative is always somewhat the same, each mother is different, so different. Endless variety, endless detail. Here we are, back at the scandal of the particular. Here we are back at the reason I write. Nothing I’m experiencing is special, novel, unique – but it feels that way for me because it’s happening to me. And when something happens to you, it wallops you with its stunning selfhood, its glittering distinctness, its particularity. Just like a baby. You meet them and they’re like every other baby, but they’re also a whole person, fully and completely their own self. That’s what’s amazing about babies. And that’s what’s amazing about writing too. It’s all the same story, but no two people can write it the same way. No two people can live it the same way. 

So my suffering in motherhood is my own. It almost doesn’t matter whether any other woman has suffered before me. I still feel alone in it, still try to work it out for myself. Then I sit on my couch while my baby sleeps in the bedroom, bracing for a sudden cry, reading Adrienne Rich and feeling, suddenly, like a mirror is being held up to my own existence. She writes what I could write too. I read her words as if they were my own. And then I, in turn, write something similar but different, from my own particularity. I join the choir. 

I can’t expect not to feel anger. I can’t expect not to suffer. Just last night, after a night-waking that was earlier than usual, it took no fewer than ten earnest tries to get my baby back to sleep. That’s not a gentle challenge. That doesn’t feel good. There’s no romanticizing it, really. But as I read this first chapter of Rich’s book, I wonder if I can make a small edit, just for myself. Can I call it instead “Tenderness and Anger”? Can the tenderness come first, be the first thought? That might take some doing, but I think it’s possible. It might not have been possible for Rich – I think her life was much, much harder than mine, in lots of ways. But if it’s possible for me, I want to do it. In fact, maybe I need to do it. It might be my only way through. 

I wrote this poem the other day, and it felt sort of like it dropped from the ceiling, wasn’t so much written as it was divined:

Christ

the only way through it sometimes 
is to tell myself, over and over, 
with each diaper, each latch, 
each time waking up to cries,

this is christ
this is christ
this is christ

Maybe this is the winding path to tenderness before anger. It is so easy to feel a sort of despair or doldrum in these repetitive tasks of caregiving. I hardly leave my house, I don’t see anyone, it’s just me alone in a house with a baby every day until my husband comes home and we’re both too exhausted to do anything but finish all of our various tasks and watch a little bit of television before going to sleep (soon to be awakened again by the baby). I could fall into anger, sadness, fear, pity like a pit. It could feel very bad, and sometimes it does. But tenderness. All of this can mean something, be a part of everything else. I can remember my soul, my center. All of this caring, these trials, this difficult repetition, can include not only myself and my child alone in our house, but god too, and the fullness of time. I can remember that the way I do these things matters, that it’s forming me. I can notice the liturgy of each task, the rituals, the snapping of a diaper like a prayer. That doesn’t mean it will suddenly feel good. It doesn’t mean it all suddenly becomes precious or gorgeous. It becomes holy the way dust, earth, blood, dirt can be holy – take off your shoes, you are on holy ground. Motherhood is forming me, revealing more to me of what is good and evil and light and dark about living. It’s really hard work. It’s salt and light. It has everything in it. And I think that is overwhelming me, the enormity of what I’m dealing with, day after day after day. A priesthood I didn’t know I was stepping into. One that is huge and mostly silent, millions of women up all night with babies all over the world. One that takes your life away from you just to give it back differently, both smaller and larger than it was before. I’m trying to loosen my fists. I’m trying to unlearn who I thought I was so I can meet myself anew. Motherhood is, very much, a practice in unknowing. 

I fear that writing this makes me sound more mindful than I am. I’m not doing any of this well right now! I’m remarkably terrible at taking my own advice! Even right this second, I’m typing this on the couch hoping that my baby won’t wake up before I finish. If I hear him cry, I’ll surely feel bitter, frustrated, even angry. I will likely wait just a little longer than I should to respond to him, and then I’ll feel very guilty and apologize to him profusely, with words he doesn’t understand. I’m comforted sometimes that my baby won’t remember this time, but I don’t want to lean into that and use it as permission to be as grumpy or complacent as I want to be. The way I mother my baby now matters, the same way it matters what I do when I’m completely alone. And that responsibility overwhelms me sometimes. In a journal entry from her early days of motherhood that she includes in the chapter, Adrienne Rich writes: “Anger, weariness, demoralization. Sudden bouts of weeping.  A sense of insufficiency to the moment and to eternity.” It’s that last line that really catches me. “A sense of insufficiency to the moment and to eternity.” There, that’s the bruise, the place where it hurts most. I feel my weakness, and it isn’t only momentary (though the moment matters), it’s also an insufficiency to eternity. The way I regard my baby is the way I regard everything. “this is christ, this is christ, this is christ.” That Annie Dillard wisdom, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” When tired, weary, facing hard things over and over again, you really could drown in thinking this way, feel yourself endlessly falling short. Wisdom starts to sting. The failures can begin to feel gigantic, cosmic. Your hope can begin to feel swallowed up. Anger. Anger. Anger. 

