Mother is Mothering: Instructional Notes to Future Me, or: Suzanna is Always Right
A different way of seeing. Butch/femme dynamics even when I don't really ID as femme, ok? Gender and queer constructions of family. Motherhood as a container. Being thick in the flowers. TMI ALERT!
The mother, then, is not just a caregiver. She is a container for everything society refuses to carry itself. -Luciana Lewis
May Queen
It is the end of April and I have my grief doula session with G. I intentionally booked this a month ahead of time for April 30 so I could enter May Day renewed, the May Queen, covered in metaphorical flowers, radical, psychotropic in my insistence to merge with all of it. I could not have known then how auspicious my timing would be. I was ready but I was not ready before now. I am coming off my rendezvous with K49 in the Subaru (I need to come up with a better moniker for her, it feels disrespectful at this point), and we are positively fecund, giddy with spring, sending messages back and forth of all the blooming things in her life and in mine. She sends me a silly video drinking rainwater from a magnolia flower and I am smothered by desire for that embrace of life. She is at the airport and sends me a picture of a flower neither of us has ever seen, the perfect pink coral color, growing in an unlikely place because it clearly just does not give a damn about what it is supposed to do. It is all so lesbian it would be hilarious if it wasn’t also earnest and that earnestness is critical right now. None of us— and I mean the plural us—have time for anything less. Spring days in this shit year are not for hardening, but for exposing our soft underbellies. Every time I sit down to write I tell myself I will not lie, I am only a vessel for honesty now, that an attentiveness to the veins of spring that are thrusting and tendril-y through the pieces of geographies separating us from each other are necessary. I am open. I will not close up.
My session with G takes me through the following weeks of so much green, the neon chartreuse of new leaves and the tips of conifers to the kelly of the oaks. They instruct me to touch myself in ways that are sensual and loving and intuitive and also hard and angry. Not necessarily sexual, this self-touch, though it can be that, too, if I want it to be, if I need it, if my body tells me to make it so. They walk me through somatic exercises that teach me to pay attention to my body in grief, tapping into that as a source of creative energy and healing. Mostly I am instructed to honor what my own touch and what my response to my own touch tells me. They suggest that later when I am crying to try to turn that into sex, instead of turning sex into crying. The latter of course I am much better at, familiar with the flood of tears that can come with an orgasm. G has been reading these entries in this, my Year of Magical Grieving, and comes to our session prepared. They are a beautiful light radiating love and I can hear the sounds of the lazy city streets behind them coming from open windows where they are in California and I cry and I let go of more in an hour than I expected, which is a lot because I came in knowing that I would let go of a lot. I am beginning to mark this ending by all the new beginnings. G tells me they’ll be in town at the end of August and I invite them to stay with me, cannot wait to hug them in the flesh.
I meet up with someone nearby and go on a walk with her around Lake Wintergreen and she says, “You seem like you have a lot of practice at grieving.” A grief-worker herself, she only means it as an observation, not pityingly, and I do, I do have practice grieving. I think that is turning out to save my life in the aftermath of the bomb K dropped on our life. I have been through enough things that I know what steps to take to process it and to give myself the permission to do so however feels right, to not skip any steps nor linger too long on any in the name of propriety, to feel and to do simultaneously. I know that these writings are central to my grieving and are helping me identify what needs identifying. The naming of it all is central, an ancient act that marks the ordering and mothering of new worlds and all the things that they contain.
It is Mother’s Day and I am alone for the first time on this day… maybe ever? I have spent more Mother’s Days without my kid than with, but this is the first year I recall being alone entirely. I get up, I go to a meeting, share about how complicated this day is for me to a room of 15 older men and 3 women, but the men, they know a lot about shame and alcoholism and the things you regret, and they nod and look directly at me and I know they mean it. I am moved by what fellowship looks like when it happens with people you think you don’t have anything in common with. I have coffee with a woman who is not new to recovery but has been out for a long time and is going through it upon her return to sobriety. Our date is too short, we could sit there and talk all day, but we have things, as mothers, we plan to do for ourselves on this day.
