April was challenging. I took on too much and didn’t feel I was succeeding at any of it. I wanted to be a good mother, a good daughter, a poet, an essayist, a good teacher and editor and encourager of the arts. I drove to Florida to help my mother, who was finally starting physical therapy for an injury she sustained in February; I laid plans to write a poem a day in April for National Poetry Month, as I’d done since 2010; Jess and I talked over ideas for Melancholy Moms posts but were too tired to write them. I played Easter bunny. I read and wrote extensive comments on a draft of a memoir for a developmental editing client. I continued teaching poetry at a local college and began teaching another round of courses for Creative Nonfiction. I’m tired just recounting it all here.
But I want to write a Mother’s Day post to all the tired moms, the grieving moms, to those who are grieving their moms. There’s something I want to point out about what it means to do it “right.” I think a lot about ways my life with my son isn’t living up to what I think it should be or could be. And then I think about what my mother’s and grandmother’s love has meant in my life, what I learned from them and how. Much of it boils down to a very human and complicated mutual witnessing.
Like all the most interesting people, my mother and grandmother couldn’t help but be themselves, and in fact they insisted on being themselves in ways that didn’t always please others. Each was born in the year of the Dragon, and when I think of them, I think of their intelligence; their humor; and their fierce insistence on recognizing the humanity of others. In some ways, I think there was a divide between them, but in other ways they modeled the same thing for me: strength of character. Staunch characters, as Little Edie would say.
Many of the pieces I’ve written attempt to get at the complexity and rich value of being the daughter and granddaughter of such women. In the prose poem “Small Animal Needs,” I wrote about being the unlikely sidekick to a graduate student in psychology who left her small town in North Carolina after having a baby at 18 and pursued her doctorate, succeeding in her goals through a combination of sharp intelligence and sheer stubbornness.
My grandmother died in 2018, and for the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling her presence, almost palpably. I’ll be standing at the kitchen counter worrying about something, and I’ll suddenly feel as if she’s standing at my elbow, beaming silent and steady support. My grandmother helped raise me and was, astonishingly to me now, only 43 when I was born. I’ve written about the grief of losing her and about how she was a “person who existed on a plane of her own.” She was remarkable for the seeking quality of her mind, how all her life she seemed to contemplate It All, what it means to be here.
Here is one of the (prose) poems I was able to write in April:
A set of preferences
My grandmother’s preferences often charmed me, the ones she would report. She was a woman who knew her own mind. (Even now, the past tense is strange, her voice having been so immanent in my psychic universe.) I’ve always enjoyed sleeping upstairs in a house, lifted off the ground like that, she once reported on the telephone.I feel myself lifted and nappish just thinking about it. I don’t know the name for such a speech act. It’s a type of firmness of conviction interacting with a receptive will. Her declarations and my willingness to be charmed.
I’ve always liked the sound of rain on my roof as I’m drifting off to sleep warm in my bed, is another thing she said to me as child, tucked in next to her when I was scared. And now, these decades after, the sound of rain as I’m drifting off to sleep, and her sensibility comes drifting in as well. A weaving of company and weather.
When she was dying—after a stroke that paralyzed her left side and caused her toward evening to lose track of years and people’s relation to each other—she had a moment of twilight lucidity when I was sitting by her bed. When the body begins to break down and you can’t do for yourself, it’s time to leave. I started to tell her that she would leave the hospital and go to rehab and have more good years, but she repeated more insistently that it was good and right to leave when the body wears out. I knew then that I was being called to listen in my particular way, that I was the one in the family who could hear it. I let myself understand it, then said, I understand.
What I’m thinking about is how mothers are, for many of us, our closest examples of what it means to care, to try, to struggle. To be human. D. W. Winnicott wrote about the “good enough mother,” and if we’re lucky, we had that, human beings who mothered us while trying to live their lives, in all the beauty and messiness of that. Who provided examples of what was mostly consistent, kind regard. Who tried. They let us be witnesses to a life.
For some, our being-mothered fell short or ended too early. It was distinctly not “good enough” (or was too often critically perfectionist) or it was interrupted. And for many of us as mothers, the messiness that is the mutual witnessing of mother-child relationships feels overwhelming at times. It’s not simple. It’s not assured. Some of us have extra challenges on one or both sides, disability or mental illness or lack of resources. And it is, like most human relationships, interwoven with grief or the potential for grief. There will be loss, there will be misunderstanding, maybe periods of alienation or distance. But what I think most of us are doing right as mothers is in the struggle itself. We try. We are mostly the “good enough mother.” We keep opening out toward our idea what it means to live a decent life and, if we’re lucky, to realize our talents. It’s so hard sometimes and sometimes we fail. But this is part of our gift to our children and what we are doing right. We are letting them witness our messy humanity. This is what a life looks like, in all its terror and beauty, we say. This is what it means to find the thread of love amidst it all. Watch me try.
What We're Doing Right
Beautiful Joanna; so well described. We are all doing the best we can and that is good enough, showing our kids and grandkids that we are human, and wonder women in our own way. <3