Or, tenderness. This insufficiency that will always be there can be an invitation to keep returning, keep resuming prayer. Each moment is new, and connected to eternity. Whether I do these things with grace or mindfulness, I’m doing them, and they’re forming me, teaching me more about what it means to be alive, and that’s good. Everything is here. Even if I spend most of the day distracted, worried, harried, raw, the two minutes of holding my baby’s hand while he nurses, my holding him close, responding to his needs, my being the ship that carries him through the ocean safely to the shore of sleep, that is good work. That is eternal. Tenderness, tenderness, tenderness. I am needed by someone else in a way that I never have been before, in a way that is transgressive to my independence, comfort, solitude. That could be and is a source of pain, but it also is an invitation to new joy, a new dimension of the world opening up for me like a flap in a pop up book. 

I was listening to a really great episode of the Artist Mother Podcast yesterday. One of the artists being interviewed (Tracy M. Taylor) talked about her experience exclusively pumping breastmilk for her son throughout the first year of his life, which was a very difficult experience for her and also so time-consuming that it left absolutely no time to make her artwork on top of caring for her child. It occurred to her that she should turn the time spent pumping into her work, that the only way forward was integration. Eventually, she compiled all the data from that year of pumping into many artworks, and one in particular blew me away – an art quilt made using data from the entire year: how many ounces pumped, how much time, weather data, etc. I didn’t need to be given permission to integrate my motherhood into my work (can’t help it, it seeps in, nothing else to write about, etc!), but seeing her quilt gave me a new surge of power, of resolve. I will allow my work to be about motherhood. I will take that risk, bare my tenderness, my anger. All of this raw work of motherhood, all this time, all this keeping track, all this ordinary and extraordinary suffering and joy can be a part of our work as artists, turned into something beautiful, something striking and visual – and also something meaningful. The work is about breastfeeding. It isn’t just an abstract quilt. It takes all of those hours, all that time, all the suffering, and holds it up to the light. It says, “look at this! look at what I did!”

I wonder if any of these thoughts are helpful to anyone but myself. Have I been too vulnerable? Would it be better to mother silently? No, I don’t think so. I have plenty of time for silence, spending everyday almost completely unobserved. Hear my voice! Motherhood is not precious, and need not be solitary. It does not require my littleness. Every mother needs to reconcile her work and her motherhood somehow, whether that reconciliation is drawing very clear boundaries between the two, or letting everything blend together like wild mush. Because I’m a writer, my writing is where I am working this out. I don’t think I can make a boundary. I think motherhood has already transgressed every boundary I thought I had. 

After lots of hemming and hawing about it, I named my new newsletter on substack (sign up!) My Candle Burns after “First Fig,” a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

When I became a mother, I became a candle burning at both ends. I will always be my self, my own small singular self, taking things in and in and in, and I will always be someone’s mother, pouring things out and out and out, as long as my child needs me. I feel my energy being used up at a pace that is frightening. It will not last the night! I think that feeling fuels my urgency to write this essay, and all the others – quick, before the candle goes out!  But it does give a lovely light. And as my baby gets just a little older each day and I see him waking up the world, I find more and more energy and hope in the work of mothering.  I can burn these double wicks, I can see by each flame. It is true that from this time onward, I will always be burning double. I could focus on how quickly my candle burns down, or I could enjoy the way the room is illuminated around me, a double portion of light, a second grace. 

So I have to embrace the newness of my life, and welcome motherhood into my work, my thinking, my writing, my hope for the future, my self. I have to integrate it, and I suppose I already am. I have to be honest in my writing about how much it is consuming my mind. I wish to live just as I wish to mother and to write – with great tenderness, and some truthful anger, laying all my bruises bare; upholding and holding up both my child and my scribbled letters, my life’s work, my toil, my lost time and lost mind, for eternity and love’s sake.

You can also read this essay in full + lots of other essays at amybornman.com