Today for Mother’s Day I am going on my first ride of the spring on the bike K guilt-bought me in December. Two weeks before Christmas I had frantically dismantled the Christmas tree and dragged it in the rain past every unit in my condo complex and down to the dumpster, hoisting it like Hercules above my head and into the bin, adrenaline pumping. Hell knows no fury like a woman scorned, I thought to myself, I hope everyone here is watching this dramatic scene. K bought me the bike a week later and “hid” it in the basement even though I proclaimed Christmas officially canceled. We did not talk about it until January, when she asked me if I had “found” it. I tell her I had, and that is the last time it is mentioned. I am still getting occasionally stabbed by the pine needles the tree left behind deep in a rug I have vacuumed twenty times by now, voodoo pins sticking in my feet from the worst Christmas of my life.
I take the guilt-bike to the Farmington Canal trail to go for this ride, per usual. It is a perfect day to bike, if not a little bit windy. I am texting with K49, who drove down to CT from ME on Friday and spent 20 bliss-soaked hours in my bed, and on my couch, and on my kitchen counter, doing things to me that I did not know were possible. I am freaking out, because I do not want to be ruined for sex with other people by this person who lives 250 miles away and whose life is more complicated than mine. I am freaking out because I am pining for this person, not just I’m-getting-fucked-the-best-I’ve-been-fucked-in-my-life pinings but something else, possibly absurd.
I don’t even want to type it out here, it feels embarrassing to admit, but I am committed to telling the truth and it is not fair to K to tell one side of the truth about my life with her if I am not going to tell the truth about my life without her. I am fucked, I am going to fall for K49 (Suzanna is always right), probably hard and far, and not just because she can make me laugh and is ridiculous and smart or because she makes me squirt for the first time(s) in my life or does something with her hands to my pussy that basically makes me pass out (no, really, what was that and why hasn’t that been done before and do the rest of you KNOW about this because she looks at me while she is doing it and practically winks at me and says, “feels good, right??”), or because she leaves a perfect blue-purple-raspberry handprint bruise on my ass that I will feel for a week even as I watch it fade, but because she looks at me and doesn’t stop looking, she climbs into my eyes. Because she is a person who notices, notices everything, lives deep in a world of noticing, of moss and rocks and flowers and the ocean and trees and the world we live in and of people and sensations. It feels batshit arrogant to say it out loud but it feels like she notices the way I notice, just lives intensely in the world, earnest, profoundly interested, but also she notices the way I notice, understands intuitively what I am clocking around me, has an eye for my eye? We text about what is drawing us to each other and how to categorize this connection and I think to myself Rebound? Limerence? Should I be on 90-day Fiancé, New England K1-EZ Pass Edition? but I know it is not these things, and she says “it is like a different way of seeing” and I have never felt so exposed in front of someone, I am always in control and now I am not. She sends me pics of her beautiful life back home and I send her pics of my beautiful life here and we agree it is good that we live far apart and are adults.
I am freaking out because she is poly and I am not trying to deal with more feelings than I already have, jesus no, even as I am well aware that there are people I am sleeping with that I do not want to stop and won’t stop sleeping with. I am freaking out because I do not want to miss someone and lesbian yearn for them, even though I know that not getting what I want immediately—instant gratification, the death knell of the addict—is good for me. I am freaking out because I do not want to deal with jealousy or examine my need to be the most special in the wake of being made to feel treated so, so, so secondary to a life I put everything I had into. I talk to my therapist and we agree that K had a midlife crisis and that it blew up my life and expedited the timeline of my own midlife crisis, though because I can be deliberate about how I want to rebuild my world I can classify it as a midlife reawakening. This feels good and sane to me, the only way I can think through what I have no choice but to do now, which is to decide how I am going to be, who I am going to be, what constellation of people and objects I want to place around me. How rarely have I been given this choice? How do I chart a way forward in relation to other people, with love and sex and intimacy, and not replicate the patterns I have walked for 46 years? I am mothering myself, patiently.
