Me vs. Her

A meditation on mom guilt

Jul 06, 2023

Thanks for welcoming me into your inbox. If you’re anything like me, you have 2,460 unread emails there. It means a lot that you opened this one.

Anyway, I love having you around. I think about you. I pray for you. And I do an actual happy dance every time I get a notification that another of you has joined The Second Cup as a subscriber. I want to give a special shoutout to all you paid subscribers out there—you help make it possible to set time aside each week to write these posts, and to offer them for free to anyone who wants to read them. Thank. You.

If that’s something that you want to be a part of, too, join the crew! Not only will you help support these posts, you’ll get access to exclusive content, too.

Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

That’s what I wish to do this morning. The art of writing is a fine balance of liberating whatever is inside of you and also controlling it so that it doesn’t scare or confuse your reader (or maybe so that it doesn’t scare or confuse you). But there are times when I just want to bleed, so to speak. To—just for a moment—let whatever is pulsing through my insides pour from my fingers and come to you, unadulterated.

So that’s what I’ll do now. Because I want to talk to you about motherhood, and because I believe the internet’s already got enough perfectly-curated imagery out there on this topic. Because I believe what’s most helpful is that we, as mothers, do one another the kindness of just bleeding sometimes.

There is nothing that makes me think more about what I am, what I am lacking, and who I am becoming than spending a 5-day holiday weekend with our children.

We slept at camp, we rode in boats, and we ate ice cream every day. We skipped naps and we broke rules and we stayed up way past bedtime. I tucked scones and barbecue chips into little outstretched hands and wondered how many days a human can survive on carbs alone. I snapped, I apologized. At one point I said, “Just get away from me!” to a child underfoot in the kitchen; minutes later I pulled her into my lap and ran my fingers along the delicate skin of her legs, her arms.

And this morning, they are back at daycare and I am sipping a cold chai latte and, of course, I am all at once relieved and also feeling that maybe I shouldn’t be so relieved. Here I am again—coming to terms with the dissonance between the type of person I think I should be and the person I really am.

I distinctly felt those two women at war within me one morning over the weekend at the camp when Viv woke up at 4 AM, telling me that she was ready to get up and play for the day. I got up and tucked her inside my pregnancy pillow with me, where she promptly fell back to sleep and so did my right arm and right leg. As I lay there watching her sleep—wide awake now myself—I felt our baby boy kicking around in my stomach and I desperately wanted to flip, to turn, to get more comfortable, but I couldn’t move without waking her. A little later, Theo woke and also climbed into bed with us, crawling on my head and thrashing about in my hair. He was cold, he didn’t have enough room, he wanted to cuddle too. He snuggled against me with his bum high in the air, one of the last remaining vestiges of his babyhood.

And inside my soul, these two women—the one I think I should be and the one that I am—fought against one another. It was a battle that nobody knew about but me.

One of these women was irate. She was exhausted and pregnant. She was uncomfortable. She wanted to sleep alone, to simply be untouched and to perhaps have someone bring her coffee in bed and say, “Wow, you nurture a lot of life. You are incredible. Why don’t you take the morning off and sit looking at the lake while this hot coffee steams your poor, puffy face?” She also wanted to scream, “GET OUT OF MY BED!” and then find a position where her body didn’t feel like it was splitting into a thousand pieces and being distributed to everyone around her.

She—I fear—is my basest self.

But there was another woman present there too. This woman hushed the other, speaking in soothing tones and saying, “Come now. Is this really the end of the world? Let’s find the beauty here.” She looked over at Vivian and noticed the pouting pink of her perfect lips. She watched her chest rise and fall with the air moving through her lungs and felt thankful that she had this day to breathe alongside her daughter—that for at this moment at least, they got to linger and exist in the same realm.

She felt that little boy punching her uterus from the inside and tried to imagine the way his hair might fall across his eyes someday, rather than perseverate on how much all that movement really made her have to pee.

