~Guest Post by Anna Sullivan
As someone whose nurturing instincts are mostly directed toward a dog who thinks she owns the couch, I figured this coming Mother’s Day called for some perspective from someone deep in the trenches of actual parenting.
So, I asked my neighbor and friend Anna Sullivan—a writer, mom of two, and all-around thoughtful human—to share a few words for the occasion. She said yes, and what she sent back is funny, raw, tender, and full of truth. I’m honored to share her essay with you.
Keep reading for Anna’s reflections on the wild, weighty, and wondrous ride that is motherhood.
A foreword: I write all my essays from a place of immense privilege. I generally (and probably inappropriately) treat that as an unspoken, though on this one it merits saying “aloud.” The below is a note about motherhood that’s specific to me, at my exact stage (with a healthy 1 and 3 year old), an immensely supportive partner, the financial safety to be home with my littlest, the social safety to share freely in this (and other) space(s), the physical safety to write about small issues that aren’t issues at all, really. There are so many people without these basic entitlements. Sometimes it feels trite, too self-absorbed and minute, to question anything when I have it so good.
Yesterday, as I was noodling on this, I got a text from a dear friend from college, also a mother, similarly blessed in many of the aforementioned ways, one of the most creative funny forceful women I know. She said, I’m so happy for my son and partner but I’m “deeply & darkly struggling with my self-worth.”
There are countless women who want children, long for them, have lost them, have lost a mother. Mothers suffering in motherhood. Women (and men! People of all ilks!) carrying quiet and loud pain, big and little questions, love and angst and joy and sorrow.
The experience of living—specifically, of living as a mother—is not singular. I recognize and acknowledge that. I also believe there’s universality in most things, that sharing is a way of not being alone, that not being alone is foundational to a good life. So here we are! May this essay carry some small nuggets of connection for you, wherever you are on the journey. And if motherhood is a tender space for you, please feel comfortable passing this over.
My mother-in-law asks if I’m okay. “You seem,” she says carefully, because we’ve known each other for almost 20 years and she’s familiar with my soft spots, “saddled.”
I am saddled, Diane. Before all this (“this”, of course, being motherhood), I was a mustang! The world was my oyster, huge and open with the potential of pearls. I sought them; I took a ship around this whole earth, raced a truck 130mph across a desert, cried at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. I waved to a child watching from her family’s rooftop as I crashed into an Egyptian field in the basket of a hot air balloon. I fell in love for 24 hours in Granada, three days in Cape Town, 15 years with a man I once said I’d never date because he’d never leave the tiny hamlet where we grew up. Then we lived in Madison, WI; Providence, RI; Chicago, Los Angeles, and the Cascade foothills. Look at us.
And now? I’m a pack mule. I tread the same rugged path day after day, spurred on by two unruly, unreasonable overlords. My world is so small, and I carry what I can on my back. Some days, questions (whats and whys, hows, ‘the fucks?’). Some days, rage. Some days, very little. Which is a way of saying that my capacity for global heartache and horror has decreased so dramatically it’s embarrassing. Most nights, I’m buried under terror. Motherhood has taught me how little I control (nothing!) and now I have these two beings I love so much, more than everything, and they’re simply OUT THERE, exposed to all the vast meanness of the world. My inability to protect them is unbearable.
Each day—sometimes for a heartbeat, sometimes throughout—I look up from my rugged little trail to understand that my tiny world is huge with beauty. Just beyond my feet: the mountains, a three-pronged river, an unknowable number of trees. Rattlesnake Lake, where I fell in love with my first baby while he was still in utero (a girl named Carl, in my head). The ashes of our beloved dog buried beneath a butterfly bush. Friends with whom I laugh, sob, ride my bike through the woods, whose houses I let myself into to make soup, and who do the same for me. A forest lush with unexpected magic, a metamorphosis discovered in the refracted light of motherhood, the power and means to fly. Can you see it?
Motherhood is an undoing. It’s unanswered emails and texts, canceled plans (croup again!), bargaining with an unhinged maniac on the floor of an airport terminal. It’s shapeless days spent in a shapeless body, making the same request so many times you wonder if you’ve slipped into a foreign tongue or perhaps are really, truly losing it this time. It’s an eclipse. It’s a river I can’t swim without acknowledging the saddle.
And.
Motherhood is an ocean. It’s a universe. It’s a becoming, an uncontainable prismatic beginning. It’s days spent wholly, impossibly in love. (How can a person go to the post office and buy coffee and move through life’s simple motions while feeling this much love?) It’s rapture. Inexplicable. Long days of achieving nothing besides the simple miracle of keeping a human being—a whole future!—alive.
Mothers, all of us, are mustangs. We’re pack mules. Beneath the load—despite or because of it: wings. (Don’t forget.)
Anna is a North Bend-based writer and teacher of mindful connection. She makes art, writes essays, and hosts events offering slowness in our fast, loud world.
On Sunday, May 18—one week after Mother’s Day—join Anna and Danielle Sack (With Love Yoga Co.) for Mother’s Day Off, a day of regenerative rest in the rolling meadows of Carnation Farms.
Anna and Danielle will lead you in deep, whole-self nourishment through gentle yoga, writing practice, creative play, and rest, with delicious food, including a GF and vegan lunch by Wilde Roots Provisions. There will be time to connect, wander, and watch the clouds drift.
Learn more and get tickets here.
[Feature Image credit: Odua Images]