Not Your Wendy
Someone who knows me better than I know myself sends me text after text all winter, voluminous insights, taken from their own life, their own growth, their own experience of me, their understanding of the dynamic that can play out in butch/femme or b/f-adjacent relationships. I collect these nuggets of wisdom all winter, but there are so many I have to categorize them by topic. I cannot believe how much they resonate, and I am so thankful for this mirror, even if it is showing me what I want to see and I know that there is some confirmation bias here. I cannot fix the butches who show up in my orbit, cannot do for them what they cannot do for themselves, cannot make their lives look like whatever they want them to look like by letting some of my exuberance rub off on them by proximity, cannot love them in a way their moms didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t.
You are not a safehouse for damaged butches! Ever again!
Don’t date down! Equal or better only!You are a champion of the underdog and that’s a great quality except when it comes to ya own house.
Don’t let any damaged butch types steal your thunder, they don’t mean to but they do it anyway, they can’t help it!
Any future butch prospects I think you should ask them about their therapy journey and healing first. “AND HOW HAVE YOU WORKED ON YOUR MOTHER WOUNDS?”
For months I have been looking for queer writing on the topic of the Wendy/Peter Pan dynamic, and I am surprised when I can’t find anything as it relates to queer relationships, only straight ones. In my mind it is a common trope in our community, especially for anyone femme of center, just something we know about and have talked about a million times over the years? Is this not true? In 2010 or so there was a queer femme FB group I was in where I’m sure this was discussed a lot, maybe someone made pins and patches? I have a vague memory of us acknowledging that there were problematic elements inherent in this trope but also that it was a good analogy for us to talk through our experiences.
At any rate, “Not Your Wendy” feels close to what I’ve got to leave behind, this pattern of butch and masc of center people dating me or MARRYING me even and then flitting away when they realize I cannot mother them the way I mother my actual flesh-and-blood kid. I try, I try so hard to carry the people I love into their futures, and I am only now becoming aware of my tendencies to want to give the butch people I date something to grasp onto, a map to self-actualization, the love they never received from their moms or from the world around them. I think about all the jokes about women with Daddy Issues in cishet culture and though I know how sexist that is—god forbid a woman have issues after suffering in patriarchy!!!—I want to understand if this plays out in queer/lesbian/b/f relationships in a special Mommy Issues version. In my attraction to masculinity in the iterations I find it attractive in, what am I replicating for my partners and for myself? Worse, am I mothering the little boy I did not properly mother, the one who mattered most?
The most accurate thing I think K said to me during our brief foray into therapy was that I loved her potential and not her and that she could no longer bear me loving what I wanted her to be instead of what she is. I knew she was right. Within days of our dissolution I had written in my list of things I would work on that I would align my vision of her with what she wanted for herself, not what I wanted for her; I did not need her or a therapist to tell me this. Six months later, and the smartest person I know sends me this funny/surreal/horrifyingly dead-on Reel that says it better than I can.
I am thinking about mothering and mothers because yesterday was Mother’s Day and because I am a mother and because I wrote a love letter on my heart for who I wanted K to become and I am not grieving her but the loss of a future in which she would be a person she is not. The person she is is a person who I have been waiting for five six months to reach out to Ezra and say something, anything, to unbreak his heart a little bit, to maybe act like some kind of mother to the boy she left behind. At this point I would be fine with her lying to him if she has to, even. Anything, anything at all, a “Hey Ez, I am sorry I haven’t reached out, I am sorry about how things went down with your mom, I love her and I love you, you have meant so much to me over the years, I hope you are doing okay, etc…” Anything at all would be better than her stoney silence. I am grieving the person I wanted her to become, who would not avoid hard things and then call it healing.
