Yesterday was my fourth Mother’s Day as a parent, though I believe that for the Mother’s Day that passed while I was pregnant with my oldest, (“while I was pregnant with my oldest” is such an OG mom thing to say, I can’t believe phrases like that are my reality) Nick bought me a t-shirt that said MILF. I called his bluff and wore it ALL THE TIME around the house because it was a perfect weight and softness.
We are still cycling through year one of not living a quick afternoon drive from either of our parents. It’s a drag in many ways, like when there are odd school closures for Desi, or when Nick and I want to have a night out without paying market rate for a sitter. But it’s also a gift, because dumb holidays like Easter and Mother’s Day no longer present the opportunity to be shared. Actually, my mom gave me, a codependent, the ultimate Mother’s Day gift by being on a cruise with my dad for the past week or so. Not only was she not home to receive a gift or card that I would need to remember to send enough days in advance, but I couldn’t even call or text them at sea. With Nick in charge of celebrating his own mother (a phone call, I think, but I was uninvolved), I was free from thinking about any mother’s feelings but my own. It was the best Mother’s Day yet, and I’ve had some decent ones.
My birthday is the 9th of May and thus will always be American Mother’s Day-adjacent. On some especially cursed years, Mother’s Day and my birthday fall on the same date. As long as I’ve had an American mom (since day one, folks), we’ve been trying to work that out. My mom tends to want to give the weekend observance to me, in classic maternal sacrifice, and I tend to feel embarrassed by my birthday and try to punt the day back to her, and we hot-potato it until we are both disappointed. The appearance of grandchildren on the scene has been a welcome rejiggering of dynamics.
Now that I have kids, I feel entitled to taking up space on both my birthday and Mother’s Day, and my mom and mother-in-law care, and I cannot overstate this, way less about how dutiful their adult children may or may not be. I know that some of my peers feel abandoned by this turn of their parents’ affections, but for Nick and me, it has been a welcome release of tension. I feel pretty confident that I could receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom and it would not be as big of a hit as a really great shot of Desi in a yellow raincoat texted to their phones. And thank God.
Mother’s Day remains gross and uncomfortable, mostly due to it being a big fat crock. Moms don’t need mimosas and brunch specials so much as they need medical equity and an end to cash bail and affordable high-quality childcare, and sufficient paid maternity leave oh and FREE ABORTION ON DEMAND ha ha ha we are literally dying out here and so excuse us if a Yankee Candle misses the mark a bit.
But don’t misunderstand me, if you are a cis hetero dad you are benefitting richly from patriarchy in your partnership and in your career and just generally siphoning power and MORE POWER from the air that you breathe in, and so you had better be pouring that woman a mimosa.
A few years ago, I started tweeting about how not to screw up Mother’s Day if you are a dad. It was borne of experiencing a sharp dissonance between the sweet, grateful public social media posts by moms I knew, and then the private disappointment they expressed in group chats and private Facebook groups. Dudes were not getting it. They were brand new to parenthood and forgetting that the day was now primarily about their partners and not their own mothers, they were not making any plans and not asking for guidance, they were doing things that seemed heroic (making elaborate brunches that dirtied every pan) but ultimately put more work on their partners (childcare).
Nick has historically knocked it out of the park on days like this, so I felt kinda bad that my tweet storm this year got some attention (for someone of my minimal Twitter influence, more than 100 faves feels low-key viral). Nick, being a non-fragile person, did not express any insecurity at this and I did not dilute my message by clarifying “but not my honeyyyyyy” although maybe that’s what I’m doing here. I hate when women post an article about emotional labor or whatever and then either they themselves do that cult-member, Stockholm Syndrome thing of qualifying “SO GLAD BRYCE AND I HAVE AN EQUAL MARRIAGE THO” or even worse, their spouse gallops into the thread to be like “MEEP WOW I GUESS I SHOULD HAVE UNLOADED THE DISHWASHER LAST NIGHT HA HA” or similar. Though, again, is that what I’m doing here? Nick is a goddamn gem, but he is still, regrettably, a dude, benefitting from our marriage in ways that I never will.
Yesterday as I was enjoying my day (slept in, coffee waiting for me, lunch out with Nick sans children, impromptu scalding-hot afternoon bath, kids in bed early, NEW SKATEBOARD tight tight tight tight tiiiiight), I felt struck by a particular grief. The four of us were horsing around in Nick’s and my bed, Desi naked, Jane stoic, Nick and I concocting ways we could “play” that allowed us both to be lying down with our eyes closed.
And the thought I had was one that I have all the time, which is that I was enjoying myself. I enjoy my children, and my experience of being their mother, pretty frequently these days. It’s easy to enjoy your children when you’re middle class and you can afford childcare and you have good insurance to take them to the doctor when they’re sick and to access the medication you yourself need in order to enjoy, well, anything. When you’re not constantly teetering on the precipice of poverty, when leaving an abusive partner could leave you and your kids unhoused, when it all feels so close to coming apart at the seams. So many moms don’t get to enjoy their children while they are children because they’re being ground to dust by an unfair economic that robs them of their humanity but wishes them Happy Mother’s Day unsolicited in the CVS checkout line. Makes me want to ride my new skateboard into a volcano.
I had a lovely Mother’s Day and I’m glad that today I’m the farthest away I can possibly be from the next one.
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A few weeks ago when Substack put out their leaderboards for paid and unpaid newsletters, I got that weird nervous feeling of like, wait, am I a dumb-dumb for not charging people for my newsletter? And I thought about what that would be like, and how I would decide what content to paywall and what content not to paywall. Ultimately I decided that in trying to establish two tiers, it would be good stuff for the paying subscribers and chaff for the free subscribers and that wasn’t what I wanted to do at all. If I were charging, I would also feel more committed to creating on a schedule, and more critical of my own output, and with a full-time job and kids and my NYT crossword puzzle streak to keep up, that seemed laughable. So instead I am just going to start putting a tip jar at the bottom of these and if you ever feel moved to throw a few bucks my way, that would be cool. Tip away —>
TIP JAR
TIP JAR
TIP JAR
I’ve also been writing some short fiction and was thinking about starting a separate newsletter to publish lil serial guys. Thoughts?
And, hey, in the spirit of **manifesting**, I am interested in publishing short stories or essays, so if you are an agent or editor and you want to talk to me more about that, do not hesitate, DMs are open as they say, except really I just mean email me. It is also my dream to be on podcast because I love 2 gab. Email me.
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yr mate,
Evie
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