mothers and others
I often think about mothers, and losing them, and what that means as we grow older. Some lose their mothers early due to neglect, abandonment (physical or emotional). Others lose them young (in the few months after I lost mine, a friend at work found me crying at my desk not because of my own loss, but a student worker, only 20, had lost her mother to cancer and this seemed terribly sadder than my own, with whom I had had many adult years. I was, after all, in my forties, the age at which such losses inevitably begin.) Some lose their mothers to illness, to accidents. Some to estrangement and boundaries.
While my relationship with my mother in my teen years may have been volatile, we were close enough in my adulthood and I say enough, because there were still many things my mother was not aware of (particularly romantic things I preferred to keep private.) While my visits to Rockford were only a few times a year, they were often week-long chunks, during which we would thrift shop, go on adventures, etc. . After she was was gone, my visits were often shorter (this was partially due to work and under-staffing that prevented longer vacation stretches, but without my mother, while I enjoyed spending time with my dad, it was wholly different. ) I was also lucky enough to go on a few road trips, both short and long, with my parents, including poetry-related things like readings, workshops, and conferences I asked them to tag along to after they were retired. They also, in better health days, often visited the city for zoo and museum outings, as well as attending some readings and helping out at craft/art markets when I was still doing them regularly.
As someone who is child-free, thankfully I never felt much pressure from my parents on doing traditional things like getting married and having kids. My mother once said something about her being okay with no grandchildren, laughing that she didn't feel the need to be a grandmother since she thought she'd done a good job first go-round as a mother. Which she did. In fact, the happiness of my childhood is one reason why I probably decided not to have any myself. My parents possessed a kind of patience and nurturing I really doubt I could muster, not to mention finances and logistics of rearing kids, even under the ideal circumstances (and good god, certainly not during daily school shoot-ups and the downfall of U.S. democracy.). In my 20s, when something like having a family seemed foggy on the horizon, decided wait and see how life went, and if I decided too late physically to have children, I was always open to adopting or fostering.
As I moved into my thirties, it dawned on me that I would probably not want children, then, or anytime in the future. This opinion was sealed in concrete by the time I hit forty, even though I would go onto meet someone in the next few years that would change my views on marriage but luckily also share my aversion to having kids. We occasionally muse about what our life would be like had we met earlier in our lives, if we would have paired up and had a more traditional timeline that would have accommodated kids. I am convinced, given both our baby and toddler pics we would have had beautiful children no doubt. But we probably would have struggled and been slightly resentful of having to raise them. And certainly unable to afford them. We marvel regularly at the happiness and freedom of our lives without them, the absence of school pick-up lines and music practice, and having to find sitters to even just have a movie date, things which we watch other people struggle to balance who have them. Also, I cannot imagine the labor specifically that inevitably falls on women when it comes to child-rearing. As non-parents, we split our household duties pretty evenly (I do routine cleaning, dishes, and some cooking while he does things like laundry, trash removal, car care, etc.) Add kids to the mix and things get much muddier and more complicated. (Luckily, with just cats to raise, most of the chores I do since I was doing all along before sharing a household. )
But then again, mothering and mothers are not just relegated to the person you gave birth to. My family has many women who helped in my raiding, including my grandmothers who I lost rather young, various aunts, my mom's best friend. While I am suspicious of mentors after a couple bad experiences, other women have granted important 'yes' es and done work that I have benefitted greatly from the creative environments they created. There are also literary mothers. I have many, from Mary Shelley to Shirley Jackson to Sylvia Plath. From Emily Dickinson to Anne Sexton. Women poets, both near and far who have championed my work and whose work I adore. All mothers in some way.
Some mothers are not human at all. this past fall, I lost the most motherly cat I'd ever owned, my dear Bella, who, as one of the ginger twins I got in the late aughts, managed nearly two decades of me bringing random kittens home, all of which she treated in many ways like her own, so much that her nickname was "mama" despite never actually breeding.
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