Ezra’s adoration of K has been deep since Day 1 and it is increasingly hard for me to field his “I don’t want to make this about me mom but doesn’t she miss me??” questions. No matter how hurt K is or how difficult for her this rupture might also be, I am angry about it, about this avoidance that knows no end. YOU ARE THE ADULT IN THIS SITUATION, I want to scream at her into the hills nearby where she has squirreled herself away with the girl, the girl who is only two years older than Ezra, a fact I just cannot stop being aghast over. I’m embarrassed to keep repeating it here, as though if in repetition it will stop being true. I am embarrassed to keep repeating it because it feels so middle-aged-lady-obsessed-with-the-replacement’s-youth, but that is truly maybe 5% of it, the 5% that is jealous that the girl grew up in an era that stressed using sunscreen and moisturizer, maybe? But the other 95% is not about that, not at all. The girl’s birthday and Ezra’s birthday will forever be two years apart no matter how many times I say it. She is my child’s peer.
I snarkily dubbed the girl the “Romanian Nanny” before I even thought too hard about it, back when K told me I not only didn’t give her but cannot give her the nurturing she needs and that this girl, in contrast to me, was serving it up cozy. In the weeks that followed, as K continued to refuse to come home and stayed with friends and wouldn’t see me and couldn’t talk on the phone because of reception, etc. etc., she told me that her best friend’s wife was mothering her in the ways she needed, had just taken her in and opened her home and was caring for her and making her feel so comforted and attended to. At the time I didn’t want to scare her away so I held my tongue but in my mind I was YELLING. Can’t you see you’re transferring this mothering demand and responsibility that you put on me onto this girl and your best friend’s wife? Can’t you see that I am not a container for what you refuse to carry yourself, that no one else will be able to ever give you enough, either? Your friends DON’T WORK, they live in a house they’re basically squatting in until it goes through the court system, they are completely isolated, of course they have the time to be available 24/7, what the hell is wrong with all of you?!?! I held it back. I thought if I was gentle on K she’d come home. I would nurture by omission if I had to, let my silences, my lack of criticism, my niceness bring her home to me.
I wanted to have some small place in the litany of women whose care counted for something to her. I didn’t want to be erased in that way, revised, absented from the story of our life and what I know I gave her. If I could just keep quiet enough, make myself small enough, center her enough, she would see how good I was at mothering.
***
My fear of being what K accused me of- angry, irrational, hysterical- contributed to the first couple months when I did not tell Ezra what was going on, hiding it through the holidays even though it made it nearly impossible to talk to him because the effort it took to conceal the cracking in my voice and heart felt like a lie of omission and now more than ever I will not lie. I was protecting K in case we made it through, because I didn’t want his 20-something-year-old brain to judge her when he’s had so few life experiences to serve as a basis for determining the ethical implications of a middle-aged married person’s behavior (cough), because I didn’t want him to worry about me, because I am his mother and because I have come to understand that the only right relationship, despite our closeness, is one where I have a firm grip on the fact that he is my kid and I am his mom and he will never and should never feel the same way about me that I feel about him.
I have come to understand that this response was largely driven by an Ur memory from my childhood. My mother is sitting on the couch, covered with a blanket, sobbing about a man who treated her horribly, who beat her and lied to her and cheated on her constantly. It is a moment from my childhood I’ve held onto tightly. Over my years with K it is this actual moment I flashbacked to every time I ever told her that I could not take care of her feelings or fix things for her. I felt helpless as a child, and responsible, and it taught me a lot about codependency, and children parenting their parents, and being afraid that your parent was not going to be okay, and that stuck. And so I don’t want my wellbeing to be Ezra’s responsibility. My mental health is something he should not spend his days and nights worrying about. When it came to K, this fear that I would need to mother a person who could not see her own way through stuck around. I said many times that I could not fix the things inside her that were breaking her, and every time I thought of my mom on the couch, inconsolable.
