Editor’s note: Don’t worry, we haven’t turned into a mommy-blog. For the next few days we’re going to spotlight essays about motherhood in honor of Mother’s Day. We think you’ll enjoy this thoughtful piece by Allie Bullivant, whether you are a writer or a parent or just someone who wants to find more balance in your life.
We’re often told during these days, these modern, liberated, you-do-you days, that moms “can have it all.”
What is meant by this, I’m not entirely sure. Generally, I’ve heard the statement made almost exclusively to suggest that a mom can retain her career and her role as a mother at the same time. And, that this is a great triumph.
I want to preface the rest of what I’m about to say by asserting, hardcore, right down to the tiniest bones in my inner ear, I’m a feminist. I am for advancing the dignity of women in all arenas of life. I am for absolutely crushing a patriarchy that actively silences or subjugates women for the benefit of men. No questions asked.
I just happen to think that right now, one of the best ways for me to do this is to stay home with my daughter.
I recognize this is not the case for all mothers. But it is for me.
More often than not, my choice has been met with a combination of disapproval, pity, or bewildered curiosity. Sometimes accompanied by a comment about how “that’s great you are privileged enough to do that.”
But definitely not with the celebratory, “wow, women really can have it all!”
Because choosing to stay home means I’m missing a piece of the pie for mothers, less than having “it all,” which, if you’ll pardon me, sounds a bit like reaching for success in some internalized-capitalistic-patriarchal competition anyway.
The fact is that for me there is a pie in motherhood. But it’s not the pie of “how many hats can you wear at the same time?”
It’s the pie of “how many hours are there in a day and what can I get done?”
In navigating this question for nearly two-and-a-half years, I’ve realized that I have a finite amount of energy and a limitless amount of work to do, most of which revolves around my child's well-being and our house not becoming a breeding ground for mice, ants, and mold.
For the first two years of motherhood, I tried very hard to keep up with tasks around the home, my health, my child’s emotional development, my marriage AND my writing.
Some moms say when they become mothers they “lose their identity.” That’s not me.
I know who I am.
It’s just that for most of the day, every single day, I feel like I have to push her aside and tell her to wait for Clemmie to start grade school.
With one exception: Writer Allie sure as shit wasn’t going to let herself get rusty.
Day after day I dug my heels in. I would write, even when my brain was exhausted and sleep deprived. Even when a friend asked me to meet her at a park and I said yes because I straight up forgot we didn’t have a car. Even when I didn’t have childcare relief for months on end, no days off, not once, 12+ hour days, every single day.
I would keep writing.
The problem was, of course, that it wasn’t going very well.
Writing is never easy to do, but as the mother of a toddler, I find it’s pretty painful.
I’d write a few sentences and realize I’d been writing the lyrics to a John Denver song. Or I’d go for a morning walk with my daughter to “gather ideas” and she’d scream the whole time because of a broken daisy.
Meanwhile I watched as classmates from my MFA program won publishing deals, awards, and competitions. Each time I opened a social media platform with another update, my heart sank. Must try harder, I thought. Must. Not. Suck.
So I experimented with some strategies. I would be on the “alert.” If I just tried harder, I would see the harvest of material right in front of me.
And I looked. I skittered my sights across the surroundings with the voracity of a hawk. I hunted metaphors, images and ideas.
I got desperate. A “No Parking” sign became “the possible central symbol for an essay.”
Really? Really?
It took some time to recognize I was “predatory reading” my life, something I always warned my former high school students against. Predatory reading is when you skim a chapter looking for the answer to a question (i.e.: What is the Munich Agreement?) but you miss the overall message as a result.
Who could blame me for slipping into this habit? I had only a tiny bit of time to write and a sliver of motivation to do it. To compensate for this limited store of inner resources, my instincts shifted toward hyper-vigilance and cagey zeal.
After all, something terribly important was at stake. My identity – my personhood – one small artifact of me leftover from the Big Bang of becoming a mother: my writing.
So, my brain, ego, and grit told me, it had to be good. And I had to do it.
The funny thing is that I always taught my students to yield to the slow process of reading. Read the whole chapter, I’d say.
In the end you’ll get the answer to the question but you’ll also get everything else, too.
—
One afternoon when I had written and deleted yet another shitty draft of an essay, I realized what I was doing.
Perhaps it was time to lay down my arms and stop hunting, I thought.
“Keeping up with writing” was one small way that I was trying “to have it all.”
In doing so I was discouraging myself, adding pressure to a very stressful job, and I was competing with people in a completely different lane than I was.
But if I stopped “predatory reading” my life, stopping searching and hunting for material, what would I do instead?
Did I have the time, energy, and bandwidth to slow down and read the chapter of my life for its own sake, without a set goal in mind, without the pressure to create something dazzling in the end?
I was terrified that if I stopped searching, if I stopped trying so damn hard, my creative self would dissolve into the ocean of monotony.
But I knew I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing.
So, I decided to take a break from regular writing. Just to see.
And I told myself, I guess I’ll have to have faith that there will be plenty of time for ideas, but later, for future me. Because present me just can’t anymore.
In the words of Hall and Oates: “no can do.”
So I went a few weeks without writing a single word. I let my mind relax. I leaned back a little.
It turned out that “reading the whole chapter” instead of always being on the hunt made my life seem a bit more peaceful, for starters.
A walk could simply be just that: a walk. A trip to the grocery store could be just that, a trip to the grocery store.
Everything became slightly more valuable, just as it was.
I didn’t have to “have it all.” Neither did the contents of my life: the ins and outs and familiar sights and sounds didn’t need to multi-task or contain layers to become part of some mediocre poem.
A tree could be a tree, as Thomas Merton says, because it gives glory to God by being a tree.
Slowly, I realized the same was true for me. I could be a mom – not “just” a mom, but a mom, because that is enough and there’s glory in it.
In that boundary, in the set limits for this time.
Kierkegaard says somewhere that “purity of heart is to will one thing.”
Not many things – one.
I find that in terms of having it all, and all the hats I could try to wear right now, I can only really handle one. In fact, trying to wear more than one hat just makes me feel like the slightly creepy peddler from Caps for Sale, a book my daughter unfortunately adores.
And maybe there’s a “purity” in wearing only one hat for me. Not a superiority to other moms. But a “purity,” or a purifying at least, a cleansing of pressures I’ve been carrying in order to retain some idea of who I am.
Hey, perhaps who I am is more and not less right now. Who knows?
Only time will tell.
But I don’t mind. I’ve got some time. I’m going to read the whole chapter.
And I might even take some naps, too, because they’re a whole lot better than writing these days.