Have you noticed the uptick of stories of overwhelmed mothers in the news? Have you noticed that society suddenly seems to notice and care that we have all collectively had it? Maybe we’ve run out of stories about social isolation and economic collapse and toxic white masculinity but the big news outlets are now behaving much like my children when they know I’m about to use my mean voice and throw a plate. You can almost hear the collective, oh shit, we’ve really pushed mothers to the absolute brink of what they can handle, which is more than any person should ever have to handle, and we’re not sure what comes next.
Did you hear about the woman who dropped the cake in her driveway and collapsed in tears and was carried into her house by her husband? The neighbor watched the whole thing and then made her a new cake, an act of empathy and care that could almost move an emotionally numb 44 year old mother to tears. When I saw that tweet, I *almost* wept.
“This is all of us right now,” Joanna said, meaning the lady in the driveway, not the neighbor who baked the new cake. We need more neighbors who will bake the cake, because most of us are sobbing in the driveway and then carrying ourselves inside and baking our own cakes.
Joanna gave an interview last week in which she said motherhood had radicalized her--and also complicated and enriched her creative work while simultaneously making it nearly impossible to do that work at all. Then she called me to talk about what we should write to you this week, but during that call my daughter had her own driveway collapse because she’s auditioning for a high school production of Chicago and is convinced she won’t get cast as Roxie Hart, won’t get cast in the ensemble, won’t ever be in a play, will never find love and will die forgotten and alone. So I had to get off the phone with Joanna and pick up my daughter and bake her another cake. “I gave her Advil and put her in the tub, like a toddler,” I texted. It worked, miraculously, and she came downstairs transformed in her pajamas and did her homework. But I was still in the metaphorical driveway.
Who mothers the mothers? Joanna asked in an essay she wrote for me when I was working as an editor at a literary magazine. She was writing about the women who perfumed Jesus’ body in the tomb, and because Joanna isn’t hung up on Jesus like me she focused on those women and the politics of care, which apparently haven’t evolved much since the time of Christ. We who are the fixers, the comforters, the bringers of the oil for the corpse, also need fixing and comforting, and that dynamic of care is actually at the core of a healthy society, and yet to express this more than once seems whiny and frivolous in light of *gestures wildly* everything else.
We worry that insisting on this, even talking about this, makes us tiresome; that we’ll be perceived as complainers; that readers don’t want to hear this and in fact will not hear it. Mothers shouldn’t show the seams, or to stick with the metaphor, the driveway collapse. Working mothers, and in our specific context, mothers who are also artists, are made to feel especially silly about how motherhood impacts our work (yes, STILL), and therefore we try to complicate it in ways that sound artistically “interesting,” even to ourselves, all while collapsed on the driveway.
In response to this massive project in gaslighting, I point you to a 2015 study at the University of Arizona called “Who mothers mommy” about the importance of “unconditional acceptance” and “authenticity in relationships” in keeping moms grounded in their roles, which are, by the way, essential to society. There are reams of data about what moms should or shouldn’t do, what we do and don’t do, but there is “almost no attention to what mothers need to negotiate the inevitable challenges in sustaining ‘good enough parenting’ across decades.”
In short, we need to be mothered too, and not just by our own mothers. To be more specific, the psychologists summarized what they meant by “support” for mothers in two statements that are often only applied to, or seen as relevant to, healthy children:
“I feel seen and loved for the person I am at my core.”
“When I am deeply distressed, I feel comforted in the way I need it.”
Number 2 really landed for me, inducing the same feelings as the tweet about the woman dropping her cake and losing her shit in the driveway. Yes, I am (often) deeply distressed, and no, I do not (often) feel comforted in the way I need it, and when I do, it induces tears because the feeling is completely unfamiliar, and I immediately worry that I am too needy, not as strong as the world insists I must be, and will not be able to sufficiently repay whomever has done that caring.
Our cakedropper had a loving spouse (we imagine) who tenderly collected her from the driveway and led her inside, maybe gave her an Advil and put her in the bath. She also had a kind neighbor who saw her pain and didn’t judge her (we hope, though she did tweet the scene, my god) but empathized with her distress and stepped in to help her produce what she needed to produce--in this case, a new cake. She had a community that in that moment mothered her as she mothers, and I’d like to think she felt no shame for accepting that care, needing that care, wanting that care, even asking for that care. “Normalize crying in the driveway,” Joanna emailed. “Normalize being carried inside and someone making you a new cake.”