So much of this has gone out the door in the past six months, which I guess was inevitable but also healing. If nothing else comes from this disaster, I think I can finally let go of my mom sitting so so sad on that couch, of sometimes not being sure what support looks like and how it differs from enabling. To be fair, though, I do think that K wants enabling and not support. As for Ezra, Suzanna told me to tell him back in February, assured me that it is okay to need his support, that his love for me is a resource, and she was right. Ezra is 25, not 10. He has heard and seen me cry a lot about this, has listened to me, has said thoughtful and insightful and kind things and I am thankful for his simple wisdom and love through these months, because he does love me unconditionally, and he does worry about me, and my vulnerability with him I hope shows him that women are not a fortress of strength 24/7 who can handle everything all the time. He deserves to see that you can break a woman, even his mom, maybe especially his mom, who is usually made of steel.
The hardest thing now though is to look him in the eye and not say what I fear out loud: K never really liked you or cared about you she made herself do it for my sake she said so many times that she supported me in my struggles with you but I always doubted it, it always felt like she had batshit ideas about how I should handle things, I always tried to shield her from the worst of our years and times as mother and son, to keep the impact of your existence as low for her as possible, I never quite believed her performances of care for you, you were the thing we fought about most and never resolved, she resented you so much and pretended she didn’t and maybe it is because you are the only one I feel responsible for, that I want to mother, because I brought you into the world, and she wants a mother, but I am your mother and your mother only. I do not say any of this, of course.
I spent my entire relationship with K teetering the essentialism line: Motherhood is not a biological given! You do not need to be a mother to understand mother love! But also you cannot possibly understand! You have never birthed a human being from between your legs after carrying that life inside you for nine months! You have never shared a body with another body this way, you have never been an actual physical container for a life that you have grown inside you! My body was a house and inside it an entire universe was born!
I know the answer is somewhere in between. I was 19 when I was pregnant, terrified. I have had a contentious relationship to motherhood. I think Ezra would say I’m more like his big sister than his mother and he would be right, though he called me last night on Mother’s Day, late, 10pm, and we talk for two hours, he has been struggling so much, he is in a dark place, he needs his mom and feels bad for needing me on the day that is supposed to be mine. But he is the entire reason I have this day and it is my greatest joy to be his mom. So much of what I know about who I am is because I have him, because we have each other. He tells me that I did a good job, that it is so hard to be him in his head but that everything he does have he has because of me. We talk about my politics, what it did to him, how he navigates that in a world where he feels like his feelings as a white man are completely irrelevant, how painful that is for him, how angry it makes him feel that he can’t be vulnerable and be taken seriously, and how angry he gets at himself for feeling angry about it. I listen, I know that listening out of love is something I can do now though I mostly raised him within a political framework of panic and fear. I was inconsistent AND consistent, I made choices that broke my own heart in the name of feminism and queerness and needing to be more than a mom and more than a mom stuck in a time and place that could not mother me, that could not contain me, that could not hold me. Ezra suffered because of that, and it has taken many years for me to come to terms with the ways I caused that suffering, the mathematics of giving and receiving what he and I both needed and how to make those calculations when I had at times literally no resources, none, not one person to count on besides myself and my belief that somehow I could be both myself and his mom, that I could raise a straight white boy in a world where I wanted nothing to do with any of that, that I could pursue a fucking doctorate and also show up to as many parent-teacher conferences and soccer games five hours away as I could.
When I was a freshman in high school we read The Awakening and I never forgot the lines near the end, when Edna is flinging herself into the sea: “I would give my life for my children, but I will not give my life for my children.” I knew at 14 that there would be nothing truer for me than those words, and that if a woman writing in 1899 could say them, even if it meant death, than certainly 100 years later, a woman giving birth to her son in 1999 could say them, too. Now there is a boy walking around the planet who is grappling with the legacy of patriarchy and what it tries to make women contain, when mostly they are flinging themselves into the sea to be free.