Then she ran her fingers down the bare skin stretched across Theo’s spine, feeling each vertebrae along the way and thinking about how strong he’d become someday, this now-small child who clutched a toy boat in his elbow and squirmed mercilessly.

This too-small bed was filled with life and all of it was hers to care for. It was a scary and wonderful responsibility. She wanted to be worthy of the task.

That woman is the one I think I should be. She’s the one I sometimes triumphantly embody, but also the one I often loathe because she’s just so altruistic, so perfect, so hard to hold onto.

This is the type of woman that is celebrated on Mother’s Day, isn’t she? She’s the type that her adult children will probably publicly thank someday when they receive an award in front of a large crowd of people. She’s the one they’ll long for when their lives break and shift and feel too foreign, too confusing.

I suppose I have this terrible fear that this will not be the woman who wins inside of me. I worry that my basic humanity will be too strong, and that it will be the one to ultimately triumph and take over at the cost of my children. People talk a lot about “mom guilt,” but I think it’s really just a title for this fear that lives inside each of us—we who are all too conscious that there’s a battle raging within us between two ferocious woman, and who cheer for the altruistic one but also hate her a little because she taunts us when we’re down.

But what about this, instead?

Maybe we don’t have to be at war with ourselves at all.

Maybe we actually don’t have to be one woman or the other. Yes, sometimes we’ll be altruistic and adoring, and others we’ll beg to be left alone and, for the love of everything holy, for someone to just bring us a cup of coffee. But maybe those are just different pieces of the whole, real package.

Maybe it’s not at all about whether we fit inside the “Mother’s Day mold,” but whether we have the grit to just keep trying the hard thing—every single day—even after we’ve been kicked down and we’re spluttering blood and things aren’t pretty but we’re still there, like a bad penny that keeps on showing up.

This poem fell out of one of my notebooks the other day, written shortly after Vivian was born and Theo was only learning to walk

What if what matters most is that we don’t wallow in the shame of being imperfect?

It’s a bad cycle. I know from experience that it makes it harder to mother, and it makes it harder to love. It has a strange way of making us even more me-centric. It’s got the power to cripple us and leave us bitter, under the guise of trying to make us better.

Instead, we must find the courage to say, “Yes, I am human. But I also love these humans I’ve been given to nurture, and you better believe I’ll try over and over again to give as much love as I can, even though I’m a limited and finite creature that really does need sleep and silence once in a while, too.”

Refer a friend

At the start of June I wrote about embracing this summer for what it is. Not for what we wish it would be. Not for how we think it should be. Just for what it presents us with, at this very moment in time. I think that we can apply this principle to parenting. (Heck, I think this principle would actually serve us well in any area of life.) Gosh, it takes courage—to be honest about what we are, what we are not, and who we are becoming.

Do not get me wrong: doing this is not to adopt an attitude of resignation or to make excuses for our sins. Rather, it is a willingness to take stock of reality and to work with what we’ve got. Should we strive to grow in maturity and love? Always. Always, always, always. But this process is best done in the arms of Grace, preferably with a Father who whispers over us, “I love you still. I love you just like this. And I also love you enough to mold and remold you, too, until you become a beautiful and dynamic reflection of me.”

So, instead of spending any more time this morning wrestling with whether or not I should be relieved that my children are at daycare right now, I’m going to drink these last delicious drops of iced chai, and then I am going to walk out onto the sidewalk and let the sun wash over me. I will enjoy the next five hours of uninterrupted work time. I will embrace the present, just for what it is, and me, just for what I am.

And when it’s time to pick Theo and Viv up at the end of the day, I’ll pull them into my arms and kiss their cheeks and say—with the way I look in their eyes and prepare their supper and tell their bedtime story—that though I am limited and human and often broken into lots of self-serving little pieces, I’m willing to try over and over again to show them how much I love them. That I’m committed to keep on doing this very thing until I die.

And I think—I just have to believe—that at the end of the day, that’s the most that any of us can give to our children. A love that just won’t quit: bloody and spluttering and limping and all.

The Second Cup