My Mother is Mothering
A few days before I go to Maine to visit my mom I find myself retroactively dipping into Chani’s horoscopes for 2025.
Adding to 2025’s atmosphere of the unexpected, eclipses will be sparking fateful plot twists, synchronicities, and growth opportunities in the foundations of your life and in your greater calling. The Virgo eclipses on March 13th and September 21st encourage you to shed patterns of perfectionism, overthinking, or martyrdom, and to revise any narratives you’ve internalized from your upbringing or inherited through your ancestral line. Examining your lineage with a fine-tooth comb will prepare you to widen the scope of your dreams for your career or public offerings.
I am struck by the imperative to shed martyrdom, to revise narratives I’ve internalized from my upbringing, to examine my lineage and its minutiae to widen my scope. These past few months have brought me closer to my mom than we’ve ever been, which I have alluded to over the course of these posts. What have these past months been but a series of eclipses, fateful plot twists, growth opportunities in the foundations of my life and my greater calling? My mother has been here. She is going through her own transformation, and it is so so beautiful to witness, her quiet life on the lake, her sobriety, her wild reckonings with her insanely fucked up childhood and family. I am grateful that I can still transform my relationship to our relationship. I will write about my ancestral line, all those gay aunties are coming for me, I can feel them in my bones, running around Munjoy Hill in Portland, Maine with their peg-legged girlfriend, running away with their lovers to Miami, they are getting louder.
***
In a normal year, when I sit down and I think about the upcoming year and what I want it to look like, an umbrella overview of what to expect is constructive and enlightening. It is my favorite tradition I have, to decorate the tree and think about the ornaments and the past they represent and how far I have come and to think about what I want to do in the coming year. When I look at this year’s horoscope retroactively though I think that its accuracy is only evident in hindsight and so now its usefulness is doubled, tripled, quadrupled as I face this universe-inside-a-box of a life in front of me and decide what to put in it.
Get ready to shapeshift.
When wild-card Uranus — the planet of innovation, rebellion, and upheaval — enters your sign on July 7th, it begins a seven-year period of radical reinvention for you. Whatever Uranus zaps becomes a touch unstable — and more flexible. In this case, you can expect shake-ups and surprises in your relationship with your identity and personal development over the coming years. Because this is a relatively long transit, its effects will play out over time. […]
Your transformation might also manifest as busting through old beliefs about your charisma, appearance, or self-worth, and writing yourself into a more liberatory hero/ine’s journey. It’s never too late to break from society’s limiting narratives and other people’s assumptions about who you should be.
Am I shapeshifting? Am I a New Animal? Is this the beginning of my portal era, a little late maybe but a 7-year-itch of “radical reinvention” that changes my relationship with and to my identity? I fucking hope so. I cannot be the same person I have been, she is dead and gone.
Where You Will Find Me
Diane AckermanAt sunset, when your large fir
cradles the moon in its arms
and colors surge, remember me,
the caresser of life ever moving,
with a heart full of mischief,
and tense, fragile dreams.
I typed most of this sitting on a flowered couch next to a friend who gives me plant cuttings. In ten minutes we are leaving this week’s writing spot because she has offered to reclaim me and K’s annual lilac heist tradition. We are going to raid the enormous old bush near the apartment me and K lived in for six years. For this occasion, I am wearing lilac-colored linen pants from LL Bean that I thrifted last week. I am adrift on a sea of signs and symbols, I am an obsequious and willing servant to the laws of attraction, I am pollen and I am insect both, I am rebuilding this box I have built around my life and I am telling myself, it is okay to be ravenous, to give yourself this Michelle, to let yourself be undone by beauty. Step onto the raft and trust that it is okay, it is safe, you can mother yourself now and that means loving yourself unconditionally, throwing your heart at the moon and seeing who might be there waiting to catch it.
